STEPHANIE HANNON: Healthcare.gov has taught us
that billions of dollars is being
spent on technology that just doesn't work.
It's not just health care.
It's food stamps.
It's the DMV.
It's our schools.
Code for America, sometimes called
the Peace Corps for Geeks, is trying
to address this by matching software geniuses with US
cities to reboot local services.
We're excited to welcome Jennifer Pahlka to the studio
today.
She's the founder of Code for America.
And she also recently spent a year at the White House
as the US deputy chief of technology.
We're so excited to have you.
Thank you for being a great friend
and collaborator to Google.
I think it'd be fun to start by having you tell us
in your own words what Code for America is.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: Code for America,
as you said is the Peace Corps for Geeks.
It was really started, because we
were in the middle of what we call the Web 2.0 revolution.
And yet, the technology in government
is stuck back in the 1980s.
And that's a problem for taxpayers.
As you said, we're spending so much more
on technology than we should, really orders of magnitude
more.
But it's also a problem because when services
don't work, like healthcare.gov, or like when you go to the DMV,
or when you try to enroll your child in school,
you really have this experience of not trusting government.
And we must trust our government to have a functioning society.
STEPHANIE HANNON: I'm sure you're
combating a lot of perception with your program
that government can't change.
So I think hearing a few of your success stories
or some of the innovative technology that has been built
would be really great.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: We see all the time
that while there's great software
technologists and developers and designers that
want to come help, there are also
great people inside government who want their help
and want to try things a new way.
They know that it's not working.
So I'll give you an example, when
we worked in the city and county of San Francisco
last year with a team of folks, who
were looking at the problem of food stamps.
Now, there's a lot of different problems
that happen with food stamps.
But they were particularly looking at the fact
that when you enroll in this program, most often
you fall right off of the rolls.
So you spend a lot of time applying.
And then suddenly, you're not on it.
And your EBT card, your food stamps card, doesn't work.
It turns out that it's really about a lot of very confusing
notices that you get in the mail that
aren't written in human language.
They're very long and very confusing.
We enrolled in the program and couldn't figure them out
either.
And so you haven't complied with something
that they're asking for you, some piece of information.
And they drop you off the rolls.
We ended up doing a very simple intervention, which
was to text message people when they're about to fall off
the rolls and telling them to call the office.
And that meant that 40% more people
stayed in the program, which is great.
So that's a lot of money that we're
saving in a better experience for the citizens.
But more importantly, what we found out
is that the people that we worked with in government
then understood the importance of enrolling
in their own programs.
When they moved on to new programs,
they said the first thing I'm going to do
is sign up for it so I understand the experience
that my users are having.
That's fantastic.
That means we have this whole new generation of people
who work in government who care about the user experience.
And they know the technology is going
to have to change dramatically in order
to have that better experience.
STEPHANIE HANNON: So you talk about text messaging
as an important channel, text messaging.
And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley
would jump to building an app.
Can you talk about the importance of that channel
for the audience the fellows are trying to serve?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: Right now, we're
seeing that a lot of people who need government services
don't have internet at home.
So if they're going to be accessing these services,
it'll be possibly on a smartphone, but generally
a low-end one.
And so it really has to work in that format.
But very often they'll only have a feature phone.
So a lot of what we do must use just text messaging.
One of the first programs we did in the city of Philadelphia,
for instance, was about getting better feedback
on the city plan.
They were in the middle of a very long term
plan for Philadelphia.
And they knew they needed feedback from the citizens
about things like where there were food deserts,
or which rail lines needed to be extended.
But the people who show up for the input sessions at city hall
tend to be not the people who are affected
by the changes that were going to be made in the plan.
So they knew that they had this specific questions.
And they went out and put posters up.
So there was a poster in a certain area saying
where do you shop for your food if it was a food desert.
Or in a bus shelter asking, should this offline bus line
be extended?
Would you ride this line if it were extended?
And the way respond is to write back in text.
Well, you're getting exactly the people
you know you're trying to ask of.
And they're very easily able to respond.
And that just changed completely how they got feedback
for the plan in ways that are so much more useful and so
much cheaper.
STEPHANIE HANNON: A lot of people
are frustrated with their schools.
Can you talk about any fellow projects
that have worked in that space?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: In our very first year,
we worked with Boston public schools.
And we worked on a really small problem.
But it's one that is right at the beginning
of your experience with schools, which
is selecting a school for your kid.
They had just changed the rules in Boston
about where kids could go.
And they had this 28-page brochure with tiny, tiny type
that you were supposed to read, and then
figure out where your kid could go.
Truly, it was a mapping problem.
And it was about the distance between school and your home.
And so we did a very simple web app
that lets you type in your address
and the age of your kid.
And it would tell you which schools
you were eligible to attend.
And it really just changed the relationship
between the parents and the schools
where they really felt like they were starting off
on the right foot.
Now, so much more has happened.
And we're working with Rhode Island
this year to make sure that when you start filling out
all of those forms when your kid enrolls in school, that you
only have to write your name and your address once instead
of 40 different times.
