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Recently, I interviewed Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America. She recently served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she architected and helped found the United States Digital Service. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and is the recipient of several awards, including MIT’s Kevin Lynch Award, the Oxford Internet Institute’s Internet and Society Award, and the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award. She spent eight years at CMP Media, where she ran the Game Developers Conference, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Independent Games Festival. Previously, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, California, with her daughter, husband, and seven chickens. In addition, she recently wrote a great blog post: Procurement Under Trump. Here’s our interview broken into three parts: (1) Code For America’s Evolution, (2) Modular and Agile Procurements, and (3) Global Government Digital Learnings.
Part 1: Code for America’s Evolution
For folks who don’t know what Code For America (CFA) is, can you give a brief background? Where did the idea for Code for America come from? What pain point is it solving?
Pahlka: What we do today is different from when we started, which was with a regulatory perspective. Our government created conditions and regulations that made it hard for tech people in government and government leaders to be really helpful to the people and users that it benefits. We saw that in all levels of government. It was hard to get things done and pushed through pretty quickly, and even simple things became very hard in contract. It’s not that government is bad, but it’s just created a lot of processes to go through before something can actually come to fruition. So we created a Teach for America type organization for developers and designers working in cities to solve a wide variety of problems that those cities have.
Over time, we have found that some of those solutions - such as developers doing service combined with government - are things that should not stop. They should evolve and grow from...