Jennifer Pahlka: Showing Cities the Startup Approach

So I thought what I'd do is take a little step back and tell you about Code for America and a little bit about how it got started and some of what we've learned over time. This is our first class of Code for America fellows that came together in the beginning of 2011. So these are folks with several years of experience in the industry. Average age of our fellows tends to be about 29 or 30. But recent grads are more than welcome to apply who take a year out of their careers to give a year of service to their country. And we match them with local governments who want to try things in a more startup sort of spirit. And we have a very structured program. I could tell you a little bit more about that in Q and A, but I think I'll tell you more about the work that we've done. One of the first things that happened, we had a team working with the city of Boston in 2011. They actually went in to work on a sort of data platform for education in the Boston public schools, which at that time in our existence was very hard for us to get access to data. The movement of open data and sort of trusting data to be outside the walls of an institution was a little bit younger then, but so they were fumbling around with this sort of very grandiose project of an API for all Boston education data. When the mayor, lovely mayor, may he rest in peace, he was a fantastic mayor in Boston, came to our fellows and said, we have a really big problem. We have changed the rules about how kids get assigned to public schools. It's essentially now around trying to have more kids be able to walk to school. So it's essentially a mapping problem. A couple of other rules in there, but what we've done is published a 28 page printed brochure with type that small and, and sends it to all the parents who are now in tears because you can read the 28 pages of four point type and you still have no idea which schools your kids are eligible to attend. Can you help us? And so one of the fellows was working on this API, said, let me take this, and went off. And about eight weeks later he published. I don't have the slide of the early version. This is what it looks like currently. He published something called discoverbps.org, put it up on a, I think on Amazon, and it basically, you type in your name the age of your grade that your kid in, and if you have any sibling, if the kid has any siblings in another public school, you could put your address in and it returns a map list of where you can go to school. So it takes a very long process down to a couple of minutes. Great, fantastic. That's pretty easy to do. But what we learned in that process, we were like, okay, what do we do next? The. The folks in city government came to us and they said, you don't understand. If this had gone through a regular procurement process, this would have taken us at least two years and cost at least $2 million. And I don't think we actually realized that at the time, because what we were saying, what we were trying to say to the world was, look, these interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use. We can have a relationship with government that says delightful and positive, as we have with other institutions that are mediated through digital technology. But the other thing that really got me about that was it wasn't really about the money. It was about the time. Imagine being the mayor and having to go to parents and say, yeah, we'll get you that in two years. In the meantime, your kids are trying to enroll in school. So this really set a pattern for us of there's data that needs to be made usable to a certain set of users. We can do that pretty easily, and we can put an nice front end on it, and it costs kind of what it should cost in the real world.