It's little things like that that I
think are adding up to people feeling better
about the experience they're having with public schools.
STEPHANIE HANNON: So your fellows
come from some of the most agile, fast-moving technology
companies.
What's been really shocking to them
as they've tried to work with government, or big lessons?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: Well, our fellows
come from a lot of places.
A lot of them come from Google, which is great.
And we're very glad to have them.
We would love to have more.
But yes, they do tend to be in places that build stuff quickly
and have a philosophy of build it and iterate it and also
measure it as you're building it,
which is something that doesn't happen often in government.
They are often shocked at the level of risk aversion
in government.
We've done things like trying to get data out
about the locations of fire hydrants in the city.
And we'll be told sometimes, oh, we can't let that data out
because it would be in the hands of the terrorists.
Or right now, we're trying to solve the problem of people
using EBT, that Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, which
is what you get for food stamps.
If they use those cards in places that charge a fee,
a lot of their benefits go to a bank instead of to food.
And we were asking for the locations of free ATMs.
And we're told, oh, that's not data that we can make public.
Well, there's really no risk to it.
And if you come from the world where it's always best
to have it open, it's a very difficult response to hear.
We really try to get our fellows to understand
that it's a different culture.
And that they have to work with them.
And that the public servants that throw up barriers
to opening things are doing it because they genuinely
believe that they're protecting the public.
And you must tap into that notion of service,
even if it's misguided, and understand
that they have the same intentions that we do,
which is to serve the public as well they can.
STEPHANIE HANNON: I've heard so many great case studies
in specific cities your fellows have worked in.
And I'd love to know more about how you make them sustainable,
and how you scale them.
How can you take a success like Honolulu Answers
and bring it to a lot of cities?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: The program that you mentioned
was in Honolulu, where they tried to fix the website.
It was a very large, clunky website
with a lot of information that wasn't useful to users at all.
And they actually used volunteers
in the community in a very simple, basic interface
to rewrite the answers that most citizens were coming
to the website to get answered.
And this was a huge success.
They pulled the whole community together
to rewrite this website in simple, clear language.
And then that spread now really just through the community
to all sorts of cities that want to do this.
And the city may or may not participate.
In Oakland, where I live, the city's
very much involved with it.
In fact, they host Oakland Answers.
And the community is there to not only write the site,
but keep it updated and maintained.
Our Oakland Brigade-- our volunteers that live and work
in Oakland in part of the Code for America Brigade-- maintain
the technology, but the citizens really
maintain the content in it.
We have this notion of for the people, by the people.
It really must be the people who come
to the table to make this work.
And that works in some cases.
A really great way that Code for America technology
has been sustained is through companies.
We've had seven companies spin off of Code for America.
Textizen, the one I mentioned that allows you to text message
the city about the city plan, is now a very vibrant company
working with hundreds of cities around the country.
Another one is Open Counter that simplifies
the business permitting process.
It makes it so much easier than it is without that.
And we're just now working with a new company called
Transit Mix that actually lets you mix and match
transit lines in your city and is
being used by city employees.
When we build businesses around these technologies
and allow people not just to use them on a volunteer basis,
but to buy them as a vendor, we can see really great growth
and sustainability.
But we've also seen great success
where we've helped governments bring
in the skills and the talent they need to maintain
the technology that Code for America builds for them.
And that, in some ways, is my favorite path
to sustainability because it means that you've
got people in there now that are going to help that city make
far better choices in the future about a whole wide range
of things.
And that's true sustainable change.
STEPHANIE HANNON: I think by now a lot of our audience
is wondering how they can help or get involved.
You mentioned brigades.
I'll think it'll probably be helpful to tell
a little bit more about those.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: So we have brigades
in about seven cities around the country.
And all that means is that there are
people in that city who have some degree of technical skills
from incredibly talented technologists
to people who are just comfortable using technology
but know that that's the best way for them to help
make their communities better.
So they get together generally Tuesday or Wednesday nights,
generally in city hall, because they're
working with local government.
And they work on open data portals,
or they work on standing up applications
that help people in their community.
And it is a really great way to get involved
and to understand a little bit better the problem that we're
trying to solve.
We always say, we the people will solve this problem.
We also, as the people, need to understand
how government works.
And often we don't want to do that.
This is a great way not only to understand the problem,
but to get to meet the people in government
who are really trying to help.
So I would encourage anybody to join their local brigade.
And there are several in the Bay Area.
But also, if you live somewhere where there isn't a brigade,
to start one and lead one.
That takes time.
But it's a lot of fun.
And you'll end up with a community of people
that you really enjoy and feeling really
good about the work that you guys can do together.
There are, of course, a lot of other ways
to get involved from the highest commitment, which
is to go work in government.
We always encourage people to think
about taking a couple of years out of your career,
whether you're spending it at Google
or sort of bouncing around, to take some time
and apply to work in government.
There's some fantastic positions open
where you really can do good.
