Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Either that, or maybe I'll rant about a topic for a while. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about civic tech. Anyway, let's go ahead and start the show. This time, we're gonna be talking about an organization called Code for America. It's a name you may have heard along the way if you've listened to episodes as there have been volunteers from that organization that have come on the program to talk a bit about initiatives they've had going on, including even their current CEO. But to catch folks up, why don't we talk a bit about what Code for America is? As I mentioned, it is a nonprofit, and one of the things they do is they partner with government at various levels to improve services delivery, often using techniques like human centered design. In a way, you could think of them a bit like a nonprofit consultancy as they attempt to create partnerships and promote good practices through their work. You might be familiar with some of the projects they've done, including the automatic records clearance work they've done in California, as well as the food benefits work they've done, the name of that being GetCalFresh, among others. A lot of their work is very focused on things that are involved in service delivery and things like the social safety net. But that's not the only portion of the organization that exists. There's also this thing called the network. But you might be wondering, well, what is the network, Ryan? It all comes back to this idea of there being these civic hacking groups that formed, and they've been around for quite a while. And the network kind of came along as a way to form social bonds between such groups, and these groups as these groups are spread across different cities all across the country. And really what they are are folks that have come together to attempt to volunteer their time, their skills, that sort of thing to help improve nonprofits, to help improve the way government service is delivered, etcetera. And the way that then involves Code for America is that folks from that nonprofit then engage with these groups of volunteers to help facilitate connections through things like communication tools that are provided as well as through events like Brigade Congress and Summit. What's interesting about this isn't so much that there's a grassroots organization out there of a bunch of kinda decentralized groups that are trying to improve their community, nor so much that there's a nonprofit that provides services and consulting to government. But the fact that there's kinda both of these things together under the same umbrella. And that kind of leads into the conversation we're gonna have today, which is about something called network revisioning. This is a project that was announced on a forum that Code for America uses on March 16, and it was described as an opportunity to revisit core questions about what the volunteer network is doing. Things like, why are we doing this? What is it we're trying to change? And what is our path forward? Initially, in that post, there was an outlying of some potential paths and the promise of a journey ahead toward a recommendation influenced heavily by the volunteers themselves. Over the past seven months, there has no doubt been a lot of learning that's happened and a lot of exploration. On this podcast for a long time, we've had this tradition of asking our guests, what is their personal why? The thing that drives them to get out of bed each morning and do what they do. In a way, what we're about to do today is ask that sort of question, but to an entire grassroots organization. To that end, we'll talk to folks that were a part of this process. We'll talk about why this is happening, how conversations happened, how data was analyzed, and a bit about the path to implementation. So let's start with why. To try to dig into that, I spoke to a group of folks that have been involved with this revisioning effort and with the volunteer network more generally for quite some time. So let's see what they had to say. Can each of you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? My name is Janet Michalis. I am co captain of Code for Dayton,

Hey. I'm Tim Leesman. I'm the co captain of code for Greensboro and was the cofacilitator of the data team during the the narrowing phase of revisioning, and I'm still working as a facilitator on a volunteer and partly paid position with Code for America right now. And I've been with Code for Greensboro for about three and a half years.

writer, peer specialist, and game developer. I've popcorn around the network in a lot of different, cameo scenarios and, worked on last year's Brigade Congress content committee. I joined the network revisioning team as the recommendations, lead writer during the closing phase of the process,

and I'm super glad to be here. As each of you are thinking about this network revisioning process, why do you think the volunteer network decided to go forward with it and pursue it?

