There are a lot of similarities between building a web application and creating policy- you see a problem, you do your research, devise a plan of how you can fix the problem, and you start building onto your idea. You run through thoughts like 'if we create x, then will it break y'. You make decisions anticipating best and worst case scenarios, and base, for example, your numbers, or how groups might respond to something, on your experiences and your large amounts of research. You share your ideas with friends, stakeholders, until ultimately building and deploying a piece of policy to be seen by the world.
I learned about these similarities while working on a political campaign in my hometown of Chicago. I had started out planning and building campaign technology, but ended up spending a lot of time discussing at lengths the different policies that would be best for the city. I noticed that I thought about policy problems in the same systematic way and that I felt a lot of the same joy from attempting to solve policy challenges as I did while building new technology.
The only issue was that I was always left stuck within the research/ideation stage. I had all of these ideas but didn’t know where to put them. Ideas about how consumers and their data should be better protected, about ways in which we could mitigate disinformation on the web, and generally how technology and government can better commingle, to name a few.
I joined TechCongress to build on my ideas that have been sitting in ideation, and to learn, grow, and be challenged in the process. I'm looking forward to theorizing things like the good and bad avenues in which tech can go, thinking about how we can solve problems within technology preemptively (not once tech has done its damage), and learning enough to create policies that positively impact the lives of as many people as possible. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do all of these things, as well as excited to see what this year on the Hill holds.
Victoria is currently serving with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).