OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to "help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web." Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post's description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”

It's an apt comparison. All three organizations choose a specific municipal problem and recruit volunteers with specific skillsets—in this case, people able to conceptualize and build some sort of tech tool—to tackle it. Accordingly, the past two years of the CFA program have produced a few high profile successes: "BlightStatus" in New Orleans lets people check up on blight in their neighborhoods, while "Honolulu Answers" in Hawaii refined search on the municipality's websites. In Boston, the CFA was responsible for both "Where's My School Bus?", which provides real-time school bus information for parents, and "Adopt-A-Hydrant," which helps the city save money by letting people volunteer to shovel hydrants near their homes out of the snow in the winter.

Any city can apply to host CFA fellows. If successful, the paid fellows spend a month in the chosen cities, then head back to CFA’s headquarters in San Francisco to regroup, code, and work on their projects. The third crop of CFA fellows will disperse all across the country in 2013 to Louisville, Kentucky; Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Las Vegas, Nevada; New York City, New York; South Bend, Indiana; San Mateo County, California; San Francisco, California; Summit County, Ohio; and Oakland, California.

This year's planning is already underway. Oakland city officials came to an agreement with their three Code for America fellows just last week. The fellows will spend the year developing a “public records request portal,” hoping to alleviate an overwhelming problem for city government employees.

“Ultimately, what we’d like to do is have a shared view of requests, both current and past, and [include] what the status is of what’s going on. That way, people from the community can see what’s going on and city staff can see who has [the public records request] and where it’s been routed to,” Cris Cristina, a current Oakland CFA fellow, told Ars.

Cristina and his two others colleagues, Richa Agarwal and Sheila Dugan, will have the rest of the year to build the tool he described. They’re each being paid $35,000 as an annual salary by the City of Oakland with the goal of completing the project by November 2013. (They actually receive a total of $60,000 when travel and benefits are taken into account.) Among past and present CFA cities, Oakland hopes that it's uniquely well-positioned to demonstrate that technology-infused government can work.

Oakland sits in the geographic center of the tech-focused Bay Area with the University of California, Berkeley right next door. The city already has a new co-working space called Tech Liminal and an even newer hackerspace, called Sudoroom. (Disclosure: I am a paying member at Sudoroom.) There are a slew of well-educated, well-intentioned, civic-minded hackers and hacktivists outside of the CFA program that also want to make Oakland better through technology. In fact, there's a well-organized and consistent digerati set that have a standing weekly “hack night” on the ground floor of City Hall.

But the reality is that Oakland doesn't yet have the level of tech culture that exists elsewhere in the Bay Area. Pandora and Ask.com are the only local household-name tech companies. And while conditions in downtown and uptown Oakland (a handful of blocks away from each other) are improving, huge swaths of the city remain hamstrung by poor schools, slow economic development, and frustrating policing.

City officials see CFA and other parallel hacktivist projects, like OpenOakland, as a welcome (and low-cost) effort to aid a city under strain. They don’t expect technology to solve all of the Oakland’s problems, but they believe it might alleviate a small portion of the city’s challenges. And something is better than nothing.

“Having this system will help bring to light what people are looking for,” said Nicole Neditch from the Office of the City Administrator. She's been the CFA fellows’ primary contact to the city. “It can help identify what people are interested in and make [those records] available. That’s absolutely part of what we’re talking about. It’s access to information.”

Oakland after “Occupy”

The problem CFA will address in Oakland—public information requests—is by no means new. In fact, Oakland already has an online interface for submitting such requests, but it doesn’t have an obvious way to monitor the status of each one, and Oakland has no way of tracking requests made offline, on paper. When asked, Neditch couldn't even say how many total public records requests were pending.

“Part of the problem that we have is that we don’t have a good way of tracking public records requests right now,” she admitted. “My job is to return that record to you as quickly as possible. I have that responsibility as a city employee. But we don’t have all employees set up on the records request system. One of the goals that we hope to get out of this project is to get clear metrics. Actually, right now we don’t have clear metrics. You [can submit a request by] phone, e-mail, by text, in person—a lot of records are requested in person and are fulfilled right there.”

