Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo, I gave a talk on The Opportunity for Civic Startups.  I was filling in for Code for America's Jen Pahlka, and the presentation itself is an hybrid of a version I did at the t=0 Entrepreneurship Festival at MIT a few weeks ago, a version Jen did at Future of Web Apps earlier this year and a version that Andrew McLaughlin has been giving.  Here are my slides. I broke it down into two main sections: (1) trends that are setting the stage for civic startups, and (2) models/approaches that civic startups are following.  Unfortunately, the timing of the speaker notes on slideshare doesn't match the slides, so the notes are in off by a few slides, but you can get the idea. One of my favorite threads in this story is "the rise of the civic hacker" -- folks who use their coding & product development superpowers to make cities work better, almost always from outside of official channels.  The "civic hacker ethic", if you will, is about making shit, and it represents a pretty new way of getting civically engaged -- less about arguing policy or politics and more about building something helpful.  What's even cooler is that there are now a solid handful of civic hackers who have parlayed a passion project on the side into a real business or career: Dan O'Neill & Adrian Holovaty with Everyblock, Harper Reed (transit hacker and now Obama campaign CTO), Jon Wegener of Exit Strategy NYC, Joshua Tauber (GovTrack & Pop Vox), Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix and many more. And there's more where that came from.  I believe that we're just at the beginning of a big wave of civic startups (here's looking at you, Code for America 2011 graduates), and I am looking forward to continuing to follow them, help them, and learn from them.

This weekend, I built some shelves in my closet. It was pretty simple affair -- some pre-finished shelving boards, wooden corbels, and a rod for hanging things. What's funny is that the supplies for all this have been sitting on the floor in my office for about eight weeks now. Every time my wife asks me if I'm going to do the closet, I say "yeah, but there's a lot I need to think through, to figure out how I want it." I had big plans for super custom shelves, with beveled trim and all kinds of beautiful polish. And so while I thought about it, the pieces sat there for more and more weeks; meanwhile my clothes continued to pile up on the floor and become an undifferentiated mass because I had no shelves.

Finally, after more gentle prodding from Frannie, I took a few hours the other day and put up the shelves in the way that made the most immediate sense. It was quite simple in the end, but the change was dramatic. Now, instead of a big messy pile, I have shelves on three walls and everything is stacked neatly. My daily wardrobe has been refreshed as I've found shirts that have been on the bottom of the pile for weeks. Amazing! Some product is better than no product.

Now that the shelves are up, there are a few things that aren't quite right. Lucky for me, it's easy to put a few screws in the wall and move a shelf. So I did -- and I added another hanging rod when I realized I needed one. Simple -- a total of one more trip to the hardware store and 30 minutes of work. I'll surely make more changes in the future.

The point of this is not to talk about my closet and awesome t-shirt collection. This is about iteration and product development. And of course I'm thinking about it in terms of my real job, building things on the web. Especially when there' s a big team involved, it's really easy to get into a pattern of "think think think! argue! mull mull! get it perfect before we build anything!". When really, often times the best approach is to just build *something* and start using it, then go back and make revisions.

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo, I gave a talk on The Opportunity for Civic Startups.  I was filling in for Code for America's Jen Pahlka, and the presentation itself is an hybrid of a version I did at the t=0 Entrepreneurship Festival at MIT a few weeks ago, a version Jen did at Future of Web Apps earlier this year and a version that Andrew McLaughlin has been giving.  Here are my slides. I broke it down into two main sections: (1) trends that are setting the stage for civic startups, and (2) models/approaches that civic startups are following.  Unfortunately, the timing of the speaker notes on slideshare doesn't match the slides, so the notes are in off by a few slides, but you can get the idea. One of my favorite threads in this story is "the rise of the civic hacker" -- folks who use their coding & product development superpowers to make cities work better, almost always from outside of official channels.  The "civic hacker ethic", if you will, is about making shit, and it represents a pretty new way of getting civically engaged -- less about arguing policy or politics and more about building something helpful.  What's even cooler is that there are now a solid handful of civic hackers who have parlayed a passion project on the side into a real business or career: Dan O'Neill & Adrian Holovaty with Everyblock, Harper Reed (transit hacker and now Obama campaign CTO), Jon Wegener of Exit Strategy NYC, Joshua Tauber (GovTrack & Pop Vox), Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix and many more. And there's more where that came from.  I believe that we're just at the beginning of a big wave of civic startups (here's looking at you, Code for America 2011 graduates), and I am looking forward to continuing to follow them, help them, and learn from them.

This weekend, I built some shelves in my closet. It was pretty simple affair -- some pre-finished shelving boards, wooden corbels, and a rod for hanging things. What's funny is that the supplies for all this have been sitting on the floor in my office for about eight weeks now. Every time my wife asks me if I'm going to do the closet, I say "yeah, but there's a lot I need to think through, to figure out how I want it." I had big plans for super custom shelves, with beveled trim and all kinds of beautiful polish. And so while I thought about it, the pieces sat there for more and more weeks; meanwhile my clothes continued to pile up on the floor and become an undifferentiated mass because I had no shelves.

Finally, after more gentle prodding from Frannie, I took a few hours the other day and put up the shelves in the way that made the most immediate sense. It was quite simple in the end, but the change was dramatic. Now, instead of a big messy pile, I have shelves on three walls and everything is stacked neatly. My daily wardrobe has been refreshed as I've found shirts that have been on the bottom of the pile for weeks. Amazing! Some product is better than no product.

Now that the shelves are up, there are a few things that aren't quite right. Lucky for me, it's easy to put a few screws in the wall and move a shelf. So I did -- and I added another hanging rod when I realized I needed one. Simple -- a total of one more trip to the hardware store and 30 minutes of work. I'll surely make more changes in the future.

The point of this is not to talk about my closet and awesome t-shirt collection. This is about iteration and product development. And of course I'm thinking about it in terms of my real job, building things on the web. Especially when there' s a big team involved, it's really easy to get into a pattern of "think think think! argue! mull mull! get it perfect before we build anything!". When really, often times the best approach is to just build *something* and start using it, then go back and make revisions.