My Origin Story

How do Members of Congress get things done?  You might guess that they write a bill and then work hard to get it signed into law.  But you'd be wrong. 

Bills are what get signed into law.  But letter writing is the way things really get done in the legislative branch.  

Letters-- typed on paper, printed, signed and then mailed-- are how Members build awareness, exert influence and exercise oversight on issues.  

A tumblr post I wrote back in October last year describes how Members of Congress do this (and here are some relevant recent examples).   Creating a portal that captures and tracks the letters the Members of Congress send-- a Congress.gov for policymaking letters-- was my first foray into how technology could be used to modernize the legislative branch.   I worked on the project through the NYU GovLab Solving Public Problems with Technology course which was led by former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck.  We called it Legisletters, and NYU ultimately built a Beta site, which scrapes and aggregates the existing letters that Members post to their own websites and makes them open and searchable.  The Beta is a great start to the project and NYU has been looking for additional funding to expand it and add functionality.  

Legisletters is my origin story-- the first project that sparked my drive to work on Tech Congress full time.  Because Tech Congress is not only a technology fellowship-- it's about building a 21st Century Congress writ large.  Tools like Legisletters are an important part of the work.  

Congress and the Internet of Things

Darren Samuelsohn at Politico reveals what might not come as a surprise to folks in the tech community: Congress isn't ready for the Internet of Things. 

What I found, overall, is that the government doesn't have any single mechanism to address the Internet of Things or the challenges it’s presenting. Instead, the new networked-object technologies are covered by at least two dozen separate federal agencies — from the Food and Drug Administration to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, from aviation to agriculture — and more than 30 different congressional committees. Congress has written no laws or any kind of overarching national strategy specifically for the Internet of Things.

There was never a shortage of meetings or briefings about connected cars or wearables or drones while I was on Capitol Hill.  But the holistic concept of a new world of connected devices-- and the policy implications therein-- hasn't broken through, at least to the average House staffer.  I can't remember a single meeting or briefing about the IoT generally.  Samuelsohn points to a key structural challenge for government relating to the Internet of Things, and a problem relevant to technology policy writ-large.  

there’s an underlying mismatch between the way government handles issues and the way this new technology actually works. Government operates in silos — in Congress, committees often fight one another for jurisdiction harder than Democrats clash with Republicans; all the agencies, departments and commissions that make up the federal executive branch maintain separate fiefdoms for everything from agriculture, to defense, to transportation and energy. 

The IOT is precisely the opposite. It is a freewheeling system of integrated objects and networks, growing horizontally, destroying barriers so that people and systems that never previously communicated now can. Already, apps on a smartphone can log health information, control your energy use and communicate with your car — a set of functions that crosses jurisdictions of at least four different government agencies.

The obvious takeaway is that technology policy is increasingly diffuse.  Every agency and every committee-- transportation, energy, health, commerce-- needs to have staff that understand how tech works in order to make effective policy.  The difference between Congress and the federal agencies it's charged with authorizing and overseeing, however, is that the agencies are making a real effort to source that kind of talent.   Congress, on the other hand, is not.  

Bring in the Nerds

There was a great piece in the Washington Post last week from Dave Steer, the Advocacy Director at the Mozilla Foundation, and Jenny Toomey, the Director of Internet Rights at the Ford Foundation that I wanted to highlight.   Mozilla and Ford have just launched their Open Web Fellows program, which is bringing technology talent into civil society organizations.  As they describe it

Unless we address the tech talent crisis, our ability to craft effective public policy will be at risk. As one member of Congress said during the Stop Online Piracy Act debate in 2011, it’s time to “bring in the nerds” who can explain the potential risks of ill-informed Internet policies.

I couldn't agree more.  While the current slate of tech-to-gov initiatives at the US Digital Service, 18F and Code for America are doing really important work to help government build better service delivery platforms and smarter tech infrastructure, technological expertise should be extended to help inform policymaking.  The Open Web Fellows program-- like Tech Congress-- will do just that, and take technologists and place them in policymaking roles at places like the New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and elsewhere.  

The first cohort of fellows started this month.  It's an exciting development for the technology-policy pipeline.  

Shuttleworth Funded

Our first grant seems like an appropriate time for a first blog post.  We are officially funded!  Thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation, and a flash grant from Seamus Kraft of the Open Gov Foundation, we have our first bit of money through the door.  Seamus has been doing really great work at OpenGov like hosting a series of Hackathons for Congress (Hack4Congress) and developing open source tools like the Madison Project to allow elected officials to more effectively engage with constituents.  

The flash grant is a pretty cool concept.  It allows Shuttleworth fellows like Seamus to nominate someone for an essentially no-strings-attached grant of $5,000 to concentrate on an idea that they might not otherwise have the resources to work on.  The only requirements:  to be transparent about how you use the money, and put their logo on your website for six months. 

Requirement number one, check. 

Requirement number two, here we go. 

Aside from taking a brief break in February, I've been more or less bootstrapping Tech Congress since January.  Thus far, I've spent about $12,000 building the organization-- mostly for living and office expenses, but also on a couple cross-country flights for meetings and events with stakeholders.  I estimate the Shuttleworth Foundation dollars will afford me about another seven weeks of expenses in San Francisco (this place is pricey!).  This includes costs like rent, a trip to Washington DC at the end of June for meetings, a trip to Phoenix, AZ in July for Netroots Nation and incidentals like PB&J sandwiches, my Squarespace site and Freshbooks accounting software.  It's enough to keep my head above water while I pursue other funding.  

I'll update the post as necessary to let you know specifically how I spend the grant dollars.  In the interim, big thanks to Seamus and the Shuttleworth Foundation, who are helping me keep working on building a bridge between the technology community and Congress by getting Tech Congress off the ground.