Baratunde Thurston: Good morn­ing, every­body. Nice. Can we just express a moment of appre­ci­a­tion for the set design of the New America Conference. It’s like a hip­ster farm­ers mar­ket, right inside the Reagan Building. Which he nev­er imag­ined. So, it’s real­ly real­ly great. I want to jump right into it, Vivian. You worked in the US Digital Service. You’re one of the found­ing mem­bers of the team. What was it like to work in a func­tion­ing exec­u­tive branch?

Vivian Graubard: Good ques­tion. I’m not sure. No, I’m just kid­ding. You know, it was inter­est­ing. I was at the White House for almost six years. And most of the time that I was there was spent on try­ing to bring sort of these best prac­tices that we knew worked in the tech indus­try to bear in gov­ern­ment when it came to pol­i­cy imple­men­ta­tion. And so there’s been this inter­est­ing arc from the Presidential Innovation Fellows, where a sin­gle agent going into an agency and then very quick­ly learn­ing that that might not be the best idea. To the cre­ation of the United States Digital Service, which real­ly focused on small, fully-stacked teams that were work­ing on one issue, one very con­crete thing and see­ing how we could sort of change the tides that way.

Thurston: So it was amazing.

Graubard: It was amaz­ing, it was the best.

Thurston: Okay, great. That’s what I was look­ing for. We have a pub­lic sto­ry of the US Digital Service, which is some­body for­got to plug in the web site to health​care​.gov. Obama called his tech bud­dies. They hung out over whiskey—

Graubard: That’s right.

Thurston: —flew in a bunch of heroes from Silicon Valley who took time off of ship­ping bur­ri­tos to rich people—

Graubard: Right, cat apps.

Thurston: —and, made America great.

Graubard: Yeah.

Thurston: Um…

Graubard: Again, or just…

Thurston: For the third time, I think? There’s been ups and downs. It’s a sto­ried past. Can you share some nuances of what the expe­ri­ence at USDS were on the mis­take side, on the mis­cal­cu­la­tion side, on the ​“we had assump­tions that were wrong” side? Because it is a sexy sto­ry from the out­side, but inside it must’ve been a lit­tle messier than that.

Graubard: There is. There is a sto­ry that absolute­ly took advan­tage of a cri­sis, right. The cri­sis that the President was pay­ing atten­tion to. That the left, that the right were pay­ing atten­tion to. And it gave us sort of all the air cov­er and the lift that we need­ed to say you know, health​care​.gov is not the only thing that has ever flopped over on its side. We are spend­ing now more than $84 bil­lion a year on tech­nol­o­gy in gov­ern­ment. And I don’t know if any­one feel like they’re get­ting $84 bil­lion worth of ser­vice? Tell me. And so we were able at that time— And Jen Pahlka, who’s in the room, and Marina Martin who’s in the room. There are so many peo­ple who are able to sort of make the case for build­ing some­thing like the USDS that was mod­eled off of the Government Digital Service in the UK. 

But to answer a ques­tion about the hard­er parts, you know, the ugli­er side of the sto­ry. So yeah, there was a cri­sis. The President was pay­ing very close atten­tion. There were dai­ly meet­ings with him which con­tin­ued to give peo­ple the—

Thurston: So you said the President was pay­ing close atten­tion. That’s so amazing.

Graubard: Yeah. 

Thurston: Sorry, guys. I’m going to keep doing that. It’s gonna happen.

Graubard: Baratunde Thurston, every­one. And so that gave then Todd Park and Mikey Dickerson and Mina and this incred­i­ble team of peo­ple the cov­er that they need­ed to show up in Virginia every day to these con­trac­tor’s offices and say, ​“Look, they’re pay­ing atten­tion. They’re ask­ing us for updates.”

Well, then they got it to a place where it was ​“sta­ble,” func­tion­al, and then there was a team that stayed behind. And to just give you an exam­ple, two years lat­er Mikey Dickerson was going back to the XOC, which is where the war room for health​care​.gov is. And there were new con­trac­tors. And they were doing some sort of fun­ny stuff. And he said, ​“Why are you doing it this way?” It was how they were con­nect­ing to the sys­tem to make changes to it. And they said, ​“Oh, because you know back in 2013, Mikey Dickerson told us to do it that way.”

And he said, ​“But you don’t have to do that anymore.”

And he said, ​“Well, I don’t know if we can change it.”

He’s like, ​“I’m lit­era— I’m Mikey Dickerson. I’m telling you we don’t have to do it like that anymore.” 

And so the thing that’s hard is that you can’t just… The heli­copter­ing in and think­ing that every­thing is going to change overnight, and we now have this new way of doing it, and every­thing is per­fect in the world… It’s not like that. It’s plant­i­ng a seed. It is nur­tur­ing it. It is water­ing it. It is plant­i­ng many oth­er seeds once that one seems to have tak­en roots and prov­ing that you can do this over here, you can do it over there. And keep­ing your eye on the ball. Which means that tech­nol­o­gists and peo­ple with these skills sets are not peo­ple that heli­copter in and out. We need to think about embed­ding them long-term and mak­ing them a part of the orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture that persists.

