e-Estonia ... Started presenting digital lifestyle. A lifestyle where citizens can trust the government, so the government is usually transparent when it comes to processing information, where most of the services are delivered online through digital channels, and the people don't have to hassle with any paperwork.

That's Anna Piperal, one of the ambassadors for e-Estonia. As she explains it, in Estonia, citizens carry just one document, an ID card that allows access to a blockchain encrypted hub with documents pertaining to every area of life. e-Estonia has everything. Your passport, driver's license, birth certificate, car registration, health insurance card, along with prescriptions, doctor's notes, and even your grades from college.

You plug in the card, you put in the pin code, and the system identifies you because of this encryption happening on the back end. You can see the list of services from different areas of life. It's like a one-stop shop that collects all the links to different services.

With citizens and the government using one central system that has all of your information, tasks can be done in a matter of minutes. Need a new passport? Just log on, select your birth certificate and driver's license, hit send and boom, you are all set. Individuals have complete control over who sees and uses their information. If you want to apply for a loan, for example, the bank has to request access to your pay stubs and only after you choose to grant it will they be able to view those documents and those documents only. The bank won't be able to see your health records, your address, or car payments if you don't get them permission. With e-Estonia every citizen owns their data and how it's used. Because E-Estonia is built on blockchain, every time someone logs on, views a file, or request access to a document, it's recorded on a permanent public database. Anna argues that it's a more transparent system. One where the government is better held accountable for the storage and exchange of a citizen's data.

In Estonia, not only can I look into the population registry and see what is exactly the information they've collected about me, and also see how exactly this was used. Who was accessing this data from other state institutions? This already gives me so much more control, and security when it comes to the relationship of the state and the citizen. For my own personal protection, and from the data protection purposes, having identified the identity, like we have in the form of the ID card, has really opened new opportunities to more trust and more transparent operations, and plus saving everyone a lot of time.

Okay, so why doesn't America just go ahead and build an e-America, so we never have to wait in line, or fill out a physical form again? Well, it's not just that developing software, building a platform, educating people about it, and getting people comfortable with it takes time. A system like this requires a certain relationship between citizens and the government. It requires trust.

Over 70% of people use the ID card on a monthly basis, constantly. Really, this has been life changing for Estonians. I know many starting to, who moved abroad for some reason, and they're stressing out publicly about the bureaucracies of the world. But for local people here in many cases, it's hard for them to value what they have as they are still used to it. They're kind of grown with it. It's used very natural.

I'm Claire Evans, and this is You, a podcast about the intersection of technology, humanity, and identity, brought to you by Okta. This is episode four, and we're talking about government and citizenship with the founder of Code for America.

Hi. I'm Jennifer Pahlka. I run an organization called Code for America. I worked for a while at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, starting something called the United States Digital Service. I work in government in a number of ways. I serve on the Defense Innovation Board, and I like to work with state and local government.

Tell me, how does Code for America work?

Well, today, what Code for America does, really, is build government services that are so good that they're surprising. They're surprising for the people who use them, and they're effective for the people in government to get the outcomes that they intend. You talk about what's your favorite app on your phone? What really makes your life run more easily? How well does that app work? Compare it to how most government digital services work today. We're much closer to that favorite app on your phone. We build services that inspire people, like a different way of applying for food assistance, a different way to clear a criminal record, and then, we help other people in government when they see that this is better. Not just for the user, but for government. Then, we help them learn how to do that themselves. Then, we build a community of people around those ideas ... Who say this is really important to the future of our country. Let's spread these ideas, and get more people inside and outside of government practicing them.

You said once that we cannot reinvent government if we do not reinvent citizenship. What does that mean?

Well, I think we keep otherizing government and saying this is someone else's fault. You see that the problems that hold government back, that make it risk averse, people like to complain about things like procurement. Procurement rules make government technology bad. I mean, that's an overstatement, but forgive the slight overstatement. It makes it very hard to do good technology. Those rules were put in place because we the people thought we shouldn't trust government. We shouldn't trust people in government, and maybe for good reason. But we the people created the problem, so we the people need to fix it. If we don't start to think about ourselves differently, our role in government, not just in ... The rules and regulations that govern government, but also our role in fixing the problems in our own communities, then, we're not going to get out of this. But I think we can.

Is there a culture clash that happens when a bunch of dynamic tech people enter the government space? What are those conversations like?

Sure. Culture clash is what it's all about, in a certain sense. But there's also this incredibly wonderful thing that happens when people have been working in models that are tough to get good results from. You create a space for them to do it in a new approach. A new model. We call it delivery-driven government. But it's basically it's just a user-centered iterative and data driven way. That dynamism gets unleashed. Then, you have a beautiful culture meld of the tech skills, and the incredible passion of public servants, so both.

