Blogging For America

Code for America Summit was full of emotions I didn’t expect.

Our whole Fellowship year has the Summit in mind. How will we tell our story? Will it be memorable? Will it be something that embeds itself in the institutional storytelling of the Fellowship, of the Code for America network?

Even though I wasn’t on stage for our team, I was nervous because I put a lot into crafting the presentation and telling the story of our application; in some ways I felt I was straining to see my legacy in the slides and in the presentation.

But as Lyzi Diamond has so eloquently pointed out, our legacies are much harder to pin down, much more widely distributed across projects and relationships and they are more elusive than our Summit presentations allow.

There’s no way around it – the presentations are disproportionate representations of the work that we do as Fellows. Not only because it is such a team process, but because you have just five minutes to talk about such an intense nine months of learning and hard work.

The moments I enjoyed at Summit weren’t the ones I had anticipated all year – of telling our struggle/success story or of receiving congrats on our hard work.

In other words, it wasn’t about me.

Instead, it was hearing staff members speak whose work I hadn’t been following closely. It was connecting with the other people around the country who are gov geeks, who are doing the same work in Long Beach, in Philadelphia, in Denver, in Miami, in San Juan. It was taking time to eat on the steps of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with people who have shared the highs and lows of the fellowship year.

Thinking about the main stage programming, there were several memorable moments that have stayed with me. Tuesday, Jen Pahlka framed the week by speaking about the work that we do, the way that this community has transformed, and how our mission has crystallized and shifted this past year.

David Eaves introduced her that afternoon by saying, “This work is truly from her heart” – that stuck with me the whole Summit. This community that gathered at the Summit was born from someone truly caring about making something better and then hustling like hell to activate a system to make it so.

Wednesday I was electrified by Catherine Bracy’s talk about why she is passionate about the work of inclusive community participation, followed strongly by the people who spoke during this track – Laurenellen McCann, Diana Nucera, and Denise Taylor. They were so passionate, they had done such meaningful, weighty work in their communities in Washington DC, Detroit, and Somerville respectively. You could feel the importance of what they spent their days working for, and why it was all worth it.

Thursday I was front and center for the ebullient Joy Bonaguro to hear her cheer along with an audience member about Switch by the Heath brothers (“Woo! Yeah. Toootally.”) and energetically talk about getting departments motivated to open their data and work together.

Playing back my mental highlight reel I remember how Rebecca Coelius spoke about health, and Cyd Harrell and Frances Berriman & Karen Boyd speaking about the importance of the user and purposeful decision-making in design.

These were the talks that have stuck with me. I can see them all, and still feel the importance of what they were saying. And it’s not until writing this out that I realize all these moments came from women.

During the Summit, it didn’t occur to me to think “Oh cool a woman speaker!” It was another valuable perspective and representation of the work that this community does. But now that I reflect, I realize that this reveals a larger intentionality that is present at Code for America.

As a woman working here, I can and have taken this for granted. It just feels normal and right to work with and hear the perspective of a diverse group of people – regardless of gender.

It’s no accident that so many powerful female voices spoke about their work at the Summit but neither is it something that is forced or even overt in how we talk about ourselves as an organization. It’s just a demonstration of how things should be but often are not in the tech world, let alone the government world.

And that’s Code for America. It’s easy for me to realize these things only in retrospect, because when values are set and carried out it feels seamless. It becomes part of the reality of our workplace and our community.

It was at the Summit that I was able to step back and regain perspective on the work that we do and how significantly we are in contrast to many other communities. Lots of work has been done to make things balanced and inclusive – both in our office and in the communities we foster across the world.

Code for America Summit was a re-focusing on the organization as a whole. As a Fellow, I have been so buried in the work that we do, the dramas of our particular cities and product development and team relationships, that what was significant about Summit was seeing my larger place in it all and appreciating things about this community that are easy to take for granted.

Groundwork has been laid in order for me to have a successful Fellowship year, in order for me to feel comfortable and empowered regardless of my gender.

It reminds me of the feeling I had in the first days of working at Code for America, a feeling that has never left me: this is a special place, this is a special organization, I am lucky to be here, participate, and contribute to it all.

This was originally posted on Ainsley’s blog.