opening Keynote by Jackie Kazil

Speaker 1: Hi. How's everyone doing today? Good. Okay, so today I'm gonna talk about uh how tech has been changing in government Okay, so how often do you interact with government? When I say government, I mean your government. It could be local, it could be state, it could be federal. in one year. So uh for folks who do it uh twice a year, raise your hands Okay, got a couple. For folks who do it once a year. Doing something with government. Okay, got a couple, couple more. And no zero.

Speaker 1: Okay, a few or zero. Do you guys file taxes? So uh in the past uh oh I'm missing my notes. In the past 12 months, this is on average how many people have signed into federal government websites. I asked the taxes question because most folks are only interacting with government to do their taxes. However, there are

Speaker 1: at the time of the creation of the slide, there were For the US federal government, 161,495 people at one point on US government websites with 1. 4 billion users for every 90 days. There's three of you in this room right now. I'm just kidding. You can find this information on analytics. usa. gov. And you can dig into where people are, how people are using government websites on the federal level. So things are happening, a lot of things are happening. in on the state, on the local, on the national, and international governments.

Speaker 1: There is on the local level, a lot of the initiatives include Code for America, which was spoken about at PyCon. Um there's the creation of CIO and CDO positions, CD CIO being chief innovation officer, not information officer. and uh chief data officer positions at various cities like Detroit, LA, New York. So, why am I talking to you today? Because I'm on a mission. I get really, really excited about this. I'm on a mission to get folks involved in public service and to understand this area better. Passionate public servants are the cornerstone of government. If you are not excited to be a part of helping out your government and the things that you can do by the end of this talk

Speaker 1: At least you will know two things. One, how Django is used in government, and two, some of the resources that you can find coming out of government in the open source world. So let's talk about government. So, who am I? So, I've done a lot of stuff in the Django and Python community. But since I'm here in my official capacity today, I will talk about my professional self a little bit more. I'm a former journalist. That's how I came to Django. I worked at the Washington Post, where Adrian Halavadi worked, and inherited some of his code. When it was uh pre -1. 0. Um and uh I started in journalism because of the civic mission, the idea of empowering

Speaker 1: people. and empowering citizens to be able to make decisions. And currently I work at 18F, which I'll talk about later, which is a part of the federal government. To me, it's the same mission. It's the ability to empower people to make good decisions and to be able to offer them and get them the services that they need. But ATF is just one part of the story. But first of all, who are you? Oh, that doesn't seem to be showing up well. Okay. Well You can this is a map of Django Khan attendees. Oh, there we go. I did that on purpose. Um the DjangoCon organizers were uh

Speaker 1: uh were uh nice enough to let me use this from their invites, um, because I wanted to know who I was talking to. And while my talk is mostly what's happening on the public sector in the US federal government, it's important to know that this movement's happening all across the world. Every government entity has one thing in common, how to best serve their people. Governments around the world are exchanging ideas Each sovereignty is also made of a unique set of beliefs, to say that my cultural beliefs in the US are different from other cultural beliefs in other countries and also regionally. Some things translate from culture to culture while others do not.

Speaker 1: Varying views on privacy, for example, and trust. What do you trust your government to do? What do you trust your government not to do? Varying structures of operation within the government had an effect on the approaches that various governments and entities have taken. Centralized government offices versus independent and uh government offices. So through the US example, I hope you learned something today on the impact that you can make on your country, on your municipality and uh to make the be to make it a better place for the people who are like you. In all, e even in the private sector We still have this mission. How do we best serve the people? The people being our customers.

Speaker 1: And as I said, this is happening all around the world. If you go on uh uh government. github. com forward slash community, uh you can search to you can search a whole bunch of various entities On the local, state, international level, and you can see who's doing what. You will see a huge amount of countries located internationally I can't talk about every one of them today, so I will highlight one. It's kind of considered the leader in the international realm, which is gov. uk They launched in February 2012, and they're sort of considered one of the leading examples in government digital services.

Speaker 1: So I'm going to rewind a little bit and start telling you what's happening on the federal side of the U. S. So the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is uh was before the the launch of gov. uk and specifically Django is used in the Library of Congress's repository development center. Um Including Django, Python, Solar, Golang, Redis. Projects include, one of them is called Chronicling America, which you can easily Google. It's an old newspaper archive. That's a project uh that I had worked on after leaving journalism. Uh another project that uses Django is uh E -deposit, electronic deposit, it is the electronic intake of content into the Library of Congress.

