April 8, 2011 | 9:54 AM | By

Jennifer Pahlka: Taking government into the future

FILED UNDER: Community, Code for America, Open Government

President Barack Obama’s first executive act when he took office in 2009 was to issue a memorandum that said he was “committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

About a year later, the federal government embarked on a massive data dump, making available millions of data that showed everything from federal spending patterns to crimes in neighborhoods.

In response to that, a new wave of geeks have emerged: those who combine a love for political affairs with a love for technology. On the forefront of this wave is San Francisco’s Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America. I spoke with Pahlka in the Code for America offices. Transcript after the jump.

JENNIFER PAHLKA:There was a big influx of money and people to government in the 70s. I think the people who work in city government are largely mission-driven and care about people, but they are using model that are outdated in the business world and also in the consumer world. So the way we bank now, the way that we deal with communication and inter-personal communication now has changed a lot in the last ten years. But the way that city governments and many levels of government approach communication transaction, collective action, all of these problems of government is still, in general ways, sort of stuck in the 80s and 90s model.

RINA PALTA: So can you give me an example of, a particularly egregious example you have come across and anything you guys have done to swoop in and change that?

“City council meeting notes are often saved or archived by printing [them] onto paper and then scanning them back in.”
PAHLKA: For one example that I saw in a small city that I went to, and this is very common, is that city council meeting notes are often saved or archived by printing out the meeting notes onto paper and then scanning them back in. The problem with that is that it makes the city council notes not searchable and that means that citizens can’t find when issues have been addressed before, and neither can city council people. It’s also just an inefficient way of doing it. All our fellows would need to do is go install a print to PDF button on the machine of the secretary who works for the city council and train them in how to save that in a format that is searchable.

That’s a much smaller problem than the big projects that our fellows are tackling, but it is an example of the kinds of ways where little ways of working are stuck in city hall.

PALTA: I saw you speak a couple of weeks ago and you were talking about this massive turnover that’s about to happen in city governments, in municipal governments nationwide. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PAHLKA: Sure, so back in the 1970s you had 13% of municipal employees over the age of 40. Now that’s reversed. Thirteen percent are under the age of 40, and the city of San Francisco estimated that 60% of municipal employees will be eligible to retire in the next five years. So that’s both a crisis in terms of talent, but it’s also an opportunity. So if we can get people into those jobs who are very mission-driven, hip to the latest technology and to how social media works and to how people communicate in daily life today, they’ll be able to find some creative, light-weight, agile solutions to problems that don’t cost the city tons of money.

PALTA: So, how do you get the right talent in there and is there an interest among the younger, tech-savvy generation in joining and being a part of city government?

“Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades.”
PAHLKA: There suddenly is a huge interest and it’s driven by a couple of things. The Center for American Progress put out a study this summer that showed the Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades. This breaks all of our preconceptions. We think that every progressive generation is more and more cynical about government. But here’s a generation that thinks that government not necessarily works that well right now, but could work if government were re-crafted in their own image and the way that they run their lives. I think that’s because they have grown up taking the internet for granted. They know that the problems of collective action aren’t as hard to solve in the current model, and so they are very excited about it.

The other thing that has driven a huge interest is the Open Government Movement and the Open Data Movement and this started really when Obama came into office. It was the second day he was in office he signed something that was called the Open Government Initiative which required federal agencies to draw up a plan of how they could be more transparent. This has resulted in huge numbers of federal agencies and also cities and states opening up all of the data that they have and making it available for hackers to build applications on, to remix, to do interesting things with, and this is just hugely appealing to this generation of technical people who know that there is great value with that, and make the world around them better by making that data available and applications to their fellow citizens.

PALTA: So that’s why we see more and more of these maps coming out showing where crime has happened or can break down states by demographics and things like that…Is that something that people would have seen coming out of this movement?

PAHLKA: Exactly. One of the first ones happened nearby in Oakland, California, several years ago. A wonderful group that have been supportive of us, named Stamen Design did something called Oakland Crimespotting, which made crime in Oakland visible and transparent in a way that it had never been before. And what we are trying to do is not just do it from the outside where citizens are building those apps, but also go into the government and bring that learning and that approach back into the city so that they are actually building apps like that, that benefit not just citizens but the bottom line inside city hall. Because the bottom line is really in crisis.

Jennifer Pahlka is founder of Code for America. How open do you think government should be? Do you want to see everything? Or do you think some things shouldn’t be disclosed to the public? Let us know at 415-264-7106, or drop us an email.