Thank You CfA! – Dan Melton

This post was written by Dan Melton, Code for America’s CTO. The original post on Code for America was automatically pulled into GovLoop and accidentally mislabeled as by Abhi Nemani.

I’m stepping out of Code for America at the end of the year. It’s time for some new leadership to continue building the CfA network effect.

It’s been a little over a year and half since I got involved in the Code for America story. I was hacking government in the Midwest when I heard about the birth of a new type of public service that paired geeks with cities to solve all kinds of problems with a lean startup mentality. After a few years of battling to get ‘the datas’ paid for by my tax dollars, I knew I wanted to get involved, even if it meant doing dishes. Government needs transformative change, I saw CfA as a place to do it.

I started following the blog as soon as it launched, and sent my hat in the ring when Jen posted the need for a CTO. At that time, CfA had raised maybe $25 to $50k, not near enough to support her, much less me and an army of geeks. Two months later, Jen had raised nearly $1million and said, ‘when can you start?’ For an organization to go from birth to adolescence in such a short time is a testament not only to the need for CfA but to Jen’s leadership.

I’ll be writing some thoughts here about the year as we close out the first fellowship cycle. For now, we’re looking at bringing on a technology lead and a new CTO to complement our amazing new fellowship program director, Bob Sofman. The organization is in great hands and I’ve had a blast helping Jen and team build iteration one of Code for America. I’ll still hang around in an advisory capacity and look forward to watching iteration two launch next year.

I plan to step out at the end of the year (Dec 31), work on my vitamin D levels at the beach, and then head back into the private sector working on government technology. Stay tuned!

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