Code for America: Ryan Ko & Jazmyn Latimer

Government doesn’t work as it should for many Americans today. Flawed bureaucratic processes keep government programs from reaching the tens of millions of Americans they are intended to help. Code for America addresses the widening gap between the public and private sectors through the use of technology and design.

To learn more about this work visit www.codeforamerica.org.

Talia: Ryan take us back 10 years ago when the organization was just getting started.

Ryan: So about 12 years ago, it was actually Jen at a conference, she was working in technology media at the time. This was back when web 2.0 was kind of a big thing, and social was new. A junior Senator from Illinois had just gotten elected because his campaign's organizers use social media to organize block parties, and house parties, and things. So digital, and government, and technology was all kind of new. The iPhone had just come out in 2007 — social networks were first coming along. So it was just a very different age. And Jen through a conference met a local CIO who said, "I don't understand why government technology can't be as good as some of this consumer technology we're seeing. I have a phone. I can do mobile banking. I get text message reminders. I can do a boarding pass. This is 2010." And this local city CIO said, "I'm ready to go rogue and just hire a bunch of private sector people and go from there." And one thing led to another and that kind of became this Teach for America model fellowship — what would happen if we just brought in talented technologists into government and see what happens? So the first couple of years of Code for America was exactly that, it was fellowships. That first year, there were 20 fellows across Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, and we just really learned a lot. The very first year, I mentioned Washington DC, well, if you're listening and you remember, there was a mayoral transition from Mayor Fenty to Mayor Gray. So we come in literally January 10th or whatever it was, and the new mayor had just showed up the day before. Well, we were hired and sort of under contract with the old mayor, imagine our five fellows showing up at city hall in Washington DC, going in and security saying, "hey, sorry, you're under the old administration, the new and mayor's cleaning house." This is like day three, which was actually hilarious if you think about it. But silly local government transitions aside, I think we learned a lot about what we can and cannot achieve with a local fellowship. You can only do so much in a year. You can build some cool apps. You can engage and really learn and understand government, but change in government takes time. And so as we've evolved over the last 10 years, we still have that fellowship program, but I think we've grown a lot in the way that we think about government and how we need to work with and build, and teach, and train capacity in government, and that takes more than a year. So while we still have a fellowship, it's a much smaller part of the whole organization than it was back then.

Talia: So what does the organization look like today?

Ryan: Our current CEO, Amanda Rentaria, likes to call this evolution from apps, to opps, to scale. And the way I put it, Code for America is kind of emerging from its adolescence now. And here's what I mean by that. 10…11 years ago, there really wasn't a civic technology or government technology kind of space, right? There were vendors and there were governments. There weren't really non-profits, digital services firms, or teams like that. So it was just Code for America. And as the only non-profit in the game, really, we had to do a lot of things. We had the fellowships, we had a talent initiative where we tried to recruit people and have them work in government. We built our local volunteer network. We actually were a gov-tech accelerator where we invested seed funding in gov-tech startups for a couple of years. We built communities of practice and cohorts, and we just had all kinds of programs, really trying to build the field. Since then, Code for America alums, and alums of governments, and people we've met and talked to and befriended and worked with along the way, have all gone and started some amazing organizations ranging from academics, such as the Beck Center at Georgetown, to think tanks like New America, to the Tech Talent Project, and the list goes on and on. And what that means is we haven't had to do everything. We've kind of grown the field. And of course, if you ask public servants, they'd say that a lot of this movement was happening concurrently as well — The United States Digital Service that kind of spun up after Healthcare.gov, The Presidential Innovation Fellows, the States Digital Service teams, 18F at the general services administration… So we haven't had to do as much field building because the field's kind of been built and there are a lot of organizations that we can partner with now.

Talia: Jazmyn, I'd like to turn to you now, as a the Service Design Director with Code for America, I'm curious if you find that there's enough of a desire from these agencies to work with you?

Jazmyn: Over time, it's gotten much easier I think. I joined Code for America in 2015, and at that time we were focusing almost exclusively on short-term engagement with government, where we partner them with three technologists, so a designer, an engineer, usually and a product manager, who worked with the government for about 11 months on a scoped challenge. At the time when we were doing fellowships, governments were applying to be included in that fellowship. And then we had them apply and then we paired them with the technologists.

Talia: In theory, you create an app then you find that your solution is actually applicable to multiple agencies.

Jazmyn: Yeah, the way that we kind of scale up projects, we usually start pretty small. So help three counties in California improve the process of clearing their record, for example, thats how we first started our Clear My Record project. We did that for about a year, stood up a small online application that allows you to connect with the attorneys, and then after that, we started thinking about, okay, now we've got it working in three counties, can we now get it working in all 58 counties in California? We didn't get to all 58 counties with that one solution. But then we started thinking about automatic solutions, or things that could work in other states. So as the project goes on over time, we're thinking about how to expand the impact beyond just the original small scope. Our Get CalFresh project serves California, and we've since then grown our safety net benefits portfolio to include a project that we call integrated benefits, which is all about helping people apply for many benefits all at once, and we're thinking about how to do that in lots of different states.

Talia: Is there an example you can give us of you, from your team where you've kind of had to push the government to move in a very different direction than they're comfortable for?

