Thanks so much. So my name is Arash Rock, and I am right now a professional editor and writing coach. But when I wrote this book, I really was a researcher of, communication and specifically political communication and social media. And, I still am interested in these in these topics, but I've kind of moved from researching them to working on, you know, a lot of books and articles written by other people writing on them. So I'm still in the mix, but just in a slightly different way.

working particularly with researchers, graduate students, early career academics to help them write a better book and improve their writing and improve their research. And I just really I'm a nerd. I can't kinda hide it. Yeah. If it's not clear from this book, I just really like understanding the meta context of things, that gray area knowledge. And that's the ground on which I kinda built my business as an editor and writing coach.

Well, I think through Code for America, we understand the evolution of what we can broadly call digital politics as a whole. And I'm always looking out as a researcher for that kind of small site or phenomena that tells a bigger story. And I actually kind of stumbled into this. Around 2012, I started going to in 2013, I started going to a lot of civic hackathons, other events, and I just kept on running into people from Code for America. I remember, running into the first year of fellows for the city of Long Beach, which is where I live, which included, Fury, and Dan Gettleman. And I just kind of kept on showing up to these events. And so naturally I gravitated towards the organisation. And I should say that at the start I thought the story was not that interesting and I don't mean that in a dissy way. I just didn't have a grasp of the big story that that it told. But I kept on showing up and around 2015 a lot of interesting things happened like that's sort of like 2015, 2016. There were a lot of different efforts going on at Code for America and about digital politics and organising around it. And I found those fascinating and that's what really the book is about and it's also about how these undercurrents really change the organization itself. The other thing I'd say is that I was motivated to write this book because, to be entirely frank, I was, like, taking classes in organizational communication, at USC Annenberg, which is where I got my PhD. And so I was looking for a vehicle and a way to talk about these things. And so, you know, I was working, you know, I was like Henry Jenkins' research assistant for a while. I was part of Ann Balsamo's research group. She's a really renowned techno feminist and Francois Barr, is my advisor who's really a community, someone who brings community organizing together with technical practice. And so there are all these kind of ideas swirling around and Code for America ended up being an interesting vehicle for a lot of those ideas. And I think ultimately I wrote this book to show kind of two things. One that organizations change over time, particularly these types of tech forward organizations change over time. And that technological practice changes politics, but that's not natural or fated to be one thing. Right? So I think there's this idea that, like, oh, Silicon Valley shows up to city hall and, you know, they're beholden to, you know, Elon Musk. And I actually found something very different where, you know, a lot of the actors in the non profit tech space really didn't have a whole lot of power. And so they really had to be creative in terms of getting into those rooms and doing the things that they wanted to do. You know, so I think the dimensionality of that story is what kept me coming back.

I describe Code for America as a tech forward nonprofit working at the state and local levels. So that kind of puts it in a fairly small niche in 2009 when it started. There really weren't that many organizations doing that. These days, that's actually a fairly big area. You know, you you you see a lot of synonyms, you know, civic tech being one of those terms, also public interest technology. And, you know, there there are a lot of, I think, things going on now that, organizations more organizations are doing. When when it first started, I think the idea of geeks working with government was quite new. You didn't really have that frame for understanding what that would look like or what would happen. You know? So but but on a fundamental level, I think Code for America is a tech forward nonprofit organization, and it also represents what I just call infrastructural politics, which is both kind of working on digital infrastructure as a political activity and then also, you know, the infrastructural organizing around that effort.

Yeah. I'm glad you picked up on this and and use this as kind of a first question to get us into the discussion. I think it was this moment where there were a lot of actors at the state and local level who are interested in, you know, riding this tide of interest that Code for America was also as well. And, you know, you saw this earlier in the 1970s when the idea of participation started entering our vocabulary. And these days, I think what I think Garcetti shows us is that he's really interested in volunteers taking on, you know, the roles and the things that administrators have historically done, and then some maybe. Right? So I think it also, I think hope hopefully shows the big spectacle of these events. And that's something that returns in a lot of different ways throughout the book, particularly through the events that, you know, Jen Palka put on because she came from, a world where she was working on, organizing game events and then also, you know, working on Tim O'Reilly events. And so the idea of the spectacle and, you know, kind of having a having a literal stage, you know, really comes back throughout the book. And, you know, I think this vignette really shows this moment where, it becomes plausible for people to volunteer their labor through technological practice.

