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How can I help my local government as a developer / designer?
42 points by Lichine on July 25, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments
I am soon taking a whole year off from client-work (a kind of "sabbatical") and I've been looking all over the interwebs for ways to help my local government / city through my skills as a front-end developer and designer... I'm stuck!

Does anyone know where to start finding problems that a local government might be facing and would like solutions (prototypes)? Has anyone tried this and would be willing to share their experience?

Sidenote: I recently got the chance to sit down with the Head of Social Service & Care of the city I live in (2nd largest city in Denmark, Aarhus) who was "mindblown" about the fact that developers and designers actually would want to help out their communities and the local government. She said that they had many issues they could list publicly for anyone to jump on.

That made me think; I could make a non-techie-friendly platform for local governments to post their problems (maybe as a GitHub repo), embed it on their website and make it easy for developers and designers to fork a problem they'd like to work on, notifying the local government whenever something is released?

But that would take local governments to sign up and developers / designers to begin solving problems that matter to their local society. Might be worth a shot though?

I've already looked at Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for Good and similar, but it's not quite what I have in mind.

I know from experience that public healthcare can greatly benefit from prototypes and concepts made by freelance developers, which gives them major leverage against the large companies who they are often ball-and-chained to whenever they need IT-solutions. Many of these solutions have again and again proven themselves way too costly, bug-ridden, outdated and incredibly user-hostile. rant.

Any ideas are appreciated and I hope you'll all have a great weekend! :-)

- Anders




"But that would take local governments to sign up and developers / designers to begin solving problems that matter to their local society. Might be worth a shot though?"

Tech minds are always want to build a tool, not sure why it's just how we're wired.

Don't.

Just do less and do something.

Ask the "Head of Social Service & Care" you were talking to to get 5 or 10 colleagues to get in a room with yourself and a few other hackers.

Ask them their problems and write it all down. Then build something to solve ONE of their problems. This could be as boring as reducing their wasted time and money by automating a menial task in the departments offices.

Once you've built a thing show them it, then ask them to organise another meeting to talk about other problems. Ask them to invite community members. Then you do it again, and again.

Helping people isn't about building things, it's about talking to them about their problems and solving them. Keyword there "talking".


Hey Michael!

I love that way of thinking, since you're totally right; everything can't be solved by another tech tool that looks nice on TechCrunch.

I have been lucky enough to be a part of what you're proposing a few times, and it is an amazing (and exhausting!) experience. Talking to them, fully understanding their pain points and even try to go out into "the field" with some social workers is a very important method for solving problems that matter in the right way. I agree. :-)

What I have experienced though, and your mileage may differ, is that even though you want to invite them (and community members) they simply do not have the time unless it's some under-the-radar workshop or some big hackathon. Both good initiatives, but it nags me that there's nothing "in-between".

Our local government is stressed and pushed to its limits, meaning that many initiatives like hackathons and the like needs to yield some sort of return of investment.

Nevertheless, I completely agree with you and thanks for sharing your thoughts!

- Anders


If you are looking to join or form a local group with similar goals, this is probably what you're looking for: http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/


Ey webmaven!

Thanks for sharing that link! :-) That is a very nice tool (motivational too, even though Denmark isn't represented (yet!)). I might just as well start up a brigade of my own!

It would be nice though if the platform behind CodeForAmerica was more international, since this feels like you can only help out the US (which is cool too) and not your local government in your own country.

Maybe that's the next step for the people behind CodeForAmerica?


http://codeforamerica.org/about/international/


Well, there you go! :-D Thanks! Starting a program might be a little too much for me, but I know a few who I think would love to add Denmark on the map.


If you can't commit to starting a Brigade on your own, perhaps the smaller step of joining the mailing list and looking for others to help might work better: https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/forum/#!forum...


Hmm, well if a Brigade is a team of developers then I'd definitely go for that and ask some of my friends. But starting an entire Program seems better suited for some other people I know. :-)

The Google groups tip is nice, that's a very nice idea. Thanks again!


Most Brigades are just local devs/designers/citizens/public employees/stakeholders trying to make their cities better. The 'International' site is more along the lines for someone who actually wants to start 'Code for Denmark'.

