 All right, so it's time for our last session. We've next asked Jen to come on here mostly just because I wanted to ask her questions. And if y'all are interested in answering questions, that's like a distant, secondary interest. So for usual, I guess I could take the rest of the question. So it's a quick file in case people are not familiar, which I've learned all kinds of things on Wikipedia and LinkedIn and all these. So correct me if I got any of these details wrong. But you really started in the world of video games, especially working to build the Game Developers Conference in two from like a relatively small event, so a huge event like 95 in 2003. And then from there kind of continued in this event organizing, but 2.0 Expo, go 2.0, so like go 2.0 Expo, more or less, right? And then 2009 Founding Co-For America continued to be service executive director today. In the middle there, 2013 to 2014, took hiatus to service the deputy chief technology officer of the United States. And through that time worked to launch or help launch the United States Digital Service and the E-Team F. Very well. And people never made it, it's really funny that a deputy chief technology officer type of office, I'm not technical. Well, that's what it definitely comes to. I think it's not really crazy technical. Yeah. Can we get some degree for that? Yeah. Is it fair to say you're like the founding mother of Civic Tech? I don't know. I think it is. OK. 2009, can you tell us about like the initial conversations and like what led you to starting Code for America as a concept, as an organization? Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me, it's really awesome. You did a great community here. And it's great to see you. You reminded me of something I had to do. What? Rachel's sleeping early. OK. So before she leaves, I'd say thank you to Rachel and Joanne. T-shirts. No, maybe it would just be another day. Sorry. I'm going to sit on that side and I'll still be making some. Thanks. Thank you. And you guys take such good care of me, thank you. Yeah, so it's 2009. 2009. Well, so I had been running the one-to-one conferences. And so one-to-one was like a thing from 2003. It was like a new word that was very few people in the world. And in this room, we'll remember the web 1.0, which was just like figure-rich-share up on the internet. And then everything crashed and burned. And then so one-to-one was like the participatory web. So that was much cooler. And one-to-one was super fun for a while. Like crazy growths, crazy companies growing fast, people doing interesting things. And then it got to be a little bit like every brand in the world wanted to be web 2.0. They became very brand-oriented and a little bit less interesting. And so then this guy started writing for president named Barack Obama. And everyone was like, he's using web 2.0 to get elected. And we were very interested in that. And what would that mean? And a bunch of us started going, well, that's cool. But can this, you know, the principles and values of the participatory web help him govern? It seemed like a pretty important question to ask. And so that's why we started this event called web 2.0. And so they'd be like, well, how would you convene people around that idea? And I think initially people thought web 2.0 was like, the EPA will be on Twitter, yay. Which was nice, but there would probably be something more profound that you could do with that. So it was really just out of the moment seeing how government does software. Did it then, and largely still does it that way, though it's changing now, that made me want to do something about it. Because the energy and creativity and speed and value that you could see happening in the web 2.0 world really wasn't happening in the government world. And there are real consequences to that. And I was sort of tuned into the consequences and saying, we've got to figure out what to do about this. If you weren't involved in tech or weren't involved in politics, to think that tech's been in politics for a long time and campaigning and so forth. But before 2006, really, there wasn't even much campaigning on my fundraising, et cetera. It was that 2006 to 2008 kind of period where it was like, wow, we could use the internet to raise money and make phone calls and do all these things. And then after the election, it was kind of like, OK, let's use these skills to actually do something now that's just raising money. So how, one of the things that's interesting to me about co-America is the statement of a non-partisan organization. And tech tends to not be non-partisan. So when you're starting up in that environment and you say, yeah, we want to do, we want to get involved in making government work better, then we want to do it in a non-partisan way. Put people receptive to that because it felt like all the left was in control and waiting. So it's like, yeah, yeah, a non-partisan, like all our people. Or was it like, why were people skeptical of that? I think that people are always a little skeptical of it. And yes, it happened to be that there were, Obama brought in a bunch of ex-Goolers. It was very front-linked to tech industries. At least he joked they were the only president in the API. I really did. Like, it was joked that you would think that the cabinet secretaries dropped a given 20 when they couldn't define API. The user was really good. So yeah, it just so happened that we had this guy that was, his politics matched a lot of the tech industry. But the tech industry is not exclusively on one side or the other, I don't think. But I think what we did really early on is instead of, so I got up to you that I really worked with the federal government. But my shift to starting from America was to move to the local level. And there's this thing like, there's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. And that's what most people do in relationship to government. I mean, you elect people. But most of your interactions, if you really think about it, aren't with the political layer. Which I would say this is a thin little surface thing that we pay all the attention to. Government is this sort of vast thing that does so many different tasks that actually determine your quality of life in a lot of ways. And most of those things really, we've gotten caught up in a lot of ideas about big government or small government. But they're really just practical things that need to happen. And it can't be happening the same way in 2019 that they happened in 1969. They have to be different now. And when they're not, then you start to get this sort of dwindling spiral of loss of trust and faith in government. Because it's not working well. And then we degrade our resources into government. And then no one wants to go into it. And then the services get worse. And I think that idea