Yeah. And I think this is a term that I came up with. And so, you know, if there is remember, this is an academic book. It's published by an academic press. So this is how academics write. Like, you have a concept that you're infusing with meaning throughout the book. It's a term to me that's both historical and analytical. So historically, it describes this moment in time from, I would say, 2009 to twenty twenty slash twenty twenty one, in the evolution of this fusion of technical practice and organizing, in politics. So it starts with the idea of like networks and Web two point zero. I mean, you have to really put yourself in that mindset. When was the last time anyone talked about Web two point o? Right? You know, but that's where we start with the idea of, networks, Web two point o, government as a platform. You know, these ideas that people like Clay Shirky and Tim O'Reilly are writing about, the possibility of openness and collective action changing politics as a whole. If you remember, Tim O'Reilly would write about, you know, against the vending machine model of politics where you simply put in money and get services. He would say, well, we have to kind of participate in politics itself. Right? Over time, a lot of new ideas got attached to, I think this idea of infrastructural organizing, prototypes end up being really important because the ideas that people came up with needed like a material vehicle, like a proof of concept. Like, look at this look at this app. This shows what government would be like, you know, more simplified, more attuned to our needs, if we simply kind of found a way to use it. Right? You know, another idea, of course, is networks. That thing never goes away. Right? And this is also a lesson, about political organizing. And I think, it's Dave Karpf who writes a lot about what he calls sedimentary organizations, right? That you have practices that, you know, sediment like, you know, silt, right? And they never go away. So, for instance, data was a really big rallying cry for Code for America, I would say around 2015, 2016. It never has gone away. You still see that come up. You know, and so a lot of these ideas, kind of go into the organization and become part of how people think about their organizing. To the point that when I refer to infrastructural organizing, I'm referring to not just building digital infrastructure, but the organizers themselves becoming infrastructural. They're pieces in a larger puzzle and the ideas that they bring to the organization through things like networks, prototypes, expertise become a vehicle for doing politics. And when you look at infrastructure organizing, it looks different than for instance, traditional hierarchical organizations or even corporations like Meta, the way that they kind of organize their workers. It's distinct and that's why I refer to it as an analytical term as well because, it doesn't just help me tell in history, but I think we're living in an era of infrastructural organizing. It's really become the water we swim in essentially, and we just don't notice it because it's now extremely common.

Yeah. This is where I'm I would say most pessimistic about Code for America. I would say other chapters, I actually really do admire a lot of what they did. But in early days, I mean, Jen Palka herself has been pretty explicit in interviews and presentations about really not having very much in the early days. Right? So put yourself in her shoes. Right? You're building an organization. You need to show that you're doing something. You need working evidence of geeks changing politics. So kind of the early idea was this thing called fellowships. Fellowships would generally be around three people who would get a contract with local government, and Code for America would negotiate that contract to work on a project that mattered to government and possibly other partners in the city or town where they were they were doing the work. For example, in, Long Beach, they partnered with the Molina Foundation, which is does health care. So unsurprisingly, you know, the the stuff that they did was related to health care and also, mattered to local government as well. So why didn't the fellowships work? I think the simplest way to describe it is that, Code for America didn't think through the challenges very well, and so there was a lot that had to happen in a year. Right? So the fellowships would just be a year. Government moves very slowly. Tech culture moves very fast. And a lot of the time when geeks show up and they're just like, hey. Here's our, PowerPoint pitch, for what we think needs to be done. That actually didn't end up being a great way to get the kind of political capital that is necessary in government. Right? Because that's not how government culture works. You need to stick around and a lot of the ways that you get and develop capital by which I just mean, kind of material resources and then also things like reputation. Right? This person is a known quantity. They'll do a good job at this. That takes a whole lot of time, you know? So that's one thing. Trying to move too quickly and perhaps breaking things. Right? Also kind of misunderstanding things like policies and laws. Right? So, HIPAA violations. Right? You, can't actually access you know, in Long Beach, this ended up being a thing. It didn't actually, I think, ultimately sync the project, but it did end up being a pretty big bump in the road. And then also the fact that as much as we might look to Code for America and be like, oh, it was birthed by the tech industry. Code for America is not like, you know, Hewlett Packard's public sector wing. You know? The Code for America is never gonna get a $100,000,000 contracts to build platforms for government as much as it talks like that sometimes. So in in some cases, I think they actually misunderstood the the power that they had in these spaces for for reasons other than, you know, trying to move too quickly. I think they just didn't understand that, you know, vendors end up being really powerful. These huge non you know, these huge, organizations that have public sector, you know, they're doing business, the same kind of business they do in the private sector, just in the public sector, And they're freaking gigantic. Right? I mean, they they they could they could eat good for America for lunch, you know, and and pick their teeth with their bones. So, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm actually although I'm very pessimistic about fellowships, I'm sympathetic to, like, you know, what they were trying to do because they were trying to do something really ambitious. And really, I think their hearts were in the right place, but, you know, it just ended up being, you know, producing a lot of just, you know, projects that were just another tombstone in the civic tech project graveyard, unfortunately. And if you don't believe me, you can, you know, go go look at the Code for America GitHub and draw your own conclusions.

