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The problems that get solved have everything to do with who's doing the solving

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Tiffani was a 2014 CfA fellow assigned to work on criminal justice issues in Atlanta. Fellows are designers and developers doing a year of service, building apps with local governments. 3

During her year with us, Tiffani got very upset about people living in Detroit without running water. She is now calling for legislation that makes water a fundamental right, but thats now where she started. She tweeted about this problem and her desire to do something concrete about it.4

Kristy Tillman responded to her tweet. They had never met, but they decided to collaborate. 5

They built Detroit Water Project, which let anyone in the country basically pay someones overdue water bill for them. So far, theyve helped 900 families in Detroit restore water service. 6

The strategy is delivery

Mike Bracken, UK Government Digital Service

This is an example of what Mike Bracken, who runs the UKs Government Digital Service (which has been exceptionally successful in reforming govt IT), calls the strategy is delivery. And its part of what we want to borrow from the consumer technology industry when we think about how to solve problems in the 21st century. Let me share another example.7

I recently took a year off from Code for America and served as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, working for then US CTO Todd Park. Todd recruited me to help with the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, but I reversed pitched him on standing up a US version of the UKs GDS, applying the same principles that Mike Bracken had had such success with. I went there in June and was working on the strategy and plans for the new unit when on October 1st, healthcare.gov launched and didnt work, and Todd was called in to help fix it.

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He recruited a team of folks from the consumer tech world to come help, including the guy in the middle, Mikey Dickerson, who was a site reliability engineer at Google, and who came on literally one days notice to come help. These guys threw out the three years of meticulous, complex plans and started watching user behavior and incrementally improving the site based on data. 9

Slowly the site started to get better. 10

And in the end, the site enrolled 8 million people in healthcare, which is more than we even projected BEFORE the site failed. A remarkable achievement. To me, the team are national heroes. Mikey and his colleagues had no formal authority; they were subcontractors to subcontractors to the prime contractor; they didnt formally work for the government. Mikey added up his hours and at one point he had worked an average of 18 hours a day for 120 days straight. Why did he do this? Because he wanted his fellow Americans to have healthcare. He knew that if the site failed, implementation of the Affordable Care Act would be delayed, and because of Republican opposition, it would likely be repealed or otherwise blocked.

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Todd used to bring us the letters that the President received about healthcare.gov. At first they were angry, but as the site started to work, they were grateful, and they often made us cry. The one I remember most was from a woman who said that for the past 15 years, shed had to choose between healthcare for herself and healthcare for her kids. Now she was signed up and had her first appointment in 15 years to see a doctor. 12

They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me.

Mikey Dickerson

Mikey and others got national attention in Time magazine, but listen to how he describes his feelings about his work. "It was only when they were desperate that they turned to us.... They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me. Maybe this will be a lesson for them. Maybe that will change. A Google Site Reliability Engineer is not exactly an oppressed minority, but I actually very much understand why he feels out of place in the DC power structure, despite being a hero. The social/power structures in DC and Silicon Valley are nearly exact opposites of each other. In DC, policy makers, planners, strategists are on top, and the people who actually make things are on the bottom. In the consumer tech world, the people who make things are on top, and they often drive both strategy ad implementation.

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Its almost as if they thought the nuts and bolts of governing is for peons. They are policy people.Steven Brill

Steven Brill wrote that Time article, and was later interviewed by Charlie Rose. Heres how he described his impressions of what went wrong with healthcare.gov. Implementation was below the purview of the people in charge.

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What do we want to borrow from tech?

There is an underlying question in the community focused on social change about how much we want to borrow from the technology world. Consumer tech has no doubt fundamentally changed the game. There is a concern that we not borrow the perceived elitism and arrogance of the tech world, and the quite real lack of diversity among the makers of tech. But there is something fundamental that the social sector must learn from this world, and I believe it is not so much technology as an approach that values implementation. An approach that is fundamentally iterative, user-centered, and data-driven.15

Old process

1. policy2. process3. systems4. users5. stasis

This again, is borrowed from Mike Bracken in the UK. This is how government, but also much of the corporate and non-profit world, approaches problems. You start by trying to define a policy, though you dont know what that policy will result in. Then you design processes and systems to implement that policy. Only then do you think briefly about your users, and possibly get a bit of feedback. But since the policy, process and systems are already in place, that feedback isnt easy to act on, and you quickly hit stasis. This is the world in which Mikey feels totally out of place; its also the world in which someone like him is considered utterly tactical. Technical people in this model might as well be thought of as stenographers, typing in the code that people of higher status tell them to.16

New process

1. users2. service (re)design3. system development4. policy check5. feedback

Heres a better way, and the evidence says it works. Start with users. Start by truly understand the needs of the people youre trying to help. Create services that actually meet their needs, in an iterative, data-driven way. Situate those services within the system, and only then do you check to see if your policies align and support the delivery of the service. This is policy in the service of users. It is the environment in which the most successful consumer tech products were built. 17

One privilege the insured and well-off have is to excuse the terrible quality of services the government routinely delivers to the poor. Too often, the press ignores or simply never knows the pain and trouble of interfacing with government bureaucracies that the poor struggle with daily.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post

But healthcare.gov wasnt on the cover of magazines and dominating the headlines just because it was the Presidents signature policy initiative. It was because it was an interface to government that lots of people in the the middle class had to use. Ezra Klein put it perfectly. If youre poor and using government services, youre using healthcare.gov every day.