You'll notice that most Brigades are in countries where a 'Code for Country X' exists, but by no means all. So go for it!: http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/tools


Look for information you would want to see in your available media -- find a dataset and build it into a useful app to be filtered and queried in different ways. Map data points to physical locations. Correlate those things. At some point it all starts to look like a population density heat map, but sometimes you find good stuff in there. And people want to see it. They need more tangible access to all the real world data we have been collecting. Otherwise, what's the point?

I worked for a year at a newspaper and built apps and stuff like that -- it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done and I wish the situation had been able to work out. If I ever get a chance to do real news apps again, I would jump on it. Enjoy your opportunity, Anders, and be prepared to show your work.

Sometimes, the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is applicable. If you build something that shows you CAN build something, show it to the right people and you will attract attention.

Some inspiration: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/ http://blog.apps.npr.org/ https://source.opennews.org/en-US/ http://flowingdata.com/


Hey Jacob!

Thanks a bunch for sharing your insights, it's really helpful to me. Your newspaper experience is very motivating too :-)

In Aarhus, we do have an open data collection called ODAA (http://www.odaa.dk/) that might be an avenue to pursue. A few developer friends and I have played around with it once, but we quickly discovered that despite it being relatively easy to just "make something", it's much harder to "make something useful to others" and we'd love to have had a government representative in the same room to guide our skills in the right direction.

I completely agree with you on what's the point of all this data if we don't turn it into something people can understand and use in a meaningful way. What I'm missing is that person / people saying "Hey, can someone turn THIS heatmap data into X thing, that would really help!".

A newspaper sounds like a great place to learn deeply about different local issues / problems that could be solved. I have a few journalist friends I could try and contact, see if they have encountered something.

Also, thanks a bunch for those inspirational links. They are bookmarked for sure! If / when I do create something, might I throw it your way for feedback?

- Anders


If you know any journalists, I'm sure they'll have ideas -- They are (in my limited experience) intelligent and incredibly busy people, leaving them with little time to really dive in to every topic they see that interests them. Also, news organizations have been slow to catch up to the internet age. At least in the US, there are only a handful of papers REALLY diving into the app side of things. Thankfully that number is growing.

I'd love to see what you and your friends are doing with open data. I'm finding it difficult to stay motivated in my own area, with few developers and little free time.

Glad to see that people world over are investing time in open data. :)


I have a few in different areas, mostly writing for technology-based magazines but have previously worked at local and larger newspapers.

As for news orgs. to be a bit slow, I hear you completely! I conducted a closed workshop with a corporation that develops enterprise-level software for newspapers and you could literally wow them with simple CSS3 transitions and animations, let alone flexbox layouts. :-)

Motivation is a big factor for me too, I tend to dream about applying my skills to the common good, but end up creating either entertainment-based webapps and / or tools other web developers (https://github.com/AndersSchmidtHansen?tab=repositories).

I'll keep you in the know! I think that investing our skills into evolving our society (local and global) is the next, natural step for us geeks. ;-)


Chicago has a group called "Open City" that builds open-source applications for the city.

Link: http://opencityapps.org/

One thing you could do is look through their apps (they're all open source & on github) and figure out which ones might make sense for your city.

You can then clone the apps you like, configure them for your city (many cities use the Socrata data platform, so this may be simply a config change in some cases) and deploy it for your city.


Hi Laura!

Thanks for the link. :-) It's bookmarked now!

This reminds me of something we discussed at a hackathon some time ago, where the government representative raised the issue of how to connect all of these apps together (like Legos) to make maintaining and integrating them into a workflow that makes sense to government employees.

I could try contacting Open City to hear what their thoughts on this. The current solution that's on the table here is to require the apps to be able to connect to a central "engine" that would act as a "local government dashboard". The apps would stream the data, either raw or filtered and be presented and manipulated in an interface that's understandable and actionable for non-technical employees.

If it's the right way, we don't know yet though. :-)


From my experience with local administration here in Italy, I think that a big big problem in doing this is that most of the development work is done by private contractors which, understandably, want to defend their economic interests. Mixing in voluntary work would be very difficult, also because individual volunteers in general aren't dependable enough for anything that is really necessary.

If you want to do something small but that could bring results for sure, my suggestion is to contact some individual department and offer to do for them something that is "nice to have" but they don't have the resources to do. Very often (at least here) the cultural departments have little resources, many small projects/events, and it would be easy to create for example a website/page/small tool.

