Three Conversations You Can Only Have at Summit

Each year, Code for America Summit brings together a diverse group of people from all levels of government, the civic tech space, and community organizations working across the country. It’s a space where people gather to learn and collaborate on all the topics that might be too niche to find real camaraderie around back home. In short: it’s a space for passionate people.

While our slate of breakout sessions, lightning talks, and mainstage discussions will allow for deep dives into all the latest hot topics in the space, we have to admit, what really sets Summit apart is the conversations in between. The person at your lunch table who has the same procurement problem you do. The group in the hallway talking about the ways they’ve approached a particularly challenging benefits renewal problem. The presenter who stays afterward and joins you at the happy hour to walk you through how to improve your web accessibility.

These are the kinds of conversations that spark fresh ideas, uncover new perspectives, and build relationships that extend far beyond the event itself. They’re the kind of conversations you can only have at Summit:

How did you build that product/service/portal/program with limited resources?

Ah, the classic Summit question: how exactly did you do that? There’s nothing more inspiring than seeing a small team with limited resources stand up a program that’s serving every county in a state, or build a portal that thousands of people are using to access government services. But inspiration won’t get you far if you don’t know the steps that team took. Summit is an excellent place to take advantage of all the collective knowledge of so many government and civic tech practitioners to learn how you can replicate their results in your locality. So get into the nitty gritty: what did you write into your RFP and how did you run your procurement process? What APIs or data-sharing protocols are you using to ensure interoperability with external systems? How does your team manage compliance with state and federal privacy regulations? How long did your project take from ideation to full launch, and what was the feedback loop like during development?

Nowhere else will you have access to so many skilled, and, dare we say it, exceedingly friendly practitioners who will be more than happy to share what they know with you. This community knows how to support one another, and all that starts with good conversation. 

How should we be responsibly using new technologies?

We get it: a lot of people are talking about AI right now. With that comes the question of how we implement new technologies in an ethical and human-centered way. This is something the civic tech community has confronted before, and will do over and over as new technologies appear on the scene—so AI is no different. Summit is a great place to ask people in government, academia, and nonprofit organizations how they’re thinking about transparency, accountability, and public involvement as they explore implementing AI. Some people are trying out large language models for research projects, some governments are looking at using entity resolution to deal with messy legacy data, and some organizations are seeing if chatbots can help people applying for benefits.

This year, we’re excited to debut the Demo Lab where people from government and civic tech will be showing off how they’re using the latest technologies—it’ll be the perfect place to see this work in action and ask questions about how others are approaching it. 

How are you thinking about building trust with the people we serve?

Trust in government is pretty low right now. That, in turn, makes it much harder for government and civic tech organizations to do our work effectively. If people don’t trust us, they won’t utilize the services and benefits that could help them, and they might disengage in other ways too—like not voting, not engaging in collective action like public health initiatives, and not making their voices heard through forums like town halls or community engagement surveys. People have to feel heard to want to speak up. And it’s our job in civic tech to figure out how to make people feel heard. 

We know one big thing that improves people’s faith in government: building services that work well for the people they’re intended to serve. But we know there are a lot of other solutions out there we haven’t tapped into yet. At Summit, we plan to explore that question with other people who see how important this work is. 

We’re excited for you to join us this year in particular

Civic tech is always evolving, and the next few years will bring big challenges and big opportunities. What comes next for civic tech is up to us, and Summit is exactly the place to be to join the conversation. We hope you’ll join us there.