JAMEY: Hello everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. I'm Jamey Hampton and I'm here with Coraline Ada Ehmke. CORALINE: Hello everyone. I'm also really happy to welcome Astrid Countee to the panel today. ASTRID: Thank you, Coraline and I would like to also introduce my friend, Janelle Klein. JANELLE: And I'd like to introduce Jeff Reichman. Jeff Reichman is a technologist living in the Houston area. He graduated from Temple University with the BA in English and an MA in creative writing. He's a principal at January Advisors and in 2016, he co-founded Sketch City, a nonprofit community of 2500 hundred people who apply technology and data to public problems. It's very awesome. Welcome, Jeff. JEFF: Thank you all very much. Appreciate to being here. JANELLE: One of the ways we like to start off this show is by getting a little background on your origin story. Could you tell us a little bit about your special power and how you acquired it? JEFF: I have moved across the country for most of my adult life. I grew up in Philadelphia, I lived in Santa Barbara, California for a while, Washington DC for a little bit. I moved to Houston about eight years ago and I love it here. This is my adopted hometown. I can't imagine living anywhere else. Over the last eight years, I've gone from introvert to extrovert and started going to meetups and meeting people in my neighborhood and in my community, just gotten to know folks. If I have a superpower, it might be just meeting lots of people and understanding the power that happens when you unite them. JANELLE: How can you go into from introvert to extrovert and making that shift because I'm sure like a whole lot of the listeners are very far on the introvert camp? What was the process of making that transition? JEFF: I love reading books. I got two degrees in English and I love spending time alone and what I realized is it's more about how long I can be around people. I have a particularly high threshold where I can really be on, so to speak for about five hours a day. Then I need the rest of my work time to think and reflect and respond and strategize and whatnot by myself so protecting that balance in my work life has been really helpful. I also decided back in 2011 that I was going to go to meetups. I was going to go meet people. I don't care who I was going to meet up. I was going to shake people's hands and hear about their stories and learn about them. What ended up happening, especially in a place like Houston, is you meet the most amazing people and you get really into their stories and where they come from. You learned to really love people in a particularly human level. I've been doing that now for about seven years and it's just taken on a life of its own, especially with these relief efforts. CORALINE: I used to be really, really shy. Especially when I go to a conference, I would just feel overwhelmed by the press of people. I start to play a little game with myself, where I would say, "I'm going to walk through the room and talk to the person with the most interesting shoes." I'm going to find the person with a red shirt and I'm going to talk to two people with red shirts and that really helped me to come out of my shyness. Eventually, become a lot more gregarious. JAMEY: That's a great game. I actually did something a little bit similar when I was nervous at a conference recently. I took a selfie of myself and posted on Twitter and tag it with the conference and I was like, "If you can find me, come talk to me and give me a sticker," or something like that. Dozens of people are like, "I saw you on Twitter. Here's a sticker." CORALINE: That's really cool. Jeff, how did you make the transition from being an English major -- I was an English major too but I didn't finish -- to being a technologist? JEFF: I was really fortunate that I grew up with the computer. I'm enough to earn years now and I had a computer in home as a very little kid. I've always been familiar with technology, my brother and I would take it apart and put it back together. I love books and I was an English major but when I needed to get a job, I got a job with a technology startup in California because I could write proposals and we did business with governments. I had just started picking up and doing what was necessary. I got interested in coding. I realized that it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be and I could get a lot done with some very basic skills. Any time I have the block of time to dedicate to it, I try and get my skills a little bit better and it just was a natural transition a couple of years ago. Because I'm able to work for myself, when I decided what kind of projects do I want to work on, I really made a conscious decision that I never want to lose those tech skills. I always want to be refining them and that's been awesome. CORALINE: I looked at the ReadMe for one of the projects which we're going to be talking about today and I think for the Harvey API, we really demonstrates the value of being able to write and being able to communicate clearly and how important that is in a software product. JEFF: I wish there were more writers involved in tech teams who can help document and market and communicate so that developers and designers can be left to their job and left alone by people who are constantly knocking on their door saying, "I got to get this to this person. I'm talking to the press. What's