I would add to that that from my perspective, when I stepped into brigade leadership in 2018. After getting an onboarding session with Code for America and starting to get into the brigade network at, Brigade Congress twenty eighteen in Charlotte, I noticed that, outside of our regional group of North Carolina and Southeast brigades, there didn't seem to be much outside of the Brigade Congress, intentional cross Brigade collaboration and events where we joined each other and talked about best practices. And one key part of that also was feeling like we, as brigade leaders, wanted to find ways to support ourselves as a network and have Code for America provide support for our work more intentionally. And so there was a call for that as well that I think was part of the revisioning process decision or the decision to go forward with the revisioning process. And at every point, people who got involved, you know, the saying, we decided to go forward with the revisioning process as a volunteer network. Work. Right? This was really, over time, people joining a conversation and saying, hey. This would be a good thing to reinvent our role in the way that we work together. And sometimes people would leave that conversation and come back into it over the years. But every time that someone joined, it's like, hey. Wait. This is this is like a needed conversation. Let's keep doing this. Right? So it wasn't just one time that we decided, you know, let's make a let's make a big change. Right? Over the course of time, the conversation kept building towards we need to make a change, and here's how we might do it in a way consistent with our value our values.

So I I feel like my perspective code for America community, I spent some time on the sidelines watching watching the work come out, either from the organization or from the volunteer network. A a a division between them wasn't easy for me to perceive as such. To me, it was all just code for America work. So when I did enter into the, network community, the volunteer community more properly and, you know, began to understand some of the historical relationship between that volunteer side and the more formal organization side, some of that history there. I was surprised by the level of friction that could be sustained and people still show up to the work on both sides of that equation. And I was really intrigued by that, that this was a community, on both sides of a formal organized side and the more volunteer, maybe, rapid turnover, higher volume side. I was really intrigued by that relationship and felt that where where the revisioning process is at now is a natural a natural peak. It's a natural, end to the friction that came before volunteers are I'm sure.

But yeah. What are each of you hoping that the volunteer network gets out of the process?

work that they can do within the network. When I when I first joined Code for Greensboro's leadership, the original people who had gotten together to form Code for Greensboro had formed a board and filed as a five zero one c three. And, like, their goal was to to quit day jobs and and work, full time doing this and and have a five zero one c three. And it turned the five zero one c three structure is very rigid and turned out not to be the right fit for a spontaneously driven and volunteer based model of working. So when I came on on board, if I I think that if a few of us hadn't raised our hands, just two of us, to keep the organization going and say we we would step into the co captain role, it might have gone dormant. And so another thing that has always been on my mind through this and leadership transition and, like, how to get new people into civic tech, How can we, reenvision the way that brigade leadership is handed off and sustain it when key people, you know, move on to other things in life. Something that I hope the volunteer network gets out of the process is that pathway to leadership that is organic and helps to to build grassroots support in each of the communities where we work. So it's not just like, start a brigade, work on a project with your government, maybe an election cycle goes by, and go away. Right? But actually build partnerships with other organizations working in the community, not just government so that the civic tech support in any given community where we work is is organic and is sustainable. And I think that's what I hope we get towards

with what comes out of and the next steps in the revisioning work. Next, we'll talk a bit about the research phases to this process for network revisioning. One of those is referred to as peer to peer conversations. Effectively, what would happen is that folks that were volunteering with this effort would set up one on one and small group conversations, where they would try to work through a series of questions in order to figure out things like what values the individual has and how they relate to the network, their views on the way the network is now, and their hopes for how the network could be in the future, among other things. So let's go ahead and check out a conversation about this step along the way. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

Why has the network embarked on the peer to peer conversation effort that you've been a part of? I think that

Are there any insights that came out of these conversations that surprised you?

As was mentioned there, along with those one on one conversations and the information that they yielded, there were also things involved like surveys, larger group engagements, all bringing data into the process that would be looked at in trying to figure out where folks in the network are at. So our next conversation is gonna dig into a bit of the experience in bringing structure to the analysis process as well as the challenges that they faced in trying to make sense of it all. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

Hi. My name is Jennifer Miller, and I am a co organizer of the North Carolina Statewide Network Of Brigades. My background is in teaching and doing research in public policy. And right now, I'm focusing on projects that advance open knowledge, so in the areas of open data, open education, and open science.

