I spent a year at the white house
where STEM education was a top priority of our president, President Obama.
Just last week he announced an initiative called
Computer Science For All
in which we dedicated four billion dollars to the states
to put more computer science education into classrooms around our country.
Now, why is this such an important priority for the United States?
Well, first of all,
employers can't fill open computer science jobs.
Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of jobs open
and we believe that by 2024, there will be over a million jobs
in computer science that we can't fill because we don't have enough graduates.
Only 8 percent of STEM graduates are actually graduating in computer science.
And you may think that we have more graduates overall than in the past
but in fact, we are graduating fewer computer science students now
than we did 10 years ago.
And for women, it's actually half the number.
This is a major problem for our economy and for our future
and we believe this is related, in fact, to another problem.
The same way that we really need to get kids to think
about coding as a superpower
that helps them impact the world around them
they also need to think about civic engagement
as a superpower that helps them impact the world around them.
But in fact, in the United States,
we have one of the lowest voter turnouts of any OECD country.
And I work at the local level, where only one in five eligible voters
is voting in local elections.
Civic participation is a broad area
and this is despite the fact that we have political campaigns
spending more and more money every year trying to get people to vote,
philanthropies and government trying to get people to vote,
and fewer and fewer people are showing up, whether it's to the polls,
or to city hall, or to a meeting with your neighbors.
Only 50% of Americans were involved in civic life in the last year.
In order to change this, we're really gonna need for kids to think
about themselves as having impact in the world.
And why is it that these two issues are so closely tied?
Well, I want to propose one common problem:
in the five hundred and ninety minutes a day
that we are consuming media,
whether it's television, or a tablet, or your phone,
we are exposed to about 362 ad messages.
And we even remember about 153 of those messages.
That means that over and over again during our day, we are told one thing,
and that's this:
that you're a consumer.
What is it that you're told to do every time you consume that ad message?
Choose a brand,
buy it, use it.
This is something that we are told every day, thousands of times a day.
But there is another narrative.
Not one that's new; one that's actually quite old
but it's got a nice 21st century ring to it today.
And it's another message that says that you are a maker.
This is a girl who's just made a little robot,
and she's trying it out in a competition.
We now have a word for this, The Maker Movement.
But really, it's just that DIY mentality and those DIY activities
that have always been part of our lives. We're pulling them out of the garage
and out of the schools and giving them visibility
and making them something that we can all participate in.
The Maker Faire started in the Bay Area. We now have over
a hundred and fifty thousand people that come to the Maker Faire,
but there are also a hundred and fifty Maker Faires around the world now,
where two million people are going every year.
This is just one small expression
of that maker mentality coming out into the world
and showing itself as an alternative narrative.
And a narrative that really promotes a sense,
I think for both kids and adults,
that they have this power to create the world around them.
So if the maker narrative is an alternative to that consumer narrative,
then how do we raise makers?
How do we raise folks that really understand
that this is their superpower?
Well, I think it's the same question as how do we raise citizens.
How do you raise kids who understand that they'll have an impact
on civic life and government as well?
And I think this is a great time to also ask,
how do we start to make our government
in the same realm?
At Code for America, we have a program that takes
mid-career professionals
from big technology companies, like Google and Apple,
and puts them in small start ups
that go work with local governments over the course of the year.
Now, they're making technology, but more importantly,
they're showing how a user-centered, data-driven and iterative approach
to making technology makes better outcomes in government.
Let's talk a little bit about how making government really works.
And this is a story from our first year in Code for America.
We had a team that was sent to the city of Boston,
and it happened to be that year that there was an enormous amount of snow.
Now, the Code for America fellows were actually working in the schools;
they were working on a better interface
for parents to be able to figure out which schools their kids could attend.
But while they were there, they looked at a bunch of other problems.
And one of them was this is: they found that
when the snow piles up over the fire hydrants and no one digs it out,
it's actually quite a danger if there's a fire.
All of that time that's spent digging up the fire hydrant,
is time that's not spent fighting the fire.
Now, municipal governments have cut their budgets
all over the United States
and there's no money in the budget anymore to dig out these fire hydrants.
But one of the fellows looked at this problem and said,
"But that there are people shoveling the sidewalks
right in front of this fire hydrants.
Why don't we get them to help out?"
And this is the question we ask over and over again at Code for America.
How could we make it easy for the community to help
where government isn't able to step in?
So this fellow saw this problem and quickly got a dataset
of all of the locations of the fire hydrants in Boston,
put it on a map,
and allowed people to adopt a hydrant and say,
"I will dig this fire hydrant out when it's covered with snow
and I will make my community more safe."
Now, this was not a lot of code;
it took him about a day to put this together.
At least the first version of it.
But what happened is that others picked it up.
In Honolulu, one of our other city partners saw this
and said, "You know what? We don't have a fire hydrant problem
on the beaches of Honolulu.
But we do have a problem with our tsunami sirens."
