Community Technology, and the Ghost of Civic Hacking Past
As Code for San Francisco’s National Day of Civic Hacking weekend event winds down, I’m reflecting on organizing my first hackathon, and exorcising the Ghost of Civic Hacking Past. Given the recent brouhaha about the end of civic technology kicked off by Dan O’Neil (formerly of Smart Chicago), the shortcomings of our collective checkered hacking history are top of mind.
Dan is not the only person wondering where community fits in civic technology. The leadership team at Code for San Francisco, especially Co-Captains Jesse Biroscak and Maddie Suda, have been asking similar questions about projects at CfSF, and working to establish a more human-centered orientation for the brigade. At CivicMakers, we have been teasing out a “co-discovery” process to “discover with, not for” and validate problem statements in direct partnership with the communities that civic projects hope to serve, before proposing any solutions.
With this alignment, CivicMakers partnered with Code for San Francisco to design a hackathon based around community, skillsharing and, of course, hacking. Here’s a rundown of our weekend, and what we learned.
Community
First and foremost, we were clear that we wanted the third annual Code for San Francisco National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH) to be about listening, not just building—listening to communities we hope to serve, to potential partners and to each other.
To wit, we kicked off the weekend on Saturday morning with an ice breaker activity to answer the question “Who are we?” Attendees broke out into small groups to share the issues they care about, what skills they can offer, and how they want to participate in Code for San Francisco. If you’d like an fascinating snapshot of a volunteer civic hacking group, look no further than this raw data.
On Sunday morning we held another small group exercise designed to identify what issues we collectively care about, and what communities and partners we should be working with to address those issues. All attendees wrote down one problem they experience in San Francisco on a slip of paper, all of which were collected and redistributed to groups of 5 people. Those groups were asked not to propose solutions, but rather think about who we should be connecting with to fully understand the problem. Some interesting reflections included how difficult it can be to not automatically adopt a problem-solving stance, the need for clearly defined problem statements, and questions about how and where we can connect with some of the partners that were identified. Check out the full list of issues and potential partners here.
We were also honored to have two incredible speakers to offer their perspective on solving civic challenges. Saturday morning, Eric McDonnell, EVP and COO of United Way Bay Area reminded us that 1 in 4 Bay Area residents struggle to make ends meet, shared some struggles United Way faces in serving those populations, and implored us to remember the human side of technology. On Sunday, Nicole Sanchez, VP of Social Impact at Github, recounted a few amazing social good projects on Github, and suggested that, when we want to develop a tech solution, we can maximize our impact by finding a community partner who understands the problem at hand.
TAKEAWAYS:
Not all project teams were ready, willing or able to jump into community work and “co-discovery” at NDoCH. Also, developing relationships with community members and partners takes time. Consequently, we were not able to make this year’s NDoCH as user-centric as we had hoped. Culture change is a long game, and the brigade is stepping firmly onto the community-first path.
Training
Code for San Francisco has a serious talent stack, so we created a skillsharing track to ensure we were learning from each. We also recruited some leaders in user research and community-centered design to cultivate these core capacities for building successful civic technology.
A major highlight was Jane Davis, Design Researcher at Dropbox, leading us through an “End-to-end guide to user research basics.” With Jane, we developed a sample user research plan during a highly engaging post-it note exercise. Jane emphasized the importance of asking good questions to understand user behaviors, goals, pain points.
The rest of the workshop slate was also really strong, and featured a host of experts both in-house and from partner organizations:
- What the heck is civic tech? — Jesse Biroscak, CfSF
- Mini design charrette with active listening — Victoria Lam, Program Manager, California College of the Arts Center for Art and Public Life
- Best practices for maintaining an open source repo — Trent Oswald — Trent Oswald, CfSF & Mashape
- Github for non-developers — Jesse Szwedko, CfSF & Braintree
- Community-centered design — Anna Jaeger, Caravan Studios
- Introduction to version control with git — Jesse Szwedko, CfSF & Braintree
- Markdown and documentation for your code — Trent Oswald, CfSF & Mashape
- User acquisition for civic tech — Jacob Sills, CfSF & Uptrust
TAKEAWAYS:
Code for San Francisco has some seriously smart, talented folks who generously shared their skills with each other. And for topics beyond our in-house expertise, partner organizations were thrilled to contribute their knowledge and passion. Each workshop was well-attended and well-received, which means we’ll be doing this again. Plus, we now have some core content we can continue to offer at weekly hack nights.