In our conversation before this interview, you mentioned that one of your primary roles has been to bring structure to the data analysis process. Can you talk to us a bit about that experience?

Yes. I joined the data team for the revisioning process, and the team was clearly working very hard and doing a lot, but I think had gotten a little bit ahead of itself. I could see places where a little more structure underlying the team's work would really make a difference. One of the main areas where I added structure was to bring some of the Code for America perspective on usability to think about our volunteer taggers or coders, data coders as the end users. And here, I wrote up a, more detailed step by step process on data tagging and, rearrange the process so the taggers could do almost all of their work on one screen, you know, minimizing the extra work from a user perspective of having to move from screen to screen while also keeping some very fairly complex abstract ideas that they were identifying in the tagging process.

So you you mentioned that that work in attempting to tag data as part of this process. What sort of data were you all working with as you're going through that?

We were working with survey data. And so some of the data was from a survey about the the Code for America values where people had submitted qualitative responses, written responses about the extent to which they felt Code for America lived up to a series of values. For describing how brigades achieve, change, for describing how brigades achieve, change, their theory of change, and how brigades actually, you know, accomplish their impact in the world. And then there was some very loosely structured forum data that took the form of, speaker remarks, chat comments, and other texts that came as part of a series of online forums that were held that invited everyone, to comment on various aspects of the revisioning process.

We we've talked about how folks are are using these these these tools to to the act of tagging. That's that's a term that's come up a couple of times. For folks that might not be familiar with what that means, could you talk a bit about what that act is?

We loaded the survey data into Airtable, which is kind of an online form of a spreadsheet with some additional functionality. And, actually, tagging involved reading an excerpt of text and then thinking through a series of categories. The categories included pathway, strategy, relationships. And then for each category, the tagger was asked to think about a number of tags and whether or not they applied. So within the strategy category, people were asked to think about, does a tag for partnerships apply? For does a tag around efficiency apply? And they would Airtable has kind of a color coding, so you would select the the tag that matched to the concept.

I imagine that working with this sort of data presents its own unique challenges. What were some of those that y'all had to work through going through this process?

I'd like to talk about two challenges specifically. First was another example of bringing structure to the process. Something that we lacked in addition to a step by step process was we lacked a codebook. And a codebook explains exactly what we mean by each of those categories and each of those tags. It's easy to think that you all understand what is meant by strategy and partnerships until you start comparing the idea in your head with the idea in someone else's head. And then you realize that you're not actually using those terms in the same way. So creating the code book was a big step forward toward getting our volunteer taggers to use those tags and concepts consistently. Another challenge that we face with the data is that the vast majority of the data was not collected with the specific question of what should be the new vision for the brigades. The majority of the tag responses were around the question of various values. There were some surveys that asked specifically which of the three pathways that we were contemplating people should use, but those had fairly low response rates. And we also found that people interpreted the three pathways very differently, and, ultimately, we had to move away from pathways as a structure for articulating our results. And then the forums also were focused on specific aspects of revisioning, but none of the survey responses that we had were specifically people writing. I think the way to describe how brigades will create change is this. So we had to tease out the key themes from people's answers to different questions.

Another interesting comment was made during this conversation about that balance between rigor and openness that took their academic background into account. Unfortunately, I didn't really have, like, a question to prompt beforehand, but I did wanna make sure y'all got that context. So before we move on to the next section, take a listen to this comment.

So one thing coming from an academic background, one thing that for an academic study would have been very important is interrater reliability. That is looking very carefully at whether the taggers were applying those tags in the same way. In an academic study, it would be very important that if you and I read the same text, we chose the same tags for all of the categories. And your taggers need to be trained until they achieve those type of results, and then you can let them work a bit independently. We were really committed to having an open tagging process in which volunteers could drop in, get trained up quickly, participate, really an open form of engagement with the tagging. And this meant that we were not really able to strive for an inter rater reliability metric.