that we need to reverse that cycle and actually see good services which make them want to go into government, make them want to do it well, make them want to resource it and actually get to this point where it's not a big or small. It's about government that runs right because we're making it work the way it should in 2019 using digital as one of the big things, digital thinking as well as actual technology. That whole idea is varied by part of it. We had probably more fans and more Republican members of Congress than Democratic fans, to be honest, in part because they see all of this. It's easy to look at this agenda and say it's about cutting out waste when IT projects are many billions of dollars. And one of your talking points is they shouldn't be many billions of dollars. Then that's very friendly to a certain one side of the aisle. That is important to me. What drives me is not so much the cutting of the costs, but is that that is an important necessary way to get to better outcomes. I care about the child welfare system in California where I live, cutting out a bunch of the costs in creating that system was a necessary thing to do in order to create a system that does not lose kids, doesn't place kids in foster care with no rapists, which is what happens when you're relying on fax machines to get information from law enforcement to a social worker. We need that data to flow directly into that account so that kids are not placed in an unsafe environment. And that's what matters to me more than the cost. It just happens so happens that the cost, in this case, cutting the costs makes it more likely that you won't have to use a fax machine to do that. Was the fellows program, like was that the initial pitch when you were in for people to look at you and describe that program? So I was excited about this idea of making government work the way it should in the 21st century. And first it was all about what the federal government could do. And then I had a friend who worked for Teach for America. He had done Teach for America. So he's now working for the mayor of Tucson. And he can say, get some of your developers from your web chat at a world to go about working Tucson local government. And it was just that idea like, OK, they're not going to do that for money because they have better job offers on the table from companies and startups that they might could do it as a year of service. So yeah, the original offering was this year of service for folks with technology skills. We put them in small teams that managed the skills that you would see as a startup. But instead of having a startup as this plan, they had to go work with a bunch of people in local government to solve the problem. And it was kind of magical, like all these wonderful sparks flew, and people in government were excited about it. And the fellows were so excited about the opportunity to see how government actually works. And they really learned a lot from each other. Yeah, so that's when that started. Yeah, when you pitch cities in 2011, it's like the first fellows are getting placed. It seems like an easy pitch to be like, hey, we've got some labor to do technical stuff that you don't know how to do. We're going to give it to you for free. They had to pay some. They had to pay some. So yeah, sometimes the plan was to come and cover it. But we really wanted them to have to pay a little so that they would get attention. And it really mattered, actually. I imagine the buy-in was probably high and principal. And then was it, was that true when people actually hit the ground? And we're like, OK, now we need things. Like, we need data, we need access for this. Was it, yeah, we're catching what you need. Let's make this thing work? Or was it more commonly, like, simmer down? Like, there is a process you will go through for all these things. Well, the thing is, like, the government isn't like one-mile of the state. There was almost always somebody in government who was the person who most wanted a fellow's team. It was the most excited. It was like, yes, we're going to get you all those things. And then they would go to the actual IG department and the way the data, and they would run into trouble. So you have people who are super excited and ready to run through any wall for you. And then you've got other people who are like, what? You want what? Yeah. That's not going to happen. And our job really became pretty clear pretty quickly that the technology skills that were needed was that magic of, like, yeah, but I can fix stuff. And I'm going to be your friend and you're going to love me. And that magic was necessary in order to get through those walls. And the job wasn't, to the end of the day, writing programs or even just doing some data sorting or fixing someone's preacher or something like that just to make friends. The job was to get through those walls and get the data. Or sometimes it was so very, very often was you couldn't get the data. We had whole projects go because you couldn't get the data. Data that was necessary to the project they had bought into. It was like, why did they bring us because they weren't going to use the data, right? But then later on, it would be like, you have this great program that you can't, are you? Can we hear you what an ATO is? Who here is working on the authority to operate? Yeah, you couldn't get the ATO. You couldn't, the whole thing was like, right in the go. I mean, like, users could use it, but you couldn't push it live. So there were just walls like that that you ended up finding a whole bunch of strategies and tactics together, almost just which involved making friends with people and being nice. Point of politics. Point of politics. Thank you. This is all history. Cookies and donuts really help. Yeah, with many side-advantages, we talked about city government is buying papers is not expensive. It doesn't don't. The very long line, donuts are not illegal as much as people will tell you everything is illegal. It's not illegal to buy donuts. With the first cohort or cohorts, what were your measures of success? Like, what was going to determine whether this was the thing that continued to go or whether it was like, oh, that was fun, let's wrap it up and do something else. I mean, we were measuring ourselves on a lot of things that ended up being the wrong things. In the end of the day, it was just like, we got a couple of cities to work with us our first year and we're a couple of their cities going to come forward. That was going to determine whether it continued to do the work. But really, what we decided was that you're going to end up doing a lot of stuff that gets drawn away. And actually, that's true whether you work in commercial software or government or startups or whatever, you will write stuff that has been away. But what we needed were just