(Post)^3 Modernism

I went to something real intense a couple weeks ago.

On Friday January 9th at around 10 PM, four young men were shot to death in a car on my block. It was a drive-by shooting with multiple weapons.

When the news emerged that the car the young men were in was stolen, all the comments on the blogs reveled in snark and glee. “They had it coming.” “Gentrification doesn’t look so bad now, does it?” All blunt-edged victim-blaming hot takes.

Community members of the Western Addition neighborhood announced a vigil for the victims at the African-American Art and Culture Complex. I decided to attend it to listen and understand what goes on in my neighborhood beyond the cafes and the Meetup groups.

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I had never seen the San Francisco I saw at the vigil, but it was so real. Around 150 people attended, 80% of whom appeared to be Black. Board of Supervisors President London Breed spoke, as did Police Chief Greg Suhr, and a lot of pastors and community leaders. Most of them delivered a message like “We are a village, and they {the forces of gentrification} are crushing us, while we kill ourselves.” Supervisor Breed said she grew up in the housing in the area. She talked about how she used to hang out with folks, and they would party at Virgo’s in Hayes Valley. Everyone called out “yeah, we were there!” I, a Hayes Valley resident of 10 months, have no idea where or what Virgo’s was.

The pastors and old-timers who sat on the corner had some common themes too. “I’ve been a G too.” “I was in a set for 20 years.” “My brother died in 2002, and my cousin got shot in 09, just down the block.” “I was in jail for 40 years. Now I sit on the corner of Golden Gate and Fillmore 24/7, talking to these boys, trying to keep them out of the life. But I haven’t been able to stop crying for the last three days, because the last four boys I spoke to on Friday was those four boys.” And the most repeated harmonic: “It’s not snitching when someone shoots four people and you aren’t involved. So, come forward if you know who did this.”

During one speech, a mother wailed outside the room. Never in real life nor in the movies have I ever heard such a raw human cry. I pray I will not hear it again for a long time.

It seemed that most people there were at most two degrees removed from the victims or their families. There were a lot of tears and hugging, and chanting. The White people present, other than myself, were all hugging and comforting people. So, I think I was one of the few true loners at the vigil, with no personal connection to the victims other than proximity to the site of their murders.

A real anger simmered in the room over how responsible everyone in the community was. It is clear that there is a persistent problem with violence in the community, everyone is aware of it, and folks seem to know who is responsible for most of it.

The last speaker said, “We’re all about yelling after some cops when they shoot us, but when we shoot each other, we don’t do a damn thing.” Peals of cheers and whoops.

Then, we walked the seven blocks to the site of the murder. As we walked down Laguna past the bougie shops of Hayes Valley, over 100 Black folks marching in front of the all-glass bar fronts full of White people just staring, out the windows of the ghosts of Virgo’s past – I saw the neighborhood from a perspective I’ll never lose.

As folks gathered at the memorial on Page and Laguna, across from the Zen Center, one of the mothers of the slain spoke about her son. “Yalani Chinyamurindi, my son, was on his lunch break from his new job at Benihana,” she called out. “He was carrying his third paycheck, and wanted to surprise his mama with his first support of the rent.” When a SFPD sergeant called her two days later, he apologized for taking so long to notify her about her son’s death because he had no criminal record. He said the only way to officially identify Yalani was by checking the fingerprints he made when he got his official California state ID as he matriculated to high school.

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It’s been a while since I last did this.

