The San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation is looking for its next round of fellows. The program was launched last year in an effort to sustain a Code for America-like fellowship every year within the Mayor’s office. Fellows are given full-time pay for the period of one year to help develop civic technology and improve service delivery for the city.
This application round will result in two fellows being chosen. Fellows will be involved in a range of projects including ongoing efforts to create open data standards for social services. As CivSource previously reported, those projects include health inspection data standards, an opening of the municipal code, and building inspection data standards.
Other projects include Entrepreneurship in Residence (EIR) which pairs public sector fellows with private sector business in order to improve service delivery in San Francisco. Other cities like Philadelphia have similar programs aimed at incubating civic businesses.
City budgeting and zoning concerns are also on the docket. Notably, potential fellowships should be mid-career professionals with 5-8 years of experience, perhaps underlining the maturation of civic tech as an industry sub-sector.
“The need for innovation in government has never been greater, and we must work with our greatest resource – our human capital – to find new solutions to old challenges,” Mayor Edwin Lee said in a statement.