a couple of things that needed everyone to talk. And that really ended up, I mean, this is true of our strategic pillars today. We do three things. We show what's possible by making something that's so good that it just changes people's minds about what's possible in government. And now we do that at a much greater scale than we did back in 2011, but it's the same idea. And then once you can change your conversation and have people go, oh, you can make software that's that good that helps people, really helps people, and costs that little in government, OK. Once you do that, then people want to do more of it. So our second strategic pillar is help others do it themselves. So it's just like you're creating demand and then trying to meet that demand. And our third strategic pillar, which was sort of there in the beginning too, we just didn't know how to measure it, was build a movement. No one, this isn't going to keep going if there aren't people, you know, lots of people, whether they're in government or in local community groups like our brigades or all of you who are, you know, pressuring government and offering your skills to government to say, we got to keep getting better at this. And so that's who tried to sort of make that into a virtuous cycle. But back then it was like, is the software going to live? Like, will they actually be able to use it? And it turns out only, you know, four or five software projects a year would actually kind of live on. But that was enough to have everyone go, holy cow, we must have been doing something wrong. How do you change this new playbook? Was there any pushback or like outright attack from the Accentures and Lockheed and Bolliams who run these $200 million software projects for city governments? There is pushback from that. I'll be honest, I don't think that they feel threatened by what Code for America does very much. I also think that we've shifted over time to going, how do you not just sort of push back against them but how do you give them a path forward so they can move some of their business into the new model? Like, I have been really wubbly, I'm sorry if there's anybody in the room, but like I've been really extremely critical of Oracle. I've written horrible, nasty grounds for Oracle. I'm also extremely critical of Oracle. I call it a toxic waste dump. I feel that I'm American. That's like a deeper bird, you know? I'm like, how can I doubt that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, and I decided that what I was gonna do, so we'll give, I'll give you a question, like so on the topic of lady. We'll just talk about Oracle and the rest of it. We can't, and it's not nice to say about Delight, but Delight's also sponsoring your conference. This is getting really awkward. Your conference, no? Like yes, I'm gonna just go work to Code for America Summit. It's like lunch for everybody and I'm like, how much love do you get from lunch? How much love do you get from lunch? How much is poison? Oh my God, right, that's probably what it all is. Okay, make sure it's all. Okay. Note to self. Like I said one day, what I needed to do was say, look, I have this like intense rage against some of these companies, but it's like not gonna work to just say this entire sector, these companies are huge. They censor the way I'm thinking. Let me be clear, I'm not saying all these companies are awful, which is gonna become parents, okay. But it's not gonna work to just go head on against them. What we have to do is say, look, these guys are playing by the rules the government sets. And so like step one, government change the rules so that companies can write software that serves us all in different ways. So we're working on government work with that. I mean I also serve on this defense aviation board and so what I've been doing off and on today is rewriting these reports about software acquisition reform that the defense department's trying to do. And that's exactly where the government has to change the rules. Then the companies also then have to respond differently. And I mean it's not exactly sequential, but it's really true that companies will fight these changes, right. Because they have these smalls that rely on building dollar software projects that fail. Routinely fail. But what I'm trying to do is say look, I'm gonna reserve, I'm gonna say that one company is completely irreducible and that's horrible just because I've seen stuff that they've done. And then arbitrarily in my mind say great, that's like the other spectrum they will never know. Every other company out there has the opportunity to prove to me that they will come along with a new vision. And governments gotta do its part but then the companies have to do their part and say great, I see that you're making lightweight, agile, modular, user centered procurements that we can only bid on something that's a chunk of what we would have bid on. But there's still a great profit margin in it and we should still that do their work. And there's just gonna be 10 times of those so we can still be a big music company and you know what, then help me, then I'll let you actually want to work for them because you're trying to be meaningful and interesting and satisfying because you're writing software that actually works for people. So my whole thing is like, everybody except Oracle gets the chance to live up to my personal expectations of these companies and that's probably a better way than just like putting up a wall and saying all these incredibly powerful and wealthy companies can go to hell because I don't think that's gonna work. Anyway, what was your original question? I don't care. Keyword, which I think comes up in conversations with anybody that talks to you, it's about this word for procurement and like for people who have not been- I thought you meant power procurement, yeah. Well, we're tied together for an opposite, right? Like what is procurement? Why does it become such a hot issue for people? I don't know, just shut the other shit because it's shuddering right now. So procurement, actually look at, let me say everything with the last question before we move on. Have the big companies come out for growth for America? No, I think the day that someone from Deloitte like cuts the break in my car like because he succeeded and I'll take that. We haven't. That's the way you're gonna go. I'm not gonna go. I'm insulted to Deloitte once. I mean, no, I told her that we'd die mysterious when you ask her questions. It's on video now. But they have, and I just wanna say that they have some of the companies and I decided I would just pick up Oracle because it's just easier to have one and be like, yeah, Oracle has come out for USDS in a lot of, we need to talk about the USDSS, but that's the United States Digital Service, the place where I help all the people