If instead you would like to do something with a bigger impact, I think you could evaluate collaboration with other developers for some open-source building blocks for software pieces needed by most public administrations. But it would be much tougher.


As one of those contractors myself, it's not just about defending economic interests.

For one thing, technical volunteers are one of the most infamous types: They arrive with a bunch of technical experience, the client goes "OH MY GOODNESS" and pretty soon the volunteers are cracking their knuckles, getting ready to start.

At this point, one of two things tends to happen: 1) The volunteer has underestimated their need for constant high-level stimulation and runs out of interest, or 2) the volunteer completes a solution that is a poor fit for any existing problems.

I once had a volunteer come onto a project and immediately suggest a variety of changes to the work I was performing. He told me how he had gone over my work to date (a funny thing that citizens like to do, and that's fine) and decided that he had identified problems A, B, and C in the system, so it needed to be changed to do X, Y, and Z, where X, Y and Z were all fairly obvious beginner mistakes in the ecosystem in which this was happening. I called the client and told her I would need her agreement in writing that these mistakes would be implemented, and I never heard from the volunteer again. What the client really needed was to make a high-level decision to do things the right way. Instead they had a "we can't do that" mentality and each decision was basically a small patch on some part of the system.

From my perspective, one of the wisest things a volunteer could do is identify and contact a current contractor for said government organization and ask them what kind of volunteer work would be helpful. By doing this they pair up with someone who has a deep insight into existing systems. Then the volunteer can go back to the government and say, "hey, we talked to the contractor and here's what we as volunteers think we can help with." Since you have to educate the client anyway, you might as well do it with the help of existing contractors. Of course, if the contractor is really a jerk about it, you've just saved yourself the headache of working with them.

I could easily come up with a range of non-technical to technical issues that affect my government clients and need help, and I'm busy enough that even a case where I lose work isn't actually that critical to me if the client is gaining an advantage. From working with a lot of volunteers though, I really question whether the follow-through on their side would be substantial.


My experience here in Italy is limited to few not-so-small projects, and from my experience I doubt that a contractor (and I wasn't thinking about an individual, but a company that 99% of the times is led by salesmen) would even think about touching a volunteer with a 10 feet pole. But I'm glad to know this is not true in other parts of the world :)

From what you said, a really nice idea could be to think about a process with which an administration could match volunteers with contractors... and then create an open source tool to facilitate that.


Hey there Lichine,

I can only answer from my perspective even though it'll look like a shameless plug (which it probably is).

I'm the technical lead for a project called OpenSpending (https://openspending.org/) which is a free/open source project that tries to track and analyse public expenditure and budgets throughout the world. We're always looking for people to help out.

You could either work on the main site to improve that for your government or help them get their budgets/expenditure datasets loaded onto openspending.org or, since you're a frontend developer you might be more interested in what we refer to as satellite sites (openspending.org can be seen as an analytical machine with an api).

Satellite sites are done mostly by people outside of the core team but use the api to visualise budgets and expenditure for citizens in a way that is easy to understand. Some examples of sites include: http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org (for Britain), http://budzeti.ba (for Bosnia) or http://openbudgetoakland.org (for Oakland, California). These sites use the openspendingjs library for visualisations (you could contribute new visualisations based on data from your local government).

Since I see you're based in Denmark you might be interested in this site from Politiken: http://kommune.politiken.dk/ which used our visualisations but not the openspending.org backend or an instance of the OpenSpending software (which is fine, but a bit weird).

You might also be interested in knowing that OpenSpending is now mostly led by Nordics. I, the technical lead, come from Iceland while the community lead comes from Denmark (but lives in Washington DC).

OpenSpending is a community project founded and facilitated by Open Knowledge which is an organisation you might be interested in. There are a lot of other projects Open Knowledge works on in various fields that most try to help either governments or citizens. Here's the Open Knowledge website: https://okfn.org/

Good luck finding an interesting project to do and you can ping me if you're interested in OpenSpending (I'm always around on OpenSpending's IRC channel for example).


Heya tryggvib!

First off, that's one awesome "shameless" plug. :-) I've been looking for a site / project that does this for so long, you can't even imagine. So thank you for sharing that, I will be checking it out more thoroughly later.

Second, that sounds like a great invitation, I might just jump aboard when I begin my "sabbatical". I actually have seen the site at Politiken (small world, huh?) and it's awesome to see that there are initiatives working on more economic transparency.