Introducing Superpublic
A highlight of the weekend was a meaningful and exciting conversation between Code for San Francisco and Superpublic, a first-of-its-kind innovation lab bringing public, private and nonprofit sectors together to solve urban problems. The scope of this new collaboration is still being defined, but initial focus areas for Superpublic will include mobility and transportation, digital government services and performance based-procurement. Members of the founding team from City Innovate Foundation, SF Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, and the General Services Agency shared some background on Superpublic and objectives for their involvement.
A lively discussion followed about how Code for San Francisco can contribute to developing civic solutions in collaboration with Superpublic.
TAKEAWAYS:
- Showing up matters — having Superpublic meet the brigade at NDoCH was an important first step in establishing an ongoing partnership, but what are the regular channels and touchpoints moving forward? A slack group was suggested to engage all of the necessary parties, along with establishing communication protocols and expectations.
- There were a number of questions about how Superpublic will source and validate problems from communities across the Bay Area, including those traditionally hard to reach.
- Superpublic realized that they have a willing cadre of collaborators and thought partners in Code for San Francisco, as long as Superpublic can be specific with their asks and understand the limitations of working with a volunteer-led group.
- A Bay Area civic user testing group (patterned after SmartChicago’s CUTgroup) would be a very appropriate framework to enable meaningful collaboration between Superpublic and Code for San Francisco.
Projects
What would a hack weekend be without projects? Before we got to pitching, Project Team Lead Larry Bafundo reviewed the Code for San Francisco project lifecycle, highlighting the need for defining and validating problem statements at project inception. In fact, all teams shared their problem statements as the hackathon got started.
Some of the standout projects this weekend included:
- TrustOSS — an emerging standard for maintaining open source code repositories to cultivate trust with developers.
- Zika VR — an effort to raise awareness of the vectors for Zika disease using VR
- EmojiCode — A riff on Municode that aims to replace certain phrases with emojis to lighten up the lines and lines of municipal code and encourage citizens to engage.
- Data science working group — One of the team’s foci this weekend was partnering with @OpenJusticeCA, a California Department of Justice initiative aimed at opening and analyzing the state justice system’s data to improve operational efficiency and promote social good. By hack’s end, one of OpenJustice’s visualization challenges and one of their statistical/insights challenges had been substantively addressed!
- FoodRev — A project collecting and delivering excess food to those in need.
- We Vote — As always, the WeVote team was out in full force, this time preparing for the friends and family soft launch of their social voting platform!
- BrigadeHub — A CRM for managing brigade content and projects.
You can find the full list of projects is here. All in all, it was a great weekend of community, learning and hacking.
Thanks
The civic love was flowing all weekend long. Jean Walsh, Outreach Manager at San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, presented a Certificate of Appreciation to Code for San Francisco for developing Adopt-a-Drain SF. Jean noted how this project enabled the SFPUC to deploy an engagement tool for residents much more quickly than they could have with online internal resources.
Hosting an event like National Day of Civic Hacking takes a village, so there are many people to thank. However, I want to extend a very special thank you to one very special person who we won’t see around CfSF for some time. After two and half years as C0-Captain of Code for San Francisco, Jesse Biroscak is stepping down to move his family to Boston. The passion, vision and dedication that Jesse brought every week will be sorely missed. Our loss is Code for Boston’s gain!
NDoCH was a labor of love for many. I want to thank the entire Code for San Francisco team, especially Co-Captain Maddie Suda, along with Jesse Szwedko, Trent Oswald, Sanat Moningi, Pamela Mardo, Hy Carrell, Larry Bafundo, Phoebe Shum and Jason Lally. I also have deep gratitude for all of our speakers and workshop leads, especially Eric McDonnell, Nicole Sanchez, Jane Davis and Anna Jaeger.
Finally, thank you to everyone that brought their passion and commitment to addressing some of the problems we face in San Francisco. I remain inspired and hopeful for this movement to affect real change in the future. Civic hacking may have made some missteps in the past few years, but together we’re learning how we can best contribute to civic solutions.