We know this at Code for America, because at the same time Mikey and others were fixing healthcare.gov, a team at Code for America was working on an interface to another government service: CalFresh, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. Aka food stamps. This team of fellows was partnered with the City and County of San Francisco. 19

52,000CalFresh clients2xGrowth30%Churn

One big problem in the program was the churn rate. People sign up, then drop right off. Thats bad for the user, and expensive for the system. 20

The first thing they did was actually sign up for the program. And they started receiving notices in the mail; notices that looked like this but went on for pages and pages. The messages are REALLY confusing, and you can read them all the way through and not understand that they are asking you to send in additional documentation, like a pay stub or verification of address. But if you dont, they drop you from the program. 21

And the way they find out they no longer have benefits is that they are at the front of the line at the grocery store, they slide their EBT (electronic benefits transfer) card, and it doesnt work. This is the moment these fellows tuned into, because its a humiliating moment, but more importantly, because it means youre going home without food for you and your family. A lot of EBT is spent at midnight on Wednesdays, when the cards are recharged. Who shops at midnight? People who are hungry. 22

The fellows tried several different approaches to avoiding that moment at the check out stand, and they measured each one. Its important to understand that the solution they finally arrived at was not somehow obvious and just only accessible to tech people. They made hypotheses and tested them. What finally worked was sending folks who were about to be dropped from the program a text message telling them to call the office. 23

The text messaging tool is still not widely implemented, but the fellows are looking at the other parts of the problem. California has the next to lowest rate of uptake of SNAP in the country, and part of the reason is that the online application requires clicking through more than 50 screens containing hundreds of questions, many of them confusing. Its a form no one can quickly or easily fill out, and even harder if you dont have a computer with Internet access at home.

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[CLEAN]

The team made an application form that is six screens, just a few questions, and works on any smart phone or tablet, so you can get folks to apply out on the street or in food banks and homeless shelters. The social workers who try to sign folks up love it. 25

Why was this team able to arrive at these interventions? Because they actually understood large portions of the user experience. Alan Williams is one of our team. Hes actually enrolled in the program. They dont have personal experience of all the other elements of their users experience, many of which are simply what life is like if you are poor in America, but they do spend an enormous amount of time with the people applying and the workers trying to help them.26

Final example: in 2012, the City of New Orleans asked CfA to send a team of fellows to work on the problem of information about blighted properties. The CIO of the city had been told by a vendor that a $30M 3 year project was needed in order to aggregate the data and understand the status of properties.27

Amir Reavis-Bey, Eddie Tejada, and Alex Pandel went there (along with Serena Wales, not pictured). 28

In a few months, they had tied together the various data sources and published a simple, easy to use web tool. You type in the address of a blighted property and.

You can see whats going on. In this case, this house has been reported as blighted, its been inspected, a notice has been sent to the owners, it was inspected a gain, and the case was heard.

The app proposes a new kind of more productive communication between the two groups that moves past angry and frustrated citizens on one end, and a paralyzed city on the other.

-Fast Company Exist

The result was astounding. Previously the monthly BlightStat meetings had been bitter fights between neighborhood groups and the city about what was going on. Now that they were all on the same page, looking at the same data, they started talking productively and civilly about what to do next. The city and the residents were hugely grateful.31

People think I can fix New Orleans problems. Im just a designer.

Which is why I was so surprised one day to find Alex Pandel crying in the bathroom at CfA. I asked her what was wrong and she said something about all the pressure on her, the expectations. People think I can fix the citys problems. Im just a designer.32

Just a designer. But designers have super powers. When they understand their users, it appears that they can do things no one else can do, because they can fix problems others cant. This picture is from the office at the GDS in London (again!) Its a large piece of paper with a piece torn out of the middle taped to a window. You walk by it and look out through the little window, and youre reminded: Thats who we work for! We are here to meet THEIR needs, not governments needs. 33

1 doing2 empathy3 diversity

I hope these stories illustrate a few things common to the people who are solving problems right now. A preference for doing, for implementation, and strategy derived from the actual work. Empathy for your users. And diversity. We cant solve the problems of all of America if the people doing the solving represent only some of America. 34

Code for America Fellows

We are not an organization focused on diversity in tech. Thats Code 2040, Black Girls Code, All Stars Code, and others. But we believe in a diverse cohort. While the ratios of both women and African-Americans run around 10-15% at companies like Google and Apple, CfA fellows are generally about 40% women and 40% non-white. This is important.35

Lets check in on what has happened in the three stories I told. Mikey, who felt that DC has no use for him, is now the head of the USDS, the unit I went to DC to set up. We did get our American version of the GDS, and Mikey is there not only fixing healthcare.gov, but also veterans benefits, the systems that run citizenship and immigration, and other critical government services. And he still dresses like he works at Google.36

The team working on food stamps has stayed at CfA long past their fellowship, and the CA state Department of Social Services has noticed their work and invited them to help with a $500M system written in COBOL, a programming language from the 1960s. Theyre getting a chance to make the services we provide Californians actually work from the inside out.37

And lastly, Tiffany has not only expanded Detroit Water Project to Baltimore, but yesterday pitched at YCombinator, Silicon Valleys most prestigious start up accelerator. At least one person besides me thought it was the best pitch of the day.38

A final story. We held an open house at Code for America last month. Most of our partners and alumni come, so its a very busy evening for me. At one point, I noticed that the guy who runs our local volunteer chapter was waiting patiently to talk to me. He introduced me to an older woman named Anne, and explained that she had been coming to their weekly hack nights for several months. Anne had wanted to meet me to thank me. She told me that she lives in a homeless shelter, and that she has been trying to volunteer with dozens of hacker groups, but is always turned away.39

No one has wanted me. I can still contribute. This is the only place that has welcomed me and let me help.

The Code for America San Francisco Brigade was the only place that welcomed her. Because it meets in our office, she wanted to tell me what a special place this is for her.40

With,not for

Anne is why we must always remind ourselves. We must build solutions WITH, not FOR the people.41