Boston’s Latest Experiment in Civic Tech Collaboration
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In the Hub of the Universe, a one-off grant is being used to build an “ecosystem for in-house development” to help boost youth summer employment.
Boston’s two-year plan to connect the city’s youth with summer employment isn’t just about providing thousands more residents with jobs, but also figuring out how metro stakeholders can perfect civic technology collaboration.
Code for Boston had been holding informal, weekly “coding nights” for a while when the Metropolitan Area Planning Council was encouraged to apply for a new $200,000 grant at last year’s Code for America Summit.
Having now been awarded the first Civic Tech and Data Collaborative grant along with St. Louis, Missouri, Boston is currently collecting feedback—set to be reported this fall—on its youth jobs program to streamline the application process and potentially develop matchmaking.
“These methods are going to help us build the capacity of a civic tech ecosystem for in-house development so the city’s not always contracting with vendors for large amounts of money,” Matt Cloyd, a data services web developer with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council said in an interview. “It’d be a nice accomplishment that’s better for constituents.”
Cloyd also happens to be co-captain of Code for Boston, which will contribute programmers and designers to test a prototype application process next spring and entrepreneurs to refine matchmaking the following year.
The public-private partnership hopes to have both pieces working by summer 2017 and civic data will be integral to finishing on time.
“Data will help us better understand which youth are applying for jobs and how they benefit from them,” Holly St. Clair, MAPC director of data services, said in an interview. “The assumption is that kids in these programs do better in school and have higher grades, but I don’t think the city of Boston has joined that data to test if that’s true.”
Other metrics assessing the impact of the program on things like diversity will need to be created, and protecting youth confidentiality throughout the endeavor is important, St. Clair said.
Business research will identify existing software the city might use to improve the summer job application process—which consists of three online forms that don’t look good on mobile—but the partnership expects to have to build something from scratch.
Boston places more than 10,000 youth in summer jobs annually and could be looking at thousands more, who will hopefully keep coming back with a new process in place, St. Clair said.
Living Cities, Code for America and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, which created the grant, want the resulting solutions to benefit low-income citizens, and Boston aims to address regional inequalities and youth violence improving its summer jobs program.
“We want to be an example of how government services can better serve constituents and allow them to take advantage of all the opportunities provided to them,” St. Clair said. “The idea is to move civic technology forward with a collection of players that support each other using multiple service delivery methods to be better efficient with resources.”
All programming will be open source so other municipalities, particularly nearby “Code for” brigades like the one in Somerville, may benefit.
An added bonus of automating application processing is staff will have more time to do targeted outreach, Cloyd said.
“Summer employment helps young people develop the skills and experiences that support long-term career success,” Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “Thanks to this project, our staff will be able to focus on recruiting young people and businesses rather than processing applications.”
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