Jennifer Pahlka, a coder and civic activist, believes that apps and other new technological innovations can allow the government to encourage healthy community activism.
Pahlka’s group, Code For America, sends talented app developers to city halls across the country to develop software that can improve government efficiency. Code For America recently saw unexpected success with “Adopt A Hydrant,” a smartphone app developed to encourage Boston citizens to shovel out snowed-in fire hydrants.
The “Adopt A Hydrant” app gained popularity with Bostonians for its game-like design, which allowed citizens to “steal” hydrants from other citizens by shoveling them out. It went viral.
The app quickly spread to nine cities, each of which used it for a slightly different purpose. Seattle used it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains, for instance, while Honolulu uses the app to keep tsunami sirens in working order.
“That’s sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government,” says Pahlka. She believes that open, generative apps encourage collective action and can give citizens a sense of civics. By using new technology to remind people of their duty to help one another, she believes that government can reduce costs and improve efficiency while getting real citizens involved in their communities.
While it is true that community activism and government improvement projects existed long before smartphone apps, Pahlka believes that apps and other new technology can act as helpful reminders. The Internet can even allow citizens to get involved in other areas of government such as bureaucracy.
“We’re going to have to make bureaucracy sexy,” said Pahlka.
New technology ultimately needs to connect people and inspire a sense of duty. As Pahlka notes, this new form of communication between government and citizens can allow the government to work in a completely new way–not as a business, but as a unified body where citizens can do together what they cannot do alone.
