We call ourselves a peace corps for geeks, but instead of sending our geeks to the developing world, we send them into the wilds of local government.
550 people very talented and passionate developers and designers applied to be part of our current program, we chose 28
Who will work in teams of 3 or 4 over the course of year. They work sort of like a small start up, together with the 9 local governments we also carefully selected from a pool of applicants. Together, we take them through a very structured process that’s based on lean startup and design thinking,
And they build apps, but the apps are really all about data. In some cases its better, faster cheaper data collection, as in the case of Textizen, which got hyper-local feedback from thousands of citizens via posters, bus ads, and text messages
Or they deal with data liberation. Our fellows were responsible for 836 municipal data sets being made public last year, and stood up open data portals, like this one for Santa Cruz.
There’s also data analysis. For this project, CfA fellows analyzed the search logs of honoulu.gov to see what citizens were searching for, and then rebuilt a clean, simple interface around those needs.
Fellows do a lot of data visualization too, like this app showing the status of service requests from citizens (things like potholes, streeetlights, graffitti) And this is just a small sample of what got built last year, which was the second year of the program, but the point isn’t so much the apps themselves, as it is that these are really interesting problems to solve, and that they really matter. They matter to individuals A LOT and they matter to society, they can make a big difference towards the kind of society we want to be.
Let me tell you about one of the projects we’re working on now. Last year I got a call from this woman, Anne Milgram, the former attorney general of New Jersey. She knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t work with our criminal justice system. One of the things she told me is that if you’re charged with a crime, we have a choice: we can hold you awaiting trial or release you if we expect there’s a good chance you’ll show up for your trial. Now there’s a lot of data that you can bring to bear on that decision, but we don’t use that data. What’s the biggest factor in determining whether you are held or released? Whether the judge you’re in front of had lunch that day.
And it turns out this decision matters A LOT. You’re 5 times more likely to be convicted if you were held pre-trial than if you were released. Now that may have to do with a lot of things, but they’ve studied this and there’s just a big difference in how you appear to a jury if you’ve just been in jail, often for months. And what about that bail that judges generally set if they release you? Small bail for petty crimes, large bail for bigger crimes, right? Well it turns out that most people who are charged with $500 bail can’t afford it… they simply don’t have it. And bailbondsmen don’t like to deal with $500 bail; there’s a lot more profit in $50,000 bail. So our jails are full of people being held for very minor crimes, and while they are being held, they lose their jobs, they can’t support their families, and they learn to become criminals. Now these are all essentially problems of data, so Anne asked if we could get a few cities to implement some risk assessment models that Anne’s foundation had developed. I was a bit scared to tackle a problem like this, but I sent a note out to the city governments who follow our work and asked if anyone would be interested in a project like this. And within a day I had about twenty cities raising their hands, because what I had not realized is that pre-trial incarceration is an enormous cost to cities, most of whom are in serious debt. In some cases it’s the second biggest cost behind pensions. So this isn’t just a problem for defendants, it’s a problem for tax-payers.
So Anne and I eventually chose two of those cities to work with: NYC and Louisville, KY and there’s a team of 3 fellows in those cities right now, finding out all they can about how data is used – or not used – pre-trial. This is a tweet from one of those fellows Marcin, who until January was a developer and designer at Google, and is now doing things like ride-alongs with the LMPD and in fact being processed and in fact last week he and his team were processed and admitted to jail and held for a few hours to have the experience and see what actually happens and of course to understand what data is generated by that process. I should note that the fellows get to do a lot of really fun things in addition to things like being held in jail, and that every single person who’s been through the program has said that it changed their llves, and that they’d do it again. Its very hard work, but it’s meaningful.
And its fitting that I’m telling you about this here, at an O’Reilly event, because Code for America started in part because this guy started asking hackers and enterpreneurs to work on stuff that matters. There are a lot of ways to do that….we need people like you in public service, and we need you starting companies that tackle the hard problems society faces, which is why we also run an accelerator for civic startups. But now there are a lot more ways to do this just for a year or six months, like CfA or the Presidential Innovation Fellows program that Todd Park runs out of the White House, or an organization I hope you all know called DataKind. They’re doing amazing work that you can be part of.
Because we live in troubled times. We have the tools we need to tackle these difficult problems, but we have to apply them where they are desperately needed. I don’t know what Alex Graveley meant when he tweeted this, WHO is not we, When if not now? But I know what I want it to mean, which is
That each you believe government CAN work for the people, by the people in the 21 st century if we make it so. And I hope you’’ll find your own way to make it so.