It's very important that the tsunami sirens work,
and yet, the battery packs were sometimes stolen,
and the city didn't know which of them worked or not.
So he also created a map, and let citizens adopt tsunamis sirens.
So that the city could focus on fixing the ones that were broken
instead of constantly going around and seeing which ones needed help.
Now, I live in Oakland, California, where the problem there is drains.
There's a drain full of leaves
and it backs up, you have flooding in your street.
Well, it's easy enough for me to go out and clear those leaves out of the drain.
Much easier than it is to send the crews out.
And so we have, in Oakland, "Adopt a Drain".
There about two dozen of these programs around the world
and they've spread very, very easily by people
picking up the open source code,
adapting it to their needs, and publishing it for their citizens.
Now, this is what we call civic hacking;
it's just the process of being in your city,
realizing that you need skills,
and getting in front of this amazing movement.
Lauren Ancona is a woman in the city of philadelphia,
who didn't know how to code.
But she wanted to get involved; she had a problem with parking permits.
And she taught herself to code and to use data
in order to be able to do this,
to be able to show the city the problems that she needed to have solved.
And she said, "civic hacking changed the way I saw my city and saw myself."
She saw code as her superpower
and she learned to do it, and she became part of this movement.
Now, what is the future for engaged citizens?
The future for educating students in STEM careers?
Well, I think it's important that we ask ourselves; as important as code is,
what if it were not actually the most important thing to our future?
Do we really need kids who can just pomp out lines of JavaScript?
Or if you think about that example
with the fire hydrants;
do we need kids who could understand what code can do?
What it can do for their communities, and what it can do for them.
Now, if we're going to create this generation of citizen makers,
who understand that code and civic engagement is their superpower
and their way to have impact in the world...
Yes, we're going to have to have many, many more programs
that teach kids to code.
There are thousands of them outside schools,
but if we're going to get to the numbers that we need,
the heavy lifting will have to happen in public school classrooms,
which means we're going to have to have coding as part of the curriculum
in every public school in the United States,
and probably around the world.
But we're also gonna have to understand that it's not just coding,
but it's this mindset of making
and the maker movement. And that's why President Obama,
before he announced the Computer Science For All initiative,
brought making into the White House years ago.
He held a White House Maker Faire,
and held a Maker Faire on the National Lawn.
He's been making this a part of his administration since the beginning.
There's another thing that President Obama did
to make this initiative so visible.
And this happened during the year that I spent in the white house.
I went in to create something called the United States Digital Service,
which is modeled after the Government Digital Service in the UK.
But it didn't have a lot of traction
until something happened in October 2013.
President Obama spent much of his first administration
trying to pass something called the Affordable Care Act.
It was supposed to make health care available to all Americans.
But one of the things that this law needed was a website
that allowed people to enroll in health care in the United States.
And when that website launched, it didn't initially work.
Most Americans who tried to use the site saw this message"
"The System is down at the moment."
And it was so bad, that there was talk of actually repealing the law
because the website didn't work.
This was a major challenge to the Obama administration,
and one that we were asked to rise to the occasion and help fix.
So what did we do?
Well, we brought in some amazing folks from outside to help fix the site.
These were not folks from government;
these were folks from Google and Apple and other companies,
who came, sometimes literally, on a moment's notice,
to come to D.C. to help make Healthcare.gov work.
One of them in the middle, Michael Dickerson, was a Googler,
who was asked to come on a Wednesday
and was there in D.C. the next day, on Thursday.
And they worked 20 hours a day for a hundred days straight
to get the site working better.
Now, at first, it didn't work very well,
but as time went on we got headlines like this;
"Healthcare.gov is slightly less terrible today."
And by the time that the open enrollment period
for this health insurance was over,
the site had actually signed up eight million people,
which is more than the original estimates before the site broke
and that's a remarkable accomplishment.
What's remarkable also is that the digital skills that came in
through this call to the American people to come help
actually stayed on.
This United States Digital Service,
a group of amazing technology folks who came in to
help save the site, actually lives on,
and Mikey Dickerson, that guy who came on one day's notice,
is actually leading the USDS.
When we talk about government for the people and by the people,
it's not just adopting hydrants or adopting storm drains;
it's really making our government technology work.
This only works when the people get involved.
Government for the people and by the people
has to work in the 21st century,
and we need citizen makers and citizen coders
for that to happen.
Now, it's been said that we are still in the scribal stage of the computer age,
where the skills are just in the hands of the elite.
We know when we look at the problems of the 21st century
that we're gonna need that to change,
we're gonna need that to be part of everybody's skillset.
If we're going to face the challenges of the 21st century,
we need everyone to be computer literate,
we need everyone to think of themselves as a maker,
not just a consumer,
and we need everyone to think of themselves as a citizen.
Now, in order to do that,
certainly, we're gonna need an enormous investment
in computer science education,
but we're also gonna need a change in mindset.
We need to think of coding not just as a language of the future,
but also as the language of citizenship.
Thank you very much.