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

Thanks for the link. :-) It's bookmarked now!

This reminds me of something we discussed at a hackathon some time ago, where the government representative raised the issue of how to connect all of these apps together (like Legos) to make maintaining and integrating them into a workflow that makes sense to government employees.

I could try contacting Open City to hear what their thoughts on this. The current solution that's on the table here is to require the apps to be able to connect to a central "engine" that would act as a "local government dashboard". The apps would stream the data, either raw or filtered and be presented and manipulated in an interface that's understandable and actionable for non-technical employees.

If it's the right way, we don't know yet though. :-)

You'll notice that most Brigades are in countries where a 'Code for Country X' exists, but by no means all. So go for it!: http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/tools

For one thing, technical volunteers are one of the most infamous types: They arrive with a bunch of technical experience, the client goes "OH MY GOODNESS" and pretty soon the volunteers are cracking their knuckles, getting ready to start.

At this point, one of two things tends to happen: 1) The volunteer has underestimated their need for constant high-level stimulation and runs out of interest, or 2) the volunteer completes a solution that is a poor fit for any existing problems.

I once had a volunteer come onto a project and immediately suggest a variety of changes to the work I was performing. He told me how he had gone over my work to date (a funny thing that citizens like to do, and that's fine) and decided that he had identified problems A, B, and C in the system, so it needed to be changed to do X, Y, and Z, where X, Y and Z were all fairly obvious beginner mistakes in the ecosystem in which this was happening. I called the client and told her I would need her agreement in writing that these mistakes would be implemented, and I never heard from the volunteer again. What the client really needed was to make a high-level decision to do things the right way. Instead they had a "we can't do that" mentality and each decision was basically a small patch on some part of the system.

From my perspective, one of the wisest things a volunteer could do is identify and contact a current contractor for said government organization and ask them what kind of volunteer work would be helpful. By doing this they pair up with someone who has a deep insight into existing systems. Then the volunteer can go back to the government and say, "hey, we talked to the contractor and here's what we as volunteers think we can help with." Since you have to educate the client anyway, you might as well do it with the help of existing contractors. Of course, if the contractor is really a jerk about it, you've just saved yourself the headache of working with them.

I could easily come up with a range of non-technical to technical issues that affect my government clients and need help, and I'm busy enough that even a case where I lose work isn't actually that critical to me if the client is gaining an advantage. From working with a lot of volunteers though, I really question whether the follow-through on their side would be substantial.

From what you said, a really nice idea could be to think about a process with which an administration could match volunteers with contractors... and then create an open source tool to facilitate that.