There has always been a lot of politically charged talk about “our government” and “taking our country back.” In the 03-04 campaign, Howard Dean’s catch phrase was “you have the power to take your country back”. From 2004-2008, Campaign for America’s Future ran a conference called “Take Back America” that organized progressives during the Bush administration. Since 2009, the Take Back America metaphor crossed partisan lines and went to conservatives. In 2010, Sarah Palin went on a Take Back America tour and Dick Morris published the book “2010: Take Back America: A Battle Plan.”
It’s an age old political trick. Media consultants make you feel a sense of disconnection from your government, get you really pissed off about it, and convince you that it is your patriotic duty to elect their candidate so that you can restore America to the greatness it once was. The reality is that the past is just about as real as the future — it’s easy to embellish and believe times were great — and it’s really easy for a television ad to fill you full of images that prove this to be the case. Maybe it was, maybe it was’t, the results seem to be the same every time: you vote for the person, and they don’t live up to what they told you they were going to do. The problem is a conflation of skills. It takes a different skill to get elected than it does to govern. We elect people who are very good at getting elected but rarely have any experience at governing. It happens Every. Single. Time.
The truth is: there is no taking our country back. Doc Brown’s flux capacitor isn’t going to save us by taking us back to a better time in America where our government bodies were somehow more representative. The more realistic way to solve our problems is to move our country forward — to try and solve the problems that we’re facing at the governmental, representative, and local level. Expecting an insurgent DC outsider to come to DC and change it is about as effective as appointing her or him to lead the Washington Nationals and expecting them to go and win the World Series.
I’ve written a lot about why developers are important — and I’ve also written about the crisis that a lot of our municipal bodies are in. These two things are only quasi-related. The thing is — cities are running out of money, and government bodies tend to spend a lot — too much money — on IT related products. Government bodies aren’t just running up huge debts because they’re spending too much money on IT related products, they’re also running up huge debts because providing services to people is expensive. At the inception of our republic, there were no venture capitalists or political advisors asking James Madison how “scalable” the bill of rights were.
It’s time for a new kind of government outsider. Developers who can shake themselves out of the shackles of Washington’s media culture can change how government works far more than the brightest lawyer or the most charismatic politician. Because the internet and mobile devices allow affordable connectivity at a local and federal level, and because developers control the architecture, development and construction of that medium, we’re left with an opportunity to develop new services. All the sudden, a lot of potential energy has been placed in the hands of the tinkering developer.
Let the politicians be politicians and run Washington. Developers don’t need to take back America when they can invent better future. Contests like the Knight Foundation and the FCC’s Apps for Communities and organizations like Code for America provide an opportunity and incentive to turn this potential energy into kinetic energy. Tim O’Reilly puts it best when he talks about competition on the web. Used in the context of startups, Tim means: to compete with Google, don’t build another search engine. Instead, think of the larger problem that Google is trying to solve, and solve that. Developers have a way to do that with government that very few others do: they can use their skills to effect government change by building software that disrupts the standard way of providing effective services to citizens.
To date, contests like Apps for Communities have been held in large tech-dense cities like San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC. Only cities with decent budgets can afford to bring an organization like Code for America in to help out. What makes Apps for Communities special is that it’s targeted towards rural communities and communities in need. These communities have a higher chance of actually adopting the technology that’s built as their own. The little guys are always the ones who move the ball forward because they have the least amount of bureaucracy built up to mitigate risk. Whether it be Dean’s insurgent and out of nowhere 2004 Presidential Campaign, New Haven, Connecticut’s SeeClickFix, or Manor Texas’ QR Code Experiment, America’s small towns and rural communities are the places where innovation isn’t just welcomed, it’s required.