Local data activists (and even city officials) recognize this issue dates back to Oakland's participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests two years ago. In the fall of 2011, this stubborn, proud, working-class city that I call home was swept up in the Occupy movement. After nearly a month of protests and public demonstrations, hundreds of police were dispatched to disperse crowds assembled outside city hall.

Tempers flared during the protests. Protesters camped outside city hall, windows were broken, and police arrested marchers and filled the streets with tear gas. Local resident and Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was hit in the front of the head with a bean bag round fired at close range. By the time it was all over, people wanted to know what had really happened.

Within days, around 50 citizens and organizations filed public records requests, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the “Occupied Oakland Tribune.” To its credit, the city has released a number of videos and other written materials in relation to the protests since they occurred. An ACLU attorney involved in the original litigation, Linda Lye, told Ars that her organization eventually did get all the materials it requested.

Nevertheless, 266 requests are still pending across numerous city agencies.

So while Oakland has more serious problems than untangling public records requests, it specifically asked for this solution in its CFA application last year. It just didn't make the reason why explicit—the word “occupy” is not mentioned at all in the 1,500-word application.

“We currently have a system in place that is clunky and difficult to use. By thinking through a new system, we can enhance our Open Government initiatives and become a more transparent city,” the City of Oakland wrote in its CFA application. “If every public records request that is answered were contributed to an online knowledge base, it would significantly reduce staff time in responding to the requests, and making the requested materials available to all would increase civic engagement and citizens' access to Government.”

"Many of these have already been responded to, or are duplicates," Neditch explained. "The way that the data is currently tracked, it opens a new request each time it is routed to a different department. Many times requests are routed to multiple departments. Roughly, there are about 100-130 still open."

Not surprisingly, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has been receiving the bulk of these.

"Many of the pending requests ask for videos which must be redacted, and due to a severe staffing shortages, only one person is available at the OPD to complete the time-consuming process of redactions," Neditch added. "It was primarily the complexity of the Occupy Oakland-related requests and the number of records that the requests entailed that had a significant impact on our ability to respond."

Making matters even more complicated, citizens want more than just the obvious records (like arrest reports or crime data). Many request items like, for example, all e-mail correspondence between the mayor and the city council containing the word “occupy.”

“Technological solutionism”

It's a fair question: “Can a group of hackers figure out new answers to the city's old problems?” That's how the local alt-weekly, the East Bay Express, put it earlier this year. Investing money in some coders tasked with one very specific issue could easily appear silly.

This approach is precisely what tech journalist, author, and pundit Evgeny Morozov crusades against. He calls the practice “technological solutionism.” Morozov argues in his new book, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, that not everything can be fixed simply through implementing technology. And even if it can, it's not always worth sacrificing privacy or money for.

As he said earlier this month on NPR's Talk of the Nation:

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the infrastructure through which we consume information. And I think our policymakers need to be aware of the costs that come with solutions, once those solutions are taken on by Silicon Valley. They will not come for free and the efficiency that we'll get from Silicon Valley, we'll have to pay for it with privacy or politics or just being unable to live in a world that still tolerates inconsistency.

The reality is that Oakland policymakers are faced with plenty of problems, so every allocation of resources gets scrutinized. For instance, Oakland residents could argue that there is a greater need for more cops than code: it’s a city notorious for police mismanagement and rising crime. The OPD narrowly avoided being taken over by a federal receivership just in December 2012. The city has gone through four police chiefs in the last decade and, this month, a federal judge appointed the former Baltimore police chief to be the city’s “compliance director” tasked with implementing federally mandated reforms.

It's also difficult to bring new people to the city payroll when the municipal government itself is clearly hurting. Oakland’s public employees are at an all-time low at about 3,600 total public employees, including police officers and firemen. That covers a city of around 400,000 in an area of about 78 square miles (202 square kilometers). By comparison, nearby San Francisco, a city of about 800,000 spread across just 50 square miles (130 square kilometers), has around 31,000 public employees.