Thurston: Thank you for that. And for some of the oth­er side. So, I haven’t explained at all why I’m a part of this con­ver­sa­tion oth­er than I was avail­able. Which mat­ters. People are busy in this town, espe­cial­ly now. (I’m going to keep doing it.) But I was born into this space, in a way. I grew up in DC. My moth­er was a coder for the gov­ern­ment. Yeah, thank you, one per­son. Everybody else is like, ​“Yeah, obvi­ous­ly that’s what every­body was doing in the 70s. Big whoop. My mom did the same thing.”

And then I’ve been more in the media, com­e­dy, and com­men­tary side. But my roles at jobs at The Onion and at The Daily Show were both heav­i­ly about bring­ing tech­nol­o­gy to bear on how these groups achieve their mis­sions. And the idea of plant­i­ng a seed, embed­ding and being there for the long term, see­ing that come back around… You know, see­ing some­one six months lat­er or two years lat­er, when the idea for the change comes from some­body who was already there, then you’re like, ​“Ah, my work here is done.” It can be a very mag­i­cal moment ver­sus day one when they hand­ed me a tow­er PC on my first day of the job and I thought it was a joke. Which it was­n’t. They were like, ​“We’ve always hand­ed tow­er PCs to peo­ple. This is what we do here.” So those old habits can die hard. But you can kill them off.

What do you… I remem­ber a time when peo­ple were very pos­i­tive about the Internet, and sim­ple in their pos­i­tiv­i­ty. If every­body just had a blog, we could all express our­selves and make things beau­ti­ful. And we got Breitbart.

Graubard: Isn’t that what Instagram’s for?

Thurston: Right? Instagram is beau­ti­ful food, the best food. (Going to keep doing it.) But there’s been some nuance added to the idea of what tech­nol­o­gy in the pub­lic inter­est, tech for the pub­lic good, civic tech, means. And you go from every­body has access to the Internet to we have data that is avail­able, to embed­ding teams inside of a gov­ern­ment agency not just one per­son. What is your ver­sion, what’s the sto­ry that you have in your head about this arc. The evo­lu­tion of what civic tech even is. Where are we at right now, where’s it going?

Graubard: So when I came into this world in 2011, 2012 when I start­ed at the White House, when I moved into the Office of Science and Technology—

Thurston: Not a bad start.

Graubard: Yeah, it’s not bad. And then we real­ly had this idea that we could cre­ate for exam­ple the Presidential Innovation Fellows pro­gram. It was the we can bring in one real­ly smart sort of entre­pre­neur in res­i­dence, very inno­v­a­tive techie-type per­son and they will com­mand the sec­re­taries to behave dif­fer­ent­ly and they will do oth­er things. And there was quite a bit that they accom­plished, right. 

But real­ly there was a lot that we learned. And so the—you know, one per­son is real­ly tough. One per­son across an entire agency is even hard­er. And so it began to evolve from there. And then we moved into USDS. But real­ly there were the hackathons, the open data, all things that real­ly mat­ter and I think that it’s a real­ly great step into this work. But I think that what that pre­sumes is that it con­tin­ues to feel very sep­a­rate from the core work that’s happening.

And so when you say… It is my opin­ion that if you say, ​“We’re going to host a hackathon,” I think that’s real­ly won­der­ful for the com­mu­ni­ty. I think that it gets peo­ple real­ly ener­gized. It cre­ates some great ideas about where cer­tain pain points are and things that we should be focus­ing our time are. But real­ly the big things are like the very sexy things that nobody cares— Not that nobody cares but that we don’t real­ly think about. 

So a hackathon for exam­ple is not going to fix how the immi­gra­tion appli­ca­tion ben­e­fits work. It’s a huge paper process. There are tons of peo­ple who adju­di­cate these appli­ca­tions every day. They had a ​“sys­tem” that allowed peo­ple to apply elec­tron­i­cal­ly and then when adju­di­ca­tors received it they print­ed it out to review it—

Thurston: Is that why you put sys­tem in quo­ta­tion marks?

Graubard: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. And so these are things that are… They’re not sep­a­rate. It is core to how these orga­ni­za­tions do their work. And we hear it time and time and time again. And so I think that we need a lit­tle bit of every­thing? But where I am at now, where our team is think­ing about this work, it’s in my mind sort of— It has evolved from the hackathons and open data and into the ​“How’re you doing your work? What is painful about it? What can we make bet­ter about it?” Because if you are more effi­cient you will be more effec­tive in car­ry­ing out your core crit­i­cal mis­sions, and that is what we need right now. I can’t invite a bunch of refugees to a hackathon and tell them that that is going to fix their situation.

Thurston: Can you describe the mis­sion of the Public Interest Tech team at New America and… You know, this is an organization—I’ll tee it off this way—that we heard in the intro­duc­tion this morn­ing, been around since the late 90s, employs peo­ple who can write real­ly elo­quent­ly and in a human lan­guage about deep pol­i­cy issues. And now has a tech­nol­o­gy wing. And tech­nol­o­gists don’t write papers.

Graubard: We don’t?

Thurston: I’ve seen them, they’re terrible.