work one day. Because it's really meaningful work and because they're trying to do things differently, that is a bigger threat and they have definitely done stuff that was really found unethical or un-American. And so, yeah, they do come out, they are coming out. So, procurement, what's procurement? Procurement are the like thousands and millions of pages of policy regulation that government how the government buys and builds software and every single, almost every single thing that's in there with the exception of some of the things that Oracle would. Is there because people thought it would be a good idea to have a lot of safeguards, a really good idea to make sure there was a lot of rigor. But it's mostly rigor that comes from the way that you would evaluate, say, making a battleship in 1939, not the way that you would rigorously and smartly design a process because you had software. So, we have a lot of work to do to sort of rewrite those rules and regulations. I think it must be dramatic and simplifying, essentially, to give software developers the room to do what they do well. And it's just hard to do these days. But the good news is that you, there's a lot more of what happens in the preparements is that people assume that the way that any of you would write software today is illegal. But it isn't. There's these layers between what the law actually says and then the practices that have crude over time is people have interpreted that and put into different practices that were often built for non-software processes. And so, you actually can do great software within the context of existing law policy and regulation as it relates to procurement. There's just an enormous amount of myth-busting and re-educating that needs to happen to do that, but that's why you see great software coming out of places like 18F and USDX in the state of California because someone's gone through a trouble with explaining that it can be done differently. USDS and 18F have almost like back-to-road procurement in a way where we say part of the problem in these software projects is that agile, modern firms, companies, consultancies can't afford to go through the process. Can't get the right qualifications or they can't go through a three-year spec development-ish revision cycle in order to be able to get work, they have to get work and get paid in the short term. So the only companies that can afford it are the mega, the large companies in the world, such as the world, and that they effectively have kind of a cartel-esque control over the pricing in that market, right? And they're mutually incentivized to keep prices of software very high. And it's been interesting to see over the 10 years kind of this two-fronted approach where some people have worked on changing procurement policies so that projects under a certain financial threshold, like under a quarter million dollars or whatever, could be bid more openly without as much qualification to be awarded in 90 days and things like that. And at the same time, say, okay, let's take some of these methodologies and people and just cut the whole procurement thing out and just put them straight in the government, right? And so when you started, like how did the fellows, like the fellowship model lead directly to AT&F and USGS? Well, I think you're right that it's essentially a procurement path to say instead of procuring software, I'm gonna cure people, and then people can just write software without a lot for your constraints. There are still constraints, as I mentioned, like ATOs and things like that. But I think there is a line from Bring Fellows in, which then also meant that from there, the Obama administration said, great, let's do this at the federal level, and that created the presidentialization fellows who could kinda do the same thing. But ultimately, I think the problem with that model, if it is fantastic, if it won't scale, you cannot bring all a software development in-house. You will never get to where you need to go with only that. And so you start to get to see that really keep things in-house. You can do them quickly, like at AT&F, and it is, again, just a show what's possible, get people believing that things can be different, then the lines, the politics, it's the culture, it's the, you know, actually, the empowered public servants are incredible. An empowered, excited passion that public servants who actually know how the system works are an incredible tool for change. So it's just like, activate them, and then you can go get all the other changes made. But I think it's just kind of work to just bring everybody in-house. So what was the conversation then when it was like, hey, let's start creating, what do you call them, initiatives or programs? What's AT&F and USDS? They're not agencies, per se, but what's the word for it then? One of them is an office, and the other is the, yeah, I don't know what AT&F is. Yeah, USDS is an office within the Office of Management Budget, yeah. And what was, what was the idea there? And was it a thing of like, oh yeah, we got the idea, like we're gonna make this happen, or do we have to go through a lot of approval and provision and codes? Yeah, we have like four hours to talk here, right? Yeah, that's fine. They might leave, but like, it's fine. Yeah, okay. So how that came about, was that, sorry, it's not emotional, I'm just like, I have a cough all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking about Oracle, I don't get it. Keep talking, just a second. Okay, yeah. So presidential innovation, but I'll just go quite fast on these things, because the PMF program started, I think in like 23rd, 2012, area, and so broad, where the fellows program had focused city governments, the PIF program was pushing into the federal space, working directly in the White House, and so then had a lot of credibility, but I think something that surprises people who aren't involved in this politics as well, is White House like, doesn't actually have much power. Right. The White House can suggest things, but it's often hard to actually make it do things. And it can't do procurement at all, it's not supposed to touch any procurement, I mean it's over with this, they can't screw with agency procurement, it's just really interesting. So that's what happened was that Todd Park, who was the Chief Technology Officer, the second one ever, wanted me to come in and run the PIF program, and I love the PIF program, but the day he called, I happened to be visiting the government digital service in the UK. And they were, it was like, I'm not actually a big fan of Disneyland, I feel like a kid going to Disneyland, like I was like, walked into this place and was in heaven, because they were doing everything that I thought was, like I thought I was going around the country, or our fellows were going around the