What are some projects that you're really excited about right now that Code for America is doing?

Well, we started, several years ago, trying to understand why California has this terrible participation gap in food assistance. By participation gap, what I mean is we have a federal program called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In California, it's just known as CalFresh. Yet, something like 35-40% of the people who are eligible to take advantage of it were not on the program. That's one of the lowest ... Biggest participation gaps in the country. In fact, only Wyoming had a bigger gap than California, when we started.

We were going, "What's going on here? This is not only good for the individual. It's good for communities. It's the program most associated with better health and education outcomes for kids," for instance. One of the things we looked at, well, we looked at a lot of things. But it was really obvious that the online application form, the way that you would apply if you weren't going to go sit in an office and stand in line, et cetera, just doesn't really work very for people. With all due respect ... It takes about an hour to fill out, or maybe a little bit less. It asks over 200 questions. Some of those questions are not only unnecessary, but kind of assume you're a criminal. I find them insulting. I know other people do. The application doesn't work at all on a mobile phone. If you, there's a high correlation between low income and not having broadband Internet at home, so you might not be able to do it at work.

If you go to a library, well, at the library, the computers time out after 30 minutes. This application doesn't let you save your work. How are you going to get through an application that takes almost an hour? We built a mobile-first ... Streamlined ... Plain language application form that allows you to not only just ... Submit your application in about seven minutes, but also, upload your documents, 'cause you can use iPhone's camera to take a picture of your driver's license, your pay stub, whatever. This was a crazy experiment, say about three and a half years ago, just trying something out to see what would happen, and 2019, we'll hit a million users of this. It's definitely this crazy experiment is now closing the participation gap in California, but more importantly, it's showing people that government services can be great. They can be easy to use. They can be easy to understand. They can communicate with users with respect, and treat them with dignity. That's one. I've been quite excited about it for a long time. But the numbers we're getting to right now make me even more proud.

When you're looking for new projects, or projects that you're interested in undertaking, or maybe you're looking for things where there is a service, but there isn't a lot of adoption for whatever reason, what are the sort of spots where you see yourself intervening, in the most successful way?

That's a good question. I think the basic framework we think about is what we call the implementation gap. You see it in GetCalFresh. That's the name of the app, by the way. GetCalFresh is GetCalFresh.org is how you would apply, if you want to go through our side of it. Now, an even starker example of that is another project I happen to also be very excited about right now called ClearMyRecord. It started because we were working in the criminal justice system, and here in California, this is a California story, but there are sort of examples like this in different states, in 2016, we passed something called Proposition 47, and then in 2018, Prop. 64. Prop. 47 made it possible legally to reclassify a whole set of old low level felonies as misdemeanors. Prop. 64 legalized marijuana. In both cases, you have the legal statement, essentially, that if you as someone with a 17 year old pot conviction on your record, that you can, that's actually no ...

Frankly, that's not even a crime anymore ... It should be taken off your record. It's really important that it's taken off your record, because it keeps you from getting a job. It keeps you from student loans. It keeps you from low-income housing. There's only 4,000 things it keeps you from doing, including you can't drive your kids in a carpool ... Or a school outing. There are all these things that just are really debilitating, that having a felony record for something that frankly, we have all decided is pretty minor, and that keeps, tends to keep people in a cycle of persistent poverty and incarceration. Great. We pass these laws. But how do you actually get that off of your record? What we were asking people to do was almost impossible to do. You had to go to a legal clinic between nine and 11 on Tuesdays. Find a form. There's only a paper form. The paper forms are different, county to county. You might have convictions in more than one county. To get that form, you're supposed to go over to the police station ... Request a copy of your rap sheet.

That costs money. Fill out the form. Get a legal support. File it, wait. Show up in court. There's just all of these steps that you and to do, and you can't miss any of them. It takes close to a year. It costs money. Then, hopefully, at least one of your records would be cleared. Well, that meant that several years after the passage of Prop. 47, for instance, we estimate, and others estimate, something like three to five percent of people had even started the process. God knows how many had actually gotten through. If you do the math on that, you're just never going to see the benefit of the law until you take a fundamentally different approach to implementation. The reason I think they hadn't given thought to implementation is that you need a digital service to do that.

