When Salesforce's Customer Company video explained that customers shouldn’t "suffer bad service, broken products, long waits, or endless phone trees,” I was immediately reminded of past interactions with government service agencies. Nevertheless, since joining Code for America, I'm beginning to see my relationship with government in a completely different light.

The reality is that I am not a customer of government -- I'm a citizen. Rather than treating government like a vending machine, where we put in taxes and get out services -- citizens can do so much more to make this country great. 

Changing the Citizen Experience with Apps

For the last three years, Code for America's fellowship program has placed talented developers, designers, researchers, and product managers in city governments to help improve public services. Recently, Code for America Fellows were embedded in New Orleans to help tackle the issue of blight -- a challenge the city had been grappling with since the 70’s and made worse by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There was no simple way for residents to understand what was going on with the property next to them, let alone the city’s 35,000 blighted and abandoned properties. After intensive research, months of data management and multiple product iterations the fellows created BlightStatus -- an app that provides residents up-to-date property information.

Said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, "For the first time in the City of New Orleans’ history, residents will be able to review up-to-date property information directly from City records without stepping foot inside City Hall."

Not only did this project help track centralized data for city officials, but for the first time citizens could proactively participate in the blight conversation. Armed with knowledge about nearby homes in their neighborhood, they could lend their voice to the process and advocate for demolition or salvation. It moved the conversation between citizens and government from a complaint to a conversation. And that's just one of the apps the fellows built that year, and one that city officials will never forget.

While the apps coming out of the fellowship groups are notable, perhaps the coolest outcome of the program is the way that these teams help government and community innovators keep the momentum of civic tech alive. From Honolulu's dedication to employee tech skills training, to Philadelphia’s creation of a New Urban Mechanics Office to the 40+ nationwide volunteer brigades deploying civic apps as we speak -- we're quickly becoming a country of doers.

As a Salesforce and Heroku partner, we're excited to see who will architect, design and code the next chapter of American history. And we're excited to see how we the people -- the techies, the city officials and the community leaders -- will continue to improve our cities.

For more on the fellowship, visit codeforamerica.org/fellows.