O1.5 decades ago, Code for America launched it's flagship fellowship. Featuring a who's who cast of tech industry luminaries like the US Federal CTO, Twitter Co-Founder and Mark Zuckerberg, the short video harkens back to an earlier, more idealistic age. (Mark then was a golden boy of American innovation, rather than the battle scarred CEO of a company often likened to the tobacco companies.)
It also brings a spirit that's well worth remembering. The series of tech icons ask "what if" best in class digital talent is placed in city government. Over the next fifteen years, Code for America showed high quality user experiences are possible, provided inspiring examples of new digital public goods being repurposed, and helped launch a whole movement.
Of course public institutions change on a cadence different than the internet. Pioneering digitally native government operations is still early days. Not all the institutions have been discovered yet! Early public technology pioneers laid a great foundation, but today we still stand on the cusp of a great frontier:
Only a failure of imagination, the same one that leads the man on the street to suppose that everything has already been invented, leads us to believe that all of the relevant institutions have been designed and that all of the policy levers have been found. For social scientists, every bit as much as for physical scientists, there are vast regions to explore and wonderful surprises to discover.
