ADI General Body Meeting- Civic Technology
Will attempt to quickly summarize the conversation we had on how we could use technology to help with the way people interact with our government. We started the discussion off by introducing the two questions motivating this conversation.*
We then jumped in with how do we interact with our government today? Taxes, voting, food stamps, education, Amber alerts, filing bankruptcy...
One good example was a Twilio app that had been created, where users could text a phone number and would be guided through a series of questions to figure out if they were eligible for food stamps. If they were, they would then be walked through the process, effectively speeding up a three week process to a matter of a few days.
Someone asked whether the problem may be the systematic nature of government, that it is slow and bureaucratic whereas the tech industry attempts to innovate and move and break things as fast as possible. If this is the case, perhaps civic tech projects is not the right approach, as people are not the ones meant to be responsible for solving these issues. While a few of these problems are due to outdated processes and some slow paperwork/forms to be filled out, are the bigger problems ones that can only be addressed systematically?
A. brought up a good counter-argument that this is exactly why we need these movements, government takes a while to pass legislation, but there are other ways that tech enables us (the question remains, who us should be - government organizations or the public at large) to help others, with a fast turn-around. In the case of the food stamps, a simple app that sent out text messages sped up a process that takes way too long, and even longer to change the program itself. He conceded that the issue was that we often end up relying on larger companies (Google and Facebook explaining to their users how to vote during election season) or individuals (a friend from Harvard taking a semester off to work on a civic tech project) to volunteer to work on these problems, and they often do this as a one-off project. With whom does the responsibility lay? Does it fall to the government or to people and companies to step up and fix issues?
What we need is for someone to be responsible for these initiatives, to see that they are continuously being supported and to follow-up with them. We can’t rely on arbitrary initiatives to solve all of our problems. Then the problem is that not many software engineers will or are motivated to work for the government, given the opportunity to work at other companies w/ larger salaries and environments in which they can grow and receive more mentorship.
Side Note: I think, that means that we may need to change our attitude towards helping the general good. Maybe our generation has to have the mentality of helping the public, and working on problems that will improve the collective communities experiences. But I acknowledge that to do this would be harder than it sounds. I’m also hopeful, given the times we’re in, that my peers and I will be more aware and willing to step up to help fix problems in our society.
This was followed up with the question of are there enough opportunities for us to be involved with civic tech initiatives around the city. It was pointed out that NY high schools will be required to have their students learn computer science at some point in the future (p. vague about the details on this) but the bottom line was that we should begin with helping out the students in local high schools with programming. J. interjected and said that he didn’t think it was a matter of whether there are opportunities to get involved (because there are many, and he had brought up NY Open Data earlier in the night), but rather, should we, at this stage of our lives, go into civic tech. He had apparently asked someone in the field this question, of whether college students should look for internships in this area and had been surprised when the person had advised against it, on the grounds that it was not an area where one would receive a lot of mentorship. Y. jumped in and said she had heard similar things, and her own plan was to learn as much as possible before going in and working on tech + gov. issues.
