SXSW: Code For America Founder Rallies 'Geek Army'SXSW: Code For America Founder Rallies 'Geek Army'

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Vote the bums out, or vote the leader of your choice in, but government will still be broken if the software it runs on doesn't work as well as it ought to.

When Code for America founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka addressed the crowd at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, this week, she was able to report some early successes from the program's first class of citizen coder fellows. Code for America will be expanding its program to cover more cities in 2012, thanks in part to a $1.5 million grant from Google, announced in December. Code for America is also introducing an accelerator program to encourage startups focused on solving public sector problems and a coder's brigade to encourage individuals who don't have a year to devote to a fellowship to start something in their own communities.

This is a story of social media, partly, and socially active digital media, definitely.

The SXSW Interactive program celebrates the best in Web 2.0 and mobile apps, but Pahlka explained that if digital innovators could get a peek "behind the counter" at the tools that state and local bureaucrats have to work with, they would have a better understanding of why government tends to be inefficient and unresponsive. Even those computer systems that have graduated from green-screen user interfaces are likely to be clunky Web applications that run only on old versions of Internet Explorer, cluttered with drop-down menus full of obsolete options.

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"You guys have this exuberance, this willingness to experiment," Pahlka told the crowd, describing her mission as "getting you guys excited about government." The "geek army" assembled at SXSW has skills that government needs, she said. "If you see something that's broken, you want to fix it."

Previously, Pahlka ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 Summit events for TechWeb (also The BrainYard's and information's parent company), in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, and co-chaired Web 2.0 Expo. Working with Tim O'Reilly on the Gov 2.0 event series got her excited about the potential of technology to change the way government works. She conceived of Code for America as a non-profit that would follow roughly the same model as Teach for America, a program started in the 1990s that asks professionals to devote a year to teaching in the public schools. Too many people think the only way to change government is by voting, and then are frustrated when voting in new leaders fails to achieve big changes, she said. Much of the reason for that is that bureaucracies continue as leaders come and go, and they are what determines how well and how efficiently the government delivers services.

"We have to engage at lower levels of the system if we are to change the basic machinery of government," Pahlka said. The Code for America fellows have a chance to achieve more change because "they are not just being politically active, they are being bureaucratically active," she said.

In addition to enlisting fellows for the program, Pahlka hoped to inspire more startups to focus on civic software. "This is the last undisrupted market. The problem is people like you would rather get their teeth pulled than work with government," she said. However, a new generation of city leaders is trying to bring more innovation into government and lower some of the procurement barriers that have made them hard to do business with in the past, she said. The Code for America fellows are proving that government systems can be redesigned much more quickly, at a much lower cost, and deliver usable, beautiful experiences. When the Boston Globe published a series on how bewildered parents were at choosing among the school options available to their children, the fellows delivered DiscoverBPS.org, a site where parents could sort through the options, see them on a map, favorite a few, and make comparisons. That project was started in August and went live in October, yet city officials said if it had been done through the regular channels it would have taken two years and cost $2 million.

"There's no reason we should be paying orders of magnitude more for a Web app than it should cost," Pahlka said.

A quirkier project to come out of Boston, Adopt-a-Hydrant, addressed the problem of hydrants getting buried by snowplows, creating a public safety hazard. The app encourages citizens to "adopt" a hydrant and promise to dig it out after snowstorms. If they do so consistently, they get to name it--taking advantage of the social dynamics of recognition.

That open source project has begun to "do something very few government technologies do, which is spread virally," Pahlka said. While its most obvious spread was to other snowy climates, it's also being used in Hawaii, where the problem is with tsunami warning alarms that too often are disabled because the batteries have been stolen. As with buried fire hydrants in Boston, it's a problem that the local governments don't have enough paid inspectors to address, creating an opportunity for citizens to fill the gap.

"This is an app that invites us to think about government a little differently," Pahlka said. "It's not an app that calls on government services. It calls on us."

Citizen programmers can contribute to building a better government by writing code and everyone can contribute by being better citizens, she said. "Howard Dean said you have the power. Obama said yes we can. They were both right--they just weren't specific enough," she said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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