PyCon Day 2: Opening Plenary
Keynote: Catherine Bracey, Code for America
Introduction
Opening quote (after the AV people had trouble getting her presentation on the projector): “Technology will fuck you”. Worked on Obama election campaign. During the campaign, lots was talked about the Affordable Care Act. But it almost fell apart, because of a broken website. Think about that again. The biggest piece of landmark legislation and was the crowning accomplishment after 75+ years of not passing health care legislation almost fell apart because of a website.
94% of government IT projects that cost more than $10 million are either late, over budget or never delivered.
For people who are poor, government doesn’t work for those people… even more than we think it doesn’t work for us (the priviledged class).
Anecdotes
- 2013 Florida rolls out an unemployment website. A few months later the unemployment “fell”. Because the website wasn’t working. $63 million later…
- Los Angeles tries to roll out a big school district website that was supposed to be a unified website for all scheduling, transcripts, etc. 130 million tool that was scheduled for 2007, 7 years late they rolled it out, it crashed.
- Arizona: Food stamps website. When you try to use it, it shows that “federal data sources are not available during the following times”. “I’m not a database specialist, but I don’t see why a database would have to be down”.
- State of Louisiana, had their food stamps website down for an entire month at which time, no one could get their food stamps.
Democracy
Trust in government is lowest since the Civil War. Lowest voter turnout since WW2.
This is dangerous for democracy and it breeds cynicism.
We need government to work, and in the 21st Century that means we need to incorporate the digital world.
Code for America is hopeful that government can actually work. But everyone has to work together to do it.
Engagement
Stop Waiting for Permission: How civic hacking changed the way I saw my city—and myself.
Woman showed up at a hack brigade, because she was concerned about the Philly school disticts. Brushed up on her HTML. Was having problems with parking in the city. Lauren hacked up a map and tweeted it on Friday, on Monday was talking to the city, and later that week was employed as a data scientist.
Tiffany: assigned to work with the City of Atlanta to streamline the court system. Heard the story about Detroiters who had their water shut off. Tweeted that she’d pay for someone’s bill directly. Built the “Detroit Water Project”…. has helped 900 families to pay $170k worth of bills.
Code for America: The Brigade. Meet weekly. Partner with the government.
Successful Projects
LocalFreeWeb: San Francisco, a way for people to find free web access.
OpenOakland, Adopt a Drain. Snowstorm, snow storms bury a fire hydrant. Website to allow citizen to dig out the fire hydrant. It takes maybe 5 minutes, but it’s the sense of connection and responsibility that I feel for my city. It’s not just government’s job to do that work, it’s all of our jobs.
Food stamps: you get an EBT card, and it’s not easy to check your balance. The easiest way is to go to an ATM and check balance. Every time a EBT client does that, the bank charges them $.75. Last year, banks in California made $21 million dollars, $.75 at a time. They built an app where you can text your EBT number and get back your balance for free. Balance.
None of these projects, on their own, will revolutionize government, but over time it represents what the practice of democracy looks like in the 21st century. Government can work, but it’s going to take all of us to work together and take action.
The Ask
- Join the Brigade
- Apply for the Fellowship 2016 starts in January.
- Learn about tech jobs in government
- Launch a Code-for program in your country
Questions
Click that hood.
Code for All (we would love to talk with Canadians). Opening new chapters is demand driven.
The Gerrymandering Game. We don’t work on politics at all, we only work on the beauracracy. Few are paying attention to the every day role of government, so our focus is there. Gaming… we don’t have a gaming expert on staff, but we try to build a few playful things into our apps.
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