Yeah. This was an important chapter for me to tell. I to be entirely candid, I don't know if I did a great job in this chapter. I would if you're listening and you research this stuff, write about the things that I write about in this chapter, but just do a better job, you know, honestly. Just because I think this story is still ongoing and I don't know quite where it ends. But I do think in terms of the code for America world and its history, what I saw is that there was a movement from, you know, working on technology. You know, we talked about the fellowships. Like, you're gonna make an app. What ended up happening here is that the employees really, ended up working more on, for instance, recruitment in showing that Code for America, when it's doing recruitment for government services, can be more empathetic than government as a whole. And so with sometimes that involved using technology, but a lot of the time it was just kind of boring stuff like using Facebook ads to target otherwise minoritized or disempowered groups, right, who are eligible for government services. It's a different way of using technology and it's a different situating of code for America, in the nonprofit landscape. Right? And I do think it does. I think two things happen too. Part of it was what you said, which is that there were new people who ended up kind of bringing new ideas to the organization. And and at every point, I think, you know, really based on their labor in what they were doing, and I know it wasn't easy always, you know, trying to advocate for, you know, doing it a different way. That said, I also, you know, believe, you know, Jen Jen Palko, we might critique some things that she's done, but I do think she had her heart in the right place in terms of how she thought about, you know, things like the brigades, which she I do think she promoted internally and also diversifying the groups who, were participating in Code for America. And at some points, for instance, like with some of the advisory groups, she really was like literally at times like this can't just be a bunch of dudes. You know? We gotta have some women and people who aren't men in there. Right? So, I I think part of it is, you know, add you know, the employees advocating for a new way of doing things and the slow osmosis of ideas from employees to the fabric of the organization. And these ideas hopefully working their way up to the organizational strategy and C suite level, hopefully. That's one part of the story. I think the other part of the story is, it became very politically unpalatable, particularly after, you know, the twenty sixteen election to, you know, be completely naive to questions of of race and gender and power. And so you did see that kind of I you know, organizing around those ideas simply became something that Code for America could get funding for practically and so I think that's another reason why it didn't happen earlier, you know. So it's not like people like Catherine Bracey weren't advocating for more egalitarian perspectives on tech organizing where they're directly empowering people of color. I think she was and she was explicit with like when she talked with me that that was a goal. It's just there wasn't really an appetite, for doing that at that particular time, you know, in like 2012 as there was in like, you know, 2017, 2018 when a lot of those things changed. So, I know it sounds like a bit of a cliche, but, you know, the I think those people were also kind of part of the organization at the right time to change those things. I also think it's important to note that I again, I mentioned I don't know where this story ends. I don't know if the Amanda Rentrea era, you know, if these ideas will persist. And really my research with Code for America ended about two, two and a half years ago. So there's probably been even more things changing, and I don't know what those things are. That's why I sort of, you know, kick kick the ball to whoever else wants to write about this stuff. You know? Follow this thread, though. I do think it's important, and I would love to see, where it's going these days.

To clarify, I don't mean that this term is a pejorative. Like, it's not an insult being like, oh, myths are bad. Like, we all need myths. Just look at our current presidential race in the ways that, you know, stories that may or may not be particularly true get raised to the level of, being central to organizing. Like, you know, the the the whole idea of an American identity, what it looks like to be an American. You know, we're this is kind of being played out right now, And so you do have like competing myths. So in terms of Code for America, I think storytelling was what the, you know, higher ups could do at a high level at things like the yearly summits that really were targeting people who both were inside local government and potential funders. It could help them tell a big story that the world is changing. You can be part of this progressive change, right? And, to put a different way, I have a chapter that's kind of about how they worked with ideas of citizenship. You know? The idea of volunteers being digitally enabled citizens and they exist at the local level, and there's this whole movement that ends up being a big keyword, of people interested in doing this work. That's way more fundable, you know, to like the Knight Foundation than them just being like, hey, we can fix your website. You know what I mean? One is sort of this pragmatism and another is like this big story of progressive change and one is at the end of the day, one is way more persuasive than the other. And I think that's still true. I've gotten a few emails from people who have worked with Code for America who seem to think the book is about getting storytelling or mythologizing out of politics and just being sort of a raw pragmatism. Like, this is what we're doing with the technology. That's not really my argument. I don't think we're ever gonna get storytelling out of politics. It's always gonna be there because that's how we think as humans and that's what we find persuasive. But, you know, it's just something we really need to pay attention to if we're gonna understand infrastructural organizing, right? That stories are what bring people together, not necessarily technology. Maybe stories about technology, but not technology itself.