this?" English majors are the glue that holds it all together. CORALINE: Totally agree. ASTRID: Jeff, you mentioned that the job you have, the startup had something to do with the government. Can you talk a little bit more about how you got started working on projects related to government issues? JEFF: We were a small startup that provided parking software: parking permits, parking enforcement, parking tickets and that kind of thing. I was a sales rep for part of my time there so I would sell to local governments. I respond to RFPs, I get to know how the purchasing process works, understand how to verify vendors and things like that and I got really interested in how local government works because they do a lot. If you work in parking, parking is an auxiliary service. It makes money. It's something that people pay for and then that money goes somewhere else. It doesn't go back into parking. It's vitally important. If parking fails, everything else fails. If you can't park your car, your experience is ruined so it's a critical front line customer service function of the city and it gets very little respect. Yet, it processes tons and tons of money. I really got insight into the types of people who work in positions like that, these really good people who take their jobs really seriously. That kind of spidered from there a few years ago as I started to work with the City of Houston and really started to take that mindset of understanding the types of people who work in government and how hard they work and respect for them. That's helped me worked with teams to uncover new things that we can all work on as a community. CORALINE: It seems like elected officials get all the attention but like you said, there are a lot of hardworking and very dedicated people who are actually doing the work of government and it's really interesting in that, you got to spend time with them and empathize with the jobs that they're doing too. JEFF: Thank you. They work really, really hard. Elected officials deserve a lot of credit. It's an impossible job, you have to shake hands with everybody all the time, you have to be nice to everybody all the time, even on your trolls. You have to watch everything you say and do and be really careful. Win a popularity contest every once in a while. Those people are really important and powerful for spreading a message and setting of the tone, of values and agenda but they'd be nowhere without the thousands and thousands of other people who fill the potholes and answer the 311 calls and do the daily work of government. At least for the City of Houston, it does so much that we just take for granted. The fact that our garbage is getting picked up after the largest rainfall in American history a week later is amazing. JAMEY: Jeff, I'm curious about how your experience working with these government people affected when Harvey first hit and your reaction and how you wanted to step in and do something about that? How was that related in a way? JEFF: In any working relationship, you have to build trust and trust comes with time and with successful delivery of projects. I think that our community, the Sketch City community has built up a lot of trust with government. We have a lot of people who are collaborating with government officials on projects. We have City of Houston, taking some of our projects and embedding them into their own infrastructure. We have a really good working relationship with them and that's helpful because what we want are ideas for things that are going to make an impact. Right now, the people who know what's going to make an immediate impact to the people working for the city and working for all the relief agencies and the relief efforts so having that trust existing for several years, it makes it a lot easier to simply sit down at the table next to them, watch what's going on and start coming up with ideas for how we can help. Then we've got this huge tech community, both Houston and the globe but especially Houston, that put everything aside, their power stayed on, no water gotten their house and they said, "I'm fine. What can I do to help?" And I'm sure the rest of the world is seeing these stories. It's true for the tech community too, where the fourth largest city in the country got a ton of people and it just came together beautifully. CORALINE: What is Sketch City, Jeff? JEFF: Sketch City is a local Houston nonprofit community of technology and data people, who believe that tech and data play a role in public decision making. All too often, elected officials, department directors, agency heads aren't necessarily thinking through the data end of things or they don't have the data or they're not trained on real time data or modern data methods for analysis and we seek to advance that and educate them and do work alongside them to help give them the best information they have to make a good decision. JANELLE: I've been listening to you talk about this kind of theme that's emerging about what it means to respect for you. I've recently been emerged in this kind of CEO investor club culture, which is very different from hanging out with engineers. It's like the world looks like on the other side. I can't help but think about all these parallels between the community and government and respecting the people that do all the things and the same kind of dissonance of us versus them that we have in our organizations with our business leadership