Long Beach’s Code For America fellows (l to r) Rhys Fureigh, Dan Getelman and Molly McLeod. Photos courtesy of Molly McLeod
Dan Getelman is a New York software developer with his own education-technology startup. Rhys Fureigh is a web developer who studied sociology and once worked with the inventor of the Macintosh project. And Molly McLeod is a graphic and web designer interested in urban planning and community development.
Meet Long Beach’s Code For America team: three diverse tech lovers who have put their respective lives on hold to embark on a year-long fellowship with the so-called “Peace Corps for Geeks,” a nonprofit that since 2009 has helped municipal governments work better through the creation of custom technology projects.
“Early in my career, I realized that technology can be kind to humans,” Fureigh says. “It’s not necessarily your fault if something is not working—the systems can be designed better. The same goes for government, which is just another system. I like the idea of government being kinder to humans too.”
Long Beach is one of Code For America’s ten partner cities for 2014, an opportunity that is less about sending hackers to do guerilla warfare at City Hall and more about curating a creative team of techies who—after investigating issues along a single chosen vertical—can collaborate with city staff on solutions.
Because of our mid-size and our robust network of nonprofit hospitals, specialty surgery centers, pediatric care doctors and healthcare insurers, city officials decided to ask the fellows to focus on Long Beach’s public health sector and found a generous funding partner in the Molina Foundation.
“When you look some of the biggest issues at the table—not problems as a mayor, but when you look at large social issues—it’s really difficult to not keep coming back to public health,” says Becki Ames, Mayor Foster’s Chief of Staff. “This is not a referendum on the Affordable Care Act and we are not making a political stance, but there are fundamental issues on how the public accesses both the healthcare system and information about public health. When you look at ways to make the future brighter, you keep coming back to access to care.”
The fellows arriving at City Hall their first day in Long Beach.
For the last two weeks, Fureigh, Getelman and McLeod have been receiving a crash course in the inner and outer workings of Long Beach’s public health situation, touring facilities, meeting with experts and fielding important information that will help them better understand where the most crucial needs lie.
On the first day of their month-long intensive, the fellows rode along with a Long Beach Fire Department truck, witnessing firsthand what it looks like when 84% of calls for service in a city are medical in nature.
“Hearing a statistic is one thing, but seeing it with your own eyes is another,” Getelman says, “and I think that’s what we’re really excited about for the rest of the month—seeing on the ground what’s going on so we can find the places that we can have the most impact.”
Past health-centric Code For America teams have produced data infrastructures for social service directories, apps that map public fruit trees and gardens for foraging and a text messaging system where CalFresh members can be notified of expired enrollment.
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With all the changes being brought on by the Affordable Care Act, the ability for technology to rewrite the rules on how people access health information and services has never been greater, but the specific outcome of the fellows’ time here will not become clear right away.
Though the goal is to start testing out ideas as quickly and early as possible, the Long Beach fellows will return to Code For America’s San Francisco headquarters by March 1 to meet with the other 30 fellows, who will share best practices and help them narrow down suggestions to determine what is feasible in the relatively short time frame.
Throughout their time in San Francisco, the fellows will have constant contact with Long Beach officials, sending over small testable experiments and seeking feedback from the on-the-ground experts they met during their month in the city. The evolving, collaborative process is a shift from the typical planning-driven process under which most bureaucracies operate.
“We are excited that people [in Long Beach City Hall] have energy around this and there’s an openness to experimentation and not necessarily getting too bogged down in the planning process,” says Fureigh. “If we can provide good examples of how this process can be used to achieve change, then that’s great. We’re all about ‘the art of the possible’ and figuring out what can be done in a way that still respects people’s work.”
By the time the fellowship is over in November, the Long Beach team will have produced some sort of deliverable product; however, the real impact Code for America fellows have is often greater than the product itself.
An app may not be able to immediately solve ongoing, recalcitrant problems that plague large urban environments, but staffers in past partner cities have said that regardless of the product created, transformational experiences have come to their city halls.
Through year-long interactions with out-of-the-box-thinking Code For America teams, the ho-hum of daily governing gets an infusion of geek-driven creativity, helping municipalities embrace on a larger scale how technological possibilities can be used for the greater good.
“I think cities are really interesting as complex systems and it seems like a fun challenge to take off a piece of that and make something better,” Getelman says. “One of the things I’ve always thought was cool about technology is that you can have a really big impact on a large number of people from a small place and sure, we could use that power to make something like ‘Facebook for Cats,’ but I feel a duty to do something that helps other people with technology so I’m excited to do just that.”
For more information on Code For America, visit codeforamerica.org
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