Anne Jonas — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/acknowledgments.xhtml
Due to its permanently beta status, writing about Code for America is to put a shapeshifter under a microscope — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_1.xhtml
Over time, CfA rarely gained expertise with leading-edge technologies and became ambivalent to organizing around specific technologies. It was concerned with tech-forward governance, although not in the sense that scholars typically ascribe to that term of involving “public policy and regulation” (Dutton 1996, 4). Even today, it remains agnostic about bread-and-butter technology policy issues, such as privacy rights, that drive organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Code for America has produced professionals, but has rarely devoted significant resources to professionalization. It kept its efforts ambiguous to remain nimble, ready to seize political opportunity and ensure its survival. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_1.xhtml
Luigi Ray-Montañez — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_1.xhtml
Address-IQ didn’t actually tell first responders anything new; they already were well aware of the problem of 911 being overused, since they were the ones responding to the calls. Instead, Address-IQ was designed with the data-seeking administrator in mind—who was always the Fellows’ actual “client.” — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_2.xhtml
Scholars have found that a major dilemma grassroots innovation movements face is “whether to realize their aims by trying to insert themselves into prevailing institutions … or to seek to mobilize support for transforming those institutions” (A — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_4.xhtml
The lesson is that if you replace organizational structure with informal, nepotistic friendship networks drawn from the tech industry, bad actors find it easy to endure — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_4.xhtml
When she was still Executive Director, it was common for Pahlka to pull an employee into a room for a sit-down meeting or hover by their desk, asking for stories to tell on stage—which employees referred to as a “story tax.” Stories were a fungible commodity and how employees proved their value to the organization — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_5.xhtml
Mike Migurski, Frances Berriman, and the Chime team were “horizontalists” who advocated for a GDS-style play that would produce a durable “civic technology stack” that could be repurposed to serve different government needs. “Reject services, choose product,” reads a document, authored by members of the Chime team and publicly hosted on Google Docs, that summarized the need for an orientation toward platforms in manifesto-like language. “Code for America has been operating in a patronage model since 2010, and it’s time to stop,” they wrote, “we are too responsive to our funders’ desires and too dependent on nonprofit-style metrics reporting, and this harms our long-term credibility.” To isolate their work from the whims of funders, they proposed selling online platforms to government. A “product-oriented approach” would hypothetically allow CfA to produce and market “a common technology stack across partner governments.” Once the “full stack” platform existed, smaller “agile” efforts could be built on top of it. Creating a large platform and directing traffic to it was a familiar way that the private sector tech companies like Google and Facebook made money through advertisements. Had CfA gone down this route, it would resemble a tech corporation like Facebook or Twitter. The tech team used a similar framing as GDS and staff were already familiar with GDS-style of “digital transformation” projects. To them, a CMS like Chime was a necessary part of Code for America fulfilling its vision of Government as a Platform and a way to innovate by using fundamentals of software engineering to improve basic services—which the term referred to as “innobasics.” Dave Guarino, Alan Williams, and others on the GetCalFresh project—which had been bootstrapped out of a Fellowship and run in extended demo mode for years—believed that Code for America should instead pursue “focus areas,” or thematically similar “verticals” that more directly improved residents’ lives. The first focus area (health and human services) was managed by Jack Madans, endorsed by Bob Sofman, and built on $175,000 received in 2015 from the California Health Care Foundation, which formed a foundation for GetCalFresh. Philosophically, the “vertical” faction were less attached to “product” than Migurski’s team. They instead believed in acquiring domain knowledge and using user-centered design principles to improve participation in government services. Their driving motivation was to reduce the harms that the neoliberal state imposed on citizens. It was quite a different approach to the vision of the “horizontalists,” who believed in engineering a general-purpose “full stack” platform for governance. The “vertical” effort also demanded a different funding strategy based on smaller, no-bid government contracts (which will be discussed shortly). The debate about how Code for America should become a technology company continued until Jennifer Pahlka returned from the federal government, where she served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from June 2013 to June 2014. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_6.xhtml
GetCalFresh playbook as “coming from a lean background” where they were “doing applied customer service, and then automating the things that worked out for clients.” — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_6.xhtml
GetCalFresh and Clear My Record, much like the Brigades, happened almost by historical accident, as they were just a few of dozens of ideas percolating up from employees and volunteers. Each project was modular, able to sit under the umbrella of Code for America’s larger organizational identity, and decomposed into individual assets to be deployed in other program areas. They also benefited from Fureigh’s foresight, Latimer’s charisma, Solomon’s storytelling, and Guarino’s specialized political knowledge. These human communication skills became more essential to the organization being able to recode itself than any technology — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_6.xhtml
Similarly, when Governor Newsom announced (Office of Governor Gavin Newsom 2020) a new initiative in early 2020 to support workers affected by the pandemic—freeing up $50 million for undocumented adult Californians with one-time cash benefits of $500—they looked to the team for help building a web portal. However, teams were often thrown into tense situations due to time constraints. “It was one month to launch and they were literally writing the policies as we were trying to build the software,” according to Edelman, although “we had a certain amount of leverage, and were able to push back on some stuff.” — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_6.xhtml
Placing culture over structure and relying on ambiguous messaging worked far better for Code for America’s institutional positioning, membership negotiation, and self-structuring (McPhee and Zaug 2009) than for coordinating its employees. They were often left confused about how decisions — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_6.xhtml
In their worst moments, Code for America practiced a kind of extractive organizing, taking kernels of ideas of members and employees to scale up and promote, while keeping everyone else perpetually in orbit. Infrastructural organizing—like infrastructure itself—could handily disguise how power operated, even as it offered a site for the expression of political agency. Institutionalization remains an organizational — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml
Scale was Code for America’s siren song. Alex Hanna and Tina M. Park (2020) refer to “scale thinking” as “the ability of a system to expand without having to change itself in substantive ways or rethinking its constitutive elements” (1). Scalability is driven by quantification and manipulation of core elements of a system, which impart a sense of moral correctness. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml
What I call the “problem of misplaced scale” emerges when scale thinking is applied to prototypes that grow into projects to alleviate public problems without addressing changing constitutive elements or new contexts. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml
Code for America scaled up its plucky side project across the state and then nationwide, increasing the number of eligible people applying for food assistance. Its team—initially composed of cisgender white men—were sensitive to race and poverty while grappling with the constraints of government food assistance. Unfashionable as it might be in our current political moment, we should recognize that people can ethically labor in the service of others unlike them; in fact, the future of our democracy likely depends on it. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml
As implementers, Code for America couldn’t set criteria for evaluating who gets food assistance or what types of food it could be used for. Once GetCalFresh gained momentum, its boldest ambitions—to exclude the middlemen who were already contracted to deliver the benefits and change policies to reflect new possibilities—remained elusive. Why would intermediaries change how they operated, just because a team from a small nonprofit organization showed a more ethical method of enrollment? Code for America made their lives easier, too. Infrastructural organizing promised to be decentralized and permissionless like open-source software, but could not escape organizational and institutional constraints. — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml
CfA was most effective at finding opportunities for improving niche government services that could unlock the next round of funding. It liked the aura of democratic progress more than the grit of it, and used nationalistic imagery to coax members to instrumentalize themselves to change complex systems—even if those goals were ultimately unachievable — : 54f7b6be-1275-44fb-ad78-a8ad63718739!OEBPS!xhtml/chapter_7.xhtml