Yeah. So I think yeah. So I think the network is used by Code for America in the abstract where it's like everyone who has ever been part of Code for America and they are, and again this is not unusual with nonprofits, they collect email addresses, have newsletters and are in constant contact with both volunteers and employees. That's not unusual, but I think the philosophy of the network is important. Brigades specifically were really important for Code for America because as someone who would prefer to remain anonymous put it to me, without the brigades, code for America is code for California. And I think that's funny, but it's also very true because it the brigades that code for America show that nationwide reach in a way that simply the fellowships did not. And where the brigades came from is a bit of a long story. Plug for the book, buy the book. But very briefly, Code for America conducted a lot of very tech related experiments. A lot of it was related to this problem that the fellowships brought up was that no one really used the tech after it got completed. And to code for America, they were like, well, maybe we can put it on GitHub and build a community around that. Again, made sense at the time. And there are people for whom GitHub is something to rally around and I wanna diminish them. However, that eventually went turned into what we now call the brigades. Jennifer Palka and Abi Nemani, kind of helped write a grant for Google. And a lot of it was really modeled on City Camp, and it was really designed to take advantage of what they saw as an opportunity, which was really that they got more applications for fellowships than they expected. So, you know, they had, like, 500 more applications than they had spots. And so it's like, what do we do with all this labor? Right? And the solution ended up being, what was initially just called, you know, for fans of Code for America. And so it's for people who were volunteers but didn't necessarily make it into the fellowships where they were, you know, paid a a a small, admittedly, kind of poultry wage when compared to the tech industry, but, you know, something to kind of live on. These would be like the volunteer wing. And a lot of the initial brigades were built on top of or boot bootstrapped, if you will, to, you know, the Evite scene, I guess, or the, meetup scene of that era. Beta NYC is is one of them. I mean, they preexist, they preexisted code for America. Others were entirely new. But, basically, they had a very light contract, we could say, with Code for America where they would agree not to, you know, abuse the, essentially naming rights of Code for America. But they were allowed to get some kind of, you know, initially financial support and later on more sort of, other types of resources like technology and thought leadership and access to events, but that would help them organize on on the local level and do code for America like things in a volunteer capacity. So that's sort of where they came from. And I think Code for America still thought about its role really not as, not as someone who not as an organization that would control these organ these brigades, but really more as a convener. So these volunteer groups would open up space for discussions and technological practice and really tackle, like, local issues. And this goes back to, like, Jen's work running gaming events and Tim O'Reilly's whole thing, you know, not creating the message, but as he still puts in his Twitter profile, watching the alpha geeks. Right? So paying attention to what these technically inclined people are doing and kind of building a structure around it. That's the starting point. And then the brigades went off in all sorts of different directions and ran into kind of their own problems that eventually became unmanageable for code for America and they basically shuttered, the effort, two years or so ago.