versus engineering culture in that same us versus them clash. I'm curious what kind of parallels do you see because you're so involved on both sides. I'd really love to hear your perspective. JEFF: I think that parallel definitely exists in government. You have lots of silos, you have people who say, "That's not my job. I'm not curious about this technology thing. The tech people handle that." Those same silos exist but I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I talk to a lot of new entrepreneurs who want to start a software company and they said, "I just need a coder. I just need to get some money and hire a coder." I kind of look at them and say, "One, if you're doing this full time, just teach yourself to code. Figure out a way, give yourself a budget of $100 and get yourself to a prototype. How would that work?" There really is this ability for some people who have an inner disciplinary background, even just very basic technical skills like I've built a website before so I know the process of thinking about what I want and then learning how to do it or adapting a theme or a template. Just going through the very basics of building those tech muscles gives you respect for that intricacies of the job and how detail oriented it is. I think what's great about the City of Houston is that we have a mayor who is a worker. He's a lawyer. He's a legislator. Now, he's an executive and he has deep respect for all of his employees and has a genuine interest in how the job gets done and how to make it better. I think that type of intellectual curiosity, it naturally leads to respect. You can sit there and say, "Their job is just to be a garbage man and pick up the garbage." When you start thinking about, "How are they doing that? What’s their process look like? How physically taxing on the body is it to do a route? How do you route the trucks? What is dispatch look like? How do you keep them safe?" All the things that go into that, you start to realize that this is a pretty well-oiled machine and there's a lot of those machines. Just to get back to your question, I think those silos exist because of ignorance around how hard a particular job is and once you just pick up a shuttle and start shoveling for a little while and your shoulder start to burn, that gives you a respect for people who do that all day long. CORALINE: It kind of reminds me of what the onboarding process at my current job is. I'm on a team that supports warehouse associates and for the first entire week of my job, we actually went to the warehouse and did various jobs in the warehouse so that we would understand their needs and understand what their working life was like and be able to create solutions that would make life easier for them. I think that comes down to the theme that's emerging here of respect for people who do the work and how important that respect is. Do you think executives don't have respect for people who write code or do you think that it's just this mysterious black box for them? Does that lack of respect go both ways? JEFF: I think it can. In government especially, respect is one component of it but just the way the bureaucracy is set up, you have to have elected officials say, "I want my bureaucratic people -- the people who are going to work here when I'm gone -- to take risks and to be rewarded for taking risks. If they fail, that's okay." Ultimately, it comes down to the leader setting the tone to say figure out a better way to do this. Otherwise, people who work in government are risk averse and they're not going to try something new if something already works. What we're seeing now in Houston is unprecedented scale of disaster and needs and things that these people who already have full time day jobs, now have full time night jobs too. It has gotten really complicated and in times of crisis, that forces a type of innovation like it. If it fails, that's fine. At least we got it out there and we're trying and we're supporting and we're getting better. Because in emergency situations, you fail. You fail constantly and it's terrible, awful feeling to know that you can't hit home runs every time you come to the plate because there's real stakes. I think when you're in an environment like that, it gives you some freedom to innovate technologically that you otherwise might not have. Those innovations do two things: number one, they prove that tech innovation exists and that it can be done and that it can be done quickly and cheaply in a way that highlights new solutions, and number two, it proves that technology should have a seat at the table, that if you're thinking about citywide housing relief, there's ways in which low tech temporary solutions can really help. What the City of Houston in its wisdom does is it make sure that they pull in people from all of this different areas and there is a seat for technology at the table. JAMEY: I really like this talk about innovation and I'd like to dig into that a little bit deeper. Can you tell us about some of the innovations that you've been seeing and that you've been working on in the wake of Harvey? JEFF: Sure. We have been working with a lot of different organizations that have been coordinating crowdsource dispatch and crowdsource verification of information. When you're displaced, when your house floods, you go to a shelter and that shelter is going to feed you, it's going to give you some fresh clothes, maybe, it's going