Joel Riphagen, consensual hacker

A series of emails brings us to a real-world rendezvous point: Naked Lounge on Q Street, daytime. If movies have taught me anything about hackers, I’m looking for a lone male dressed casually and stooped over a battered laptop. There are, like, four of those guys here. Luckily, my hacker wears his allegiance on his sleeve—literally. Joel Riphagen is the new captain of Code for Sacramento, the local branch of Code for America, a vast network of volunteer coders who use their mutant powers for good. A survivor of the government sector, with stints at the California Legislative Analyst’s Office and Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, he believes hackers and government can work together. Time to bring down the firewall.

What’s the difference between a hacker and a coder?

When people hear “hackers” in the context of computers, they immediately think of people breaking into computer systems and doing things they should not do. That is one definition of “hacker,” and it has nothing to do with what we do. There’s another definition of “hacking,” which is finding creative solutions to problems. You’ve heard of “life hacking.” What we do is “civic hacking,” which is trying to solve civic problems using creative technological means. It has nothing to do with Edward Snowden.

Or when Anonymous weighs in on the Right to Rest debate?

Nobody’s tried to make that connection to us, for which I’m grateful.

Until my tabloid journalism introduced it.

(Laughs.) Right. Really, we’re heads-down, trying to make government work better for the people. To the extent that there’s issues like that, I appreciate the motives of people in many cases who are trying to force freedom of information in ways I wouldn’t necessarily condone.

The last Code for Sacramento project involved building a portal to make it easy to visualize certain aspects of the city budget.

Right, and we did that in partnership with the city.

How does that compare in terms of your other projects?

That project got a lot of press, but as a technological effort, it wasn’t that difficult. Something else we got a lot of press on last year was WICit. Again, it was fairly simple technologically. But essentially it’s a mapping application where you can find the locations near you that accept WIC.

It’s inventive.

We’re actually working on a project right now that I know a little more about where it came from. There’s a local nonprofit that deals with homeless issues [Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness]. They publish a guide in paper and PDF form of the various resources you can access, and they have been looking at ways to digitize it and make it more accessible.

Interesting.

We’ve had a volunteer working on it as part of a capstone project in a programming course he’s taking, so he’s getting credit, he’s providing free work for this nonprofit and he’s creating this app … which locates food resources throughout the community.

Is that its focus?

No, the resource guide is very general. … Once he’s done, we’ll open up the project to the rest of the community and perhaps they can expand on it, add the rest of the guide, add the other functionality in it.

Other projects?

Last year, it’s a small little thing, but it’s called @CutePetsSac. It’s a Twitter bot that every day tweets out a picture of a pet from the Front Street Animal Shelter, thereby increasing its chance of getting adopted. That’s actually a good example of the Code for America ecosystem, because it was created by a Code for America brigade in Colorado. But everything we do is open source, so everything we create, the code is available for anyone to use and change for their own purpose.

You’re very open-system oriented.

Yes, we are all about open data. I actually came from a government background. I worked for 15 years in state and local government. My skills are all in data analysis and visualization and policy and things like that, and open data was never really an issue for me.

You had access to it.

I had all the data. As soon as I left my government job and I fell in with Code for Sacramento, open data quickly became an issue. Because when you’re trying to make progress on something outside of government, you begin to realize all the barriers there are to getting the information that you need.

Feel the pain, brother.

Exactly, you sometimes have to feel the pain to understand what the problem is.