Speaker 1: Before this point in time People would literally walk up to the Library of Congress with hard drives or mail in hard drives. And still to this day, some folks are doing that depending on the content, depending on the size of the content. But this was the foundation to allow people to file electronically for copyright and then get it classified in the Library of Congress. And then next is the World Digital Library. The World Digital Library is housed in the Library of Congress. Some of you might know one of the major developers on this, which is Chris Adams. He's a longtime member of the Python and Django community. And he seems to contribute under the radar to a lot of things, but yet

Speaker 1: um I couldn't find one specific thing that was like his his wheelhouse. But he's um he's actually been a mentor of mine. He's super awesome. Another one that has been a leader has been the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau If you've never heard of this, you should know about it. They're great. They were created on July 21st, 2011. as a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2012, 2000 I mean sorry, 2007, 2008, and the subsequent uh Great Recession. The consumer uh consumer they handle consumer protection in the financial sector. Jurisdictions include banks, credit unions, security firms, payday lenders, uh

Speaker 1: mortgage service operations, and foreclosed relief debt collectors, etc. While the Library of Congress's Repository Development Center existed before CFPB, CFPB was an interesting use case because it was a greenfield project. It was an agency where an agency didn't exist before Which doesn't happen very often. And so they were able to really push the far the bar forward on what's happening in government. This is a great app. It's built in Django. You can find it on CFPB's GitHub repo, owning a home API. Basically, you can look up unbiased interest rates for your geographical area. I have to say while I was making these slides,

Speaker 1: I went and I had some some links from CFPB and I went back and when I saw this I immediately sent it to like three friends who are trying to buy a house right now, including my mom who's trying to refinance And I I thought it was fabulous. So it's not necessarily you're getting your interest rates from a private entity where you don't know what's happening in the background with respect to advertising dollars. Um so it can give you a good baseline for what your expectations should be. Another project is e-regulations. E-regs, for short e-regs, e-regs make this project makes regulations easier to read and digest. and easier to navigate. The title matches the section.

Speaker 1: The title matches the section and the URL updates as well. So you can send direct URLs to a specific section of the regulation. Which, as you can imagine, as CFPB comes out and is trying to regulate some of the financial markets or some of the things that are happening and protect consumers, this is a great way for people to share information. And uh so you can see how like the title updates. Honestly, I I I this is eye candy. I was really excited about the slide moving. Yeah, so uh President Obama said we must harness new ideas and technology to remake government This was on January 21st, 2013.

Speaker 1: As part of this, he launched the Presidential Innovation Fellows, which was where I went after the Library of Congress. It was it was established in 2012. The photo above is the first round of fellows. And the purpose of the Presidential Innovation Fellows is to bring innovation economy into government. This is the reference to some of the private sector stuff, by pairing talented diverse technologists and innovators with top civil servants. And change makers within the federal government to tackle some of our nation's biggest challenges. So some of the projects that have been worked on are the Blue Button Initiative I was really excited when I saw this in the private, like in like from my doctor.

Speaker 1: You can now download your own health records and share them electronically. That's through the Blue Button Initiative. It increases accessibility to electronic health records. The Green Button Green Button Connect. reduces waste and shrinks bills by providing consumers information on how their power, what their power usage is, and where it's coming from. Notalone. gov is actually a very interesting case. Notalone. gov was a White House initiative built in less than 30 days. And it was to improve the transparency and information sharing of sexual assault prevention and enforcement data for schools, for students in schools. And as you will know, I uh

Speaker 1: skipped over GOQ because that was my project. Um So uh during my fellowship I worked on a project called GeoQ, which is an open source disaster well it's an open source mapping Tool where you can do mapping workflows, but as uh it was used in this context and created in this context for disaster response and recovery It crowdsources geotag photos to coordinate response. The original idea came to increase the speed of damage assessments. When Hurricane Sandy hit, it takes a multiple effort from multiple folks in multiple jurisdictions to be able to assess the amount of damage on a house. At the same time, people are sleeping on cots and don't have a home, but they needed people to physically go to the house.

Speaker 1: Using imagery from public from social media and using imagery from the civil air patrol who does uh flyovers. after a disaster, we could start to uh start to identify properties that were in such decrepit condition that we can then issue money to be able to get people on their feet faster and back to their life. This project also led the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to join GitHub. Which is really exciting because it paved the way for intelligent community entities um to be able to post repost publicly. So, this this is really exciting to me.

Speaker 1: The changing landscape is saving lives and saving money And Django is behind a lot of the work that's happening. On August 17th, 2015, which was just a couple days ago. The president signed an executive order which made the Presidential Innovation Fellows a permanent entity within the government. Now, ATF, which is where I work. ATF came after the Presidential Innovation Fellows. AT<unk>F was launched on March 14, 2014. It's a digital consultancy for the US government inside the US government. What does that mean? We are a subcomponent Of an agency called the General Services Administration.

