2018 Code for America Summit

Welcome 
Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America
Dan Hon, Summit Co-Chair
David Eaves, Summit Host and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
Your co-chairs and hosts want you to get the most of our two days together, and to go home refreshed, renewed, and recommitted. We’ll start with that end in mind.

What’s at Stake Here
David Plouffe, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
David may be best known as the campaign manager for Barack Obama's successful 2008 presidential campaign, and then Senior Advisor to the President, but he now has another powerful platform for change, leading policy and advocacy for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Among other efforts to promote justice and opportunity, David’s team at CZI supports work to transform how government delivers services to the American people. What’s at stake if we don’t make government work as it should in a digital age? More than you might think. Strengthening government’s ability to serve all Americans with respect and dignity is critical to our nation’s future.

Staying the Course
Joanne Collins Smee, Executive Director, IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, General Services Administration
Joanne now leads the GSA’s work to transform government’s approach to technology that began under the Obama Administration, and she is passionately committed to the mission, the approach, and seeing this work through in the service of the American people. Come hear how the Technology Transformation Service and its Centers of Excellence are putting digital principles into action in federal agencies and providing leadership for change that everyone in government can benefit from.

Building on a Bedrock of Failure
Rodney Mullen, skateboarder, entrepreneur, inventor
Failure sucks, especially for skydivers and bomb-diffusers. For skateboarders, it’s a necessary part of progress; hence, they develop a well-honed eye for risk assessment as well as a clarity to flush out what are real vs imagined dangers, giving rise to a confidence to go after more creative, daring, and better outcomes. This is why the best skaters tend to be the best fallers, because a kind of intuition for minimizing damage emerges, so seemingly catastrophic falls become sustainable, which eventually forms a hardened foundation that can hardly be attained in any other way.

Blameless Post Mortems
John Allspaw, Adaptive Capacity Labs
John is an inspiring leader among engineers, but you don’t need to be technical to benefit from his message. Too often in government, we’re told to minimize risk and avoid mistakes at all costs. The reality is that mistakes and accidents happen when working with complex systems; how we respond to them makes all the difference in whether learning from them will happen or not. Systems and the cultures responsible for their operation can become more brittle and locked down, or we can learn from mistakes and become more resilient. The latter path starts with blameless post-incident reviews, part of management principles known as forward-looking accountability and just culture, which come from research in domains like aviation, medicine, and manufacturing. Evolving how we learn from incidents in these ways is critical to turning accidents into real investments in the future.

Delivery-Driven Advocacy that Transforms the Criminal Justice System
Evonne Silva, Code for America
Jazmyn Latimer, Code for America
Meilani Santillán, Code for America
Bob Weisengoff, Executive Director, Pretrial Release Services Program, Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services
Brittany Berwanger, Code for Tulsa

How can technology and design help our government create the conditions for a more just society and serve all Americans with respect and dignity? We start by placing the individual at the center of our work, recognizing the importance of those involved in the criminal justice system to be part of solving its greatest challenges, and we challenge assumptions about process that hold us back from helping people at scale. Three examples illustrate these approaches, each in deep collaboration with government partners. ClearMyRecord makes it easier to secure housing and employment, ClientComm reshapes community supervision to support positive outcomes, and CourtBot, a volunteer-led project, reduces pretrial incarceration. In reimagining existing systems through technology, design, and procedural innovation, government can implement policies that rethink incarceration, reduce recidivism, and restore opportunity.”

Case Study: When the System Gets Personal
Denise Peña, Community Justice Manager, Department of Community Justice, Multnomah County, Oregon
When you’re a victim of a crime, the pain can often be compounded by the system that is supposed to support you. Denise Pena became a radical supporter of user-centered design when she was tragically forced to use the very system she worked in. A team at Code for America helped make it easier to get the information victims in Multnomah County need to advocate for themselves and move on.

USDS Update and How are You Keeping Track of This? The U.S. Digital Service and the Appeals Process at the Veterans Administration
Matt Cutts, Acting Administrator, United States Digital Service
Gina Kim, UX Designer and Researcher,
United States Digital Service
Christopher Givens, Information Designer and Technologist United States Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs

Transforming California, Transforming Ourselves
Amy Tong, Chief Information Officer, State of California
Amy was the deputy director of the Office of Systems Integration in 2014 when the State of California began a sudden experiment with user-centered, agile development. It became clear that her leadership was needed to manage these changes and Governor Brown appointed her to the role of CIO. As Amy has led a courageous band of dedicated public servants and newer recruits to government through dramatic changes in approach, the need for government to do better has become personal.