The Epiphany
Part 1 of 3 on how I went from doing Permaculture in Costa Rica to starting a Civic Tech company
Hello dear reader. Back again with another weekly installation of How to Change the World (my working title for this series). Last week I presented my basic thesis on why a failure of governance is the root of most of our problems, and that to address this, we should change the way governance is designed. We need it to be more innovative and adaptive, and we need better ways to get involved.
This week I’m going to do a quick account of how I got into this space in the first place — this space being civic tech, or governance, or local democracy, or what have you. It’s part 1 in a three part series. This essay will start the thread with me being a farmer down in Costa Rica and take us through landing a job consulting with the New York City Council. The two following essays will be about my experiences working with the Council, and finally an account of starting my own Participatory Budgeting (PB) company and doing two cycles of it in Atlanta.
I’m writing these autobiographical pieces because as I embark on this “How to change the world” series I want to set a stable foundation. I want to make my motivations clear, even to myself. And I think it will be valuable to plot the trajectory from the very beginning. Later, I also want to identify some concrete takeaways from my experiences in New York and Atlanta, which were very rich and formative, and I’ve never fully processed them.
Now, let’s begin 15 years ago.
The emperor has no clothes
In 2008 I gave money to candidate Obama. Having only been a Senator less than one term his track record was short, but his words, his promises and his presentation were all excellent.
He made campaign promises like he was going to close Guantanamo. He was going to end the wars in the middle east. He was going to have the most transparent presidency in US history, and he would put an end to the barbaric destruction of medical marijuana dispensaries operating lawfully in progressive states.
I can’t describe to you how alluring these promises were coming on the heels of a two-term George W. Bush presidency.
At this time in my life, I was living between Costa Rica and the United States. I would return to the US for ~4 months to work and save money, and then I’d go down to Costa Rica for ~8–10 months to spend it living on farms and learning about Permaculture. For about five years I lived this way and it roughly coincided with Obama’s first term from 2008 to 2012.
I began to notice that although electing a new president is billed as the single biggest political victory that can be won, it’s possible to get your guy into office only to walk away with none of the actual changes you fought for.
When I was in Costa Rica I was almost totally removed from American politics. I had zero American friends other than an 80 year old engineer from Maine who had moved here to work with the United Fruit Company in the 1960s. I watched zero news. I occasionally got caught up on 2010 era Reddit using my dialup modem. And as the years went by and I traveled back and forth, I noticed a phenomenon.
As Obama’s presidency progressed, a few, but not many of his main promises came to pass. He may have pulled the majority of troops out of Iraq, but the war on terror was in full force, complete with CIA black sites and double tap drone attacks. Guantanamo went on. Instead of the most transparent government in history, he became famous for conducting a war on whistleblowers that saw Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) imprisoned in solitary confinement, Julian Assange lock himself in an embassy for years for fear of extradition and Edward Snowden forced to take shelter with a geopolitical foe since his ‘transparent’ government apparently regards whistleblowing as treason. And of course, Obama’s federal agents would continue to terrorize medicinal marijuana dispensaries in states where they had been thoroughly democratically approved.
I began to notice that although electing a new president is billed as the single biggest political victory that can be won, it’s possible to get your guy into office only to walk away with none of the actual changes you fought for. I began to marvel at the things that will keep rolling on just the same whether you like them or not. Military contractors always win, banks always win, and pharmaceutical companies always win, just to name a few. Candidates can tell you it will go another way, but with the current system, it won’t. You can vote for style, rhetoric, presentation, and decorum, but you cannot elect someone to stop a war, balance the budget, bring about government transparency, or really do anything contrary to the interest of oligopolistic corporate interests.
When I would come back to the US thinking about all of the policy changes that hadn’t been made, or had transpired to be the opposite of what Obama had promised, most of the people I encountered weren’t thinking about that. They were thinking of some other topic de jour served by the ladle-full piping hot and ceaselessly by the media. Typically it boiled down to how the other side had caused the current frustration through malice or stupidity. It never seemed to be about that we had successfully elected our guy, and our team, with majorities all around, and they blew it, and what actually does that mean about how well representation works in the first place.
So while the average person was getting mad at the other political team, I was beginning to suspect that the bigger problem might lie in the architecture of the system of representation. Do these candidates really represent us? Are they concerned with our priorities?
Pondering these issues I resolved to move back to the US to try to do something about it. At that point, rather suddenly, my passionate but vaguely defined life goal became to use technology to try to increase feedback and accountability with our governing systems.
Stumped on a problem? Move to New York. Someone there knows.