Accomplishments

• learned a lot about relationships, especially with respect to communication.
• moved across the country after living in DC for 41 months
• got a new job
• went on fun hiking adventures – deep snow, put chains on tires to escape, Lassen, Tomales point
• broke down my bike and rebuilt it by hand, then embarked on a 55 mile ride through Marin
• played music regularly with friends. I even played live for the first time in a while with “Alright alright.“
• renegotiated old relationships and developed the core of a good community in SF
• a year of fun free things: bike party, beach bonfires, lots of walks to hilltop views
• quit drinking alcohol for a month
• quit drinking caffeine for three weeks
• saw my family more than the previous year
• Moved to SF on the early side of a gathering of good vibes people, which should continue into 2015
• tons of fun travel: Nashville, Austin, Morro Bay, San Bernardino, hot springs, New York, Mendocino, Tahoe, Sonoma, Detroit, Ann Arbor, BHM, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Mexico City, DC, Fargo > Minnesota > Fargo, Joshua Tree
• started writing again towards the end of the year
• gained a reputation for “finding out about things” even though I’m new to SF / the West
• started a morning religion biking to Ocean Beach and touching the water weekly with folks
• wrote some more by hand than last year
• made an impact in civic tech by bringing in radical colleagues from Detroit to the CfA network
• participated in #BlackLivesMatter protests
• caused controversy at work by discussing institutional white supremacy
• went through the darkness into the light
• my going away party in DC had karaoke (thanks PTRQ)

Failures

• didn’t move on up in the new job
• didn’t establish regular public music performance
• didn’t plan well for the holidays
• didn’t really make or build or teach a whole lot in terms of work
• didn’t even put up my art in the house yet
• You know, these are just examples of not trying.
• All you have to do is try / ask.

Five Pictures to Sum Up 2014

1.

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2.

http://instagram.com/p/wChHhvHUyM/

3.

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4.

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5.

Status of NYE 2012 Vision: New Worldview, or Views of the World

I last wrote an end of the year review at the end of 2010. I moved back to the US four months prior, lived with my girlfriend of two years, and didn’t have a paying job. My life changed so much since then.

I’ve done a lot in those four years. I dated around for the first time. I moved into a new neighborhood, Mount Pleasant, and then across the country to SF. I worked with a significant assembly of digital justice actors in DC, the Broadband Bridge. I let myself get cowed into submission and self-denial by a superior. I let myself get cowed into submission and self-denial by someone I loved. I saw what I needed to do and figured out how to take first steps to leave those things behind.

The core of who I am, how I have behaved:

• I found place(s) I wanted to be, and made it there.
• I found the kind of people I wanted to be around, and made them my friends.
• I want to build communities, so I built them with elements from the first two behaviors.
• I get distracted all the time, and I still haven’t figured out how to fix that!
• I want to break orbit so far that I can’t find my way back. My life in the last four years validates that strategy, which originates from the end of my high school years through college. I didn’t have a name for it then, but “breaking orbit” seems right. It’s the scientific side of going through the darkness to get to the light.

On New Years Eve, I got the sense of finding what I sought. I’m not sure what it was. It feels like I came down from standing on my toes. My heels hit the ground soft, my back feels good. I do not fear moments.

Looking forward to NYE 2016

• I work more as an engineer than I did in 2014.
• I play music regularly, publicly!
• I am more of a boon and less of a burden on people.
• I wake up earlier.
• I go deep to build communities.

The Black Lives Matter movement is in full swing.

135 days. The movement lives. #Ferguson

— deray (@deray) December 22, 2014

I’m trying to practice being a good ally. For me, this means amplifying Black voices leading the movement and speaking mainly to my White friends about systemic oppression. I consciously follow more Black voices on Twitter and retweet them when they speak about this movement. At the same time, I tend to avoid retweeting sympathetic statements about the protests by White people, as it’s just not their / our movement to lead.

What can white Allies do:

•Amplify black voices
•Raise money in affluent circles
•Decline interviews
•Focus on support roles

— The Good Witch of the South (@ForRevolution) December 5, 2014

Aside from doing my part to reduce the White noise in the Black signal around #BlackLivesMatter, I remember what Teju Cole wrote about the White Savior Industrial Complex. He focused on foreign policy and charity by Americans to impoverished and disaster-saddled countries, but I think his advice is applicable to White interference in neighboring communities:

To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

What is the equivalent in the United States? We witness police in segregated suburbs and the country’s largest city evading judgment with the complicity of our “democratic institutions.” Judgment came to Mike Brown and Eric Garner from a gun and from muscular arms, but the system’s power saved Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo from the process of judgment. The justice system is used as a tool to dismiss state violence against Black people in 2014 as in 1931. My due diligence question right now is: why has this not changed?

