(2020-02-18) Now 10 Years Old, Code For America Hopes For Government To Walk Alone

Now 10 years old, Code for America hopes for government to walk alone. As Jennifer Pahlka moves on from her role as Code for America’s chief executive, the nonprofit she founded a decade ago now includes 25,000 fellows and volunteers nationwide

Showing government how its done, however, was only the first half of her vision. “The point is to get governments to do this without us,” Pahlka said. “And to get the American people excited about it and hold governments accountable to it.”

In some cases, as Code for America brigade program manager Chris Whitaker said, they’ve been able to change government through direct action.

Lally pointed to digital services offices like the General Services Administration’s 18F, USDS and Gov.uk, as amplifiers of the innovation that Code for America has tried to instill into local governments that often struggle to break old habits. Pahlka agreed, drawing comparisons between projects led by Code for America and 18F that show what’s possible with technology in government.

But it’s not just producing, as Pahlka calls it, the “minimum-viable product” that will change government the way Code for America intends. Rather, she argues, because policy is always a work in progress, the digital components of government — websites, mobile apps and software — should be constantly refined, as well.

Local governments, she said, are often divided between “policy people” and “digital people,” with no effective means for the two groups to communicate how well services are serving their constituents.

Code for America partnered last year with the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services to build a system that sends automatic reminders via text message to residents who are eligible to collect benefits. The agency was already developing a new benefits eligibility system that Code for America wasn’t able to work on for proprietary reasons, but Code for America still found a way to help by surveying Louisianians on the agency’s services.

Making sure that agencies can measure, understand and act on data from their own civic services has been a hard-fought battle for Pahlka, who said that a good way to measure government progress “is if government changes what it measures.” But she said even getting government leaders to recognize that metrics matter is progress in itself.

Sometimes, though, progress is just expanding the belief that government can change. Code for America’s Clear My Record project, a tool for automatically expunging marijuana convictions in states where the drug has been legalized (or will be soon), has has proved in counties across California and Illinois that digital technology can reduce to a mouse-click a task that once required a trip to the courthouse.