The Takeaway: What Tech Can Do for Local Governments, Pandemic Edition

Things are starting to get really fun for those of us who report on the tech industry. In a few weeks, Apple is facing an antitrust trial in its battle with Epic Games. The court filings are starting to spill out.

The public and private tech markets are on such a tear that shenanigans surrounding new deals are cropping up faster than ever.

As many of you know, one investor is on an extraordinary streak. Tiger Global has invested in more than 60 companies in the first quarter of the year. That’s four deals a week! Kate profiled the firm, its unusual approach and the old and new faces calling the shots.

Silicon Valley and D.C. Post-Coronavirus

There was a period early in the pandemic when I wondered if Covid-19 would be the crisis that finally pushed Silicon Valley and Washington together. Google was promising to develop a website with nationwide information about testing and risk levels. In a rare collaboration to help the government and health officials, Apple and Google said they would team up on contact-tracing apps.

Not much has come of the efforts, essentially because a lot of overpromising went on in the rush to announce a response. But behind the scenes, some technologists have had a major impact on the Covid-19 response since the start of the pandemic.

A year ago, former Facebook and Stripe engineer and executive Raylene Yung gathered together friends to answer an important question: Could a nonprofit, powered by volunteers savvy in philanthropy and tech, fix the antiquated and convoluted websites and systems local government use to communicate key information about vaccines, voting, safety and more?

The group wouldn’t charge for its services, but companies would pay for any recommended software they used. Rather than multimillion-dollar packages from major tech companies, that software would often be a hodgepodge of tools from younger companies like JotForm, Airtable, Zapier, Slack, Render, Netlify and WordPress.

A year later, the group, U.S. Digital Response, has taken on more than 285 projects, completed by more than 700 volunteers. In total, thousands have raised their hands to offer aid. They’ve helped with vaccine rollouts, distributing unemployment insurance and more.

“The public sector and government tech is really inscrutable to most of Silicon Valley. Even if you are interested, it is not that easy to help local governments with their technology,” Yung told me recently.

USDR is trying to fix that by building an organization that combines leaders from tech and government and by simplifying their tech challenges. “We ask: How do you use the tools you already have?” she says.

Three other co-founders joined Yung, all of whom at one time served as U.S. deputy chief technology officers: Cori Zarek, executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation; Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America; and Ryan Panchadsaram of Kleiner Perkins.

They’ve raised what Yung describes as “startup capital” from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and Schmidt Futures. Now they are looking for $10 million more to fund them for the next two years and fuel their expansion beyond Covid-19 challenges.

USDR started gathering steam around the election. States needed to update their constituents quickly on vote-by-mail procedures. A team at USDR built a new site on WordPress with the information and turned it into a template that 10 other states utilized. Yung said clients often expressed confusion at how inexpensive the recommended technology tools were.

“We would tell clients that some software would cost $500 a month, and they expected $50,000,” she said.

As I was talking to Yung, I couldn’t help but think back to the launch of Healthcare.gov, the website for the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. When the site crashed spectacularly, President Obama reached out directly to Silicon Valley engineers and rushed them out to D.C. to come up with a plan to save the website. They got it working quickly. But that one-off hasn’t paved the way for much meaningful collaboration between government and tech since then.

Yung thinks part of the problem is that local and state government clients aren’t attractive to software firms because they don’t scale.

Tech companies want to “acquire small customers in the beginning [in the hopes] they will grow up to be big whales,” she said, but “if you acquire 10,000 cities, it isn’t like they are going to grow into states. They are going to stay cities.”

Ultimately, that’s the best reason I’ve heard for why there’s not more true collaboration between government and big tech. You see it when it comes to big defense contracts but not much else.

USDR and other organizations offer reason to be hopeful that more collaboration may be coming. Post-pandemic, we are all more connected to our local surroundings. We should have a renewed appreciation for local government services and their struggles.

It’s nice to see one group backed by the tech industry making the most of that alliance. Here’s hoping others will follow.

Upcoming Events:

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