Something is happening in US society, behind what goes on in the White House and Congress. Tens of millions of people vote for radically right-wing Representatives and Senators every two years, but they express their values in their communities every day. Polarization doesn’t just happen in DC – it plays out in how our public infrastructure chooses winners and losers, and who pulls its levers. We seem to disintegrate in ways that matter to things like the police and the military, not just by race or income level.

Are we entering a “Praetorian society?” This phrase first came to my attention a couple years ago, in this article on the rise of the Praetorian class in the United States. It’s a rather libertarian view of the world, but I think it has basic merit. According to author Pete Kofod, the Praetorian class includes

members of the Armed Services, federal, state and local law enforcement personnel as well as numerous militarized officials including agents from the DEA, Immigrations, Customs Enforcement, Air Marshals, US Marshals, and more. It also includes, although to a lesser extent, various stage actors in the expanding security theater such as TSA personnel. The main mission of the Praetorian Class is to keep the order of the day. This requires displaying an intimidating presence in their interactions with the Economic Class.

Many returning veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq transition to careers as mercenaries abroad – staying in the war game. War machines are given freely or sold subsidized to small-town police departments. My hometown police department has two UAVs and doesn’t know why.

Samuel P. Huntington breaks down the differences between a “civic” and a “praetorian” society. A praetorian country looks like:

fragile, fleeting forms of authority, charismatic leaders, military junta, populist dictator. All forms of government whirl and change in unpredictable manner. Politics and political participation are neither stable nor institutionalized.

Huntington’s definition focuses on the experience of a whole nation-state, while Kofod’s describes a concentrated segment of our society. Since Huntington’s praetorian society relies on a less-governed society with weak institutions, this does not describe the United States on its surface, not even after a bit of digging. At ground level, however, we can see a hollowing and a shifting of social and economic structures. The ties within and between our institutions are breaking without shuttering the institutions themselves. They may undergo a renewal of purpose in favor of our corporatized society, or they teeter at their foundations while showing a strong face to the public. So instead of looking to the White House to answer the praetorian question, I want to start with the associations between people in the country.

That’s where those tens of millions of Tea Partiers and countless milquetoast liberal enablers build the praetorian society. From “I Can Breathe” to “All Lives Matter,” they divert the organizing work of critical examination and repair of society’s foundations. They hobble our potential. Power and capital are concentrating in the hands of the same people. They are real and they hang out mostly with each other and give each other guns and jobs.

I never considered what the opposition to a “civil / civic” society is. It seems to be praetorian. Code for America supports programs and rhetoric that emphasize civic institutions, like “civic technology” and government itself. I have not heard or read anything from our colleagues that outlines what kind of world we are working against.

The civic technology movement needs to identify just what we are working towards, in order to understand our movement’s antagonists. They are a movement and power themselves. If we are brave enough to publicly research and examine the praetorian society, we can better help others understand and enunciate the importance of alternatives.

We hiked the Redwood Peak Trail near Chabot Space and Science Center. We talked about all sorts of things as we climbed through the mist on cloud-soaked roots and rocks. At Redwood Peak, we admired the scene – scattered hilltop stones ringed by redwoods on the crowned hill. The slopes of the ridge on all sides supported a staggered treetop canopy and other foliage. Nature-made, human scaled. Here at the point of two-legged triumph and natural communion sat a US Geodetic Survey marker.

The government had been here. The government’s been all over the world, in our letters and phones, and in our bedrooms. Thousands have had the government in their bodies, willingly or otherwise. Thousands have had their bodies and homes torn apart by the government. Your tax dollars at work.

This NGS marker is not the same as a drone, or renewing your food stamps, or voting. Here sits a piece of work the government left for us to understand the world around us, anchored to a natural point of prominence. It was simple and provided a function and it didn’t get in the way of our enjoyment as the fog slowly broke to the gold of sunshine. It didn’t ask us anything, but we can ask it something if we want.

What if an artifact like this represented most, if not all, of our interaction with government? With governance? Cut the warplanes and the bureaucrats and just make things we can play with that go where we want to go. Put our tools of collective effort in places that matter, and leave the rest up to us.