We built it. It's very similar to the one I described before ... For food assistance. It's a streamlined easy form that puts things in plain language. We started helping people do this in a much easier way, but then, we had the opportunity to work with a district attorney, and say, "Actually, why do people have to fill out a form at all?" Right? The way to do this is to go to the state database, take all the records down, run an algorithm on them to determine which ones are expungible, or reclassifiable. I'm not a lawyer, so please forgive me if I get some of this stuff wrong.

It sounds right to me.

Change those that are. There's some number of records that district attorneys are going to want to review, because certainly, if you have other much more critical felony convictions, you might not want to do it. But the vast majority of this needs to be changed in the database. You can then upload those records back in, and that's now what we're doing with ClearMyRecord, and it's been a really interesting process, because you see people in government originally just not having even the faith that government knows how to do these things technologically. That's not right. Our government should be competent at technology so that we can govern appropriately, and close the implementation gap.

With the government, I wouldn't feel comfortable having a lot of information out there, but some basic information, such as my date of birth and my name, and maybe the government should identify me by a number. Not a Social Security Number, but a random number, and keep the rest of my information in a private "vault."

When it comes to the government, I don't really want them to have any information. But I don't want anyone to have any information, 'cause once your information's on the web, it's there forever. I don't want people stealing my identity, or using it against me. Our government becomes more and more fascist. I don't trust it.

I think there is the potential for abuse. But at the same time, allowing the government to have some access to private information facilitates to work with the government. It has to be better styled. I don't know if we've reached the right balance, at the moment.

This is something we've been talking a lot about, on this podcast. Whether it's necessary to understand a technology in order to wield it responsibly. There are certain things. I probably will never understand Bitcoin completely. But I could still use it. I think about government officials, senators, perhaps, who don't seem to fully understand what's going on in tech, or-

You're being kind, I think.

I know. Well, I'm trying to be kind. But yeah ... That scares me. But one doesn't necessarily have to understand how something works in order to understand the implications of a technology, necessarily.

Oh, I agree. I'm not a technologist, and I think it's good to know your limits. But I don't think, I think part of what you're talking about is that when you insist that everyone has a deep technical knowledge before they can play in this space, you're just alienating everyone. I see a lot of people in government essentially feeling afraid of looking dumb, or something. We really need to create a much more welcoming space, when we talk about technology. [crosstalk 00:18:25].

Nobody wants to be the person that goes down for saying the Internet is a series of tubes, for example.

I don't think that guy cared at the end of the day, though. We all care.

But is there an educational component, when you're bringing all this fresh blood into government organizations and trying to build systems? Are you sort of also educating government employees, and workers, and elected officials on how these things can be implemented in a way that's beneficial to the people they are serving?

Yeah, absolutely ... But let me put a little bit of nuance on that in two ways. I think the first thing we're doing is proving that it can work, right? Just so one of our pillars is just show what's possible. Some of it is just yes, if you're not living and breathing the technology world, you might now have a sense of what's easy to do and what's hard to do with technology. Realistically, most people today have a cell phone. They have some interaction with technology. They do get that things are possible that were not possible before, but in government, there's just this real pervasive sense that yes, but not in government.

That may be possible outside, but we're not going to be able to do that in here. That's not true. There's no reason you can't. Just showing that. Once you kind of break that open, and break open people's expectations and preconceptions, then, you can sort of move the conversation to a different place. There is certainly some degree of just educating folks about what technology can do in the service of what they're trying to accomplish, right? But I think the thing that we do most more than sort of educate is unlock people, and just tell them ... "Dorothy, at the end, you had the power all along." They had the power. They just need to not be scared about it.

Sure. It's about more than coding. It's about an approach. An ethos. A way of rolling out products. A way of thinking about the user, I suppose. The citizen. The ultimate user is the citizen, and yeah, and a way of understand where you're coming from and actually applying it to a tool at hand. Speaking of citizenship, I suppose ... How do you see citizenship evolving in the digital age? How can we harness technology to make more engaged citizens? Is it about making applications that streamline processes of government? Or, is it something bigger?

Well, I think it starts with making interfaces to government that as we say are simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Because it starts to break down that sense of distance between, and sort of distrust of the institution. We've just got to be able to do a lot, I think, to win people back to government. As they say, "Customer service is the new marketing." It's just we've got to have good interactions with the general public. I would ask people to think about our role as citizens in understanding not just the politics, but the machinery of government. My friend Brian Loeffler said once, "Neglecting the machinery of government is a choice." I think it's easy to decide who made those choices.