Speaker 1: And as such, we do uh we work with other agencies and help empower them with digital services. Currently, we're working with a more than a dozen agencies to help them deliver on their missions in user-center, agile, open, and a data-driven way. We ship code, practices, and culture. So code. We are open by default. You can find all of our code here. And there are so many repos that it's hard to find repos. So if you are looking for something specific, please let me know or I will answer the question afterwards. But one of the great things about being open by default, basically you can see I'm working on a project.

Speaker 1: If you were to go to my GitHub history, I published it a couple days ago. And it's a really dirty prototype for a Data API using Django. So yeah, you can it's not the people aren't we're not scared about sort of throwing things out there. If anything is not public, there needs to be a reason why, and then it's published that it's specifically not public. So one of the cool one of the coolest projects, in my opinion, is open FEC. FEC data was hard to, FEC is the Federal Election Commission. And they handle uh federal financial data for elections. And it having this API allows the American people to better understand what's going on with elections and how they work

Speaker 1: by browsing reports document data, individual donations, who's donating to whom, granular spending data. It was launched actually in July 2015. It was not built in Django, but it was built in Flask. So who here has a fourth grader? I'm really excited about this. Fourth graders. Yes! Oh, but you don't live in the US, do you? Oh, that's kind of s I'm sorry. I was excited about it until that. Well , Every Kid in the Park was launched in September 2015. This was built in Django, so it just launched. It was really exciting.

Speaker 1: Every kind of park gives U. S. fourth graders free access to all federal lands. and water, including national parks, forests, wildlife refuge, refuge refugees, and marine sanctuaries for a full year. Families and friends can go for free as well. So I need to find a fourth grader. If if you have a fourth grader, uh if we can talk afterwards. So it's at everykidinapark. gov. These are some students from Samuel W Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School, which received Every Kid in a Park Pass. And as I said, it was built in Django. One interesting thing about this project was the special thought to be put put into the audience.

Speaker 1: The audience being fourth graders. So the text was written for fourth graders. Fourth graders are too young to be on Facebook, so things like linking off to Facebook wasn't an option. It was really vetted and thoughtfully made to make sure that it was audience appropriate to get kids involved in the national parks. So it said code, here's practices. Some examples of practices are ATF guides. The link was a little bit long, so I created a bit. ly link, bit. ly ATF guides. Including there, you can find various uh guides on various topics. Um the one I'm most excited about is accessibility We have

Speaker 1: sort of working groups and I was one of the members of the accessibility working group, the idea of making websites accessible to everyone. Analytics, agile practices, APIs. Some of them you might not need, but there are some great resources in there that you can refer to. Automated testing play cookbook, automated testing playbook. content design methods, front-end grouplets, which is how we sort of spin up groups, which is sort of how we spin up sort of working groups to get things like this done, which aren't direct projects like every kit in a park. And then how we handle open source. And if you would like to make suggestions or updates, you can with a pull request or submit a ticket and we can address that for you.

Speaker 1: So, um, practices. Teaching agile using Legos. Uh, this is really exciting. Um if I haven't said that enough. So while the guides are open-ended, we also do formal teachings as part of the work we do. For example, ATF consultant Zach Cohen. led a workshop to teach the importance of agile methodologies to folks who weren't used to practicing agile methodologies. The story he gave to folks was as an office worker I want a laptop stand so I have more desk space. And the task was to build a laptop stand out of Legos. It teaches, it taught these people to communicate early, communicate often, and communicate continuously. So you have a laptop stand that's built as opposed to a whole desk.

Speaker 1: Culture. Um another, because it's hard to the link's a little bit long. I made a bit late link. ATNF uh C O C for our code of conduct example. Um this is uh Very exciting. We actually have a code of conduct. From my knowledge, this is the first code of conduct, not just legal requirements, but first code of conduct within the federal government. It was inspired by 10 different multiple code of conduct and legal requirements from Bridge Foundry, Open Hatch, the Python community, PyLadies, ADA initiative, and more. If you have any opinions or suggestions, please feel free to submit.