We had a golden glowing time on Tuesday around a fire on Ocean Beach. Fire brings it with the aesthetics. Fire’s pleasant glow is everchanging, fire draws you close with its warmth. Fire makes your clothes aromatic with memories. A steady Pacific wind blew the smoke, so we chatted and gazed into the fire without shuffling around stinging eyes. I bought a cubic yard of firewood to start, and went back to Safeway for another while my friends enjoyed the fire’s prime minutes.

I watched Eddie bring a fire back from a wheezing ember into flame. A shirtless midnight tweaker rambled over to the fire pit at the Wigwam Motel off old US Highway 66 in June, giggling and clenching his teeth over half-intelligible questions. He came because of us, and we were there because of the fire. Eddie was there because of us and because of the fire. Eddie stewarded the fire for thirty minutes until it slow-cooked him a dark chocolate s’more. I told this story at Eddie’s birthday party to his wife and friends while we drew his life on a posterboard in their living room.

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The fire as our focal point underlies its aesthetics and our sensations. We’re facing each other, and we can talk about the thing we’re facing. The fire is a task and an ornament. We’re all equal, or potentially equal, in relation to it and to each other. Our fates are bound to it, for a second and for who knows how long. It’s different from just sitting in a circle at the beach. Our focal point is still towards each other, but if we’re not clicking, our heart will wander elsewhere, towards the ocean first and then something else desirable or familiar. Something that will hug us, family or drugs or the television. Away from each other.

People feel anxious and alienated a lot these days. Looking at a screen, our focal points decidedly detach themselves from each other. Are we only taking and not tending? I write this as I stream the Grateful Dead 1972-03-21. “Fly on those wings of love, I’m a stranger in your town.” The Dead were and are a community beyond the music itself. A Silicon Valley capitalist would call them “a platform.” I wouldn’t have played, wouldn’t play, so much music were it not for them and the ABB back in high school. Tending a fire.

April said she might paint her new room in Oakland beige over blue. “It’s like the desert, it makes it seem like you have more space.” For me, it’d be a nightmare. I’ve heard people say that about the plains in the North and I felt the same way when I was in Fargo. Where’s the definition of space? Are focal points possible in infinity? What is the point – the purpose – of infinity? No bound to your heart means your heart is nothing.

On Wednesday night Shanky, Williams, and a couple of Shanky’s coworkers and I camped on an old radar platform on Hawk Hill in the headlands. The Hobohookah was one focal point between us. Our eyes and hearts were turned south towards the city, all crossing the Golden Gate Bridge framing our home. As I studied the city lights and the haloed moon, I asked Williams if he had felt any trouble reorienting himself to the west coast after leaving New York.

“I mean, the ocean is on the left now,” I said.

He took a pull from the Hobo, blew smoke rings. “Different sunrise, different sunset. But no trouble here.”

I’ve been on the road a lot recently, and I always miss my family. I have a lot of focal points in other places, and they are blessings. Home though is about that tended fire. I’m working on building a hearth here and I think it’s just starting to work.

WHAT I DID / WHAT I DO / HAVE A GOOD TIME

In September, I participated in different kinds of meetings with five Brigades on a two-week circuit ride. I joined for a full hack night where I could, in Birmingham and Atlanta. When I couldn’t visit a hack night, I sat with the core leadership team of each Brigade to chat in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Detroit. Code for America picked up the drinks and dinners. That’s our job – we are an aggregation of resources and we get people together to use them. A glamorous – vainglorious – description of my job would involve “convening” for “outcomes.” I think it really comes down to sharing our resources to help people have a productive time, a good time, or ideally both. All of these folks more than earned the good time we had. They’ve earned many more good times too.

Code for America’s Communities team has spent a lot of time pushing, cajoling, goading, urging Brigades to make a plan and share it with us. We’ve taken on roles as preachers in the civic hacking movement, spreading the word. But Brigades don’t need the open data, open government, open anything gospel. They have legitimate things to ask of us, from help with basic weekly organizing to multi-year strategy. We fall into the trap of viewing direction as coming straight from us, when really it comes from them. They are a multitude of vectors of ideas and action. When we don’t act accordingly, we fail to help the movement reach its potential.