to give you medical supplies and the shelters are ad hoc. It's a church basement. It's an elementary school gymnasium. These are places that are run by volunteers that don't have experience handling hundreds of people coming through their door so everybody kind of makes do. People generally will start organizing through Google Forms and Google Spreadsheets but there's limitations to that, especially when you're at the scale of a disaster like Harvey. What we ended up doing was linking with all of those teams that were coordinating the dispatch in the Google Sheets and we built an API. It's called the Harvey API and it covers the full gamut from rescue to shelter to the needs of the shelters to ordering the products on Amazon to routing them to particular organizations. You can pull from different components of that API as necessary. If you wanted to launch a real time shelter map because the shelter map of the city isn't very good, you could build one that's 10 times better drawing from the same data. The biggest concern in an emergency situation is that wherever you get your data from, it's up to date and it's accurate. That's why we've honed in on that API and we're already starting to put it to use for the preparatory efforts for Hurricane Irma. ASTRID: Jeff, one of the things that you said was that emergency situations showed that technology does need to have a seat at the table. Can you talk a little more about some ways in which technologists can be helpful because it may not occur to some people that during an emergency, we might want to tap into your local technologists as well? JEFF: Totally. There's a couple of ways. I'll give you a simple and easy example and then kind of a crowdsource example. Forgive me for getting wonky. This happens when we talk about governments stuff but the city of Houston is engaged in a bunch of different ways to get FEMA reimbursement. One of those things is volunteer hours. If you log your hours for volunteering for Harvey relief efforts, the city can verify that and submitted for reimbursement. It's done all on paper so we created a digital form in a website called ReportYourHours.com. It's a prototype but that was a need that was brought up in a meeting and we were able to turn it around in a couple of hours, send it through the approval channels and get it out there to people who have been volunteering all through the holiday weekend. It's Wednesday now. This past weekend was Labor Day weekend. We wanted to capture that as soon as possible, especially for people who maybe weren't part of a coordinated relief effort at one of our shelters or with one of our NGOs that's running those things. Just by being at the table and hearing this is a big need, it could mean millions upon millions of dollars in reimbursement for the city. It's hugely impactful. Here's a paper form, figure out the logic, get a site out there. You draw a little bit from backend database development, a little bit from frontend form management and a little bit from marketing and you get something turned around quickly. I think the tech having a seat at the table enables that to happen. But beyond that, the second example I would give is called the Texas Muck Map and that was a team of developers that built a map that as soon as the water recedes, you have to pull out the carpet, you have to cut out the drywall as fast as possible so that mold doesn't grow and what not and that's called mucking. There's a lot of people who are in their 70s. There's a lot of people who are disabled or have disabilities that don't allow them to do that work right away so we created a map basically, "I need you to muck me out," or, "I here to muck," that worked really well over the course of the weekend. It was a need that the community had, the government platform really wasn't mobilized yet, it was just getting started so we were able to get something out of the community that they could use and then the platform absorbed that data and we merged with them. Being able to have tons of people talking about solutions together and not duplicating efforts and then coming up with things that can serve as interim solutions, I think is really, really helpful. CORALINE: I'm curious how you organize a group of 2500 technologists without running into problems with egos or with bikeshedding or with platform arguments. JEFF: It's tough. We have those things. There's room for everybody. We're open. The leadership team of Sketch City are the best people in the world. These are people that I think so highly of and you attract flies with honey, so to speak when you set a tone as particular way, then I think you attract the right people. We’re platform independent. We don't make recommendations about particular technologies. We just want to connect technologists with real public problems and policy people who can explain the nuances of it. I think policy people and tech people have a lot in common, that they live in the details and if you don't work in policy or if you don't work in tech, no one wants to hear about those details but the two can share details with one another. The community management is a little chaotic but the teams know how to self-assemble. The people in our community are incredibly capable, they're project managers, they're CEOs and they're senior developers in real life and they come in and they flex their muscles and execute. We're lucky in the sense that the people in our