How can I help my local government as a developer / designer?

I am soon taking a whole year off from client-work (a kind of "sabbatical") and I've been looking all over the interwebs for ways to help my local government / city through my skills as a front-end developer and designer... I'm stuck!

Does anyone know where to start finding problems that a local government might be facing and would like solutions (prototypes)? Has anyone tried this and would be willing to share their experience?

Sidenote: I recently got the chance to sit down with the Head of Social Service & Care of the city I live in (2nd largest city in Denmark, Aarhus) who was "mindblown" about the fact that developers and designers actually would want to help out their communities and the local government. She said that they had many issues they could list publicly for anyone to jump on.

That made me think; I could make a non-techie-friendly platform for local governments to post their problems (maybe as a GitHub repo), embed it on their website and make it easy for developers and designers to fork a problem they'd like to work on, notifying the local government whenever something is released?

But that would take local governments to sign up and developers / designers to begin solving problems that matter to their local society. Might be worth a shot though?

I've already looked at Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for Good and similar, but it's not quite what I have in mind.

I know from experience that public healthcare can greatly benefit from prototypes and concepts made by freelance developers, which gives them major leverage against the large companies who they are often ball-and-chained to whenever they need IT-solutions. Many of these solutions have again and again proven themselves way too costly, bug-ridden, outdated and incredibly user-hostile. rant.

Any ideas are appreciated and I hope you'll all have a great weekend! :-)

- Anders

Hey Cal!

I'm sorry to hear that you had a negative experience... The situation you describe is especially a concern to me. It is a risk to take since they might show excitement here-and-now, but fail to follow up later on (for whatever reasons).

How did you first start out though? Did you get the idea first and then pitch it to the city council or did they reach out first? I'd love to know more. :-)

And thanks for sharing your story, I'll definitely keep it in mind.

Look for information you would want to see in your available media -- find a dataset and build it into a useful app to be filtered and queried in different ways. Map data points to physical locations. Correlate those things. At some point it all starts to look like a population density heat map, but sometimes you find good stuff in there. And people want to see it. They need more tangible access to all the real world data we have been collecting. Otherwise, what's the point?

I worked for a year at a newspaper and built apps and stuff like that -- it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done and I wish the situation had been able to work out. If I ever get a chance to do real news apps again, I would jump on it. Enjoy your opportunity, Anders, and be prepared to show your work.

Sometimes, the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is applicable. If you build something that shows you CAN build something, show it to the right people and you will attract attention.

Some inspiration: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/ http://blog.apps.npr.org/ https://source.opennews.org/en-US/ http://flowingdata.com/

Sit down with your smaller cities and find out their needs. In many cases they have 1-2 IT staff and don't have time to automate process X.

I believe http://codeforamerica.org/ exists for exactly this purpose. It matches techies with their local governments to improve things.