It’s hard for our distant team to communicate with Brigades in a coherent way. Their signals are a flood and we have to be great switchboard operators before we even have time to offer sound guidance. People in the civic hacking movement should communicate clearly about what we want and need, and what we feel. Like this:

http://instagram.com/p/s08lIMnUze/

POOL CUE ORGANIZING / DANCE ORGANIZING

A lot of organizing tries to put people in certain places, for some outcome. But people aren’t billiard balls to knock into the “right” holes. I think the whole point of organizing is to roll together, holding hands. I don’t want to strike people and conditions like a pool cue. Proselytizing like a preacher of “civic hacking” feels like being a pool cue. You knock something to knock others in a direction towards the holes you chose.

How do we make working in this movement more like dancing? When we dance, we have a shared direction. We face towards each other and what’s between us, not some arbitrary distance. I want to reach out and guide, and be guided, with my hands and feet and eyes. Sometimes I will teach, and sometimes I will learn. Unlike the static billiards table, the dance floor is endless geometry, and the only features are people and our movements. We’ll build our practice in a human-centric context.

DISTANCE OF CFA / LISTENING

We, “Code for America,” are a distant thing to most people in Brigades. They are excited about being part of something big, but they really _don’t know what that is_ unless we show it to them, usually, _in person_. We can work with Brigade Captains and core team members to be leaders that share a vision, but we can’t expect it. At least not in the way we treat visioning and direction now. We have to deeply appreciate the difference between Code for America HQ’s lived day-to-day experience and others’ lived day-to-day experience. We only get to that understanding _by listening first_.

You don’t listen just once. Maybe fifty percent of any interaction is, after negotiated first contact and pleasantry, Just Listening. Ask the occasional question when it’s warranted, but people say and do things for a reason. We will only do right to act as if we have something new to discover every day by listening.

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DISCOVERY

My friends just had a beautiful baby five months ago. They told me “he’s a new person every day.” Every day! What must that be like? They wake up and find the human they made to be a different expression, without cessation. Brigades are organizational babies right now, stumbling and learning and amazing and sponge-like. Every day they have to stay alive, and feed, and breathe, and have their mess cleaned up. That is okay! We are barely older than babies ourselves as Code for America! We should celebrate how great Brigades are as babies and bring them up to be weird and awesome.

WHAT BRIGADES NEED TO PRACTICE

Brigades are learning how to be their best selves. Based on the circuit ride discussions with Brigade Captains and members, here are the five goals Brigades feel they should focus on:

• attract “everyone, not anyone,” to hack nights
• keep people engaged in projects such that projects move forward
• turn new people into steady veterans
• build an effective and representative core team, in skills and lived experience
• find partner organizations that have deep roots in their communities

These are the issues the Code for America Communities team should spend time listening to plainly. The structure of reaching those goals has little to do with technology or philosophy. It has to do with organizing. In that regard we almost do ourselves a disservice to talk about “what is civic tech” or “what is a Brigade.” Open Nebraska Brigade Captain Rebecca Stavick put it best when she said Open Nebraska is a community group:

I describe Open Nebraska as both a tech group and a community group. Getting community members involved starts with not calling them non-coders… call them researchers, community organizers, open data advocates, whatever. In the end we’re all civic hackers working towards the same goal, and as many of us know, some projects practically require more research and advocacy than actual programming. So when I hear someone apologizing for not being “techie” enough, or not knowing how to code, I shut that down immediately. What that person is really communicating is anxiety about being judged or fear that they don’t have the knowledge to get involved… but the reality is that all of us have a strength to bring to the table, and we will not succeed without a diverse group of folks with a variety of talents.

Why don’t we call ourselves that? Why do we have to dress it up in some new word? The gloss goes from exciting buzz to meaningless ornamentation to tawdry and cheap when I sit in these meetings and think about where people’s feet are in the soil. Nearly every need I heard Brigade members express to me was about the basics of community organizing and partnerships – not about apps or technology.