Yeah. That's a good question. I I'm personally not as interested in the authenticity of it. I I think it's fair to say in a traditional social movement sense, if we think about social movements as being organized around issues that transcend, you know, things like race and class and gender, even though they might be organised around them. You know, we can, think about, marches for racial equality and organising, around things like school integration. Right? A lot of folks in those movements were of course black, but there were folks who weren't, who were organizing in solidarity with folks who were black. And so you did see sort of a transcending of, questions of race. It's not a social movement like that. I think it's interesting to me that they use the metaphor of the social movement, and I'm interested in the work that idea does. And I think the work that idea does is that the idea of a movement makes it plausible that there is kind of almost a spiritual connection among everyone, regardless of where they are. Right? We're all sort of pursuing a lot of the same goals. And then there's an ethos that pervades the organization beyond what is kind of written on paper or discussed. And I think that kind of spiritual element ended up being really important. So as much as we might kind of dispute the idea of it being a formal movement, like, you know, social movement scholars would look at this and be like, like, yeah. A bunch of, like, educated, geeks, you know, it doesn't really seem movement y to me. You know, they would probably give a polite response like that. I do think it's important to pay attention to, you know, not just the veracity of it and be like, look, this is bogus, but to kind of be like, well, why did this work? Why was this organizationally effective at this particular moment in time? You know, that's sort of my, my North Star in this book. Like, why was this messaging effective right now? Why, did this idea take off and not others? Because it could for America, if anything, floats like a million different messages at any particular time, and they're just kind of chumming the water. It's like throwing it out there, see what rises. Again, very Tim O'Reilly thing. Like, I'm gonna publish a million books. Some of them are gonna be bestsellers. You know? It's thinking that way. So we're gonna throw a lot of ideas out there and see what rises. And I think the idea of a social movement came at a time when people were really ready to think about themselves as being more than just people engaged in technical practice. Right? So more than just a bunch of nerds working on apps. It's a social movement. That sounds a lot more compelling, particularly if you are interested in, as I think Code for America was, in broadening the sphere of technical practice. Because it and I haven't mentioned this before, at its start, Code for America really didn't have very many technically inclined people on staff. Like, they didn't have their first data scientist until, like, 2017. If you were, like, a a tech company, this would be unthinkable. Right? So, you know, they they always worked with technology, but more the, the metaphor of it, the image of it. And then a lot of the actual practice of it, they sort of promoted, but they didn't have people on staff who were like, I'm gonna build, a Facebook until very much later. And I think Jen resisted that, honestly, for good reason. I think it would just be a little bit of a boondoggle. Like, I would just pull them in and they didn't have the resources for it. But they did do something kind of similar but also different.

Yeah. I I think that's correct, and it's important to think about why. So, you know, talk talking with Carlos Moreno and, you know, the code for Tulsa folks, Yeah. They were just kind of like, yeah. We don't wanna, like, reimagine 911 because that's what people call when, you know, they wanna, you know, report someone suspicious in their neighborhood, and we sort of know how that goes. And, also, there's already organizations devoted to, like, doing that. So, I think at some point, the brigades started they were always kind of autonomous. They always were given a lot of space and room to move. But, yeah, at some point, they started developing differing ideas about how things should go. And I think this happened for a number of reasons. One of which is that sometimes you honestly just had strong personalities, with the brigades. Sometimes they were benevolent. Sometimes they were somewhat self centered. But, you know, what I've heard a lot from brigades is that, you know, there were one or two people who were really running these things. And some of them were really candid to me and were just like, yeah. If I don't wake up tomorrow and do this thing, no one else is gonna do it. On a good day, those people might be interested in, you know, really pro social things and things that would help their local community. In other cases, they really saw it, and I single out, you know, someone in my local city, who did this. They they were really just interested in their own kind of gains and saw the brigade as really a vehicle for publicizing themselves and making their local profile larger. And, you know, to me, you know, that that's not what it's about. And in fact, I to be entirely candid, I don't think this is in the book, but, you know, I talked with Code for America and they were like, yeah. Oh, no. I do talk about this in the book. I was like, yeah. What do we do about this? And they were like, well, if you just create a competing, brigade in your city, then maybe that bad actor will forget to file the paperwork to be a brigade. And I'm like, that's the solution? So it was always this kind of rhizomatic spread and Code for America never wanted to get, you know, too deep in the weeds of either managing the brigades or mediating conflicts. And I understand why it's labor intensive. There weren't ever a whole lot of people devoted to brigades, and I think they did the best that they could with the resources they the resources they had. So, you know, that that's like one thing I think, strong personalities, conflicts about, you know, what should be done. You know, another example that I use is, the Open Oakland situation where, you know, there was an app that was, you know, basically a crime heat map application that, you know, hey, in, you know, in in the early twenty tens may have seemed plausible. But, you know, a lot of the people who started coming to open Oakland were like, yeah. A lot of these things that you call crime are actually reflecting, you know, not crime itself, but crime reports. And those crime reports tend to occur more predominantly in lower income communities of color, and a lot of them were themselves from these communities. So they kinda showed up and were like, what the heck? So sometimes it was about the technology too. And then finally, I think the master kind of frames, you know, and, you know, coming back to Tulsa, this clash between, like, we're doing this for the community and we're doing it for the government. Code for America like to do both of those things. They would be like, it's community and government, and sometimes, like, these terms meant the same thing. But when it came to, like, the community partners, you know, like, the reimagining nine one one thing, it's like, yeah. We don't wanna do that because that could harm the community. You know, same thing with Open Oakland. Like, we're we're doing this for the community, and so we're gonna, you know, privilege, you know, local partners first. You know, some people like Varnell and McCann, they were really explicit in the code for America sphere in terms of saying, well, we wanna empower the organizations over necessarily the government because there's a long history of government violence and things like this. So, all of these things together don't actually explain what killed the brigades. I think what killed the brigades is that after they got a lot of money, basically, this is gonna sound paradoxical. They got a Code for America got a large grant, and they basically were looking at how to justify all of their different program efforts as organizations do. Right? They're like, well, we're putting, you know, this many millions of dollars into this, and what are we getting back? Essentially, they couldn't justify keeping the brigades on. I think it ended up just being both a strategy decision and a money decision. So I think and again, this is me reading the tea leaves. No one has ever said this to me explicitly because for obvious reasons, I didn't get too many interviews from, like, the executive level of Code for America. But I do think it didn't it no longer fit in with the organizational strategy. And then also it just became something rather expensive that the organization had trouble justifying, even though they just got a big chunk of money. And, and then ultimately, they you know, again, the brigades became a big management burden. Right? So to actually do justice to, what the brigades were trying to do would require a lot more money and labor than I think Code for America was was willing to to devote to it. And and this just happens a lot of the time. Honestly, I'm shocked the brigades I thought the brigades would fizzle around 2018, 2017. There were, like, a couple, like, events I went to. And every time I went to them and I talked with the brigade folks, I'm like, well, that was a little that's it for the brigades. But they they they stayed on for actually a really long time. I'm actually shocked that they made that the brigades made it to, 2022, honestly. And I think the other factor was probably my read is that Jen Palka really supported the brigades. Like, she could have killed the brigades in a second. They were always a money suck. They were always yeah. No offense to the brigade, folks listening. I love y'all. But, it was just difficult to manage these all these different groups that were totally unprepared for it. So I do think Jen Palka really did, you know, believe in the brigades and and kept them in the mix because, you know, she could have, you know, taken them away very much earlier and she never did. And I do think the passing of the baton to Amanda really had something to do with that. Again, I don't really have like the inside scoop here. This is just all like the different things I saw going on and what I can conclude based on the evidence in front of me.

