 Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Nice. Can we just express a moment of appreciation for the set design of the New American Conference? It's like a hips for farmers market right inside the Reagan building, which he never imagined. So it's really, really great. I want to jump right into it. Vivian, you worked in the U.S. Digital Service. You were one of the founding members of the team. What was it like to work in a functioning executive branch? Good question. I'm not sure. I don't know if I'm just kidding. You know, it was interesting. I was at the White House for almost six years, and most of the time that I was there was spent on trying to bring sort of these best practices that we knew worked in the tech industry to bear in government when it came to policy implementation. And so there's been this interesting arc from, you know, the Presidential Innovation Fellows or, you know, like a single agent going into an agency and then very quickly learning that that might not be the best idea to the creation of the United States Digital Service, which really focused on small, fully stacked teams that were working on one issue, one very concrete thing and seeing how we could sort of change the tides that way. So it was amazing. It was amazing. It was the best. There's, we have a public story of the U.S. Digital Service, which is somebody forgot to plug in the website to healthcare.gov. Obama called his tech buddies. They hung out over whiskey. That's right. He was a bunch of heroes from Silicon Valley who took time off of shipping burritos to rich people and made America great. Again, or just for the third time, I think there's been ups and downs, such a storied past. Can you share some nuances of what the experience at USDS were on the mistake side, on the miscalculation side, on the, we had assumptions that were wrong side? Because it is a sexy story from the outside, but inside it must have been a little messier than that. There is. There is a story that absolutely took advantage of a crisis, right? The crisis that the President was paying attention to, that the left that the right were paying attention to, and it gave us sort of all the air cover and the lift that we needed to say, you know, healthcare.gov is not the only thing that has ever flopped over on its side. We are spending now more than $84 billion a year on technology in government, and I don't know if anyone feels like they're getting $84 billion worth of service. Tell me. And so, you know, we were able at that time, and Jen Palca who's in the room and Marina Martin who's in the room, there's so many people who were able to sort of make the case for building something like the USDS that was modeled off of the government digital service in the UK. But to answer your question about the, like, the harder parts, you know, the uglier side of the story. So, yeah, there was a crisis. The President was paying very close attention. There were daily meetings with him which continued to give people. So you said the President was paying close attention. That's so amazing. Yeah. Sorry, guys. I'm going to keep doing that. It's going to happen. Yeah, it's going to happen. And so that gave then Todd Park and Mikey Dickerson and Mina and this incredible team of people, the cover that they needed to show up in Virginia every day to these contractors' offices and say, look, they're paying attention and they're asking us for updates. Well, then, you know, they got it to a place where it was stable, functional, and then there was a team that stayed behind. And to just give you an example, two years later, Mikey Dickerson was going back to the XOC, which is where the war room for healthcare.gov is. And there are new face of contractors and they were doing some sort of funny stuff. And he said, why are you doing it this way? It was how they were connecting to the system to make changes to it. And he said, oh, because back in 2013, Mikey Dickerson told us to do it that way. And he said, but you don't have to do that anymore. And he said, well, I don't know what we can change. He said, I'm literally like, I'm Mikey Dickerson. I'm telling you, we don't have to do it like that anymore. And so it's not, you know, the thing that's hard is that you can't just, the helicoptering in and thinking that everything is going to change overnight and we now have this new way of doing it and everything is perfect in the world. It's not like that, right? It's planting a seed, it is nurturing it, it is watering it, it is planting many other seeds once that one seems to have taken roots and proving that like you can do this over here, you can do it over there and keeping your eye on the ball. Which means that technologists and people with these skill sets are not people that helicopter in and out. We need to think about embedding them long term and making them a part of the organizational structure that persists. Thank you for that and for some of the other side. So I haven't explained at all why I'm a part of this conversation other than I was available. Which matters. People are busy in this town, especially now, I'm going to keep doing it. But I was born into this space in a way. I grew up in D.C. My mother was a coder for the government. Yeah, thank you, one person. Everybody was like, obviously, that's what everybody was doing in the 70s. Big whoop. My mom did the same thing. And then I've been more on the media, comedy and commentary side, but my roles at Jobs at the Onion and at The Daily Show were both heavily about bringing technology to bear on how these groups achieve their missions. And the idea of planting a seed, embedding and being there for the long term, seeing that come back around, seeing someone six months later or two years later, when the idea for the change comes from somebody who was already there, being like, ah, my work here is done. It can be a very magical moment versus day one when they handed me a tower PC on my first day of the job and I thought it was a joke, which wasn't. We've always handed tower PCs to new people. This is what we do here. So those old habits can die hard, but you can kill them off. What do you... I remember a time when people were very positive about the internet and simple in their positivity. If everybody just had a blog, we could all express ourselves and make things beautiful and we got Breitbart. Isn't that what Instagram is for? Instagram is beautiful food, the best food. I'm going to keep doing it. But there's been some nuance added to the idea of what technology in the public interest tech for the public good civic tech means. Everybody has access to the internet to we have data that is available to embedding teams inside of a government agency, not just one person. What is your version? What's the story that you have in your head about this arc, the evolution of what civic tech even is? Right now, where is it going? I came into this world in 2011, 2012 when I started at the White House when I moved into the Office of Science and Technology. Not a bad start. Then we really had this idea that we could create, for example, the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. It was the... We can bring in one really smart entrepreneur in residence, a kind of techie type person, and they will command the secretaries to behave differently and they will do other things. There was quite