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BUILD WHAT PEOPLE NEED WITH THEM

Practice organizing, practice democracy, practice speaking. What’s new is civic organizing using technology skills, not civic technology itself. Build a temple with people doing tech for public good, and the act of collaborative construction and the temple are radical. The tech is there either way.

Our experiences are about what is immediate and before us. We ask: Am I welcomed? Do I feel comfortable? Stimulus response. How good does it look? How does it feel? Can I see at least a little immediate gratification? How many buttons do I have to click, seconds do I have to wait, people do I have to talk to, before I see a green button flash, read my words appear, watch my policy become law? The way we interact with each other over projects at hack nights overwhelmingly determines how people feel about coming to Brigade meetings. When people feel validated and valued, they will value spending time with the Brigade. I noticed significant difference in how people engaged at hack nights when they were personally welcomed and greeted at the door versus when they just wandered in without direction.

People need quick wins to stay motivated. If the Communities team and the Brigade leadership teams listen and affect those five goals, I am confident people will see quick rewards. “This thing is working!” they’ll say. When they believe their efforts work with the quick wins, the harder stuff will work too.

GREAT AT BEING

Brigades—these community groups, these gatherings, these circles of people who are standing up for their cities—can elevate their work by focusing on those five goals. That is where we should elevate the practice of being a Brigade right now. Focus on the fundamentals of just being a successful community group, and become a stronger, more capable body. Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.

Everything comes in threes. Getting great at being a Brigade as an organization is just one leg of the stool! It’s the body in body, mind, and soul!

What are the other two elevations? They have to do with who we are and how we work, and what we work for, together.

CIVIC HACK FOR WHAT??

How we share our practice represents the “mind” part of our way of being. Sharing practice is how Brigades and Brigade members learn and expand their “minds.” The Communities team should connect and research these practices. Code for America staff can’t tell people what to think to elevate practice. We must help folks share how they think together. It’s like making a great friend who shares a few books or an album or a film that changes your worldview. Then you explore those new thoughtscapes with abandon. You wind up blissed out and deeply exhausted and can’t find your way back to the way you were before. Which is how we change.

That’s not the role of a preacher. It’s the role of a few wild friends and partners. Code for America HQ is just one partner. Other Brigades, and other community groups, are the more likely partners. They’re the people you want to join for a big camping trip or ask to the high school dance. Or ask to sneak out with you to the concert. Brigades are relatable peers to each other. They have new ideas to share or new skills to learn.

What we work for is the “soul” part. These are the principles. They are what we believe in and why we sing. People, and people together as Brigades, get great at being Brigades in a shared learning context based around the principles. You can just run or swim for a while as long as you want, but you’ll train hard by a dedicated plan if you need to win the Ironman contest. People, and Brigades, should to come to understand these principles on their own, after we’ve shared them. Brigades need their own challenging “spiritual” experiences together to emerge with their own new perspective on what the principles are all about. Brigades make the principles their own when they try something challenging and new in their cities that is based on their reading of the principles.

People don’t need to hear the gospel. They need to learn to sing, with their own voice, the song the gospel represents. Hearing it without singing it is passivity. We all have to _learn_ how to sing it _together_.

The Communities team’s task is to understand _what Code for America needs to make possible_ for the Brigades to have an experience in which they see their perspective of the truth. All great organizations go through something like this and emerge changed. The bonds are stronger among members, the vision is clearer, and people believe with a new understanding what their role is in the movement.

Mind, Body, and Soul.

Learn how to Think Together, Get Great at Being a Brigade, Sing the Song Your Way.

Get great at Being by practicing _together_.
Learn how to think so you can be as great a teacher as you are a learner from each other.
Sing the Song Your Way so we’ll build a cultural ecosystem that bends towards a common goal but will be ever relevant and ready for shifting needs in our cities and the world.

A hundred different styles on a common theme will make for much better remixes for our children and grandchildren.

It is critical that these three ways of life work together and not individually. This way of life must be a holistic practice. It fundamentally affects how the movement grows and what the movement is at any moment. What we are at this moment is critical to what we are the next moment.