community are so capable that they don't really require a ton of management. We just play traffic cop and connect them to people and resources. CORALINE: I'm really interested in one of the things you said that struck me as counterintuitive and that is that disaster opens opportunities for innovation. I would think that in a disaster situation, people would want to fall back onto the familiar, even if that's less efficient. What do you think that is that those sorts of situations open the door for innovation that otherwise, maybe wouldn't happen? JEFF: I think having lived through a disaster now, it changes you. It's only been a couple of days, I'm still in the middle of the adrenaline field, sleepless night, 24/7 work but there's too much to do. There's just too much to do. There's too much for people to handle. The infrastructure set up to handle this kind of volume of need is not there. Even as much as we try, it's not there. We have hundreds of organizations coming together and that gets into a process and the government is really good at organizing that process but there's inefficiencies across the board. When you have trust with your friends and neighbors and government officials, those things that they can't get to, where there's a potential technical solution, they're willing to give it a try. They're willing to cut through bureaucracy to get it out there because time is essential. There's too many people in need. I don't quite know how to describe it other than there's too much to do and too few resources to do then. Naturally, people are going to look towards technology to make it more efficient. Even if it's imperfect. Even if it doesn't quite work right. We want to support it but it doesn't have to be a perfect solution. It just has to be out there in helping people. JAMEY: As someone who's pouring their heart and soul into this right now, how do you keep yourself from just feeling overwhelmed? I kind of almost hear that in your voice. How do you get past that and focus on doing something really meaningful, which is what you're doing? JEFF: It's overwhelming. You're in a constant state of being overwhelmed but I think that there's a certain zen that comes along with that. I watched incredible leaders, people who are leading efforts far larger and more important than anything that I'm doing and I see how efficient they are. I see how they're thinking things through. I see their flaws too. You can tell in my flaws are magnified as well in situations like this but it goes through phases. You have an emergency phase, where it's completely overwhelming. You have a relief phase, where the volume and the scope becomes clear and then you have a rebuilding phase. I was really lucky that people from Occupy Sandy, people who work for the city for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, they jumped into the Slack and they pulled me aside and they're like, "Hey, man. Take some time, try and get some sleep. Here's how it's going to go. In a week, it's going to be like this. In a month, it's going to be like that." That kind of guidance is invaluable. Too many people to name that offered that kind of guidance and it's really helpful and it keeps you from being overwhelmed because this is a marathon now. ASTRID: Jeff, one of the things that you mentioned early on was if you start working with local government, how you can make a huge impact, which I think is something that doesn't occur to a lot of people. What would be your advice for somebody who is looking to make that impact for them to get started working with their own local government? JEFF: I would definitely join your local Code for America brigade. If you don't have a Code for America brigade, start one. If you don't have an idea where to get started, reach out to Code for America. It's CodeForAmerica.org and they'll help you. It's helpful to have a person in government who also believes in what you're doing and wants to help that you can partner with and they can run the internal circles of legitimizing what you're doing and you can run the external community building stuff. Together, if you are able to start a long term relationship, it's magical. I watched from the very beginning a gentleman named Seth Etter, who's a community leader in Wichita, Kansas. I used to up to Wichita to facilitate Startup Weekends. I watched him make a decision to take his development community organizations skills and apply it to civic tech. He started Open Wichita, which is their civic hacking group. He got a job with the OpenGov Foundation and his leveraging best practices from across the world to his group and from scratch, created a thriving civic tech community in Wichita, Kansas. If he can do that there, you can do that anywhere. JANELLE: It's so inspiring. The community just really stepping up and seeing problems that are like, "All right. How can we solve this?" You've got this community filled with all these fantastic engineers. They can see problems and come up with solutions and then with tragedy happening all around you, it seems like one of the consequences of that is you've got this well of energy of wanting to help and you just need someone to direct all that energy and people are willing to jump in and code and help chip in and make a difference with the skills they have. There are so many different things we can do with tech, you know? JEFF: Yes. When we start pollinating the government with people