The GovLab at Dev Bootcamp

Developers continue to help improve public life through innovative tools and applications, like the new Urban Engines app to ease traffic congestion. With advancements like these in mind, the GovLab’s Chief Learning and Communications Officer and Associate Director of Research Andrew Young recently visited Dev Bootcamp NYC to discuss the already realized impact developers have had on improving governance and opportunities for the future.
Dev Bootcamp is an intensive nine-week training program that provides developers – from coding beginners to veterans – with a diversity of technical skills, including the Ruby on Rails Application Framework, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Git, agile development and more. Far from a conventional lecture format, Dev Bootcamp is crafted to act as more of an apprenticeship with a real-world technology company than a traditional classroom atmosphere. Those signing up for the program “will be learning by doing, not just by sitting back and listening.” In addition to practice-based work built around hands-on effort and collaboration – many of the computers in their Wall Street headquarters are set up so that two people can work on the same machine simultaneously – Dev Bootcamp is an experiment in “flipped classrooms.” Instead of watching in-person lectures and being assigned homework to be completed later, students are provided with a curated set of videos, books and tutorials that allow them to prepare before stepping foot in the classroom. That way, students’ time spent at the Dev Bootcamp physical space can be focused on pushing projects forward, collaborating with peers and engaging directly with instructors. The program concludes with each student developing their own application from scratch.
Kantrow and Young’s presentation to the assembled students highlighted the way technological advancements are changing the nature of citizenship by giving people more direct means to engage with government. To illustrate this point, and the instrumental role developers are playing in this shift, they discussed examples where coders are:

• helping to push government to provide more potentially useful information to the public, like FOIA Machine, a mechanism for creating an easy pathway for citizens to submit official Freedom of Information Act requests;
• enabling improved public service delivery, like PulsePoint, an application that connects CPR-trained citizens with people around them suffering from cardiac arrest;
• giving citizens the opportunity to monitor and report problems to government, like SeeClickFix, a platform for citizens to report and track non-emergency issues – from potholes to broken streetlights.

The presentation ended with a discussion of one of the more inspiring examples of developers changing the nature of modern citizenship: the so-called Millionaire’s App in Mexico. When a group of developers learned that the Mexican government was set to spend 115 million pesos (then US $9.3 million) on a simple mobile application for just 500 lawmakers to track legislative affairs, instead of simply complaining, they worked to find a solution. After a two-week open innovation contest, Jorge Soto and his team identified a newly developed application that satisfied all of the government’s needs. The total cost of the project was 11,500 pesos (then US $930), all of which went to the winning developer. Soto was later hired by the Mexican government to help launch a federal civic innovation office
Hopefully inspired by the opportunity ahead of them in the civic hacking space and the myriad of successes achieved by their peers, the students left the talk poised to begin pitching their final projects. Whether any of those projects focused on improving governance or not, the students taking part in the program will surely be in possession of skills necessary to have an impact in their community following their investment of time and effort at Dev Bootcamp.