country, like showing what was possible, it was amazing, we were changing minds, and it was like a whole different level. And then when I walked in there, I was like, oh, we suck, like this is the thing. So they had like several- I don't know if you can't travel to Europe, because it's like a future- Exactly. They just feel like, oh, I'm done with American. They had like 250 amazing developers in this building, but like, again, just like, you know, they ascended the thing as part of the cabinet office, so in the center had power. And we're taking down all of these really crappy websites, I mean, thousands of them, across the British government, and redoing them on this one, simple, clear, lightweight platform, and just, they had, it was like, you put a giant star up, space for one thing, which you just don't often see, and they had this thing called the wall of dumb. So all over the whole office, the wall of dumb, and you could literally just see, like they just, they had all websites, and pieces of content, like most of it, they just throw the content out, and a lot of government technology problems, and nothing to do with technology, it's the way that government talks to the American people, or to, in this case, the British people, and so they were finding all the information, some of it was like, throwing out, and one of the jokes was like, there's a whole website about how, like, if you were, if it was cold out, you should wear a sweater. This is not important information for the government to convey to citizens, but the parts that were necessary to keep, they were rewriting it much clearer, some of the language, putting on this custom CNS that they had built. But, so you would just see people getting up from their chair, and taking a piece of the old website, and then go put it on the wall of dumb, and it was just like, a flow of people, so just, you could see progress. It's amazing that the government digital service can be printing websites. Yeah, exactly. We said, oh, guys, we printed it, okay, fair. Put it on the wall. But then you put stuff on the wall of dumb, and they were just amazing. It was so impressive to me. It was like, oh, it's not this thing at the edge, because you're point about the White House sort of suggesting things. That's what we were essentially doing. We were to go from here, show it was possible, and suggesting you do something different. Here in the UK, they were like, no, you will do it different. We will do it with you and for you, and then you're gonna do it this way on your own. And so, Todd, who I knew a little bit through this Guptua stuff, sent me this mail saying, like, I'm coming to California. I need you to clear your schedule and meet with me. And I'm like, well, I'm not there. I'm in the UK, but I'm glad that you're reaching out, because I want you to see what I've seen. This is amazing. It turns out it was recruiting me to come to the White House, which was very flattering me. And I was like, I love the GIF program, but I am reverse pitching you on we need an American version of the GDS. And that was, there's a very long story and the answer to your question was, is it difficult, did it take a long time, it's yes. But at the end of that, we did get the United States Digital Service, which is not exactly the same, but it's our version of GDS. So we've mentioned USDS and 18F. Dan, can you explain like the models and how they're different and what those two things are? Yeah, and this is at a very practical level. But as I said, I hope all of you will go work. One of these students are a similar one in the state of local government one day. USDS just began the White House and was really designed as a unit that would work on presidential priorities. So part of that long story I was turning the skip over was that it was kind of going nowhere, even though I supposedly convinced them of where I came in to do it. And then HealthCare.gov launched and had a very tough time. I will remind you all that it didn't end up succeeding and enrolled eight million people in its first open enrollment, but voided it's up for the beginning. And it was really technically the first USDS project, even though we didn't have a unit of USDS yet. The people that we brought in to start, to say HealthCare.gov became the first people who, the first administrator of USDS was the HealthCare.gov rescue leader. And if you don't recall or weren't around at that time, like the HealthCare.gov, the rise, fall, and rise of HealthCare.gov was essentially like taking this big project, the rolling students across the country into unified healthcare platforms. And as I recall, the spec of the software split up amongst like 16 different companies. And along the way, most people thought it was not gonna work. And then even like two weeks before when all the components are getting delivered, everyone's like, hey, this is not gonna work. It's like, well, we got two weeks, like this is the date. And so when the date comes, you like turn the switch on, turns out it doesn't work. And then- They demoed it to the president and it worked the one time they demoed it to the president. That's the reverse of the demo's work. I mean, unfortunately, because then maybe they would have done something differently. Yeah, but you still have Carmen, that one moment, right? And so then after that, it's kind of like a superhero adventure's assemble. And it is, I mean, the way the legends are told is like this rag tank bunch of like 16 or 20 people or whatever, like, we'll fix everything and then they show up and they had codes for like two weeks and also there's HealthCare.gov. That's not what happened. They had rag tanks. There's been more than, so there were more, it looks a little bit myth-busting here if we should be adults. Yeah, please. We're coming for the real truth. There were more than 16 or 20 of them, but not that much more. They came in and we were recruited to come in. Some of the people that were on the kind of, we called them the ad hoc team. They didn't have any power. They were just the people that we brought in and they had a lot of soft power that people kind of knew who was on the ad hoc team. Some of the people on the ad hoc team were the people from the vendors that had a clue. And as Mikey Dickerson, who is one of these guys and then became the first administrative in the United States Digital Service, said, you were the people who still looked alive behind the eyes. So, they were not exclusively outsiders. It was a combination of outsiders and insiders and that's always true. Like, whenever you hear a story about change in government and the narrative is that people came in from the outside and fixed it, there is another story there. We should also look in the inside and if they're not telling it, they're lying. So, but yeah, there were a bunch of them