Thank You For Your (US Digital) Service
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Dear Backchannelers:
Like everyone in the technology community besides Peter Thiel, I (Steven, handling our newsletter this week) have been watching with wreck-on-the-highway fear and fascination the Republican Party convention in Cleveland this past week. I really don’t have much to add to all that has been said about the nominee and his event planning. But I was struck by something that predated Donald Trump in the party, and seems to have ramped up to top volume in this election cycle: the view that government can’t get anything right, and that, with the exception of the military, government workers are either swindlers or suckers.
I’ve been thinking about this lately in the context of President Obama’s
“tech surge,” which I wrote about this past week. Ever since the White House tapped a small band of folks from the startup and Silicon Valley world to correct the epic fail of heathcare.gov, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of recruiting the best engineers, UI experts, and designers to volunteer for limited terms to work for fellow citizens.
I got an early look at this in early 2014 when the healthcare.gov team was still righting the ship. A friend smuggled me into the effort. Allowing me on-site was too risky for this still top-secret project, so I spent a day in a nearby hotel coffee shop, serially interviewing team members who slipped away one-by-one to tell me their stories. Later, on a trip to California, I met Mikey Dickerson, and I kept up with him as he grappled with the offer to head the proposed United States Digital Service (he knew all along he was going to do it — because he felt his country needed him). I did get to write the first account of Version 2.0 of heathcare.gov, and later that year — in my last story for WIRED — I wrote the first in-depth piece about how the administration was recruiting techies to serve short-term stints for a new United States Digital Service. Last summer, I did a long interview with Dickerson and deputy director Haley van dyck to check on their progress.
What impressed me then, and impressed me even more when I wrote this week’s story about how the USDS is moving teams into government agencies, was the selflessness of the people who commonly left cushy and lucrative jobs at tech companies to work under relatively Spartan conditions in the nation’s capital. Silicon Valley companies talk all the time about making a difference. But reforming buggy products like the Veterans Online Application really makes a difference in people’s lives, by removing obstacles from securing health care they deserve.
Even though the USDS people are government outsiders, they identify fiercely with the citizens they try to serve. In Veterans Affairs, some of them had personal connections to the mission — relatives who were in the military, in one case a brother who is a 90 percent disabled vet. But they all had a clear vision of who they were helping. They insisted that I watch the videos of a frustrated vet named Dominic, who showed them how hard it was to use the current site to sign up for benefits. Dominic was then delighted to see the prototype that the Digital Service at VA had created to make it easier.
The hacker-types who infiltrated the Pentagon also took their mission with utmost seriousness. One could have imagined all sorts of culture clashes between the c0ders decked in hoodies and jeans and the button-down service men and women who prowl the rings of the Pentagon. But after Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, resolved some initial uneasiness with a stern signal (“Everybody knows I’m behind them,” he says of his beloved geeks), even the skeptics in the building have had a chance to see the sincerity of the Defense Digital Service. It’s a different kind of volunteer army.
When testifying before Congress in June, Mikey Dickerson was asked what led these privileged techies to leave their jobs to work for, of all places, the government that so many Americans seem to view negatively. He had a word for it: patriotism.
In my story, I noted how the USDS, budgeted at $14 million this year, seems to foment considerable alarm among the establishment. I hope that even those who have a stake in the current way of doing things will come to appreciate the paradigm shift that the USDS can potentially bring about. If their mission works, it will not only improve government technology, but also the profile of those who work full time to serve the citizenry.
Best,
Steven
Here’s some of what we did in Backchannel this week.
Star Spangled Geeks. This is the story I’ve been talking about for this whole newsletter. You haven’t read it yet? Please do. And, yes, VACOLS is on the quiz. (You’ll have to read the story to see what that means.)
Spanish engineer Ramon Roca got tired of waiting for telecom companies to wire his town — so he did it himself. Backchannel has been fortunate to have legendary tech columnist Dan Gillmor as a frequent contributor. Dan is an idealist who constantly seeks practical alternatives to systems that he considers insufficiently open. Here, he tells the amazing story of a guy who created his own open network that’s every bit as good as those of the big players.
Follow-Up Friday: Facebook’s Drones Finally Take Off. Like every other publication in the tech world, we found out about Facebook’s successful test flight of its solar powered drone weeks after the flight. Backchannel holds off on stories unless we have something unique to add. In this case we did —our Jessi Hempel had been one of the few outsiders to report from within the project. It turns out that she’d visited the Aquila team just one year ago, a perfect reason to include her previously unpublished observations about the project in our weekly Follow-Up Friday feature.
Backscatter: We’re growing. Next week we welcome Miranda Katz as our new editorial associate. And our next hire could be…you? We’re looking to hire one more person this summer, a talented editor who will assign and shepherd a lot of muffin-top stories for us. It’s a chance to join the brain trust of a small publication that punches way above its weight. (And now we’re helped by being part of a world-class media operation.) Here’s the job posting.
