I had a blast last Thursday at the Code for All Summit. Some highlights:
Civic Graph
John Paul Farmer works with Microsoft civic tech, and is a sponsor of Civic Hall. He explained how the company chose to invest in civic tech in places like Boston and the Bay Area. The company embraced open source. Civic Graph is a crowdsourced knowledge base that maps people and organizations doing civic tech work in communities around the globe. Farmer defined 'civic tech' as the use of technology for public good."
He encouraged people to contribute to Civic Graph and "put yourselves on this map."
"We can’t do it alone, we don’t have the answers. We want to plug into the existing networks."
Session Snapshots
The event's video snapshots are worth watching. The video below gives a quick overview of the work that each of the national groups is working with their government and civil society.
The common thread was helping governments open up their data. For example, a group described facilitating an agreement between two government departments on data sharing and standards in Jamaica.
Mexico
Codeando México discussed an open data site they've set up for open data called DataMx. They built a community around it and trained people to use the data for good and ask governments for more openness. Companies are interested, can work with/for govt to develop software in a new way.
Retos Publicos is a site for public challenges--provides a schema for how procurement should be done using methods grounded in Agile and open-source. Three hundred companies are involved.
South Africa
The South Africa group is more focused on the media. He said:
"We don’t do hackathons, they're too hacker/tech focused. We invite visual people, media people, and technologists & dig through data to tell stories."
They are also working intensely on building data literacy, which is challenging because basic math (and literacy) skills are poor.
The Code for Africa group, led by another South African, decided not to work with governments. They explained it's difficult to navigate corruption. Instead, they chose to promote an active and informed citizenry. They've seen governments catching on to the value of opening data and slowly becoming more compliant.
Organizational Responsiveness
SIMLab "uses inclusive technology to help organizations make systems and services more accessible, responsive, and resilient." It's a branch-off from Frontline SMS, a tool used by Unicef among others.
Laura, their CEO, got right to the point:
"it's important to understand how you suck and why"
...and to know what your theory of change is.
Structural Changes in Government
The session on structural change in government covered questions such as:
- How do we overcome common barriers like procurement or low tolerance for experimentation?
- How do we find the right partners within the institutions who will be the most effective collaborators?
The panelist from USAID said it's important to remember that government isn't a monolith, it's made up of humans.
Especially in USAID, which is more like an NGO, these people want to do good in the world and if you appeal to that, you can persuade them.
A participant from the Chilean government agreed, saying that they have regular social events there between government and civil society. For example, they organize Friday drinks and barbeques where they can take off their official hat and be honest with people about why they can't open up a particular data set (among other topics.)
- My full notes are here
- all tweets (including mine) are at #codeforall.
- The sessions were all recorded and are available here.
- Hackpad: http://bit.ly/CodeforAllSummit2015.
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