So now that all this information is gathered, insights have been drawn from it ostensibly, there is then the question of, well, what do we do with all that we've learned here? Which leads us to our next conversation about something called the implementation phase. And to that end, we will be joined again by Em and Renee, who talked to us a bit during the why portion of our conversation at the beginning to talk a bit about what this phase is, as well as the impact they think it might have for folks volunteering in the network. Y'all have joined this conversation to talk a bit about the implementation portion of this process that this episode's been covering. Can you talk a bit about what that means in this context?

As I understand, you know, the implementation process is a change management process with, like, a lot of moving pieces. And some of those pieces are easy to fix in place because they're rather obvious and easy to understand. But there are a lot of other pieces that are harder to sort out, and that's where it takes the collective action of everyone involved under the name of Code for America to get involved. But in order for that part of implementation to be successful, yeah, that that culture change for everyone, at least strengthening what we recognize about its value, about treating each other as peers, wherever we're at in life, and understanding what that really means on a deeper level when we're working together on things we're passionate about, things that really impact our lives directly. So that's what I am really interested in seeing through the implementation phase is how understanding each other better as peers gets us moving on making change happen.

What will the implementation mean for folks that are out there right now just kinda doing that volunteer thing out in the network?

To further, illustrate the pathways concept and and where I came to it from, you know, I had to very much carve my own path through the network to find the kind of interests and skill sets that, I needed for the work I was doing on my own or that I could offer, maybe not directly to the brigade in my area, but, you know, on projects elsewhere or elsewise. And I felt very much that I was carving desire paths, which is like a civic engineering understanding of, like, you build a sidewalk, it cuts around a certain way, and then people will walk right across the grass and build their like, their own path will develop. So, you know, I I had tried all of those formal pathways that existed. None of them really suited the way in which I could, like, link up most effectively from where I sat with my life and my work. And as I began to look for ways to integrate myself into this community, I saw a lot of people doing the same thing. So a lot of what's described as hopeful for implementation is trying to put language to those realities as they exist in such a decentralized, you know, independently carved out way. So trying to bring some support to that, means creating language that kind of doesn't exist in the community. So, some of the implementation will involve just getting used to naming things instead of just them existing without a name. And that's where, you know, the volunteer network can really fill out a lot of the unknown by naming the ways in which they've carved their own path through this work. We we need those, you know, we need them to identify where the sidewalk ended for them, and they diverged and what worked for them and why.

Let's imagine a world where the implementation phase has completed, and it was as successful as as you would have liked it to be. What are y'all hoping that the network will have gotten out of that process if that's happened?

What I love most about the Code for America community is there are not prerequisites despite all evidence that only skilled work comes out of the cream of the crop or what have you. You know? There's there's no prerequisite to have some sort of certificate or degree or anything like that. You basically you just agree to abide by the code of conduct. And as long as you're ready to show up underneath that umbrella, you have a space to be heard. This is very necessary framework, from where I come from in advocacy with the disability community. In that community, those kinds of agreements are the only way we can create the inter interdependence that we need. And interdependence is a framework that I think works really great for the Code for America community. It's collective action with a lot of autonomy held within it. And so I'm hoping to see that this, peer specialist work that I can bring in to help give language to a community that struggles to understand itself along parity lines. I'm hoping that through implementation, through the culture change required, for some of those mechanisms to work, that we understand our collective action is interdependent rather than independent and that you can be decentralized and and still connected very closely to one another.