I don't think Congress has made great decisions on this. I just don't like they're not incented to deal with the nuts and bolts. No one gets re-elected on procurement reform. But neglecting the machinery of government is a choice that the American people have made, too, and so there's a specific call, I think, to ... Citizenship for people with technology and design skills, and by the way, that's anybody, because anybody can have technology and design skills. To me, it means having part of their career, maybe not all of it, but doing a tour of duty in government. That's standard for, really, high-status careers. Lawyers. In our city, it's part of your career, is you go and work in government for a while. That should become a norm in technology.

I like that. It would certainly demystify a lot of the systems at play. Help people understand what's really going on.

Oh, it completely changes people's view on things. You go in, "Well, I'm going to do this, that, and the other." You're getting, "Oh, this is why it's so hard. Oh, and this is why these laws and rules that seem insane are there in the first place. Oh." You get a lot of empathy. I had never worked in government, when I started Code for America. I sent two classes, two and a half classes, of fellows into City Hall to work before I had ever done that myself. Then, when I went and worked for a year in government, I was like, "Oh, this is really hard." All the fellows were like, "Yeah, we told you that."

I don't think government has complete control over technology. There's so much happening with technology, and so many new inventions and different ways of using technology, and there is no way the government could possibly control what's going on.

I think the government definitely understands technology. All the apps and everything with permission. We're getting tracked at all times, with fingerprints, pictures, face recognition. They definitely understand it. I think they understand it to a point of they take advantage of people. They don't realize they're using stuff for fun, and they're really getting tracked at all times.

When it comes to government and technology, I'd say there's probably a lot of room for improvement, and more understanding on their ends. It seems like our private sector is doing a pretty good job, but the government needs to catch up a little.

I'm Claire Evans, and this is You, a podcast about the intersection of technology and identity. On today's episode, we're talking about the government. Specifically, how it can use technology to better serve we the people. Our guest, Jennifer Pahlka, runs an organization called Code for America that's partnering with the US government to do just that. When you were working under the Obama administration, you briefly touched a project called Login.gov. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

Yeah. Login.gov was been in the works for a while, but the wonderful team at 18F, which is part of the federal government, great, world-class technologists and designers working in federal government have really taken this thing to a point where it's really usable by everyone. I used it the other day. It's just a way to really verify your identity with what will eventually be a number of different digital services that you might interact with in the government. I used it the other day because I was flying back from Bucharest, and I realized that I was flying on a different passport than my global entry had. I needed to update my passport number in my global entry. Do you know what global entry is? Yeah, okay. It's that thing where you can skip a line. I ... Sort of always feel like a little bit of a jerk, but I kind of like skipping the line.

No, no. I've got TSA Pre. It's the poor man's global entry.

Yeah, it's all good. You can go online, and you, it's a very secure way of verifying who you are, and it uses some two-factor authentication that I'm used to in my digital life. There's a number of different ways to do it. They can text you a number. You can use one of the authenticator apps, and it's just a service that works the way you think it should work. It works really, really well, and it's ... Literally a service that they are providing to other services. Other federal agencies with other needs to interact with Americans, and others probably as well, but the end user can also use it, so they don't have to build their own way of figuring out that you are who you are. It's very, it's much, much safer, I think, than a lot of the ways that the different federal, state, and local agencies have built in the past to sort of say, "Yeah, we think this is you."

Do you see that as something that's going to become more prevalent in terms of how we do citizenship? Is there going to be sort of a digital citizenship centralized kind of footprint that we all have, in the future?

Well, the thing about Login.gov is it really isn't centralized. That's the thing. I don't, to be honest, Americans do not trust the government to centralize their information about us. Is that technically possible? Absolutely. Is that politically feasible? Not in the next decade. We have to figure out ways to get the convenience that we want out of a digital identity, without the fear of putting things, the government having this sort of dossier on you that people just feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable with.

But the government already has, I mean, my assumption is that the government already has a lot of that information, right? I'm a tax payer. I travel. I've got a passport. All that stuff. That information is all in some repository somewhere. Maybe it's more paper than digital. But it doesn't seem like a huge difference to me, really.

I think an engaged citizen is a citizen who is involved in the community, who is aware of his or her rights, and who has a very open outlook towards others, towards accepting technology, in this case, or even towards new things in life.

I think that it means speaking up, and giving your opinion on things that you want changed. Also, listening to the voice of others, and kind of hearing them out, and working as a community to manipulate change that will benefit others and everyone.

An engaged citizen would be a person who engages with all people, across all spectrums of life, all economic spectrums, political spectrums, any spectrum.

This is going to be a silly question, but is there an analogy to be made between users and citizens? Should our elected officials think of us as users of government? Is that beneficial?