and they didn't really write code. What they did is they stood in endless, endless stand-ups and resolved communication problems between the vendors. They did write stuff. So, let me do that. What Mikey did is ran like a kind of endless stand-up, essentially, where you would find out that like, this, and I was in some of these music, so and so we'd be over here and they'd be like, you, you're supposed to do this thing. Did you do it? Like, yeah, I put the ticket in. And they'd be like, well, did you get the ticket? No, I didn't get the ticket. What system did you put the ticket in? Oh, that system. Oh, yeah, I'm using a different ticketing system. Stuff like that over and over again. This was a boring, awful, faithless job you could possibly imagine. I'm thankful. Yeah, and then there was a smaller team. So they were just like, we have to resolve, they basically debugged at a massive scale about, and they worked 20-hour days for a hundred days straight debugging the site and they almost like, all died from exhaustion. There was an, I'm not kidding. I felt awful that I couldn't really help them that much and they were just like, if they don't do this, like people are gonna not have health insurance and they're gonna die. And they really, you know, they really felt that degree of admission around it. And so they were just not. No pressure. No pressure. I used to say, like, the top part was to say, Todd believes that if he sleeps, people will die. Unfortunately, this was true in this case. But there was another team, the team Kim ran, that just, they were like, you guys are gonna fix the existing site. And there were, I think this team was like 12 people, just rewrote the whole, not the whole site. They rewrote like the login system, like they rewrote key pieces of the site, the 13 of them in like 13 weeks, so that they turned, they were about done, they actually could replace one entire module. I hope they printed it out, you can follow me there. You've written a lot of things out. That's perfect. I, computers. I didn't, and you guys asked me your question, I don't remember what it was, I hope you saw for thinking. But it's super interesting, I think, to look at that moment in time, right, where there was so much like hope and investment in what was happening. And those people that came in from the rules and Facebooks and Apples and whatever, the world, it, it, I didn't get the impression that it was with judgment. It was like, this is our people, these are things we care about, like we're coming in to do, this is like life and death, but not, it's like they were coming in because they were joining the team, not trying to replace the team. And it's interesting yesterday, someone came up and talks kind of more than once, right, the reason these projects fail is not because you picked Python instead of Java or this front end library instead of that one, it's because you were using different ticketing systems. You didn't agree about how the API was gonna line up from one service to another. And it's like, it's the people problems, the people problems, the people problems over and over. Over and over and over again. Like, I mean there were, I mean this particular project had, other issues like the fact that they had bought some bow balancing systems and they bought and installed all of them at once. So there were some other technical issues, but now I mean across the board I think when you see these mega software projects, it's communication, it's communication. We were, I had to just ask you about the difference you've seen in the USDS. Okay, so, and I got a side track on healthcare.gov, but USDS basically has the ability to go into a federal agency and say, hi, we're here to help, whether invited or not. And they take great pride in saying that, well they're probably sent by the White House, they really like to show up in a way that's like not interested, like they want to feel like they're there to help not just to boss people around, but yes, when they need, when we're not delivering benefits to veterans, it doesn't matter whether the team that the VA wants them, they will be sent in, right? And they work kind of more on, like they come in to kind of help stabilize and change the director, so maybe they're not probably gonna stay on it super, super long term. That's not true, it's not true of every project. There's a guy who lives here in Kelly Taylor, do you know him? Oh yeah, yeah. Kelly has been working on stuff with Center for Medicaid and Medicaid Services, through USDS for a long time, he's on much longer term projects. But the ATNF, which is the General Services Administration, which by the way, ATNF developers, most of those jobs are really jargony independent, so you can work from here and do them. Kelly is a unique person, where most of USDS projects are actually based in DC. But they are more like an internal agency to other federal agencies, so yeah, so the USDA will hire them to do a project and they'll do everything from like actually writing software, like they re-wrote the federal election commissions, sites that have made all the data much more open and transparent, and the site much more real. So it's like an actual big project, they just did. But they'll also do stuff like procurement consulting, we brought them into work on that child welfare program in California, it was like, which you have a $600 million monolithic seven year project, it's not gonna work, let's help you rewrite the procurement and the RFP for greater success, so they'll actually come in and help you write that, help agencies write that. So basically you hire them, whereas at USDS, they will just show up. And yeah, so it almost feels to be like USDS, they're like special forces, they drop in, they kind of like, we're working together, also we're gonna push around a little bit, we're gonna get this thing going and then we're out. And 18F is a little bit more like really friendly mercenaries, where you're like, hey, there's a problem, it's a problem, and they solve it. Yeah, and USDS has money appropriated from Congress, but they just spent how they want, whereas GSA is supposed to be like, we're here, you give us money from your agency, and that's how we get paid back. The GSA, if you're not familiar with like, I hope you're not familiar with federal agencies and stuff, they are like a crap bag of the federal government, like they're the ones who like made people to cut the lawns at federal buildings, and also they made people to build something. Yeah, they were running the enormous disability operation, enormous, including money loss. That's a lot of loss in money. 