Thank you for making it this far into the conversation. I think we've done well exploring how we hit these why questions, these core questions that the network has been exploring in through how research was done, how data from that research was handled, into then what it looks like to try to implement some of the things that were learned. One of the deliverers that did come from this process, and it's been mentioned, I think, a couple of times in these conversations, is this idea of there being a proposal. And at the taping of this, there is a proposal that has been released that's available out online for you to read. I will have that linked in the episode description, but I do wanna talk about it at least a little bit before we end the episode. The document has a ton of information in it. It talks a lot about purpose, values, governance participatory process, digs into some of the things we talked about in these conversations, like data methods, research methods, and findings. But the thing I do wanna focus on for the moment in voice are, some of the changes that come with this proposal compared to what's currently going on in the network. So there's a couple of key points as I have this in front of me and go over it with y'all. And one of those is that it seems there's a change away from leading with government partnership, instead of focusing on leading with community partnership and accountability. Those are the kind of the words that are used in the document. And what I take that to mean is that brigades are not gonna be assumed to be an organization that are focused on, hey. Like, let's get some sort of government partnership that will help provide some sort of service using volunteer labor. Instead, the folks would be on partnering with local community groups, maybe nonprofits, folks that are close to where life is being lived and where there are things that need addressed in the community, and then trying to take an empathetic approach as one tries to partner with them and work with them on whatever problem they might want to solve, which then leads to some language that's used a little bit later in the proposal around trying to, like, find those partnerships first before just building technology. I think that's a response to in fact, some conversations we've had here on the podcast occasionally where there's this idea that sometimes things get built without really the audience involved, without that human centered element, and then it ends up being kinda tossing a piece of tech over a fence where there isn't anyone to use it. So it looks like that's in part meant to address that. There is work in here, as I mentioned, to kinda put effort into addressing, governance with the organization. I don't gather here exactly what that's gonna look like. I think that's a conversation that's still ongoing, so you wanna continue to pay attention to that if you're interested in figuring out how decisions are gonna be made in the future. The proposal also starts to talk a bit about resourcing for that kind of those kind of big aims that we're just talking about for that aim to make it a better experience for brigades to kinda have that foundation of those partnerships. And it looks like some of that involves, some full time positions with, Code for America, some stipend positions that are kinda for folks out in the network, as well as some additional kinda fundraising and staffing support that again, I I would urge you to kinda go into the documents, get more of the the specifics. But what I get from this is that there is thinking and strategy among, like, what what people resources do brigades need in order to be well supported as they go forward with this new vision of of things to come? And with that, then this document also mentions, goals. And what's interesting about these goals is that there's kind of different segments. There are some that are around that kinda community volunteer organizing bit, around goals like increasing the number of active volunteers that are involved, increasing the number of healthy brigades. I think some numbers that are mentioned here are, like, trying to go from 10,000 active volunteers to 20,000 and trying to get up to 70 healthy brigades that have a core leadership team and, internal governance structure of their own with at least one partnership. And my understanding now is that the contents of the proposal has been presented to leadership folks at the Coach for America nonprofit, and that now there's kinda some next steps that will come, At least, again, I'm speaking at kind of the the time of recording this, and that there's still a need to take all of this and develop a a budget, a plan for how to implement the things that were proposed here as well as to figure out then how to communicate about all of this to a very large number of people that are spread over a very large geographic area. So I think this is a topic, especially for to keep an eye on, especially if you're someone who's interested in this sort of volunteering. I think it's really interesting to see a kinda grassroots group really try to sit down and wrangle with these core questions of, why are we doing this? What change are we trying to make? And I'll be curious to see where this proposal ends up and how folks will end up reacting to it. Before we draw this episode to a close, I do have a quick meta note. We're going to be taking part in Code for America's Brigade Congress on Saturday with a live show, where we'll have a panel coming together, talk a bit about why folks volunteer, the realities of working on volunteer projects, and other things in between those topics. So if you're interested in checking that out, it will be virtual, and it will be at 12:30PM on Saturday. I will put links in the episode description giving you information on how to register for the conference as well as the schedule that lets you know when our session is. So hopefully I will see you all for the show and, perhaps bump into you on that Gather Town application they're using for the virtual conference as we all bumble around and talk a bit about Civic Tech. You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at civictechchat, visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.