Peace Corps For Geeks

An eager army of programmers is creating apps to help tech-starved cities--and their residents

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Cody Pickens for TIME

From left, Cris Cristina, Richa Agarwal and Sheila Dugan are fellows at Oakland's city hall.

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She needn't have been. In 2011, the program's first year, Code for America received 360 applicants for just 20 spots. It turned out that there was no shortage of coders, engineers and designers out there who were looking for a chance to use their extremely valuable skills for something bigger than the next hot mobile-gaming app. (It also helps that most of the fellows were already fairly-well-compensated professionals.) By 2013, the program had grown to include 28 fellows operating in 10 cities, ranging from Oakland, Calif., to New York City. In February it received a $5 million donation from the Knight Foundation. "It's such a neat way to learn how cities work," says Ariel Kennan, a designer who is now working on the Kansas City, Mo., team. "I never thought I would work with the government, but it's been really inspiring."

Once they've had about a month of training--mostly to prepare them for the culture shock of moving from Silicon Valley to city hall--the fellows are dispatched to work in their chosen cities, which themselves have to apply to earn a spot in the Code for America program. The work is meant to go deeper than just improving a city's official website or putting the mayor on Twitter. City governments generate a vast amount of data, everything from bus routes to property-tax records to police reports, but much of that information tends to molder away in archives, untouched except by those motivated citizens willing to make public-records requests. Code for America, which is part of a broader movement to improve the way governments function, aims to liberate that information and find creative ways to use it--and to do so inexpensively. With municipalities under increasing financial pressure from a combination of sagging tax revenue and federal spending cuts, that's a powerful draw for city officials. "We can no longer do things in the old way," says Karen Boyd, communications director for Oakland, who notes that the city has seen staffing reduced by 25% over the past 10 years. "Technology is moving in a new direction, and government needs to move that way too."

In Oakland, Code for America is helping create a Web-based outlet for public records and an online public tracking system for city procurement spending. Cris Cristina, a former design manager at Cisco and an Oakland resident for more than five years, notes that the city government has sometimes had an uneasy relationship with its citizens--especially since the violent reaction to the Occupy protests in 2011. For Cristina, his work as a Code for America fellow isn't just about streamlining city services via the Web; it's also about restoring public trust. Before his three-person team even began programming, they spent a month in consultations with citizens and officials, trying to gauge what they wanted and what they needed. "We started with the city staff and went down to people on the street," says Cristina. "There's a level of transparency that the public is looking for, and that's what we're trying to provide."

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