2016, something, so it was like this election, and wasn't it really a great day for a lot of people? My character is it's like cold water in the face of a lot of these people who have signed up, and to be clear with things like 18F and USDS, I think very ethically aligned with like a consumer financial protection bureau, and it's more during the same time and all these things. People were really, there was a lot of momentum and energy around the idea of like, let's get into government, and let's make it into the thing that we want for the next century. And then on that dark day, I think it was kind of cold water in the face to all these people. Yeah. How has the movement changed since then? It's been interesting. I think there were a lot of breaks where people felt very differently about things, and it was hard, and it's very hard because on the one hand, there was an enormous fear that a, work that USDS 18F had already done was gonna be in the hands of somebody that they thought would not have, doesn't have the same values and could use it for evil. And for example, USDS had recently done a project to speed the process of bringing in refugees. And I mean, to be fair, I think having more refugees coming into our country to my values is sort of an involved, they're good, I'm really, really glad they did it. They were sort of worried that now they got a government that access all this information about these refugees, there are a bunch of ways in which streamlining access to information, of course, if you think that information is gonna be used against those people, it makes you very nervous. So, a bunch of people, I don't know if my name is consistent, I started feeling just like, you gotta get out, like get out. And a lot of the people were like, right, veterans still need benefits, students still have a crushing student loan that need to refinance it. We still have terrible foster care or systems around the country. We still, like, I've heard our God, by the way, they still want to do it every year. Like, I'm gonna crash again. It's still sort of being recovered every year. None of these problems for actual real people in America went away. And walking away from whether it was the White House or local government or any of these things is simply not gonna help it. I really understood, my view was through both sides, but I came down on the side of stay because government is what we make it, not who is in charge. And yes, you might have to leave if there is a clear breach of your values and you're asked to do something that you don't believe in. But up until that point, stay and express your values and fight for good and write software. And hey, if necessary, if you're asked to do something that you don't believe in, I was like, this is a really easy answer to that. Thank you, we'll work on that. The procurement will take six years. So I'm like, thank you. Sounds like it was a shootout. I was like, who's shootout? So, it's been really hard. I think a lot of people have sort of, there are very good friends of mine did not talk to each other for a year after that. I mean, each made different choices. It was really hard to see, but overall, I mean, I tell you, like a very, very dear friend of mine was just right and he left USDS and actually came to work with us for a while. And then a year and a half in, she got recruited to be the chief tech, the staff technologist or chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission where she's gonna get to have, be a smart tech person in the room as we figure out how to regulate the technology platforms. Right, because he turns out to be quite an issue and they just don't have enough people to really understand how this works to make smart decisions about this regulation. And she's like, well, I'm going back in. This is good, go in, this is important. They're gonna make the wrong decision if you're not in the room. And then I started teasing her, have fun working for John. But yeah, she knew how I meant it, which is, this is important, stop. Yeah, it's almost like now more than ever, right? That's how I think about it. The pressure, you're almost like it's like an active war zone situation, right? And it's like, you can still be the defender of your ideals in day-to-day decision-making in the way you can influence policy and things like that. And the truth is, I think a lot of people aren't finding that that's the case. I think they're finding it on a day-to-day basis that mostly they're still able to do what they wanted to do. They're still able to help veterans. They're still able to, like Kelly Taylor, you should come talk here next year. Still able to help get people that are on access to their own health data. In fact, just as much, maybe a little bit more than in the past administration. It's just not that simple. The model of like having technical people involved in government cruise out, I think it's easy or accessible to recruit people to work on the foster care system, to work on child welfare, to work on healthcare access. And eventually we're going to get to like, ICE really wants to bring in 18F, right? Or DOD has started to imitate some programs and people have degrees of discomfort with like, well, I wanted to do government stuff but not that kind of government stuff. What like, what does it mean? You know, what does it mean for like the future of this community? Is that just the reality of like, again, like let's get into these things and try and do them in like ethical smart ways. You wrote a blog post that your quote said like having poor tools doesn't make us fight it makes us fight badly. Yeah. And so if you talk about like that perspective. Yeah, but then you may have to get, you know, you may have to shoot me out of here later. This may have happened to some people. I don't know, I will say, it's just tough stuff. It's really, really tough stuff. First of all, I would, you know, I will say USDS and you can't get a lot of attention. Most of what you really want to work on actually happens at the state level. There's a group here in Colorado that's trying to get the Colorado Digital Service to be a thing. Y'all should support them and, you know, Medicaid, SNAP, which is Food Stamps, Child Welfare, DMV, all of the big, big things, the states too, federal government doesn't much to do with that and they do, they regulate it and we ended up working with the federal government a lot. But states are kind of, states and cities are kind of where it's at, so we'll make that point before we go back to our general examples, the third examples. So, first of all, I would just say, like, it's just not gonna happen that you, like, don't work with federal government and suddenly you're working for ICE. Like, you would know, like, you would have an opportunity. If it were through USDS, they're just not gonna make you work on it. They're gonna find people, they'll have reasonable conversations with you about, like, who's, you know, for whom is this something that you think can be in line with your ethics and