Forward Focus: Yasmin Fodil

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

One of my first jobs was at the New York City Department of Education, where I was working on a plan to increase equity in arts education. There was so much potential to do so much good, but we were hitting major barriers because of antiquated data and technology systems (our work relied on postal mail and fax machines). While frustrating, there were three lessons I learned in that experience that have since shaped my professional journey: 

• Inequities are a product of design—and they can be redesigned. 
• (Re)designing for increased equity in government is one of our country’s most powerful levers of change. 
• Technology is one of the most efficient and effective ways to redesign for increased equity, at scale. 

These lessons led me to focus on the intersection of government and technology in graduate school, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve worked on design, technology, and change management projects in affordable housing, veterans benefits, libraries, and space (go NASA!); built a network of public and nonprofit leaders focused on collaboratively solving public problems; and designed and taught a course on Digital Innovation to Masters of Public Administration students at NYU. 

I’ve been a Code for America superfan for a long time, as the organization has always been on the cutting edge of how government can use technology for good. It’s incredibly exciting to be here at a time when we are pushing the boundaries of what that looks like, at an immense scale, and with new tools that have the potential to radically transform the way services are delivered for millions of people. 

And I feel super fortunate that as Chief of Staff I get to spend my time supporting leaders and teams to come together and align strategy, operations, and culture around our mission, and in a way that (hopefully!) enables everyone to do their best work and achieve lasting impact.

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? 

Technology can be used for good or bad, and the way we deploy these emerging technologies is essential. I see our role at Code for America as doing what we can to ensure that government takes advantage of the opportunity presented by emerging tools like AI and does so in service of alleviating poverty, advancing equity, and improving the way that government supports people. 

It is heartening to see how our thoughtfully and intentionally our engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and policy experts are together thinking through how to ethically deploy AI to improve the client experience, and I am excited for the conversations that we’ll have with other civic tech and government leaders about this at our annual Summit. 

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

Design is never neutral, and if we don’t intentionally design for equity, we’ll reinforce the status quo—which means further embedding inequities into digital service delivery. I am so appreciative of leaders (like Shawna Hein) who are creating the conditions for our designers, researchers, data scientists, and client success advocates to center equity across all phases of our work. 

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

I’m excited about the renewed energy around technologies like artificial intelligence AND am even more excited about the way that organizations and leaders are pausing to be intentional about how we are deploying them. To me this ability to pause and reflect is what most signals the maturity of the field, and being able to have nuanced conversations about how to use technology for good is what I am most excited about in the year ahead.