The Reasons "Code for America" is a BFD

The most fun soundbyte of the healthcare debate ended up coming from the ever-quotable Vice President Joe Biden, who at a press conference leaned over to the President and said -- clearly for the Commander-in-Chief's ears only -- "This is a big f***ing deal." A new program to connect web coders with municipal governments is one of the few new programs I've seen in the last year that I can comfortably say also meets that high Biden standard.

Code for America is a program that gives web professionals the chance to spend a year working with municipal data to create applications that improve resource efficiency, change the communication between officials and citizens, and general use their web app skills to improve government.

The program will be centered in the Bay Area, and include a short training program at the beginning with guest lectures and team bonding. Fellows will then travel to their various host cities to learn about the particular challenges and opportunities facing those governments, make contacts, and generally get what they need to begin hacking.

With that info and those relationships in hand, Fellows return to the Bay where they build build build. The end of the program includes a few month launch, fix, and hand-off period to cap it all off. All-in-all, it's a year long program that will pay for all associated travel costs and provide a $35,000 stipend.

So why is this a BFD?

#1: Power of data in government. Government's have a huge volume of data that could be used to do things smarter, better, more effectively, and that, if properly organized and analyzed could help policy makers make better decisions. There have been a few experiments by city governments to get this data available for web developers to play around with, including SFdata.gov, but by and large it is still locked up. What's more, it is not totally clear what incentives are driving developers to build applications around that data.

This program creates a leading context for governments to begin to regularize how they get data out of the coffers and into the hands of people who can do interesting things with it. Chances are good, if the interesting things that happen are well publicized, it will also give new developers a different context to think about how they could be solving a different set of problems with their entrepreneurial ventures.

#2: Getting smarter about the variety of things one can do "For America." Service programs have historically had the program of making people feel like there was only one or two types of service that were really valuable if you wanted to contribute. There are a lot of people, for example, who want to serve their country but don't want to be in the Military. On the private sector side of things, Teach for America is amazingly powerful in its recruitment of top students, but it creates a context in which a lot of people who aren't teachers become teachers just because it feels like their one opportunity to do something good for the world and get personal brand value that they can leverage for their careers later.

The lack of other options isn't TfA's fault, but it's everyone's problem. We have to make it feel (and make it be the case) that they can use whatever skills, talents, and passions they have to solve social problems. Code for America is a big, fat right step in that direction, and I'm excited to see more programs like it spring up.

Photo credit: zakwitnij