An Experiment in Government Innovation: Legal Hackers in Residence

18 September 2014

The following is a guest post written by V. David Zvenyach, General Counsel for the Washington D.C. Council, and is cross-posted from their website. We’re excited about Zvenyach’s new program, as it promises to be an important new method of facilitating open data within government. –Waldo Jaquith, US ODI Director

In the last two years, my office has been working with civic hackers—Code for DC, DC Legal Hackers, and others—and organizations like US ODI and the OpenGov Foundation to build open-source tools to make DC’s law more accessible. Increasingly, we are working to expand our efforts and join with partner cities through the Free Law Founders. I’ve even learned to code in Python, Node, and I am learning Ruby.

In the last year, though, I had a realization: it is time to bring the hackers in-house. It is time for government lawyers to embrace innovation and to retool our practice for the digital age. We need to stop using bad tools—or worse paying overpriced vendors for proprietary software that works some of the time—and instead work with developers. In turn, instead of building one-off applications and fighting with legal teams, developers can be a partner in making change.

And so, today, after months of working to refine the concept, I am delighted to announce the establishment of the Free Law Innovation Fellow.

The Innovation Fellow is as much an experiment as anything else: can developers, working in the open and side-by-side with practicing lawyers, make government work better and more accessible? Can lawyers learn to improve their practices by observing and integrating collaborative methods and tools that developers have mastered over the years? And can we do this in a sustainable way, engaging fully with the open-source community?

My theory is that developers can help make government data more accessible—through proactive disclosure of datasets and through smarter internal policies. My theory is that developers can build tools to help government lawyers work more effectively and with a greater focus on serving the public interest.

Let me be blunt: if my theory is right, the Innovation Fellow can be a complete game-changer for the public sector. But, for this to work, we need the right person for the job. We need a civic-hacker-in-residence who has the ability to understand a problem, ship code, and to get the job done. Most importantly, we need a person who wants to make a difference—in our nation’s capital and beyond.

If you are that person, please consider applying to be the first ever Free Law Innovation Fellow. I look forward to working with you.