with a community tech background or when somebody studied computer science and then got a master's in public policy and it's now an innovation analyst at a city or something like that, that's where this is going to take root. I'm a consultant by trade and that's how I make my money but this should be a core government function. This should be within government. Forward looking cities and forward looking states are starting to do this. I'm thrilled that the City of Houston is taking huge leaps forward to be in the top flight class of cities innovating. ASTRID: Do you think that every city should have a chief technology officer? JEFF: They do but the chief technology officer function is really to oversee the hundreds of applications that the city supports. They have permitting systems. They have routing systems. They have GIS infrastructure. They have a zillion things. That's a huge organizational lift and that's hard to do. The city has an innovation office that they just created, directed by Jesse Bounds and Jesse's amazing and his staff: [inaudible] and Steven David and Myja Lark. They're amazing. They're able to fill that role, consultant plus technology product manager and as that team grows, I think the city will begin to transform even more. JANELLE: One of the things that really struck me is this idea of the knowledge being coupled with how to make things better and what the problems are, being coupled with the people that do the work. From one perspective, we talked about the importance of the leaders respecting those that do the work. It also sets a precedent in disaster situations and what we need to innovate in really all the time, we had to find ways to push decision making toward the people with the knowledge, the people who are doing the work. I'm curious as to what kind of ideas you might have in terms of how we ought to run things differently to facilitate that? JEFF: Everything I learn, I learned it from Hackathons. This is like a real, big, long hackathon. I think that being involved in your civic hackathon as a participant is really helpful. Being involved as a government official is really helpful in getting to know one another and coming out of city hall and meeting tech people, where they live and where they are, I think is really helpful. Then knowing how to scope out a project, scope out a need, build a prototype, test it, stay up all night and get something done, I think hackathons are the best training you can get. That's a superlative. It's probably not the best training you can get but if you're a tech person and casually, you just want to prepare for something like this, your civic hackathon is the place to do it. CORALINE: I'm curious, Jeff. I think that when the disaster strikes, a lot of people are motivated to help in any way they can. Through organizations like Sketch City, there's a structure in place to allow them to help but how do you maintain that enthusiasm for helping local governments be more efficient when the disaster is not present? How do you motivate people to help in the communities when it's a regular day? JEFF: It was really great. If you're a sales person, you want to sell something that people want to buy. What's great about this is that people want to help. The community that we've grown is this community of people who opted in and raised their hand and said, "I got these tech skills. I'm curious about local government." They're usually not the people who are protesting every day. But they are the people who say, "You know what? I can make a difference in this particular way." I'm particularly passionate about environmental issues and criminal justice issues and education issues. My passions grow more than I do work in those fields but I would gladly volunteer my weekends every weekend, all weekends for the foreseeable future, when environmental data causes like that, that just is so necessary. I think about that instinct and I know that thousands of other people have that same instinct. It just needs to be given a channel to be expressed in some way. To your point, I don't think we have to keep people motivated so much as we do keeping people delivering stuff that can be helpful. With each win, more people come in and more people see what's possible from their volunteer time and the winds just keep coming as people motivate themselves. JAMEY: We've been talking a lot about what's been done reactively, as a reaction to a disaster but what do you hope maybe could be done in the future proactively, maybe in Houston or even something that could be passed on to other cities, to kind of get things set up in case something like this happens again. Hurricane Irma potentially heading again right away, which is just terrible and scary. What are your thoughts on putting things into place to be more ready in the future? JEFF: Our team is already working with Code for America brigades in Florida and all the volunteers over there. We've put together a document of best practices from our own experience so far and help set things up over there so it didn't have to reinvent the wheel. From a technical perspective, I think the Harvey API is pretty powerful. Oftentimes, people want to build the frontend. They want to build a website, a central source of information and that's good and we need that. But my passion is really around a central source of data truth. There's so much data that's collected. It needs to be real time. Sometimes, it's