0.01: Jessica Cole

This is Government

For our first episode, I sat down with Jessica Cole, the Development Services Innovation Lead for the city of Walnut Creek, California. Jessica and I met as Code for America fellows in 2016. During that year, we worked with different cities on using technology to improve how they deliver public services. After the end of our fellowship year, Jessica took the rest of the plunge into the public sector, and has been working with the city of Walnut Creek for the past five months. Although we'd kept in touch a bit, I didn't know too much about what Jessica had been working on in Walnut Creek. In this conversation, she filled me in on the importance and breadth of development services. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including - what it takes to plan for a city's future - the motivation and purpose behind California's thousands of pages of building codes - why governments have been turning to innovation teams to tackle new kinds of problems - and Jessica's strategy for accomplishing "a disproportionate amount of good" in the world I had a lot of fun talking with Jessica, and I can't think of a better person with whom to start off the show. I think you'll enjoy our conversation as well.