The Revolution Starts Now — Reflections on Civic Tech's Early Days

I am barely a footnote in the movement you might call Civic Tech. While folks like Mikey Dickerson were rescuing Healthcare.gov in 2013 I was running a mayoral race in New Haven, Connecticut. After my candidate dropped out of the race I did not get a job fixing Obamacare, I ended up enrolling in it. Unemployed, with more swagger than skills, I walked into the offices of SeeClickFix on Chapel St and glimpsed the future. My first civic hack night: a meetup where pizza meets purpose.

We were trying to figure it out. Why is government so bad at technology? How might software make our cities better places to live? Why can’t GPS send bus location to my mobile phone? How can I find my towed car? What if instead of waiting for government we built the fix and open sourced it for the benefit of government? Surely if we just visualized it on a map using JavaScript we could solve these problems.

After I started attending these hack nights my first product epiphany arrived while browsing the City of Hartford’s Socrata Open Data portal. A city employee had dutifully started uploading towed car data to the portal on a nightly basis. After reading about a similar function the City of Boston provided I believed it’d be handier if one could get a text message when their car was towed. I had never built a web application before so I used a period of long unemployment to learn a framework and language called Ruby on Rails from a web course and integrate with a service called Twilio to text folks if their car appeared in Hartford’s database. I manifested everything Tim O’Reily preached in his Government 2.0 talks and belly flopped spectacularly. It turns out folks will not sign up for an app they do not know about. I needed marketing.

Lacking cash to advertise I found the opportunity to barter with Doug Hardy, the proprietor of a local news website, CTNewsJunkie.com. In exchange for website help and support Doug gave me ad space on his website. Meanwhile I started shopping the concept to some other municipalities in Connecticut. With all the naïveté of a man in their mid-20s I thought I could sell my service to towns and cities and create my own civic start-up. I am forever thankful to folks like Doug Hausladen and Ben Berkowitz who took time to meet with me and entertained my fanciful notions. I learned there is more to software than writing code.

In this era data was religion and code was salvation. Sites like FiveThirtyEight and TrendCT suggested we just needed to visualize our problems to fix them. A story of poverty is a tragedy but poverty mapped on a screen is an opportunity. A letter to the editor about potholes is useless, but a 311 app that adds GPS coordinates to pothole complaints is a public service. Millions of residents would indeed see, click, and fix.

I still thought there was something to this idea of civic volunteerism. My journey would bring me to the big leagues: Boston, Massachusetts. There a few years prior a man named Harlan started a revolutionary Code for America Brigade. Code for Boston, bolstered by a deep bench of technology talent, was already punching above its weight. If anyone could fix government, surely they could.