Graubard: You saw my talk­ing points.

Thurston: Yeah, that’s not why…you’re around. So what are you going to be doing?

Graubard: Yeah. So, New America to me, Cecilia and Anne-Marie asked me to first come in and sort of con­sult on the pro­gram, I thought this is a real­ly— I had the same, this is a real­ly inter­est­ing place for it to be. And then… I’ll take you on a lit­tle sto­ry, a lit­tle adventure.

I was on a road trip dri­ving from San Francisco to LA with some friends. And we were lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast, On the Media myth­bust­ing pover­ty.

Thurston: I know it. That’s a good episode.

Graubard: Yeah. I don’t know if Rachel Black is in this room. But it’s when I was actu­al­ly— I don’t know you, hel­lo. But it’s when I was think­ing about this work, I was think­ing about this offer that I had from Anne-Marie and from Cecilia to come and build this. And I was going through the same steps. Like, why does this make sense at New America? I was so tak­en with this pod­cast, and sud­den­ly I hear, ​“And next we are going to speak to expert Rachel Black from New America.”

And I thought that’s why. That is why it makes sense here. Because there are so many peo­ple who are experts in the exact pol­i­cy areas that we care about—or the exact ver­ti­cals that we care about, were we would like to take their brains, their under­stand­ing of these prob­lems, and apply them in ways that peo­ple will feel, right. In improv­ing ser­vice deliv­ery from non­prof­its. In going and ask­ing some­one like Rachel where do you see the pain points here? And I know that it’s so much big­ger than that. Like I can’t even. But is there any­where that you think that tech­nol­o­gy might make a dent? That a process might be improved? That per­haps there’s one lever that we could just push on a lit­tle bit that would have like expo­nen­tial­ly huge huge returns?

And so that was one rea­son. And I remem­ber think­ing this is weird. This is fun­ny. This is inter­est­ing. And it’s real­ly excit­ing. And then I thought about build­ing a dig­i­tal ser­vice for non­prof­its, which is a very sim­ple way of putting it, near the end of my time at USDS because that’s real­ly where my heart lies.

And it’s so fun­ny, if I were build­ing some­thing from the ground up and I were think­ing of who should be my board, who would I ask to be on my board, the com­bi­na­tion of Cecilia Muñoz with her exper­tise in the non­prof­it space and at the White House and in gov­ern­ment and in work­ing on these crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant issues. Anne-Marie’s exper­tise. Todd Park, who’s my for­mer boss and men­tor and friend who has recent­ly joined the board. With advi­sors like Mikey Dickerson and Megan Smith. It is quite lit­er­al­ly a dream team. 

And so I think that incu­bat­ing it here, see­ing what works and learn­ing a lot—this is an exper­i­ment. We’re going to take it day by day and fig­ure out what works what does­n’t work and go from there… I mean, I’m super excit­ed to be here.

Thurston: Are you guys excit­ed to have her here? [applause] Okay, good. Because that would be awkward. 

Graubard: No, you hate me. 

Thurston: I want to focus on the word ​“here,” actu­al­ly, and the idea of where you’re going to be, where New America…the world that New America’s enter­ing. And so there is a his­to­ry of this evo­lu­tion of civic tech. There are prac­ti­tion­ers. There’s oth­er alum­ni from USDS out in the wild doing good things. There’s Code for America, which has made a change, but still using tech, for pub­lic good. There’s Civic Hall Labs, where I’m advi­sor, doing work most­ly out of New York City but also across the coun­try. How does the Public Interest Tech team here at New America approach inte­grat­ing with, build­ing with and on and around what exists?

Graubard: So, it’s crit­i­cal. If we go into this by our­selves, we have failed before we’ve even start­ed. First, Jen Pahlka is like the god­moth­er of this work, right. It would be a com­plete­ly missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to not work Jen and with Cod for America, to not work with Civic Hall Labs. Even if we were all doing—Civic Hall Labs, Opportunity@Work, Code for America—even if we were doing every­thing exact­ly the same, there would be more than enough work for us to all go around in our lifetimes. 

But even then, we’re not approach­ing things in the exact same way. We’re not work­ing on the same issues. We’re not embed­ded in the same ecosys­tems and com­mu­ni­ties. And so the best thing that we can do is work with each oth­er and learn from each oth­er and know that if Marina Martin is going to be work­ing on the fos­ter care sys­tem and child wel­fare, and that Code for America has per­haps recent­ly done a project in that space, that there’s a lot to learn there, even if the approach and the thing that we’re focus­ing on with­in that issue is slight­ly dif­fer­ent and look­ing at the ecosys­tem that sup­ports child wel­fare and improv­ing that. That there’s a lot to learn. And so there’s no way that we’re doing this with­out Jen, with­out Code for America, with­out Civic Hall Labs. We have to do this together.

Thurston: Awesome. So we’re out of time.

Graubard: Oh no.

Thurston: The two of us. You guys are about to have an expe­ri­ence of inter­ac­tive work­shops, etc. that I will not explain because that’s the extent of my knowl­edge. But thank you for being here. And thank you for this con­ver­sa­tion. You should clap for yourself.