
How can I help my local government as a developer / designer? - Lichine
I am soon taking a whole year off from client-work (a kind of &quot;sabbatical&quot;) and I&#x27;ve been looking all over the interwebs for ways to help my local government &#x2F; city through my skills as a front-end developer and designer... I&#x27;m stuck!<p>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?<p>Sidenote: I recently got the chance to sit down with the Head of Social Service &amp; Care of the city I live in (2nd largest city in Denmark, Aarhus) who was &quot;mindblown&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;d like to work on, notifying the local government whenever something is released?<p>But that would take local governments to sign up and developers &#x2F; designers to begin solving problems that matter to their local society. Might be worth a shot though?<p>I&#x27;ve already looked at Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for Good and similar, but it&#x27;s not quite what I have in mind.<p>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 Many of these solutions have again and again proven themselves way too costly, bug-ridden, outdated and incredibly user-hostile. <i>rant</i>.<p>Any ideas are appreciated and I hope you&#x27;ll all have a great weekend! :-)<p>- Anders
======
michaelallen
"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".

~~~
Lichine
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

------
webmaven
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/](http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/)

~~~
Lichine
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?

~~~
webmaven
[http://codeforamerica.org/about/international/](http://codeforamerica.org/about/international/)

~~~
Lichine
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.

~~~
webmaven
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...](https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/forum/#!forum/brigade)

~~~
Lichine
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!

~~~
webmaven
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](http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/tools)

------
jacobroufa
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.chicagotribune.com/)
[http://blog.apps.npr.org/](http://blog.apps.npr.org/)
[https://source.opennews.org/en-US/](https://source.opennews.org/en-US/)
[http://flowingdata.com/](http://flowingdata.com/)

~~~
Lichine
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/](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

~~~
jacobroufa
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. :)

~~~
Lichine
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](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. ;-)

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

Link: [http://opencityapps.org/](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.

~~~
Lichine
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. :-)

------
danmaz74
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.

~~~
themodelplumber
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.

~~~
danmaz74
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.

------
tryggvib
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/](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](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org) (for Britain),
[http://budzeti.ba](http://budzeti.ba) (for Bosnia) or
[http://openbudgetoakland.org](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/](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/](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).

~~~
Lichine
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

------
palehose
[http://www.taprootfoundation.org/](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.

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

------
CalRobert
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.

~~~
Lichine
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.

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

[http://opengovfoundation.org/](http://opengovfoundation.org/)
[https://github.com/opengovfoundation/madison](https://github.com/opengovfoundation/madison)

~~~
Lichine
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! :-)

------
jo_
I believe [http://codeforamerica.org/](http://codeforamerica.org/) exists for
exactly this purpose. It matches techies with their local governments to
improve things.

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

~~~
duggan
There is a "Code For Ireland"
[http://www.codeforireland.com/](http://www.codeforireland.com/) \- I imagine
there are similar groups in other parts of Europe!

~~~
Lichine
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?".

------
webmaven
If you are looking for existing open source solutions to adopt/adapt locally,
try here:
[http://commons.codeforamerica.org/](http://commons.codeforamerica.org/)

~~~
Lichine
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.

~~~
webmaven
[http://commons.codeforamerica.org/places/Berlin](http://commons.codeforamerica.org/places/Berlin)

------
Koldark
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.

~~~
Lichine
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

------
bettyx1138
i'd sign up for a site like that. (ux designer in nyc)