Thanks for the Open Knowledge link, that's definitely something I will look more into. On a sidenote, for the past couple of years I've taken an interest in medical science and how merging it with the digital industry could benefit society (think, real-time blood analytics for scientific research, modern overviews of disease and the teams currently working cures, etc.), so it's nice to see that a well-established organization do exist.

I will definitely ping you, also on any updates that might be relevant to you and your team (don't forget to say hi from me!).

Keep up the good work and thank you so much for sharing with me (and the rest of HN)!

- Anders


http://www.taprootfoundation.org/ - If you live in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles this could be an option, as well as the sort of model for finding ways to help in your community. Although this is focused on nonprofit work not government work, I don't see why it wouldn't be just as rewarding.


Chicago does a surprisingly good job of this: http://opencityapps.org/ Why not give one of the organizers of Hack Night a call http://opengovhacknight.org/ and ask how they organize their event and then copy+paste in Aarhus!


I tried to make a system to display real-time bus arrival information for Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus, and despite attending city council meetings where they said they were "excited to work with the community" I was repeatedly blown off and eventually treated with hostility. I wish you better luck.


Hey Cal!

I'm sorry to hear that you had a negative experience... The situation you describe is especially a concern to me. It is a risk to take since they might show excitement here-and-now, but fail to follow up later on (for whatever reasons).

How did you first start out though? Did you get the idea first and then pitch it to the city council or did they reach out first? I'd love to know more. :-)

And thanks for sharing your story, I'll definitely keep it in mind.


Check out Madison. Its a good concept that needs more backing.

http://opengovfoundation.org/ https://github.com/opengovfoundation/madison


Hey justaman!

Thanks for the link to Madison! I just checked it quickly (will go through it more later); it looks like a really interesting concept. I had a similar idea a while ago to move Danish legislation work to GitHub, since (imho) it increases transparency. I'll keep Madison on my radar! :-)


I believe http://codeforamerica.org/ exists for exactly this purpose. It matches techies with their local governments to improve things.


Hey Jo!

Exactly what I'm thinking about, thank you very much for that link! Hmm, this makes me think why http://codefordenmark.org/ or maybe http://hackdanmark.org doesn't exist yet. I've attended several of these hackathons.

I like those a lot, though there's a recurring issue that they only happen periodically. What I'd love to see is a continuous stream of public problems that we who have the skills can just jump on and off whenever we have the time.

We do have some initiatives that connect "everyone with everyone's problems", but those are more aimed at crowdsourcing ideas for solving social issues and I rarely see local governments take much interest in posting a list of issues they'd like help for.

Again, thank you so much!

- Anders


Is there an equivalent program in Denmark or elsewhere in Europe?


Hmm, codefordenmark does not seem to be used by anyone, so maybe the concept hasn't reached us (yet!). :-)

There are a bunch of local hackathon events, like "Hack Aarhus" etc., but in my opinion it would be cool to help out whenever you had the time and not only at events (and not involving prizes and competition, which many of these events do prefer).


There is a "Code For Ireland" http://www.codeforireland.com/ - I imagine there are similar groups in other parts of Europe!


Hey Duggan!

Thanks for the link. :-) It's nice to see that these initiatives also exist in Europe. In addition to the above, this really makes me think "Why the hell is there not something like this in Denmark?".


If you are looking for existing open source solutions to adopt/adapt locally, try here: http://commons.codeforamerica.org/


This looks really promising too! Thanks :-) I could add Aarhus to the map. Oh, if the site just said "CodeForTheWorld" or "CodeForYourCountry". Nothing against coding solely for America (that's totally cool too), it just feels a little odd to contribute solution for say Berlin, but have it published on a site marketed towards the US alone.


http://commons.codeforamerica.org/places/Berlin


Sit down with your smaller cities and find out their needs. In many cases they have 1-2 IT staff and don't have time to automate process X.


Hey Koldark!

Thanks a bunch for your tip. :-) I did something similar a while back with 2 Head of IT from a local government at a very small hackathon and it was a very positive experience.

As a "one-man operation" this could work well, I'd love to have a coffee with representatives (they rarely have the time though, in my experience). Maybe I could invite a few of my developer friends and some people from my local government for dinner as a starter. :-)

Again, thanks for your reply!

- Anders


i'd sign up for a site like that. (ux designer in nyc)




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