official data. Sometimes, it's crowdsource data. If we can provide a backbone for that, in an API that can serve it up into whatever front facing website you want to build -- you want to build the map with leaflet, you want to build a map with Esri, I don't care -- as long as it shows the right data. That's really where our efforts are concentrated and that API is open source. It's on the Sketch City GitHub organization. Now, Jesse Wolgamott is the primary architect along with [inaudible] and about 11 other contributors. Those folks are tired. They're exhausted from this. What I'm really hopeful that we can do, just hand over our best practices on organizations so far and have them build on it but also let them leverage our technology as much as they want to. My hope is that people develop on Harvey API and that becomes either that or some future iteration of that becomes a central way of managing multiple data sources. JANELLE: Jeff, earlier you were talking about handling the overwhelming stress that comes with an event like this. The thing that you said was that the calmness in the storm comes from clarity and understanding the storm, as opposed to conquering it. When you get people together and they have a plan and they're executing, the relief comes from that clarity instead. I see that same thing happen in technology too, where you've got chaos happening because essentially, not clarity in the plan so it's always like hyper-stress. I'm wondering if some of these skills and ideas that you've learned in the context of the community have potentially helped you in consulting. JEFF: Maybe. I think that it's just so overwhelming the amount of adrenaline that goes through your body for days and days on end -- I'm not a scientist and I don't really know. I'm guessing it's adrenaline -- that I don't quite know how to articulate it but you kind of have to adapt and get to a new level of normal and know that you can't operate in this frenetic pace and this feeling like things are out of control at all times. I guess, it's kind of yoga in the sense that you have to find your inner peace and people respond to how you respond to things. If you're frantic, you can agitate them. Have you ever been in a meeting where people are cutting one another off? I'm not into meetings like that. I don't like meetings like that. I don't operate that way and I don't like being dragged into meetings like that. I like structured and efficient. I guess the point is that I don't stress out that easily to begin with. I've got some good mental tools for distressing and not getting stressed out. But in a situation that's completely and totally overwhelming, you have to trust that people around you are working as best as they can and everybody tries to dial down the amount of stress. You have to take breaks for mental relief. You have to cry. You have to release physically the agitation that you feel so that you can get back to work because we're ahead of schedule in getting people out of shelters. The needs are not as overwhelming just yet and we're preparing for that next phase but there's just a lot going on so you can't waste time getting stressed about that stuff anymore than you're naturally going to be stressed. I don't know if that answers your question or not but I'd like to think that practice back in my regular life and feel stress-free all the time. ASTRID: It sounds like what you said, which is what I heard you say is that when everything is crazy but you can know something and you can actually do something about what you know, that gives you something to focus on, as opposed to being focused on everything being crazy. JEFF: Yeah. It gives you some control. It helps you control what you're doing. Something that I know a lot of us felt immediately after Harvey stopped raining was we felt out of control. We wanted to do something we didn't know what to do. We felt powerless and helpless as we watched our neighbors and our friends drown and that's terrible. I think that getting some control over the situation in whatever small way you can, whether you're helping the Cajun Navy with dispatch or you're organizing food relief or you're building a website or you're just hanging out with your friends, brainstorming ideas, that's a really good way of dealing with what's going on and finding your direction as fast as possible and figure out where you can best help. It's incumbent upon you. There's lots of volunteers who show up and say, "I'm ready for something. Give me something to do," you've got to figure it out yourself. CORALINE: We like to end each show with a reflection on the conversation that we've had and calls to action. ASTRID: One of the things that came out the conversation that I thought was really interesting was the idea of using temporary projects as a means of helping. A lot of times when we talk about technology, especially if you're trying to do some tech for good, we're thinking in a much bigger longer term way. What I thought was a good thing to takeaway is that it may become actually more important to have the ability to very quickly come up with something temporarily to get you to the next week or to the next month so that you can make it to those long term projects. That's just as important and maybe, possibly even more important, especially when it comes to some sort of emergency situation or disaster situation because that's usually where a lot of things are