Why We Gather At Code for America’s Annual Summit

We’re days away from gathering in Chicago for the 2026 Code for America Summit, and I want to be honest about the moment we’re in.

This is not the civic tech movement of ten years ago. Or even one year ago.

The pace of policy change, the volatility of government systems, the speed at which AI is reshaping what’s possible have all shifted the terrain in ways that are hard to fully articulate until you’re standing inside it. What looked stable in the fall looks completely different today. And what looks true today may shift again by summer.

There’s a growing conversation about what this moment calls for in civic tech — whether the day-to-day work of improving government services moves us toward real transformation or just makes a broken system more tolerable. It’s a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.

Here’s mine: you cannot see what’s possible from the outside. Not anymore. Not in this environment.

The system isn’t slow-moving enough to observe from a distance and redesign. It is changing month-to-month, under enormous pressure, in real time, and the only way to understand what’s breaking, what’s working, and what’s worth building next is to be embedded in it. Proximity to people experiencing the problems of today is core to building better systems for the future. That’s not a reason to settle for incrementalism. It’s the prerequisite for knowing what bold actually looks like.

There’s a growing conversation about what this moment calls for in civic tech — whether the day-to-day work of improving government services moves us toward real transformation or just makes a broken system more tolerable.

Being embedded means asking the questions that enable government transformation, rather than upholding the status quo, and acting on the answers. Questions like: 

• Are we centering people in our approach to a problem? 
• What would this look like if we designed it around the person who needs it most, not the system that delivers it?
• Are we using new tools like responsible AI to reimagine what’s possible? 
• Is what we are building scalable and reusable across government?
• Are we measuring what’s easy to count, or what actually changes someone’s life?

Those questions can’t be answered from a distance. And here’s what I see from the inside that’s easy to miss: there are states actively pushing to become the model for what government can be. There are agencies experimenting with genuinely new approaches to benefits delivery, AI integration, and administrative simplification. The future of government is already happening in rooms across the country. You have to be in those rooms to find it, and to help it spread.

The people making that happen deserve enormous credit. Organizations that have been waiting for this opening to be bold. Public servants doing the hard work under conditions most people wouldn’t tolerate: shrinking resources, shifting mandates, political volatility, and a public that has lost faith in the very institutions they’re trying to fix. They didn’t wait for the perfect conditions. They couldn’t. Ever since COVID forced government to transform overnight, to deliver benefits at scale, to meet people where they were, to figure it out as crises unfolded, the best of them never stopped pushing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been meeting with our partners across the country. And it reconfirms for me that this work can’t wait. The problems are too immediate: food on the table, life-saving medical care, a roof over someone’s head. And the pace of change is too fast. Waiting for the right window to blow it all up and start over misses the most important part. The part where humanity falls through those cracks. We have to take care of those hurting now as we design the future. 

We have to take care of those hurting now as we design the future. 

That’s the room we bring together at Summit. Not just technologists and advocates from the outside, but the people on the inside doing transformative work, often quietly, because they believe government can be better. It’s a time for people across the civic tech community, inside and outside of government, to share what’s working and what isn’t so we can learn from one another. It’s an opportunity to build the connective tissue between the experiments happening at the state level and the structural changes that could make them the norm.

At Code for America, we believe that helping people today and building systemic change for tomorrow are mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities. We know government not as an abstract system, but as a set of real constraints, real people, and real responsibilities. And we have a proven approach: last year, we helped 7 million people access $22 billion in benefits across 27 states and Washington, D.C. Our work has raised the bar for seamless benefits applications, demonstrated a simpler way to file taxes, improved the automated renewal process for Medicaid recipients and caseworkers, and much more.

At Code for America, we believe that helping people today and building systemic change for tomorrow are mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities.

Those aren’t just service wins. They are the proof points that make the structural argument real. Each one starts by understanding the challenges people face, building trust with partners, and piloting solutions that solve immediate problems — then advancing more ambitious changes based on what works today. That’s how systemic change actually happens. Not from the outside looking in, but from inside the problem, pushing toward something better.

We are in an unprecedented era of policy shifts and rapidly evolving technology. The only way we make progress, the only way we help people and build something that lasts, is by being in it. Doing the work. Together. Every day.

Come join us in Chicago. You’ll be in great company.