So that's a great question. Where did the narrow play come from and why did it happen? I do think that the narrow play came out of a lot of fairly heated debates internally about what the organization would do. And these debates happened when, Jen Palko went to work for US Digital Service and really lead that effort. And in that vacuum, my impression is that there was a lot more discussion than usual, about the direction the organization would take. And you really had kind of two camps. One camp looked to UK digital service as a model, right? Different system, parliamentary system, not this federated system we have in The US with the local state and federal levels, Very different. Parliamentary has more control in general. But basically looking to them and being like, well, they're doing a platform play. They're putting up a website for benefits. Maybe we can do that for local government too. There is an effort called Chime for Oakland that was kind of the pilot project or prototype for that. Right? So, the idea it hence Chime, digital front door. Right? Ring the doorbell. You get it? Chime. Right? So there is that effort. And then there were other people who were working on things like what would become get CalFresh and clear my record. And those were, really more directly oriented towards benefiting people. Right? So, like, people need to get access to these benefits. Right? And we're always coming in short based on the money that's going in. We're not getting enough people enrolled. And clear my record, the opportunity was like, low level marijuana convictions, like you wouldn't actually even, you know, have charges pressed against you since, you know, now legal in California. Right? Yet a lot of people are in jail. A lot of people of color in particularly are jailed for that. So we should probably get them out. So there there ended up being two kind of competing routes forward. I thought this was really interesting too because at the start, I mentioned, like, there's not one natural way that, like, technology plus government equals, like, one thing. There's not, like, one equation that describes that. And in fact, internal the code for America, there was a vibrant discussion about this. Ultimately, I think the Chime effort didn't win out, for a variety of reasons. I think not the least of which is I think when Jen came back, she thought, you know, the, Get CalFresh and Clear My Record efforts had more legs. I don't think she was ultimately that interested in building websites for government. You know, if you think about what makes for a compelling value proposition, right? A lot of people can make websites. Probably not a lot of people can do what these niche projects did. And I call it the narrow play because, you know, it focuses really on these narrow problems, not the broad ones. And it also takes a narrow path to funding. The other thing that I think is important to realize is that because Code for America was not creating technology, they didn't have to be beholden to, laws and regulations about coming up with, proposals. Right? So there's this whole, like, RFP process for, like, producing proposals to create, let's say, a website for government. It ends up being a huge pain. But, hey, if you're working on improving recruitment for government services, guess what? You can submit a no bid contract and, you know, not basically go through that same time and labor intensive process. Right? So I think that was really appealing too, because at the time, you know, I do think the the organization was trying to figure out what it would do next for money. Because a lot of the enthusiasm about web two point o and networks and yada yada was fizzling out. And they were like, well, what what do we do? How do we get funding? Even as a nonprofit, that's maybe especially as a nonprofit. That's always a question. And so I do think, again, that it's the political opportunity that there were existing routes for doing this and then also the internal kind of debates. And so that is how Code for America became what it once derided, which is just a government contractor, essentially. Right? They used to make fun of them, you know, and now it's like, well, that's what we do, and that's that's how it happened.

