Forward Focus: Tracey Patterson

2023 was a transformative year for Code for America in many ways, including the fact that we welcomed a new set of faces to Code for America’s executive team. To kick off 2024, we’re featuring conversations with these leaders in our “Forward Focus” series—highlighting their journey to our organization, their vision for the future of government services, and how we can build a new digital age that works for all. This week’s leader is not technically a new face—she’s been a critical member of the Code for America team for nearly five years. But in 2023, Tracey Patterson joined our executive team as Chief Program Officer.

Tell us a bit about your professional journey and what brought you to Code for America. What excites you most about our work? 

I’m grateful to have been able to pursue mission-driven work within nonprofits and public institutions for over 20 years, working within and alongside communities that have been marginalized, underserved, and undervalued by socioeconomic and government systems. My experience with many of the issues and benefits we work on helps me to see our programs from multiple perspectives. My motivation is to increase access to resources, opportunity, and agency for people by using a systems approach to shifting public institutions so they can work for everyone. I truly believe that government and the equitable use of technology are our most powerful levers to help people at scale.

But in my earlier career, I experienced technology as a barrier, not a door to opportunity. Technology systems are generally not designed to work well for frontline workers, administrators, and community organizations. When aiming for policy changes that would help people, the cost of implementing them at scale was often used as a reason to stick with the status quo. 

I first learned about Code for America in 2011, when I participated in a Summer of Smart Hack-a-Thon while at the San Francisco Public Health Department. Later, as an anti-hunger advocate, I partnered with GetCalFresh. When I joined Code for America in 2019, it was reinvigorating to approach familiar barriers with a new perspective, a diverse team of technologists, and a new set of tools in the toolkit. 

Over the past few years, it’s been an incredible honor and responsibility to put what we’ve learned over the last decade into our future. We’re scaling our effective work nationally through our programs and products, and developing new areas of exploration and learning. I am most excited about keeping people at the center of all that we do, while driving new methods and technologies to improve government service delivery. I think reducing friction in how people interact with government to ensure they can access food, health care, employment, and housing can be transformational.

Prioritizing equity in digital service delivery is a rare opportunity to address structural inequalities and redesign systems to work for far more people.

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are rapidly redefining the ways tech fits into our daily lives. What do you think is going to define the “new digital age” we’ve entered? 

It’s hard to even say what defines the new digital age just yet.  I think about prior technologies that have reshaped society—the printing press, gunpowder, electricity, and more—and how lasting those changes were in both predictable and unpredictable ways.  

Even while we ponder the larger effects of tools like generative AI, they have already changed how we deal with healthcare, banking, democracy, and the legal system. AI may bring a slew of benefits but its impact is far-reaching and diverse, so I believe we must be extremely intentional in its use, and take a systems approach. I was trained in the precautionary principle, and I believe that we have a collective responsibility to assess potential impacts, even while opening ourselves to positive paths for change. We can’t ignore the concerns about unintended consequences and misuse that have become central to discussions about integrating AI into society. 

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to AI: the technology itself, the various paths it might take in the future, its effects on jobs and the economy, its role in exacerbating inequalities, its implications for law and governance, and perhaps most importantly, what it reveals about our own humanity. I’m grateful to be at an organization that is thinking deeply about these questions while evaluating how AI and other emerging technologies can better help government serve people.

Government systems are highly complex. No one person can just make change happen, even if they’re an agency director. It takes lots of people rowing in the same direction, helping shift systems to be more equitable and effective

What do you see as the most important factors for ensuring government prioritizes equity in digital service delivery? 

Prioritizing equity in digital service delivery is a rare opportunity to address structural inequalities and redesign systems to work for far more people. However, inequality is not caused by digital service delivery—inequality is the result of income and wealth gaps, structural racism, and inequitable public policies that were designed to advantage one group over another. Acknowledging that affirmatively advancing equity is the responsibility of the whole of our government is an important first step. The pathway to equitable and effective delivery will vary—and so must our approach. Sometimes the policies that shape government services are so foundationally inequitable that the policy itself must change in order to change delivery outcomes. For example, the petition-based approach to clearing criminal records is so ineffective that a new approach is needed. Other times, we can directly address pain points and barriers in delivery that disproportionately affect some groups of people, and use a targeted universalism approach to make a significant impact to improve outcomes.  

One critical implication of this approach is that there is no more use for “us vs. them” binary mental models. Prioritizing equity in government service delivery requires that everyone come to the table: state leaders, policymakers, technology vendors, advocates, community organizations, and more.

Government systems are highly complex. No one person can just make change happen, even if they’re an agency director. It takes lots of people rowing in the same direction, helping shift systems to be more equitable and effective. Code for America is one piece of a much larger puzzle. We need to hone in on our unique role, elevate good technology and design practices we find in the field, and take a collective impact approach to get to equitable, positive outcomes in government services overall.

What makes you most excited about the state of civic tech and the year ahead? 

I am most excited about how much the field of civic tech has grown, and how many different organizations, individuals, and government agencies are working towards shared goals. This is not a niche field anymore. There are so many people with diverse perspectives and ideas that are combining forces to have a greater impact together. I am excited to be in this field as a lifelong learner, as there is always a new way to look at a stubborn problem and new ways to evaluate how our approaches are leading to real improvements in people’s lives.