Photo shot by Derek Jensen (Tysto Flickr stream)
Standing amidst the gilded geometries of the Netherland Plaza for the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) 2011 conference held in Cincinnati, some vicarious nostalgia set in for halcyon days of bygone eras. But this French Art Deco plaza, constructed in 1931, was actually a relic of the Great Depression.
And yet, here we are again in a depressed economy, but this time, where do we seek relief from the austerity and budget cuts of recent years? What constructed now will endure the decades? Perhaps it can be community — and the priceless experiences of sharing a smile, a joke, or a proud moment of success with a colleague — now a friend — who you may speak to everyday through email or chat, but rarely in person.
The NAGW conference, fortunately, was one of those rare opportunities to forge community.
Our first in-person experiences of the NAGW began on an early Tuesday morning when eager, excited government webmasters entered the room to hear from Karl Fogel about how to open source their apps. Susan Christophersen and Ron Pringle, Secretary and President of NAGW, respectively, warmly greeted us and welcomed us to the conference. Later in Karl’s session, Ron would share out to everyone via social code hosting platform GitHub and a newly minted OSS license, his National Weather Service weather data parser application, specially designed for government website use.
That evening was the welcome reception. A glance across the room showed groups of various folks laughing, and eagerly chatting. Many bonded over stories of finally matching a “face” to the name that they had seen on the listserv but only now had a chance to make the in-person connection. Outsiders though we were, Susan made sure to introduce Jeremy, Karl, and I to as many people as possible, and at the reception we even ran into Seattle’s Bruce Blood, with whom several Code for America fellows have worked alongside for the 2010 Seattle projects.
Whomever we were not able to meet at the reception, we would have plenty of other chances to meet at the lunches and breakfasts held every day. Never one to miss good food, I usually headed down to eat early, and on Wednesday, got a chance to sit down at a table where folks were discussing the next set of talks coming up, and which one they should attend. As I approached the table, I overheard: “But what does that mean? Hosting and deploying? Sounds interesting.” Before you knew it, I was chatting with a webmaster from Texas about free software now available to governments — what Jeremy and I would be talking about that afternoon. Then, during the lunchtime remarks, Ron related to the crowd about Code for America, and about the talks Jeremy and I would be giving that afternoon. As I looked across the lunch crowd, I realized with some anxiety — people really might come to my talk, people will be hoping to get answers, and I hoped, I could give them what they were looking for.
Then suddenly, at around 2 p.m. on an Wednesday afternoon, the room filled with many different faces and I was standing in front of them all. Young people, older people, people in the front, people in the back. People with notepads, people with white glowing apples, and people with stately grey boxes perched in front of them.
And so it began, a talk on code hosting and version control. We had the incredible luck of also having a founding developer of the version control tool Subversion in the room. We’d talk about breaking down barriers — how to access free applications on the web, how to contribute to a Drupal module, how to use these tools during a hackathon, and most of all, how not to be scared to dive in.
So, collaborative coding is not just a West coast hippie thing, it’s an everyone thing — from Reno, Nev. to Aurora, Ill. to the White House. Jeremy’s talk at 4 p.m. that Wednesday, on contributing and benefiting from the Civic Commons collection of applications, only further underscored the growing civic application community when Ron shared with everyone yet another exciting government application.
In the keynotes that followed breakfast through the week, including talks by experts Kristina Halvorson and Jeffrey Zeldman, it was clear that public facing technology encounters many challenges — only one of which is the implementation of infrastructure. On top of that, there’s content issues, design issues, and public user experience issues. All balanced sometimes by a small staff of just a couple of people for one city.
These struggles and challenges, well understood by the NAGW community, made for an exciting and celebratory mood at the Pinnacle awards banquet on Thursday night. The historic Hall of Mirrors ballroom was illuminated by examples of innovative government websites, and we absorbed in the smiles, laughter, and kinship of the earnest people sitting down with us, sharing stories, and sharing their hopes for better government through technology.
In all, it is very exciting that Civic Commons can work with NAGW, as we seek to work with every organization that shares our vision. Maybe, after years of building a community of government technologists, we won’t have a built 49-story art deco skyscraper, but, we will hopefully have created all the same, an enduring aesthetic of collaboration to be cherished for decades to come.
