CfA Brigade Open Letter

An important update from Nicole Neditch and Jen Pahlka:

    http://po.st/cfabrigadeopenletter

Your thoughts?

Notable related news:

Civicist:

http://civichall.org/civicist/recharging-the-brigade-code-for-americas-challenge/

GovTech:

http://www.govtech.com/civic/This-Week-in-Civic-Tech-Code-for-America-Brigade-Faces-Funding-Crisis.html

GCN:

https://gcn.com/articles/2016/07/25/cfa-changes.aspx?m=1

My comments:

In E-Democracy's home base of Minnesota, we've taken on the role of
non-profit fiscal agent and adviser for our local CfA Brigade chapter Open
Twin Cities. Without dedicated volunteer leaders like Bill Bushey and
Alison Link, our efforts to provide a more stable locally based foundation
for civic tech wouldn't mean much. (E-Democracy really is only 5% of the
local effort.)

However, despite the fact that the emergence of coastal national
brands/scopes in civic tech (CfA, Sunlight) made it more difficult to
attract foundation funding for independent civic tech projects like ours in
middle America (Chicage being the foundation-based amazing outlier), this
is on us, each of us in our own communities. Meaning, if we need resources
to build tech for community good or more innovative and open government
beyond our volunteer capacity, those resources need to come first from our
own cities and states. Anything from CfA or national funders would be icing
on the cake.

To seek local revenue, you might have a better chance with existing local
non-profit fiscal agents or in theory non-profit status (but ugh, that's a
big step with lots of paperwork). Open Twin Cities $40K plus of revenue
over the years has come primarily from helping government agencies host
hackathons (and further event sponsorship) and their savings is from not
spending out everything brought in from each event. We've essentially paid
people at a discount for event labor, not just material expenses. Without
core people being compensated for major event work, people would burn out
and event sponsors would likely not become repeat sponsors.

As a former leader of e-gov for the State of Minnesota, if government
innovation is your core motivation, our governments/tax dollars should be
supporting our goals. (Ironically, I am personally more inspired by tech
for civic good in the broader community.) I think we could have an
exponential impact by devising efforts to bring public funding into civic
tech as applied to the public sector state by state. You probably can't
fund Brigades directly this way, but you could fund the ecology, university
efforts, and some competitive grants programs open to non-profits, etc.

While it appears that the hey day of open gov/community innovation
foundation funding is over, if I were a national funder I'd invest heavily
in the Brigade. I'd fund a matching fund to challenge local foundations to
match $10K mini-grants and $5K event funds available only if area
governments co-sponsor events, trainings, etc. with similar amounts. To get
the local support ball rolling, we need to make investing in local/state
civic tech a thing. I'd also fund efforts to create model legislation for
state by state investments in open gov/civic tech and work for it's
adoption. I'd also invest in efforts seeking to ID opportunities to attach
"democratic strings" to sources of federal funding. Finally, I'd fund more
research of the space, including a survey of what motivates the front line
folks across the civic tech movement to go beyond the experts and leaders.
Of course, I am not part of a funder ... unless someone reading this wants
to hire me to help them spread some investments. :-)

Thanks,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org