falling apart and it would be great to be able to have a community that is ready to do something. JAMEY: For me, this whole conversation was very emotional and kind of an emotional roller coaster in a lot of ways because seeing all of the destruction and everything bad that's happening on the news has been really tough during this disaster and in general. I think that it's very easy for the news to focus on these bad things and have them feel overwhelming. To talk to Jeff today and hear, particularly what he was saying about people coming and showing up and wanting to help and Coraline's question about how to motivate people, when he was talking about where people are already motivated because they want to help, they want to be able to do something for their community and give back and it's important to people and the fact that he has met and worked with all of these people who all feel similarly to him about that and knowing that there's a lot of people like that out there, is a really good thing to hear and a healthy thing for community and also for everyone to be aware of our community, I think when things seem very grim. The emotional roller coaster for me that there's a very hopeful lining with all of these people working to help so I felt really good about that. I think that after disasters like this, we get an outpouring of support that's really impressive and I've seen a lot of sentiment from people about how in a way it's kind of sad that we have to wait for some disaster to happen in order to bring people together like this. I can see where they're coming from in that way but to me, I see it more as now that we have these people together working on things, we have to take that blessing and continue running with it in order to make it not sad and a really worthwhile thing that just happened to [inaudible] out of a tragedy. ASTRID: It's sad that people think that people don't do this. I think there are people who are doing this and don't get attention. With the disaster and then [inaudible], I think it's actually hopeful that you're not alone, that there's a lot of people who are like you who want to do something good. JAMEY: I think you are totally on point about people who want to do something just needing a way to channel it. It's situations like this that provide the catalyst for that channel, not the catalyst for people wanting to help. JANELLE: I think my reflection is as listening to this conversation, I've just been so inspired by just seeing how much light there is in the world. Even when we seem to be drowning in darkness, there's all this beautiful light in the world around us of people coming together and people pitching in to help. The thing that ends up holding people back is the simple stuff of like, "I didn't realize that this was a place I could channel my energy," and if this minimal amount of structure is set up to tie people together, to partner people with the right people, we can channel all that energy that is already out there in the world and start solving these problems. We’ve got all these engineers with all these amazing problem solving skills. If we set up a channel to say, "Let's sit down at the table and talk about how we can solve these problems," things just start happening. Maybe, if we started knocking down some of those barriers and just making that first step to get involved and connect it with the right people, maybe that's all it take to shift direction. CORALINE: I was really struck by the underlying theme of today's conversation and creating cultures of respect and how creating a culture like that where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs and for the system that's doing its job can lead to real solutions and can lead to bringing people together in a way that makes everyone able to contribute fully and open opportunities for innovation. I think that's something that each of us can take with us into our work life and our home life and hopefully, also channel into doing some greater good in our communities. I'm curious, Jeff if people want to donate your effort, either time or money, how would they go about helping Sketch City? JEFF: They can just go to SketchCity.org. There's a Slack, a Meetup, a GitHub. We appreciate all of our contributors from all around the world but first and foremost, check out Code for America and get connected with them so that you can bring civic hacking to your community. CORALINE: I hope that our listeners are also inspired to take what they learned from this conversation and apply it and do some good in the world and volunteer and give money, if you can't volunteer. I think the conversation that we had today is really, really important, especially not just thinking in terms of disaster relief but in terms of how each of us can contribute to making our communities better and safer and healthier. We feel very privileged to be able to have the guests that we have on the show and to be able to share these conversations with you. If you would like to ensure that conversations like this continue happening, you can support us on our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. We're also looking for per show and long term sponsorships that companies and individuals and conferences can take advantage of. If you are interested in a sponsorship opportunity, go to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Thank you so much Jeff. This has been great. JEFF: Appreciate it.