This is Government

Welcome back, everyone! It’s good to have you. In this episode, recorded a few months ago, I talk with Patrick McDonnell, Project Manager and Service Designer in the City of Austin’s Innovation Office. As with Jessica in the previous episode, Patrick and I met as Code for America fellows in 2016. Unlike most of the people in the fellowship who had a background in technology, Patrick brought to the table years of experience in urbanism and city planning – which we explore in detail during our conversation. Like most of my conversations with Patrick even off-mic, this one is full of neat little stories and tangents. We loosely follow the course of Patrick’s career in urbanism, making stops to look at how people are prototyping new ideas in cities, how urban areas change as they grow in size and population, and why public employees should share their stories with the public through social media. Patrick tells the story better than I do, though – so let’s jump right in. - - - Since Patrick and I talked, his temporary position with the City of Austin has ended. He has moved on to a permanent position in the city of Anchorage, Alaska as a Design Strategist on the Innovation Team. Patrick, thanks again for both this conversation, and for putting me up on your couch and giving me a great tour of Austin when I visited. Anyone visiting Anchorage should definitely get in touch – nobody gives city tours like Patrick can. As we talked about, Patrick is to be found pretty much anywhere online @patrickm02l – and that includes his newest platform of choice, Anchor, where he’s broadcasting his own almost daily updates as short audio snippets. Download Anchor on the App Store, and tune into Patrick there. This episode is the last of two pilot episodes for this podcast. I’d like to share more stories of great people doing good work in the public sector – and I’d love to know what you think about it so far. If you like what you hear, please send a quick tweet to me @thisisgvmnt (that’s abbreviated to @thisisgvmnt), or an email to thisisgovernmentpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. Once again – I’m Grayson Wright, and This is Government. Thanks for listening.

For our first episode, I sat down with Jessica Cole, the Development Services Innovation Lead for the city of Walnut Creek, California. Jessica and I met as Code for America fellows in 2016. During that year, we worked with different cities on using technology to improve how they deliver public services. After the end of our fellowship year, Jessica took the rest of the plunge into the public sector, and has been working with the city of Walnut Creek for the past five months. Although we'd kept in touch a bit, I didn't know too much about what Jessica had been working on in Walnut Creek. In this conversation, she filled me in on the importance and breadth of development services. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including - what it takes to plan for a city's future - the motivation and purpose behind California's thousands of pages of building codes - why governments have been turning to innovation teams to tackle new kinds of problems - and Jessica's strategy for accomplishing "a disproportionate amount of good" in the world I had a lot of fun talking with Jessica, and I can't think of a better person with whom to start off the show. I think you'll enjoy our conversation as well.