NEW ORLEANS – Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced a new partnership with Code for America for the 2016 Code for America Fellowship Program.
"We are proud and honored to welcome Code for America back to New Orleans,” said Mayor Landrieu. “This partnership will support our economic opportunity strategy and generate tools for connecting disadvantaged job seekers and businesses to new opportunities. As a laboratory for innovation and change, New Orleans will directly engage fellows in some of our most important and transformational work.”
The Code for America Fellowship pairs local governments with teams of mid-career, civic-minded technologists for one year. Governments and fellows selected for the 2016 Fellowship develop digital approaches to delivering public services that:
• Promote economic development opportunities in the City of New Orleans, Louisiana and the City of Long Beach, California
• Improve access to health and human services in the City of Kansas City, Missouri and the City of New York, New York
• Safely reduce incarceration in Salt Lake County, Utah and the City of Seattle, Washington
“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with New Orleans in 2016,” Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director of Code for America, said. “Each partner was selected for their commitment to making government services simpler, faster, and more effective for the people who use them.”
Fellows and government partners will explore answers to local challenges by engaging with the community, building applications, and testing the results. Over the past five years, the Fellowship program has produced more than 65 software applications with 38 municipal governments and 126 fellows.
The applications are tangible results of a process that builds much more than a piece of technology—they are vehicles for driving cultural and structural change inside government.
“Our fellows apply an iterative, user-centered, and data-driven approach to their work,” Luke Norris, Senior Director of Government Relations, said. “By focusing on the user experience of applying for and using services, our fellows help to debug government operations, and develop a new set of digital practices that help them work better in the 21st century. The Fellowship shifts the way governments think about and use technology to deliver public services.”
Code for America partnered with six local governments for the 2016 Code for America Fellowship Program. Governments are: Kansas City, Missouri; Long Beach, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York City, New York; Salt Lake County, Utah; and Seattle, Washington.