MOTIVATIONS AND APPETITES

No one will do any of this work – “civic hacking” – for its own sake. These are made-up concepts. We condensed them from vapor as a culture. Culture is impermanent. Humans did not write until six thousand years ago. Our appetites and motivations are deeper, baser, simpler, stronger than what we say on stage. That is okay. It’s beautiful. It’s human. The way we Do Our Thing ought to celebrate those motivations and appetites, _and make the rest of it possible_. Guide the people of the movement in a ritual and exercise and practice and race and academy and church and pilgrimage and festival for their Mind, Body, and Soul, just to _make it all possible_. They will carry the practice forward.

Code for America just has to be brave enough to let them go like butterflies. I’ll bet most of them stick around, when it’s important.

Laura from Code for Atlanta wrote after I spoke about civic hacking at their hack night. She said the key capabilities “spoke to me,” and:

An over-arching point he made is that civic hacking is far from being only about writing code. It’s about collaborating as a community, about bringing together skills to solve problems, about changing the way we approach governance.

As it stated on another slide, “We make the road by walking.”

I was all fired up after he spoke, and next month I think I might dive in. I totally don’t feel like I have time to work on yet another project, but who really does?! If I have the opportunity to hack away at a compelling solution to a problem in my city, who am I to turn it down?

I think Brigades have more to teach Code for America than we have to teach them. This is the BEST POSSIBLE THING. We’re five years old. We have not been over the mountain, a challenge to ourselves and to society. We may just be beginning to see the mountain – and it’s only one mountain. It’s time to roll towards it.

Our job isn’t to guide people to open data. Open data is just one big spring storm. This spring’s storm won’t make flowers bloom next year.

How do we get through the summer, if there’s drought or abundance?

So I recommend that Code for America treat the Brigades as a field of potential that _we can learn from_, and recognize our equal role as teachers and as learners. They are all teachers and learners too. The more we listen and learn from them, the more they can learn from us.

To do this, we have to reimagine and reaffirm our relationship with Brigades specifically and the civic hacking movement in general. Right now, we’re the program that props up and sustains Brigades. I think we should start by shifting our worldview. The Brigades are an emergent phenomenon, bringing technologists into participatory democracy and organizing for social justice in collaboration with their civic institutions. The Communities team should collaborate with Brigades to develop and adopt a community-based research framework that will study this phenomenon. We’ll do it in a way that supports the legitimacy and primacy of the Brigades, and that improves our skills and knowledge as it improves theirs.

A research framework can make our work always build capacity. It will focus the purpose of our work. It will keep us accountable as a peer society to collaborate instead of direct. With practice and intention, it will also help us gather quality research data that we can use to to make deeper insights into the movement. This research – done collaboratively and focused on the goals Brigades set for themselves – is the best way for us to use our position of privilege to elevate the impact of Brigades into a new level of community-based power. When we go beyond blog posts and webinars and into citable research, we will open the door to an order of magnitude improvement on our work’s longevity and impact. Together with the Brigades, we will practice our principles by using data to make and improve decisions, starting with people’s needs in the Brigades, and building multi-disciplinary teams in San Francisco and across the movement.

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That’s why I provided the Brigades with recommendations to elevate their practice to reach those five goals. The recommendations, based on listening at hack nights:

• Focus on a racial / gender / ability / age / community diverse core team
• Practice leadership on all levels with metrics. Learn how to lead by saying where are we, where have we been, and where are we going.
• Develop a standard and clear delivery process for beginning with:
  • a delivery lead per project
  • put each project on GitHub
  • share a slide per project for “here’s what this is, here’s what we did last week, here’s what we need this week” (maybe once a month)
  • deliver a report-back at the end of the night
• Find an easy and natural way to tell your story. Start by reporting on your hack nights!
• Always orient new people after the general opening of the hack night. Circle format, introduce each other, talk about what the Brigade is for and why they are here. LISTEN.

Again, the Communities team doesn’t make these things happen. We just make these things possible. Playing pool isn’t nearly as fun as dancing.