a bit that they accomplished, but really there was a lot that we learned. One person is really tough. One person across an entire agency is even harder. It began to evolve from there. We moved into USPS, but really there were the hackathons, all things that really matter, and I think that it's a really great step into this work, but I think that what that presumes is that it continues to feel very separate from the core work that's happening. When you say, it is my opinion that if you say we're going to host a hackathon, I think that's really wonderful for the community. I think that it gets people really energized. It creates some great ideas about where certain pain points are and things that we should be focusing on, but really the big things are the very sexy things that nobody cares. Not that nobody cares, but that we don't really think about. A hackathon, for example, is not going to fix how immigration benefits work. It's a huge paper process. There are a ton of people who adjudicate these applications every day. They had a system that allowed people to apply electronically and then when adjudicators received it, they printed it out to review it. So, these are things that are not separate. It is core to how these organizations do their work. We hear it time and time and time again. I think that we need a little bit of everything, but where I am at now, where our team is thinking about this work, it's in my mind it has evolved from the hackathons and open data and into the how are you doing your work, what is painful about it, what can we make better about it? Because if you are more efficient, you will be more effective in carrying out your core critical missions, and that is what we need right now. I can't invite a bunch of refugees to a hackathon and tell them that that is going to fix their situation. Right. What's... Can you describe the mission of the public interest tech team at New America? This is an organization, it's a way that we heard in the introduction this morning been around since the late 90's employees, people who can write really eloquently and in a human language about deep policy issues and now has a technology wing and technologists don't write papers. We don't? I've seen them, they are terrible. You saw my talking point. Yeah, that's not why you are around. So what are you going to be doing? Yeah. So, New America to me, when Cecilia and Ann Marie asked me to first come in and sort of consult on the program, I thought, I had the same, this is a really interesting place for it to be. And then, I'll take you on a little story, a little adventure, I was on a road trip driving from San Francisco to LA with some friends and we were listening to a podcast on the media, Myth Busting Poverty. And I don't know if... Yeah, I don't know if Rachel Black is in this room, but it's when I was actually, I don't know you, hello, but it's when I was thinking about this work, I was thinking about this offer that I had from Ann Marie and from Cecilia to sort of come and build this and I was going through the same steps. Like, why does this make sense in New America? I was so taken with this podcast and suddenly I hear. And next, we're going to speak to Rachel, Rachel Black from New America. And I thought, that's why. That is why it makes sense here, because there are so many people who are experts in the exact policy areas that we care about, or the exact verticals that we care about where we would like to take their brains, their understanding of these problems and apply them in ways that people will feel. In improving service delivery from nonprofits, in asking someone like Rachel, what are the problems? Where do you see the pain points here? And I know that it's so much bigger than that. But is there anywhere that you think that technology might make a dent, that a process might be improved? Perhaps there's one lever that we could just push on a little bit that would have exponentially huge returns. And so that was one reason. And I remember thinking, this is weird, this is funny, this is interesting, and it's really exciting. And then I thought about building a digital service for nonprofits, which is a very simple way of putting it near the end of my time at USDS, because that's really where my heart lies. And it's so funny, if I were building something from the ground up and I were thinking, who should be my board? Who would I ask to be on my board? The combination of Cecilia Muñoz with her expertise in the nonprofit space and at the White House and in government and in working on these critically important issues and Marie's expertise. Todd Park, who's my former boss and mentor and friend who has recently joined the board with advisors like Mikey Dickerson and Megan Smith, it is quite literally a dream team. And so I think that incubating it here, seeing what works and learning a lot, this is an experiment, we're going to take it day by day and figure out what works and what doesn't work and go from day to day. I'm super excited to be here. Yeah. Are you guys excited to have her here? Because that would be awkward. All right. I want to focus on the word here actually and the idea of where you're going to be, where New America, the world that New America is entering. And so there is a history of this evolution of civic tech. There are practitioners, there's other alumni from USDS out in the wild doing good things. There's Code for America, which has made a change, but still using tech for public good. There's Civic Hall Labs where I'm an advisor doing work, mostly out of New York City, but also across the country. How does the public interest tech team here at New America approach integrating with, building with and on and around what exists? It's critical. If we go into this by ourselves, we have failed before we've even started. So, first, Jen is like the godmother of this work, right? It would be a completely missed opportunity to not work with Jen and with Code for America, to not work with Civic Hall Labs, first of all. I mean, even if we were doing, even if we were all doing Civic Hall Labs, opportunity at work, you know, Code for America, even if we were doing all of everything exactly the same, there would be more than enough work for us to all go around in our communities, right? But even then, we're not approaching things in the exact same way. We're not working on the same issues. We're not embedded in the same ecosystems and communities. And so the best thing that we can do is work with each other and learn from each other and know that if Marina Martin is going to be working on the foster care system and child welfare and that Code for America has perhaps recently done a project in that space, there's a lot to learn there, right? We're working on within that issue with slightly different and looking at the ecosystem that supports child welfare and improving that, but there's a lot to learn. And so there's no way that we're doing this without Jen, without Code for America, without Civic Hall Labs. We have to do this together. Awesome. Here, yes. Thank you. So we're out of time. Oh, no. With the two of us, you guys are about to have an experience of interactive communication. I will not explain because that's the extent of my knowledge. But thank you for being here and thank you for this conversation. Yay. You should clap for each other. You did great.