Yeah. And and, again, I don't, I think the the idea of viability is important. What exactly, you know, the calculus was that, you know, the executive net level and Jen Palka kind of, you know, how they made this decision is a little bit opaque to me, but it is clear that that's where they came down with it on it because the Chime effort and the idea of platforms didn't really that didn't continue. And so to me, because these other things continued at some point, you know, that that had to be a a decision. And, again, this is what happens when you don't really have organizational strategy other than let's see what works. You know? That's been, like, one weird thing about code for America is, like, you know, the the the recipe is something like come up with a prototype, see if you can get the attention and funding, see if you can scale it. And that's sort of like a master frame that I come back to at the end of the book. If you can scale that into a larger project that's viable and you can build a whole team around, right? That's what I call infrastructural organizing and that's been how Code for America approaches these problems. They don't sort of say, like other non profits do like here's what, here and again, I know they have like a value statement and stuff, but, you know, a lot of it's really nebulous to me. You know, a lot of, organizations are like, we are involved in, you know, human rights or we are organizing around racial equality, and we're doing it in these particular ways. You know, Code for America was always kind of like scrambling around being like, well, what what's working? Who can help us? Like, what what can we what grants can we apply this stuff to? And and that was really tough, honestly, particularly for the employees.

Yeah. I think the impact of that model and the lessons we can draw from it are, first, to create clear roles in clear structures within organizations because, you know, to be dreadfully uncool about it, you know, role delegation and structure matters. You shouldn't have employees confused about who makes decisions and who owns projects. That ended up being a big factor in Code for America and a big point of frustration because sometimes it wasn't clear, like, who was in charge of a project, whether it was the engineers, whether it was the project managers, people at that level, or whether it was the people doing kind of the relationships with, funders, right? Because they also kind of occasionally had needs too. So I think that nebulousness ness, was very difficult and although the book isn't a tell all about Code for America internally, like, I'm not someone who's worked there and I'm like, here's all the juicy details about what they did terribly internally. Like, that's not generally what I'm doing, but I do touch on that. And again, that as I mentioned with the chapter about empathy brokers and intersectional designers, this is something that someone else could probably write a lot better than I can. Perhaps someone who has worked at the organization. But my point here is I do think this is a downside of what I call infrastructural organizing, right? Where the ambiguity about, you know, what is a viable strategy is never quite articulated in the way that you prove your worth as you stick around and come up with a project idea that then gets enough momentum behind it and enough of a proof of concept that then you can scale it, right? And that's ultimately what, Get CalFresh and ClearMyRecord did. They became, playbook level projects, right? In very much the same way in the early days, hey. Remember Adopt a Hydrant? Right? Like, that became like a playbook level project. They're like trying to find more Adopt a Hydrants. But I think the narrow play projects really ended up having legs, and a lot of the organization ended up being kind of built around the projects, right? Rather than vice versa. And that's the way Code for America has always been and maybe how it still is. And there's pros and cons to that. But one of the cons to it is it does give employees, a little bit of whiplash just because it's like, one week you're working on one thing, and then another week, it's like, oh, the funders you know, we might be able to get a million dollars from this funders, so you're working on something else. It's just very difficult workplace to to be in from everything I can tell.