We always hear from folks that they
know that this will make a difference.
They just need to know that they have a real chance.
And there are now so many more places
where you can go into government and have a real shot at making
a difference than there were several years ago.
And of course, the Code for America fellowship
is a great way to work with government, but through us,
which is easier.
There's a lot fewer constraints.
You're doing it for a limited amount of time.
And you have a lot more freedom than when
you're working in government.
It's an annual program.
And we'll be recruiting for it again in a couple months.
STEPHANIE HANNON: Great.
So let's look at the civic Open Data space.
I think there's been a ton of energy around it.
But it hasn't realized its potential yet.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that
and what could make a big movement in that space.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: That movement has been so exciting
for the past couple of years.
And it's been a lot of what has drawn the attention of the tech
community to government in the first place.
So I think it's had success in certain ways.
And I think early on, hackathons were
able to sort of show what's possible in a way that's
sort of opened the door to governments getting on board,
for people in government saying, OK.
If we open this data, the community
can build us an app that is so much cheaper and so much better
than we would've gotten if we'd done it
through a procurement process.
So, so many great early wins.
But because it is hard to open data,
and because it's hard for government
to understand how to get that data open
with the characteristics that will make it useful-- and you,
yourself, Steph, has said it needs to be licensed.
It needs to be updated.
And it needs to be structured.
Well, it's one thing to open it.
It's another thing to make sure that it
meets all those criteria so that it continues to be useful
for developers, and then, of course,
through the developers for the citizens.
There's more that government needs to do.
But there's also more that the developer community
needs to do to demand these things
and to help governments do these things.
I think of one the companies that we've
worked with through our Accelerator program called
Captricity.
They can take data that's currently locked in paper forms
and getting them into structured data very, very quickly
through a wonderful combination of OCR and Amazon Mechanical
Turk.
And they're getting huge amounts of government data
into a structured format so that people can use it.
They had a great success in my time
in DC clearing the backlog of adverse effects of drugs
at the FDA.
It took them six months to contract to do this work.
And they had structured data in their hands in six hours.
STEPHANIE HANNON: Wow.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: So the tools really are there for us
to be able to have this data available.
And, of course, when you release that data,
think of what the community can do
to help flag when there's been a bad batch of some sort of drug
or some pill.
And the FDA can actually act on that.
That's exactly the kind of thing that we
need the community to come to the table
and say, yes, we can make this data unbelievably useful
to save lives.
STEPHANIE HANNON: So you spent a year in the White House.
What was your biggest learning there?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: I think my biggest learning in the White
House was that we are at a very unique moment in time.
I happened to be there during the failure of healthcare.gov.
My boss was Todd Park, who went off to rescue the site
and did so really heroically along with the help
of many others, many Googlers, who
worked incredibly hard to do it.
But what I saw during that rescue
were policymakers understanding that they
need the technical world.
They need geeks to make this work.
When I was there, I was asked to go start working
on the problems of immigration because the people
in the Domestic Policy council realized that if the Affordable
Care Act-- having worked so hard to get it past--
was vulnerable because we can't build a website that works,
what happens when we finally get immigration reform passed?
Will the systems not scale?
Will we be at risk of losing that policy as well?
That's something that nobody wants to have happen.
But the good news is now they realize
that we can't rely on the ways that we've
been trying to do technology.
Sure, you can have a vendor that's
going to tell you, no problem.
The site will work.
Well, they've been there.
And they don't trust that anymore.
But they trust people like Mikey Dickerson,
who came from Google to help save the site.
They trust the people who build technology
that does work for us in our daily lives.
And they want them there.
And I think for the first time they want them there
and they're willing to give them the power to do it right.
And that's the first time in history
we've been in that place.
So I just want us to take advantage of that moment.
Since they want us there, let's show up.
Let's be there.
And let's make this work because they've never before realized
how important geeks are.
STEPHANIE HANNON: So digital and technology people in government
is critical.
Do you think we're going to see more
of that in elected officials?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: I think that people will demand it.
I think the general public is realizing
that if we can't implement the policies we create,
we can't govern.
And if we continue to have a political class that's
so disconnected from how the world works today--
we just manage through software.
That is the reality.
It's not some other thing.
And if our political class doesn't understand that,
they're not going to do a good job helping run the country.
I think we will increasingly see people
in bureaucracy and in elected positions
with not necessarily technical skills,
but with a fundamental understanding of how
the digital world works.
That's what we need.
It's a difference between knowing what's easy
and knowing what's hard, and the difference
between thinking of technology as something you buy
and something that you work on in service of a user.
STEPHANIE HANNON: Great.
So if our viewers want to learn more about Code for America,
where can they go?
JENNIFER PAHLKA: They can go to codeforamerica.org.
They can go look at our TEDTalk online.
And they can ask other people that they
know at Google who've been involved with the program.
STEPHANIE HANNON: Great.
Well, we're so grateful you came today.
Thanks, Jen, for your time with us.
JENNIFER PAHLKA: Thank you so much.
It's great to be here.