Speaker 1: We want people to participate. And last but not least, the United States Digital Services. It was founded a little bit after ATF. It was founded on August 11th. 2014, and it is a part of the White House, White House's Office of Management and Budget. The mission is to improve and simplify digital experience that people and businesses have with their government So one of the uh one of the things that they're working on is improving services for Americans' veterans. Um USDS stood up a team at the VA. And to create a simple and easy to navigate VA website, also

Speaker 1: to improve the benefits claims experience for veterans. USDS is working towards a more efficient and effective VA that delivers for America's veterans. And as some of you, some of you might know, Alex Gaynor, he was recruited for this effort. So Alex Gaynor is now living in D. C. he moved. Um, and is working at the Veterans Administration. And interestingly enough, I didn't know this when he was hired. Um and we had a meet and greet for the new team at the Veterans Administration and uh Rootbeer Floats. And um I turn around and Alex Gaynor is standing there and I was like, what are you doing here? You're you live in DC now? And he goes, hi, I'm part of the new team.

Speaker 1: So that's how I found out. Alex was in uh uh Alex was in uh DC and I'm I'm really excited that he joined the government. Another thing that has been created is the USDS Playbook, which is found at playbook. cio. gov. This creates a set of plays for CIOs more on the business side to be able to understand things that need to happen in a very high-level way. Things like default by open, understand what the people need, understand the whole experience from start to finish, make things simple and intuitive. Build the service using agile and iterative practices, bring in experienced teams, choose a modern technology stack, deploy in a flexible hosting environment.

Speaker 1: Automate testing and deployments, manage security and privacy through reusable processes, use data to drive decisions. A lot of these are things that we take that some of us might take for granted. as yeah of course these are things that you're supposed to do. But this sort of gives these these recomm these plays give CIOs in government uh a guiding force by which to make decisions that follow modern uh modern technology stacks and methodologies. And sometimes it takes a village. This is really exciting. This was a partnership between ATF and USDS. And white I'm gonna get all government now.

Speaker 1: White House OMB Memorandum M1513, a policy to require secure connections across federal websites and web services Was signed in June 2015. What is that? Creating making HTTP only standard in the federal government and pushing, making sure all federal agencies Move in that way. Why is this exciting? Because people like you helped make this possible and to create this policy to say that That this should be a thing that we do, and so therefore making the recommendations to make it an official thing with policymakers.

Speaker 1: So this image is an image of the ATF team in our very accurate map of the United States. Um we ran out of room. Uh so we talked about 18F and USDS, the VA, CFPB. Um Our folks uh in a lot of these uh agencies are remote teams spread across the country Folks who've joined us from the Python community include Christine from LA, one of the founders of PyLadies. Kathleen Devlin from Dayton who runs Pye, Ohio, and Julia Elman

Speaker 1: in Raleigh, which is very close to Austin in our very accurate map Known for Pi Ladies and Girl Develop It. And then of course a couple of the Presidential Innovation Fellows have joined. Also, folks active in non-Python communities, such as Sarah Allen, who's the founder of Railsbridge, she's located in San Francisco. And we come from a folks who've joined come from a wide variety of backgrounds. This is a uh image of the backgrounds from the 2014 Presidential Innovation Fellows. This is a having a folks from a wide variety of backgrounds is important.

Speaker 1: We talk about diversity and diversity at work in in many different ways. And why? Why is this important? Because we are representing a large constituency of folks. For the people, by the people. This applies to everyone in every sector, whatever people you are serving. You cannot truly advocate for the users of your systems that you create if you do not represent the users. Our audience is America and everyone in America. Now um uh last night um uh I don't know, 1 a. m. or so.

Speaker 1: Um I got a video in my email box from Todd Park for you guys, very exciting. Uh he basically created on an iPhone Um and he asked me he asked me uh what he asked me what time my talk was and and I was like, well it's 9 a. m. uh central and um And uh and I said, you know, if it doesn't work out, that's okay. But this guy stayed up making this video for you guys on his iPhone. And he is um technical advisor to the White House and the former second um CTO of the United States. Now, this is where it gets tricky

Speaker 2: If you're watching this video, I'm guessing we've just listened to my good friend Jackie Casino, a personal through , talk about the growing movement to build a more awesome government for the people, black people. It's a movement doing amazing better, working to end homelessness among our nation's veterans, helping to secure the future of our seniors, helping to improve disaster recovery response across the country, and much, much, much more. It's a movement powered by amazing people like Jackie, deeply gifted developers, designers, data scientists, and product managers with tremendous skills and parts the size of Jupiter. And someone that needs you. If you're a skilled developer or designer digital services, please consider serving our country. You're one of the growing number of avenues for you to do so. as a presidential innovation column, or by doing a tour of duty as a member of ATF or the U.

Speaker 2: S. Digital Service. Our country needs you. Together, we the people can build an ever better government for the American people. Thanks so much for your consideration and take the best of care.