Yeah. And this is what really pulled me into Code for America to begin with. So I'm glad we're ending on it. Like, through Code for America, we can understand both the hazards of tech forward organizing and then also the the viable opportunities. Right? So, yeah, it it it is as it's been this test bed for all these ideas. We can look back on them, and some of them, you know, I think in conclusion, we can say, yeah. This really didn't work that well. Like, the fellowships, I think that was a particularly it wasn't embarrassing necessarily because to outsiders, you know, everything looked kind of good and, you know, nobody really talks about failed tech projects anyways. They just get shut you know, brushed under the rug and then, you know, the GitHub repository, you know, lives on in some zombie mode or something. Like, there there's not, like, press hit press pieces, like, written on that stuff. But I do think in retrospect, we can say, you know, some things were good at achieving certain goals. Right? Code for America has never been that great about filling in the means. Right? Like, what do you have to do to get to certain ends? It was always like, we do whatever we have to to bring people into government, to do technological work. But I think, you know, in retrospect, you know, and no one else was writing about it. I was like, I do think it's important to learn lessons from this stuff. I think it's important that we recognize that community and government are two very different frames for organizing and that they may not be compatible. I think it's important to recognize that government culture is very different from tech culture and so when you put geeks in government, they may not be able to achieve what they want to. I think it's important to recognize that in the case of the brigades, democratic organizing that doesn't reduce things of monetary value ends up being a little bit expensive. Democracy is oftentimes expensive, you know, you know, justice and autonomy and a lot of the things that we can consider democratic ideals should be their own reward. Right? So on a kind of chapter by chapter basis, I do think, you know, we can draw sort of micro lessons along the way about infrastructure organizing and thereby understand what is worth pursuing moving forward as organizers. Cause that's why I did this podcast, like to talk directly to people who are organizers in this space. And I know they're listening and I appreciate, everything that they've moved on to now. And I do hope they read the book and kind of extract these lessons. And then sort of the master lesson, I think, we can learn is really about what I just call the hazards of scale. So, you know, Code for America would always do this thing where it's like, we're gonna learn through scaling. Right? We're gonna start, you know, by going to, you know, a a place, you know, where people get their SNAP benefits and see what that experience is like, try to improve that experience, then maybe we can improve it online. Then maybe once we have that, we can improve it sort of on a state level. Right? So we can move from sort of the local to the state, fairly quickly, thereby learning things about how to do user oriented design, about how to use the stories of people who, you know, are on the front lines of receiving benefits, you know, how to leverage those to get funding. You know, that's kind of what I mean by scaling. But then there are hazards of scale too where, you know, it's sort of like, could we scale up could for Tulsa to, like, a national level? Probably not, you know, because for all of the reasons, you know, that I write about with the brigades chapter. Right? They're concerned with local issues. They have people who believe, deeply in local politics in the relationships that they formed are with local nonprofits and activists. Right? You couldn't just, like, take that and be like, we're gonna do code for Tulsa nationally or something. So there are good and bad ways to scale. But I think I just wanna also say, I don't think it's a terrible idea to think about scale and to always think about ways that we can scale or cannot scale because I do think that remains a huge, you know, democratic challenge. Right? Like, if we think about, you know, I think about two of, let's put down the tech infrastructure stuff and think about, I don't know, like recycling plastic. You know, like like, it just drive it drives me nuts. You know, like, we we can do this stuff as a society, but because the infrastructures for recycling tended to be based on a model where we would ship our waste to, other countries and hope that they do something with it. Like, we haven't really invested in, you know, the reverse in infrastructure is necessary to, you know, recycle that that material. So so how do we sort of do that? You know, I can tell you how I do that in my house. Right? Like, I have a compost pile and I reuse, take out plastic and things like that. But, you know, how do we do that on a national level? I mean, honestly, our it's getting to the point where our very, you know, survival kind of depends on these kinds of questions. So, I do think that scale, there are good and, you know, better or worse ways to scale, and we just need to not, you know, do away with the idea of scale. Like, some people are like, well, we do something locally. We can't do it nationally. There are some times where we're dealing with issues where we do have to confront, you know, the hazards of scale.

Yeah. And thanks so much for inviting me out. It's been a pleasure to see you again. And, again, if people have comments, questions, I am very findable online. I have an unusual first name and last name, so I'm the only one you can find if you search for Arshrock. And, yeah, I'd love to know what folks particularly those in the organizational spaces, you know, that nonprofit orgs are working and think about.

And, yeah. Support your local bookstore, or you can buy it directly from MIT Press and, check my, Twitter bio site for a discount code.