Jazmyn: Yeah, definitely. One of the projects I worked on, Clear My Record, when we originally started working on that project, the way that you would apply to clear your record, if you were eligible, you had to go find an attorney, a public defender, or you could try to go find the forms, but the forms are going to be very, very hard to understand. So anyways, we took this really paper-based process, started investigating it, why is it this way…could it be better? Hearing from people on the ground when we were doing the research, "What would really help you?" And they're like, "Well, why do I have to even do this? Don't they know I have this record and they know I'm eligible based on the law? Why don't they just clear it?" They kept saying that, and we just started asking ourselves that too, why couldn't it just be automatic? And so when we started posing that to government, they're just like, "Oh yeah, that's too much, we could never do that."

Talia: Is this something that's contingent upon each state?

Jazmyn: Yeah. So each state has different policies that say what convictions you might be eligible to clear, what the eligibility is for it, and what the process is for doing it? They have different paperwork, they have different steps in process, it's madness. So we're trying to fix that process by the status quo way of doing things, like, "Okay, we'll build an application form. And then we'll connect them with the lawyer, who'll do an interview, they'll go to court..." But it was still really tedious. We were like, "well, what happens if you just flipped it on its head completely?" Once we started kind of investigating that, that's what really opened the doors for Clear My Record automatic. So we just started showing them, "oh, you know all the questions on this form you're asking, we realize that you already have all this information right here in your computer. So what if we just made something that could help you use the information you already had?" So that's kind of what started opening the doors to Clear My Record automatic. We started prototyping a few examples of how they would do that with Prop 64, which was the proposition in California that allows people to clear old marijuana convictions from their record, since marijuana is now illegal. So we kind of used existing policy opportunities like "well, you already said you agreed that marijuana should be cleared from people's records, so what if we just helped you find all the marijuana convictions in your database and then worked with you and the court clerk and leave the other person out of the process until it's actually done?" So that's what the team's kind of working on now, both passing legislation and policies that say that that's possible, so opening the door for more things like Prop 64 to say, "okay, there's already a policy that says we're allowed to clear these things and now we have the technology to do it."

Talia: Ryan, I'm wondering why, when Jen founded the company, she opted to be a for-profit rather than a nonprofit? Because it would seem that you could just charge the government a fee for your consulting services that you're offering.

Ryan: Yeah, well, there's certainly money to be made in doing that. However, I would point out that nonprofits exist at the point of market failure. Nonprofits kind of by definition show up in places where the open market hasn't made sense, and government technology tends to be one of these spaces because of the challenging environment, the high barriers to entry, procurement obstacles and challenges, and kind of the highly variable nature of government. A lot of these things play together and end up in kind of a monopolistic kind of situation. So for example, once a vendor has a contract with government, it's very hard to move off of that vendor and move to another vendor. The contracting cycle can take six months to a year and sometimes the payment can take awhile. A famous example of this, is in 2013 the federal government shut down because Congress couldn't agree on raising the debt ceiling. You kind of have to be a pretty big company to float the government, however many millions of dollars of contracts you have. And so what that means is there's very little startup kind of innovation in the space. There's relatively little competition and it heavily favors incumbents. And so for all of those reasons, it almost made sense for Code for America to be a nonprofit.

Talia: Where do you guys hope to be five years from now? Is there a reality when you guys are put out of business or something because the governments have taken on these activities on their own?

Ryan: That'd be amazing, and I think we'd all be the first to say that we'd love to work ourselves out of a job. I don't think it's going to happen in the next five years. I think on the grand scheme of things, the grand experiment of the United States of America is now almost 250 years old. So I view it as a generational thing. We're looking at 30 to 50 years as an organization. I do hope that in the next five years we see a step change, that government starts to really get our principles and exhibit the behaviors. We've seen some really interesting pockets of innovation and areas where people are starting to do this well, and it's happening across all 50 states. There's just a lot of places where people are really starting to understand that digital can be an incredible lever for change and for actually serving people, especially in a time of need.

Talia: I have one last question. Obviously, the pandemic was this really unique experience. A lot of it took place online. We were interacting with each other, we were experiencing what the others were going through in a very unique way that we've never been able to before. Do you think that this global experience is going to change the way governments work together and potentially through technology?

Ryan: I would hope so. We saw a lot of governments actually really roll up their sleeves and help. And a classic example of this was pandemic EBT. So for those who aren't familiar, pandemic EBT was a child nutritional assistance program that Congress passed as one of the early recovery bills. Children who are students in public K-12 education, who are eligible for free and reduced price lunches, all of a sudden we're not able to actually get their meals because they weren't going to school in person. and so Congress set aside some funding for states to actually provide that nutritional assistance directly to families because all the children were at home. The challenge was a lot of states didn't have the data to actually send the money to parents, and families, and guardians. The local school districts had the data about the students, but the state workforce agency and tax boards, et cetera, had the data about the parents. Of course, people move around all the time, so the DMVs have the data on where people actually lived. And so some states actually said, "hey, why can't we innovate on our data sharing, and actually share this data and tart to report things together?" We actually consulted about a dozen states on how to do this and built systems for a couple of states as well. But that's just been an interesting example of a new way of working that didn't really happen before. Different state agencies collaborating, sharing this data, and as a result, hundreds of millions of dollars of child nutrition support flowed to actual families in need, thanks to collaboration, operations, and technology.