Speaker 1: So yeah, so I've told you a lot about the work that's been happening. Um I told you uh you can find work that's happening outside the US. I like I said, there's a lot of coordination between um There's a lot of coordination between various countries. I've personally chatted with folks who work on the UK side. There's folks in Indonesia, there's folks in Australia that we've coordinated with But it's not just at the federal level, it's also at the local level, your local community, and empowering the local citizens to be able to make decisions. So if you're interested more in local stuff, I encourage you to go back to the PyCon talk by Catherine Bracie to learn a little bit more about efforts like Code for America.

Speaker 1: But uh but yeah there's a there's a lot of bit work to do on all levels. Um so I hope that I hope that after you leave today um you will start to get involved, if not Obviously, not everyone can just pick up and leave their job, at least as a side effort, because we need We need help. We need lots and lots of help. There's lots of work to do. There are over, there are about a hundred federal agencies. And I just told you about a handful. This is not to say there aren't efforts happening at other agencies, but uh this is this is not to say that there aren't uh agent uh efforts happening at other agencies.

Speaker 1: But there's just a lot of work in every corner. And whatever your interest is in the local or federal government, please come and talk to me and I will tell you about various opportunities, whether you're interested in financial, whether you're interested in um data, for example, census, whether you're interested in you know helping veterans or cultural institutions, either in your country or in ours. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Jackie, for an excellent talk. We do have time for questions. I'm going to kick off of one myself. There's clearly lots of things that ATF could be involved with. Do you reach out to agencies or do you wait for them to come to you for help?

Speaker 1: Yes. So it's often a combination. We have something called a project intake meeting where we discuss sort of some of the emails that have come in and we review them. ATF is run off of agreements with other agencies. um which are called interagency agreements. And within those agreements we write in stuff like agile, we write in stuff like open source by default and have a 30-day exit clause. So if the relationship doesn't work out We have a way to exercise it, but we've never we've never had a situation where we had to exercise it. We've always been sort of able to get through things together.

Speaker 4: Hi, uh seeing your GeoQ project was thrilling to me. I just like to say that uh I'm I'm from New York and seeing a lot of the Tech community's response to Sandy was pretty vapid, let's hack the storm, and a lot of things came out of that that didn't end up helping people. Uh so it was a real thrill to see what you did uh and thank you for that. Uh my question is how did you do qualitative analysis on the photos? So to say These photos were taken and so there's more damage here than there is over here.

Speaker 1: Sure. Um so while I was working on that project specifically, um we hadn't got up to that point in the process. So I can't really speak to it. However, if you want to see me afterwards, I can provide you contact information. um to the folks that are currently uh working on it or um you can file a github ticket in their repo since it's open and I can point you to that um and they can they can answer your question.

Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Hi

Speaker 5: Jackie. I'm Carol, you know that. We're the corner where Kara was in San Diego, just at the very bottom. Uh-huh. And I'm wondering You know, I found out about the ATF guides from Julia back in February and they are outstanding. Um I highly, highly recommend everybody take a look at it. I'm kind of thinking off the cuff at the moment, but you know, now that we have Pylladies Remote, maybe it would be nice to do a series on the guides that relate like a specific guide like accessibility with um you know a topic on actual development.

Speaker 1: Like like anchor asynchronous teams and remote work?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Well

Speaker 1: specific or

Speaker 5: yeah, or like San Diego, we have a lot of veterans that come back. And uh we have uh at the Fab Lab grants for re-entry. I wonder if there's a way beyond just Code for America to engage people within those communities that the projects serve to actually contribute.

Speaker 1: Sure. I think I mean I think the the I think the closest thing I have seen to that is the local offices of Code for America, which is like Code for DC, Code for I I'm sure there's a code for San Francisco. Right. Code for Los Angeles. And then internationally, code for all.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Speaker 1: Um and when you go to those so Code for America itself has uh like the the fellowship program, it's a more structured program. When you go to the local ones, um you walk in and you say, I'm gonna work on this project, who wants to help me?

Speaker 5: Right. Um

Speaker 1: and you can use uh you can sort of use that as your umbrella to like reach out to people.

Speaker 5: So is that the same or different than Code for America

Speaker 1: Um I believe it's under the umbrella of Code for America. Okay, cool. Um for example, like uh Code for America has a summit every year and all the brigade captains from the city from the cities go to uh go to the summit as like default. So they're like it's like one big happy family.

Speaker 5: Got it. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no problem

Speaker 3: So if there are no more questions, let's thank Jackie again for a great talk.