they're gonna talk about it. And then, as an organization, they talk about what's in line with their organizational ethics as separate, frankly, from just government at large. They can have that control and have that ability. Let me take the ICE example for a second and this is where I'm gonna, you know, I'll see it on the slide, they're nice to speak. As a parent, what happened in the border made me cry many days in a row. It's just so unacceptable what we were doing there. And frankly, what we're kind of still doing and here's the thing. I remember to post a box about this. But when you really look at what's happening there, actually having decent programmers within the Customs and Border Patrol probably would have saved us when we changed course, and by saying we in the broader sense, initially there was a policy that required families and kids to separate. The problem is that when we reversed that policy, we couldn't change the software and we had lost the connections between the A number of the kid and the A number of the parent. And that's when we couldn't reunify these kids. So having some decent programmers there or frankly, even some of you would just thought to make one giant spreadsheet of these things and I'm sure there are other nuances to it. Every program goes back to spreadsheets. It's always spreadsheets all the way down. Just somebody with some creative solutions or just somebody to be like, we could not have been that hard to do a better job of tracking the relationship between the two A numbers. But nobody was there to do it. And so I just got an email from Viv Romar yesterday because we've been tracking this with her. She was working on this through New America recently. We still have 497 parents and kids who are separated because we can't put their A numbers back together. So you may, as I did, mostly disagree with the policy that separated them. But if you are not willing to be there and help with the IT problems with the reunification, you also have blood on your hands in life. Yes, all right. James Chachad. Yeah, I'll get into my last little thread here. So I was offered a developer and... I'm not. Hypothetically. I clearly do look at my kid like that no longer. But I just can't agree. It's still school most of the time. Ah. Oh, I get it. Is that like a job? True. When people get into programming, when they come through a training program, go through a degree program or whatever, the first most important thing is to get some experience. And I think there's a lot of value in working in the machine. Like not the Oracle machine exactly, but pretty much any company you work in, you get to learn how these things succeed and fail and how management can be good and bad and how the sign can go right and go wrong. And after you learn a lot of those lessons over three or five years, it starts to feel like, okay, I think I kind of get how this works. I think for a lot of people there is that this like search for meaning, right? And I don't want to build that platform and I don't want to do coupons anymore or those kinds of things. What's the pitch? Like why does somebody sign up to do these relatively low pay, low glamour work? Whether it's through Code for American Fellowship or it's through AT&F, USPS. I think that the most popular thing to say is just try it because you take my word for it but if you try it, this is something we found across the board. Most people, once you get in there, they see what you can do and what impact you can have, it's addictive. And you kind of never want to go back and then you go in and then you're really moralized for a while and you kind of go back and forth. But truthfully, it's partly the feeling I think of being needed, right? You can go in there and we go, this is really a mess and the skills that I have could fix it and it's gonna matter to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people and particularly in the places where we work in Code for America, it's the people who need help the most that you're helping in our country. People who need Medicaid, need food assistance, who we will lot, the people who are caught in a really shitty criminal justice system that pulls them into the cycle of poverty and incarceration for really no good reason. One of our team's motto is no one should be in jail for bullshit and that's because a lot of people are literally in jail for stupid administrative problems, not for crimes or for very, very minor crimes because of the administration of our systems. And when you see that your skills can help with that, it's really, really hard not to want to. It's also doesn't pay as badly as you think it does. We have some open positions in Code for America. We used to do the fellowship, the fellowship is still part of what we do but we have 70 full-time people to get a, what we consider sort of market rate. We actually benchmark ourselves against startups. We don't have that nice stop option package for you. The non-profit stop option doesn't work out too good. It's how great you're going to be on it. It's not going to work. Equity, hard equity. All right, equity. You know, we pay what is required to live in an expensive city like San Francisco or we have people in Atlanta, we have people in Chicago. But, and the ATF stuff too, it doesn't pay that badly. It's just if you're, yes, if you went into software because you want to be Mark Zuckerberg rich, don't go into government. But you can raise kids and have a family and have a nice apartment and stuff on what you make in your business. But your point about, it's like the meeting and your job. The one thing I would say is like, go get jobs in the very best places that you can. I mean, I know you're not all right out. If you are earlier, you're career is suffered over. My advice would be to choose the place where you are going to get the absolute best training in, you know, have the best PMs and the best engineering managers because what you need when you, you will not have that when you go into government. And you have to be the person who recreates all those fantastic practices. Your actual coding skills are going to be taken for granted. As you said, it's not like it's not going to live or die by, you know, time on our rails. It's going to be that there isn't the infrastructure that you're judged on different things. There's, you know, actually product managers in fact don't really exist in government yet. And that makes it really hard to go into software. So you have to go in there and fight for the environment that creates great software. So know what that environment looks like when you get into government and fight like hell to create that space for yourself and the other people who are going to come in. That is incredible changemaking. Thank you. We'll leave it there. Okay. Thanks for your time, Jack. Thank you.