Politics Recoded

The first detailed history of Code for America that examines how democratically designed government systems can collectively improve technology’s impact on society.

For decades, tens of thousands of volunteers and employees of Code for America have taken a different path to institutional change: through designing and implementing infrastructure. In Politics Recoded, Aure Schrock employs a robust, organizational ethnography to analyze how Code for America’s infrastructural organizing changed how politics get exercised, showing how we citizens can work directly with the government on projects to improve our collective livelihoods. Drawing from theories of organizing, social infrastructure, racialized organizations, technical cultures, and intersectionality, Schrock argues that our “post-techlash society” must no longer presume that corporate platforms or social networks can level social inequities.

An underrecognized yet influential organization, Code for America emerged from a tech culture background that prioritized networks and publicity over the long, slow work of institutional change. But its evolution demonstrates how to push beyond the fundamental flaws of tech-forward organizing. This, the first history of Code for America, shows how promoting agentic citizenship and brokering in empathy let the organization influence policy at all levels of government—and demonstrates why we need to bolster institutions to ensure that everyone is justly represented and receiving the benefits. Appealing to those in political science, communication, and information studies, Politics Recoded will empower practitioners and activists to revolutionize technological design and participate in alternative forms of civic engagement.Contents
Acknowledgments
1   Introduction: “You have the power to be the government”
2   A “Bay Area” Fusion: Technologies of Infrastructural Organizing
3   Forging Infrastructural Citizenship: Hackathons and the Civic Imagination
4   Networking a Movement: The Rise and Fall of the Brigades
5   Beyond “User-centered”: Intersectional Designers and Post-Techlash Politics
6   Selling Administration: The “Narrow Play” of Service Design
7   Conclusion: The Opportunities and Hazards of Scale
Notes
References
Index“Politics Recoded is more than an organizational ethnography. Aure Schrock provides historical context for Code for America’s engagement in transforming democratic practices, illustrating how techno-tools can help reimagine traditional governmental praxis.”
—Kishonna L. Gray, Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan; author of Intersectional Tech
 
“Code for America embodied a crucial moment in tech history, back when civic technologists imagined the engineering ethos would transform government. Politics Recoded offers an insightful retelling of the hurdles and lessons that came next.”
—David Karpf, author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political AdvocacyAure Schrock is Founder and Senior Editor at the academic editing and writing coaching company Indelible Voice, and author of Civic Tech: Making Technology Work for People.