Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. This week, we'll be listening to a recording of a lightning talk that I gave last Friday at the Code for America Summit in Oakland, California. The talk itself was all about running for office. I use my own story as a an example and a source of inspiration that I hope will urge others to make similar runs of their own. So with all that said, I hope you enjoy the talk, and let's hop right in. I'm gonna talk to you folks about something that might be a little scary. That's fine. And that's gonna be running for office. So I'm Ryan Cook. I help organize the Open Uptown Brigade. I host Civic Tech Chat, and my lesser known identity is I'm a former candidate for the Ohio General Assembly. Whoop. Wrong way. So why run for office? So we've talked a lot during these sessions about the idea of civic tech and citizen technologists being at the table. What better way to be at the table than to be the decision maker yourself? Of course, the other part is serving your community. A service focus is that which is woven throughout our entire community. And I'm gonna tell you a story, The story of my run that I'm hoping that by the time I get done with it, somebody in this room will decide that this running for office thing, it just might be a crazy enough idea to work. So the story starts in late twenty fifteen. I was then living in Columbus, Ohio. I'd, done some volunteering as a in the in politics, managing a state house campaign before, but I'd never been the candidate. But this time, I wanted to do something that had to do with my home district, House District 21, and the Northwest part of the city. So I asked around, did my digging. I was just gonna volunteer. But then I found out there there were no candidates. Not one. No one interested. And, I decided that that wasn't that wasn't acceptable to me. So I took on the endeavor of becoming a candidate. So in order to do that, the first thing you have to think about is who you are. Like what's your record? Values? So for me, I'm a veteran, which means I have a goofy gas mask picture that I get to share with people. Fantastic. And, that also informs a lot of who I am, what my values are. What you may not know about me is I'm also a bit of an egalitarian. I'm all about trying to give everyone their fair shake. And, like many of you, the idea of service is at the very core of my being. So for to me, this venture was about extending that, continuing service. So then what? Well, running for office involves knocking on a lot of doors, involves asking strangers for money, which I'll admit is a very uncomfortable thing to do, and giving a lot of short speeches just like this, though obviously in a different context. And I'll admit, running for office is super time consuming. It was like having a second full time job. And I also got to do cool things like parades, talk at people, take group photos that, you know, look cool. Oh, there were also negative ads, which taught me two things about myself. One, I have a master plan. And they uncovered it. And two, with a little bit of lightning and some Photoshop, even I can look like a Bonneville. So that that's like career plan b, I think. Oh, and I can also apparently raise taxes by, like, a lot. I'm pretty powerful. So along the way, I also heard a lot of people's stories. As I mentioned, you have to knock on a lot of doors, at least in Ohio General Assembly race. And I ended up knocking on over 10,000 doors. So as you imagine, I heard a lot of, like, really deep personal stories from folks about their interactions with, state and local government. And one of the things that really stuck with me along the way and caused me to dig into it was this interim parent I talked to was actually only two streets away from where I lived. Lived. So it was like one of the first places I went to knock on doors. And what they told me is that they had their, their children were both very curious about tech, but they weren't sure how to help them investigate that. There wasn't really anything at their school to let them do that. They themselves weren't qualified to do it. And, it reminded me a lot of me. I was that kid when I was younger. I had a typing class. That that was what I had in school. And I was lucky I had an uncle that worked in MCI that could kind of help satisfy my curiosities, but not everyone has that. So I started to think about computer science education, and I did some research. And what I found wasn't so great for Ohio. At the time, there's some surveys done by folks like code.org, and, Google also did a survey. What I found is 90% of parents, they want computer science to be taught to their children, but only 40% of schools offered anything that you could call computer science or or I guess, specifically computer programming. And even weirder, only 7% of principles sampled in the state by Google saw it as a high, demand field, which yeah. It's a little weird. So I decided to make a platform. And what I was going to do was campaign really hard on the idea of trying to develop standards and model curriculum in Ohio, following the k through 12 computer science framework, which I highly suggest you look up if you're not familiar. It's a great framework, which includes, some other, like, policy suggestions I came up with, like, there should be a statewide leadership post for the curriculum, and we should allow it to be used as a k through 12 graduation requirement. Additionally, we should be incentivizing teacher certification in computer science, which again, in Ohio, is not a thing. And, we also should be providing funding for these things. It should be a continuing education area for teachers as they're seeking different licenses and whatnot. But in Ohio, that was not the case then. So as the election goes, I'm knocking on doors, doing my thing. Well, campaigns have debates. And you might think, alright, if you're running against somebody who's like an entrenched incumbent, they're probably not gonna show up to your community forum. Well, I got lucky. Mike Duffy did. That was the guy I was running against. And we have a debate, which a community forum is kind of more of like a friendly version of a debate. Like someone moderates and I say something, they say something, and we move on. But I pushed really hard on this k through 12 computer science platform stuff. And at one point, I cornered him. And he made me a promise that I'll paraphrase as, if I win this race, I will work with Ryan to make this a priority. So at the time, you're like, okay, you know, politicians say things. But Oh, well, the election came and I didn't win. Important part of the story. But I learned Ballopedia page that will be there forever. So there there there's my legacy right there. So I then wait a little bit after the election, and I reach back out about this promise. And I met with Mike Duffy, the the incumbent I've been talking about, and I got put together like this big packet of information using resources like those from like coo.org and other partners in the k through 12 computer science framework. And I was like, alright, we're gonna do this. We're gonna make something happen. We met for coffee, had a bunch of conversations, and then one day, this post pops up and house bill 170 is born. Now does it do all the things? No. But it does do some of the things. And as and of course legislation takes time. So that house bill, probably came out around 2017, and it kind of languished in the house for a while, went through committee, passed the house, then sat in senate committee for a period of months, and I would check-in with with Mike Duffy now and again, but it was kinda not much I can do at that stage. But in December 2017, house bill 170 was signed by the governor of Ohio, changing completely what computer science is in the state. And even cooler, just March is when it went into effect. So the lesson from that is my master plan that I didn't even know know about was not foiled. So what what's in this law? I've said House Bill one seventy a few times. So like the probably the most important thing is it requires the Ohio Department of Education to come up with standards for for computer science courses and to develop a model curriculum for schools throughout the state. It requires the state to allow computer science courses to be used as one of the things you use for your graduation for high school. It provides resources and incentives for teachers to use computer science for their licensing as well as to require licensure for teaching computer science. Now like I said, it's not perfect. So one thing that got stripped out of it along the way is we have 2,500,000.0 in support funding. That was gonna be for things like the like machines, infrastructure, like helping schools that maybe don't have the funding capability themselves. And instead, it replaced it with this kind of mechanism where they can kinda raise funds from private folks if they want to or through nonprofits. I have feelings about that but at least we got this stuff. It's it's progress. It's a step in the right direction. So I leave you with this, run for office. Just try it. It's crazy. It's really hard. It will take a lot of your time. But you know what? If you do it, you just might change your state's entire education system. Thank you. You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at civic tech chat. Visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.