Civic Digital Fellows Learn from Coders at USDS
As they progress through their summer of government service, the students in the Civic Digital Fellowship are learning that one of the traits needed for a successful stint in the civil service is flexibility. Without the ability to switch tracks with little fanfare, it is unlikely that even the most talented programmer or engineer will last very long. In more than one sense, the ability to adjust is familiar with the members of the United States Digital Service (USDS), with whom the fellows of the Civic Digital Fellowship met on July 11, 2017. Not only must they adjust their whereabouts in the sprawling bureaucracy from time to time, but their task also consists of upping their given agency’s technological capacity from an obsolete twentieth century level into the twenty-first century.
Guiding the fellows throughout their day was Andrés Colón Pérez, who introduced them to his colleagues at the Small Business Administration (SBA). One of the participants, Francine Morris, spoke of her passion for public service, which lured her out of private-sector contracting in order to advance the interests of the SBA. In her words, her decision struck her as worthwhile when, after a year of interacting with a small businessman “with only one employee — himself,” she observed “a fleet of his trucks” driving into work one day from suburban Maryland.
Pérez, who came to the mainland after a successful stint with the Puerto Rican government, matched in his passion, saying that in “becoming a public servant, you have a chance to make an impact on the lives of your fellow citizens. The government is not an abstract entity; the government is us.” And Rick Lee, Pérez’s USDS colleague, was quick to mention a famous quote of Henry Ford’s, “If I asked my customers what they want, they would’ve said ‘a faster horse,’” meaning that the innovator’s task is to envision what the average person cannot.
With that, the fellows were invited by Pérez to learn more about the horse-to-car innovations being instituted at the Small Business Association (SBA) by USDS. Some of these included minimizing the massive flow of paperwork that accompanies an application for a SBA loan (a burden which can sometimes cost the prospective small business owner anywhere from thirty to forty thousand dollars), the previous lack of a single source of relevant data and the much-lauded HUBZone Map that pinpoints areas in which small business owners are eligible for additional SBA support.
The fellows, for their part, peppered their hosts with questions about life as a civil servant, and the three speakers obliged with words of advice. Pérez spoke up against feeling inferior, saying that
“whenever the ‘imposter syndrome’ kicks in, you have to grab it and throw it in the trash.”
And Lee, speaking of the need to “walk the floors” of the office, brought up the importance of meeting random new colleagues whose expertise might one day be of assistance.
After this meeting, Pérez escorted the fellows to USDS’s headquarters near the White House where, with an active hive mind, USDS workers from other governmental departments met to coordinate best practices. Specifically, the focus of the meeting was on the Health and Human Services (HHS) and USDS at VA teams, who rightly pointed out that if their products weren’t worthwhile, real people tend to suffer. The lingering problem of sexism in the tech industry was also addressed in-depth. Afterward, many of the USDS employees generously spent time speaking casually with the fellows regarding their workplace experiences.
Overall, the fellows left with an extremely positive impression of of the USDS. Chris Kuang, a rising sophomore at Harvard University, stated, “We’re grateful to Andrés Colón Pérez and USDS leadership for showing our Civic Digital Fellows what it’s like to work at the pinnacle of civic tech.”
University of Washington, Seattle student Andrea Chen remarked,
“Seeing the scale of impact and the numbers of veterans U.S. Digital Services at the VA serves every day is inspiring because on the other side of the statistics, there is a human. It inspired me to come to work at Census thinking ‘What impact will I have today?’”
The Civic Digital Fellowship is the first fully-funded data science and technology internship program for innovative students to solve pressing problems in federal agencies. It is the product of a collaboration between Coding it Forward, The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Together, they have brought fourteen talented technologists to Washington, D.C. to address pressing technical issues at the U.S. Census Bureau.