Yes, but not exclusively. I think there's a bunch of big, important differences. Government services have to work for everybody. You don't get to choose your market. That doesn't mean there aren't specific communities that use services more. Understanding who uses food stamps without the preconceptions that come with that. Really actually doing the research. Who are these people? What do they need? What are the barriers that they face? Not who do I think uses food stamps, for instance, and let me bring a bunch of potentially damaging biases into that.

There's a lot of people in our culture, still, in our society who just don't do digital. We still have to serve them. The other difference is we don't, when you are acting as a consumer, you are going to give money, probably, or time or something ,and get back a thing. That's not fundamentally the equation when you're acting as a citizen. You should be coming to that saying, "No, I'm participating in the thing. The one big institution that's supposed to serve all of us, and is supposed to be fueled by all of us" ... You should come to it with less of a sense of transaction, in my view.

Yeah ... I pay taxes, right? I expect to get something back for that sacrifice. I don't necessarily want to think of myself as a user, either, but I think there is something transactionable about government. There can be.

Yeah, there certainly can be. I think that is going to be true of a lot of different services, and I think the idea of having smooth, easy transactions is not something we should throw away. That's an important concept. There's a guy named Donald Kettle who wrote about this idea of vending machine government. You put your money in, you get your thing back. I'm putting in this money, and I'm paying my taxes. I want my garbage picked up, and I want my kids to be able to go to school. Right? Or, whatever your set of things is. In contrast to that, a bunch of thinkers including a guy who happens to be my husband named Tim O'Reilly talked about the idea of government as a platform. Then, it's not just I can only buy that thing that's in the vending machine, and if I don't like it, I shake the vending machine in sort of a traditional protest model.

But think about government as a platform for people to build on, and in current technology platform parlance ... You can think about things like opening up an API to a service, so that many other people can create value by creating other front-ends to it, rather than just saying this is it. This is Healthcare.gov, or this is it. This is the way food stamps will be administered. That's one example of government as a platform. But the reason to think about it that way is not just because it gets out of a transactional mindset, but it means that it can scale. It can actually grow to meet the size of the need in a community, if people can say, "I'm going to build my own solution based on this fundamental infrastructure that government has provided." Truthfully, that is government. Government creates these things like roads. Then, we drive on them, and create value by driving on them. We're just talking about extending that, thinking more in that model, and then updating it for a digital world, where ... A lot of these things have to happen digitally.

How has your outlook on the relationship between tech and government changed since you started Code for America?

Wow, well, it's a pretty different world. I started in 2011, and in 2011, it was very much, "Oh, tech will save government." I will admit to a bit of naivete in that approach. Very quickly had that worked out of me. I think while the press was happy to write about us as these techies going in and fixing everything, the people in government will learn from the techies, I think the techies learned as much or more from the people in government. But that was the zeitgeist, back in, when we first got started.

The mood around tech was that Facebook was going to save us. Technology was making life so much better for everyone, and connecting the world. The downsides of it had not yet, we're not yet the topic of conversation. In those intervening years, not only have we learned a lot about technology, we've also learned a lot about our government, and its resilience or hopefully its resilience. But we also have had a lot of people from technology go into government that I don't think would have otherwise, both through Code for America and through United States Digital Service, 18F, these places in federal government. It never used to have the kinds of technologists that we have encouraged. I think those people would all say that it's actually a delight to be able to practice their skills in the service of the public. I think there's a sense, almost to me, that we thought tech would save government, in fact, government and the principles and values of government may have a role in saving the technology community.

Oh, that's a beautiful way of putting it. It strikes me that government politics, perhaps, more is becoming a larger and larger part of the American identity. Is that something that you're perceiving from your position in the trenches?

I surround myself with a community of people who are identifying with government, I think, in a way that's in sharp contrast with the national dialog, at least to the degree that the national dialog is increasingly polarized over politics. I have a community of people who fundamentally believe in government working, and that isn't an idea that is particularly Democratic or Republican, and I think they would say, I and they would say that both sides haven't done what they've needed to do to make government work, and I have a friend, actually, who says, "We need to start the Get Shit Done party."

You've got one voter right there.

But if you look at government, the actual problems that are keeping people from these things, it's really easy, if you're on the inside, it's really easy to say, "Yes, there are differences." I don't want to dismiss them. There certainly are. But there's so much more common ground than there are differences, if you are just talking about the business of government. Not politics, but government. I would like to see more of that identity attached to government and government functions, and less to politics.

This is You, and this is me, Claire Evans. Thanks so much to our guests, Jennifer Pahlka and Anna Piperal, for joining us. We'll be back next week to talk about virtual reality, augmented reality, and how these digital worlds interact and overlap with our physical selves. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. Until next time.