Innovation in Practice AMA with Rep. Mark Takano [D, CA-41]: Full Transcript
On December 9th, 2020, Members-elect of the 117th Congress joined current members, staffers, technologists, scientists, academics, and advocates for the inaugural Tech, Science, and Data New Member Orientation Day, hosted by the First Branch Tech, Science and Data (TSD) cohort.
In the “Tech” section of the day, Representative Mark Takano offered advice to new colleagues on innovation, modernization, and hiring the right team.
For a summary and video of this conversation, please see here.
Nicole Tisdale: Hi everyone, I’m Nicole Tisdale and we are so excited that you are joining us for the AMA. For those of you who are not hardcore Reddit fans, an ‘AMA’ is an Ask Me Anything. So first up, we have Congressman Mark Takano from the California 41st. He’s the chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, and the winner of the 2020 Congressional Management Foundation Award for Innovation and Modernization — also, shout out to the Veterans Affairs Committee, because they were the first committee to hold a virtual hearing. We’re gonna be joined by Yuri Beckelman, who is Deputy Chief of Staff, and he’s the founder of the Democratic Communications Association. They’re going to be joined by Daniel Schuman, of Demand Progress, and the First Branch Forecast, who is going to moderate questions. I have to plug the First Branch Forecast — when you’re reaching for everything that’s going on in Congress, there’s the First Branch Forecast, just literally read that and you’ll know everything going on. So Daniel I’m going to turn it over to you.
Daniel Schuman: Congressman, it’s good to see you. Welcome.
Rep Takano: Thank you. Thank you.
Daniel: Thank you so much for joining. You missed the fantastic introduction of you, so I will just simply say it is a pleasure to have you join us. We were applauding the first successful virtual hearing that you held — I watched it live, and it was a lot of fun.
Rep Takano: I’ll just say that since I’ve been in Congress, when I was elected in 2012, we’ve made much progress as an institution in innovating and embracing technology to serve our constituents better, but there’s a lot of work left to be done to bring it into the 21st century. From the very beginning, I’ve made embracing technology and using it to serve our constituents a priority. And we’ve contributed to House efforts to modernize Congress by embracing innovation, science, and technology into our practices and internally. The policies and practices that we have learned have encouraged creativity, pushed for innovation, and modernized traditional approaches to governing. I’ve brainstormed closely with my team quite often to motivate them to pitch new ideas.
And the office culture has allowed us to collaborate to deliver solid results throughout the COVID 19 pandemic. My office, like so many others, has had to make adjustments to the way we operate in order to continue serving the community in a safe, yet efficient, way. We use platforms such as Zoom and Facebook Live to regularly host town halls, and we host grant writing workshops virtually, and we have informational webinars to provide constituents with the tools and resources they need to navigate this pandemic. I know recently my staff conducted an orientation for high school students about our service academies — we did that virtually as well.
We also like to promote the effective use of digital in the Democratic caucus by embracing digital platforms to message to our constituents, and by organizing something we’ve called the Digital Academy. I’m proud to say we’ve trained 200 Democratic staffers on the best use of social media tools and digital best practices. I would like to think this has made an enormous contribution to just the entire staff’s ability across Democratic Caucus, to become more effective at digital communication.
And we’re also continuing to experiment and experiment on new ways to reach new audiences. One approach that I have to really credit my communications director, Dayanara Ramirez for: I’m looking at trying to reach audiences that aren’t necessarily inherently and traditionally political — there are a lot of overlapping audiences out there. There are audiences that might be formed by influencers, or who are maybe more like comedians, or they’ve built their audiences and I may have been the first politician to actually show up on a podcast that they conducted. So, I mean, we’re looking to reach out to various parts of the community by actually looking at the different ways in which the digital communities are emerging.
Yuri Beckelman: And that’s a great point I want to follow up on: the reason why I’m always so excited as a policy person when the Congressman does that, is because instead of the two minutes on CNN, the Congressman is really able to talk through the finer points of the policy and why it would help people, with people who are experts or who really care about these issues. My favorite that he goes on is this millennial finance podcast called Bad With Money, and they talk about the underlying reasons why rent is so high. You don’t have to stick to the soundbite that people are struggling, we can have a conversation about how we can fix it and talk about it for an hour. And it’s not confrontational, it’s really sticking to the policy, and for a much bigger audience who’s paying attention the whole time. It’s a lot of fun to do those.
Daniel: That’s a great jumping off point to ask the question, how do you find the right staff who can help you pursue that agenda? We have a number of incoming Members, and incoming chiefs of staff. How do you find your Yuri right now, how do you find the person who’s going to help your communication or who’s going to help you — what do you look for, and how do you do that?
Rep Takano: Well, okay, well, I was exhausted after a very long election time. So it was a long process, and I was tired by the end of that, and I basically delegated to my chief. I said, look, I have faith in you, as somebody who got me elected. You’re from the Texas House, you’ve been the equivalent of like, the staff of the Democratic Caucus, but you don’t really have experience here in DC, and in relationships. Yuri was among those candidates for leg director, and he had this tech interest. I also sort of went outside the box with my first communications director, Brett Morrow. Brett had a background in hip hop, actually — hip hop promotion — and he understood social media, understood building brands. And so I would say that we have this team of people from the chief, to the leg director, to the communications director, who were all kind of on a similar page as far as looking into how to build my profile in the digital media space. And those first two years were really kind of important. But we were known in that 2013, 2014 session as a real innovator in social media. Once I had that first staff, they drew other staffers.
Daniel: I apologize, I’m going to have to stop there, not because I’m not interested, but because Nicole’s appearance means that I’m gonna get the hook. Would you, if I can just impose, Yuri, if folks have questions about how you build your team, is it okay if the incoming members reach out to you or Yuri or to your other folks to learn?
Rep Takano: Oh sure, we don’t like to hoard, we’d like to share.
Daniel: Good! Well, your office is phenomenal to deal with, I enjoy your team very much. Thank you so much for your time, guys, and thank you, Yuri, and I know we’ll be seeing you guys.
The First Branch TSD Cohort is a forum for information sharing and collaboration, bringing together innovators on and off the Hill focused on Technology, Science, and Data research and resources for Congress. The cohort is a forum for information sharing and collaboration, made possible by support from Democracy Fund and the Hewlett Foundation, and led by POPVOX.
For more information, contact tsd@popvox.com.