Like many clueless youths with an ill-defined but grandiose sense of purpose I moved to New York to try to figure it out. I got a marketing job in the meat-packing district. Then I got a sales job selling crap on the street. Eventually I settled into sales management, and I was good at it.
Life was humming along. I still had the dream of changing the system, but I was building a resume, driving a slick Toyota Highlander Limited, and making good money for the first time in my life. I was an organization man and I enjoyed it. After living like a broke hippie for my 20s I had a girlfriend and no more money problems, and after working mostly alone, I now had the professional respect of like 100 people. Sure, half of them worked for me and the other half were salespeople that needed my team’s leads, but at the end of the day it was a big, friendly, hard driving sales organization and I was thriving. In other words, I was at risk of getting stuck on the money and “success” treadmill. But in a welcome move, the universe came and set me free in the form of a mass layoff.
In a single day my whole org, from my boss on down, was eliminated from the company. Some of us were generously offered jobs in parts of the company that were more profitable. I had a good record and received several offers that actually had pay increases. But they were inconvenient, and I had already decided to finally pursue my dream of applying technology to improving democracy.
A fateful invite from the vampire squid
One of the people I’d worked for at the marketing company moved on to work for Tim Draper helping him with his “civic tech” initiatives. This friend was the first person who described civic tech to me, and as soon as she did, I knew it was the vehicle for social change I had been seeking.
I began to look heavily into civic tech and discovered that there was a workspace dedicated solely to it in midtown Manhattan. I signed up and started ‘working’ out of there — although my ‘job’ was just job hunting and trying to learn what everyone else did.
I read everything on civic tech I could find. This wasn’t a daunting task. My Google Alert returned 1–2 results per day, max. One day a book caught my eye: Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America by Hollie Russon Gilman. I ordered it and read it by the coy pond in the peaceful house I rented in Great Neck, Long Island. It talked about Participatory Budgeting, its history and how it was brought to the US, first to Chicago, then later to New York. The author taught at Columbia University, just 45 minutes away by train. After finishing it, I wrote a glowing review of the book. To my surprise, I was the first reviewer.
Around that time a friend who worked for Goldman invited me to a presentation in the middle of the day on technology and financial inclusion put on by Mastercard. Being between jobs and eager to learn, I joined him. And who would I find presenting but Hollie Russon Gilman.
After the presentation, I introduced myself and told her I’d read and loved her book on PB. She was flattered that I’d read and enjoyed it so much. With the material being a bit niche, encountering fans in the wild might not have happened often. She joked good-naturedly that I was her only fan.
I told her about my interest in finding a job in Civic Tech and she beckoned a guy over named Asher. He was about my age and also happened to work out of Civic Hall. I was excited to learn that he also focused on Participatory Budgeting. He worked for a Czech civic tech company that helped cities run surveys and voting experiences like PB. Asher’s primary job was to design and oversee the New York City PB that Hollie had written about.
As if this encounter wasn’t fortuitous enough, the company Asher worked for, D21, was hiring. We scheduled an interview for a couple of weeks later at our coworking space.
I want to pause for a second to dwell on how impactful this one single encounter was. When my friend invited me out, I had no idea that it would lead to Hollie, to meeting a connection in the PB field, or that it would lead to a job offer. But as it turns out, responding to this seemingly inconsequential invite changed my life. It’s like Woody Allen says: “90% of success is just showing up!”
When it came time for the interview I loved everything Asher described about the job. Working with the New York City Council, helping 35 districts allocate $1mm+ a piece on projects submitted by the community, and using technology to vote. After nearly 6 months of research, this job felt like the perfect application of civic tech. Innovative but concrete, with real world consequences attached.
A couple of weeks later I had my final interview at the comfortable little coffee shop in the basement of the Brooks Brothers by Union Square. My interviewer was Tom, D21’s Managing Director. He cast such a wondrous vision and sold that job to me so hard I left in a blur. I can still vividly remember aimlessly walking the streets toward Chelsea, going nowhere in particular, just praying that I would get that job, and thanking God I had gotten so close so fast.
Two days later, I got the call. I was the new “Head of Consulting U.S.” for D21.
I had made my transition to civic tech. I’d realized my goal upon leaving Costa Rica all those years ago. But it was barely the beginning.
Up next:
Part 2 of the series on how I got into civic tech is an account of my two cycles managing the vote for New York’s massive PB. 100,000 votes, nearly $40mm in funding, 17 languages, digital ballots needing to be secured, 60,000 paper ballots hand fed into 6 high-speed scanners. And so much coffee.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.
