Two Philly candidates are vying for Code for America’s National Advisory Council. You know what to do

Code for Philly’s co-founding captain Chris Alfano and executive director Dawn McDougall are in the running for spots on Code for America’s National Advisory Council (NAC).

The national brain trust, created in 2016 as part of a new governance structure for civic-tech brigades, looks to empower and guide the work done by the network of local delegations. It will be comprised of five “At-Large” council members and four regional seats representing the West, Northeast, South and Midwest delegations.

Alfano and McDougall are seeking “At-Large” seats, while McDougall is also vying for a spot on the Northeast delegation. Alfano, who was first elected to the NAC in 2016, told Technical.ly that Code for Philly is the only brigade to have two candidates in the running for the council.

Technologists who have joined Code for Philly either in person or online are eligible to vote.

The Jarvus Innovations CTO is aiming to help the NAC establish something called the Civic Cloud Brigade Action Team to bring together existing devops and systems administration expertise from around the Code for America network.

“We will tackle the dual goals of building a hosting infrastructure and set of application automation standards that will enable our public interest applications to be (re)deployed in one click, migrated between commercial clouds and donated local computing capacity, and maintained in flocks independently from original developers,” said the technologist in a Medium post detailing each candidate’s platforms.

McDougall, who runs her Code for Philly obligations concurrently with her work as PromptWorks’ operations manager, is pledging to listen “deeply” to the needs of the local brigades, but also asking complicated questions and helping to find balanced solutions.

“Can we get the City of Princeton to partner with Philly on a shared project? What about having DC and Wilmington combine resources to meet shared needs? The NAC can help to prompt and guide these conversations,” McDougall said in the article.

https://twitter.com/de_mcdougs/status/961221234037084160

(The importance of collaborative relationships was also a point raised by GovDelivery founder Michelle Lee in her keynote address to the Code for America Brigade Congress last October.)

Here’s a bit more from Alfano:

And McDougall: