Where I Want to Be
When we work together, we save time, money, and most importantly, lives.
Let’s re-imagine the potential of our spaces so we can learn how to work together, better.
There’s this Talking Heads song that has omnipresence in my life. This Must Be the Place has a timeless energy that wraps around you with a portable home-like feeling. It’s cozy. It’s uplifting. And in 4 minutes and 56 seconds, no matter what I’m doing or where I’m at, hearing this song strengthens my connection to the place I am in. After my recent relocation to Washington, DC from Detroit — a city that I worked to rebuild and called home for over 15 years — ideas of home and what it means to be “at home” are currently top of mind.
“At home” is about having that sense of place. Migrating to a new city often means putting new roots in the ground, and finding meaning in new spaces as the foundation to do so. It took a few weeks, but during a walk at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, I realized that I already have roots in Washington: As a middle school violin player, I traveled to our nation’s capital to compete in group orchestra competitions. In college, I walked around the Library of Congress rotunda as part of a design association afterglow. Alongside industry and political leaders, I gained a new understanding of how much potential lies at the intersection of design, technology, policy-making, business, and government.
When my entrepreneurial career formally began in my early twenties, I yet again found myself back in Washington. Through the invitation of a friend (now with NYC’s Mayor DeBlasio’s office), I joined — as the first woman — a software development platform code sprint led by New America’s Open Technology Institute. This platform, an open source mesh-network project called Commotion (initially dubbed as “Internet in a Suitcase” in various NYT articles), was seeded by a grant from the US Department of State. The collaborations that began through this project evolved, as they should, into multiple iterations and rebrands. I helped scale the branches up and it fueled much of the work I continued to co-lead acting as a functional bridge between fractions of cities working on digital-divide issues across the world. Many years later, I’m proud to watch how my foundational work on Commotion helped pave the way for a decade of efforts that have included developments such as New America’s Resilient Communities. This program in itself is a practice in partnership, as it is part of RISE NYC, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation Wireless Neighborhood Networks, and Detroit’s Community Technology Project (the latter being recently featured in Vice’s Motherboard). That “Internet in a Suitcase” idea was in actuality the pre-formation of something we hear a lot about now — we were constructing the Internet of Things before it was a thing.
And here we are back to the now. I highlight what my Washington roots look like because shared experiences in collaborative spaces are perhaps the most critical aspect of my own transformation. A lot happened between that code sprint and today. At mid-career, I find myself joining an exceptional team at the HHS’ National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute (NCI) as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. My core mission, in its simplest form, is to not only bring diverse stakeholders together to prototype and calculate the impact of a healthcare innovation, but also to prototype what that innovation looks and feels like. Identifying a shared language and mapping key parts of the process so we can build a sustainable system that restructures the “everyday work experience” into more collaborative cultural attitudes. Developing these relationships is equal to — if not greater than — the innovative end product.
Relationships and how they relate to the spaces in which we work are universal challenges. We navigate (or don’t) places and spaces based on how we can intuitively interact (or not) within them. Therein lies the challenge of creating and sustaining collaborative relationships. While there’s no shortage of brilliant minds at NCI (#understatementofthecentury), what I find that we do lack is something far more rudimentary: access to open, collaborative spaces. This is not a direct critique of my colleagues or leadership, nor is it a condition unique to NCI. This is, however, an example of where/how we form working relationships and where cultural practices emerge. Everyday at an office can feel like an awkward dance between calendar notifications and gray desks. I find it easy to get lost in the federal government’s maze of lanes, territories, siloes, and cubicles. In coming from Detroit, where there is no shortage of unstructured spaces (we’re talking roughly 40 square miles of vacant land), this sense of “openness” is combined with thousands of people working to rebuild the built environment. There is a re-envisioning of form, purpose, and need that is at play.
I am not purporting that in order to innovate on the federal level, we have to completely discard our current set-up. It should, however, be rethought. We’re overdue for a review of what and how we culturally interact in our changed world and what is needed to support that. Let’s re-imagine the potential of our spaces so we can more openly bring diverse groups together to learn how to work together, better. More social collisions. More collaborative processes. I fear it might be hard to effectively set a new federal standard of efficiency, accountability, and overall connectivity while working within the same physical organizational systems of tin can networks that encourage and perpetuate the stubborn silos we struggle in. Think of these systems as they are now — what words and feelings come to mind? When I think of my work improving the interoperability of information to harness the power of more actionable (big) data to design more (artificially) intelligent systems that serve our American people, do our work ethics reflect our desired outcomes? Are we practicing the art of collaboration, idea-sharing, which includes building chutes and ladders to actionable innovation? Or is it something else?
And if we are going to work together, we need to then actually work together. We need to build smarter systems to support this, and share experiences in ongoing collaborative spaces. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to work together. I wind down 2017 reflecting on how fortunate I have been to attend dozens of innovative spaces and retreats over the years that have helped me develop both professionally and as a basic human. These shared experiences make me who I am and provide some a kind of baseline of what’s possible — what we (as a current members of the federal government) could aspire to. I thank the Atlantic Council and BMW Foundation’s international leadership building of the Transatlantic Core Group, as well as retreats on Wasan Island (which is a force of unparalleled team-building magic) for showing me in real life what these possibilities look like.
Fostering more collaborative relationships can take shape in many ways. Take mobile, for instance: Two of my most impactful group bonding experiences occurred on bus trips across China — one with the entrepreneurial TEDxShanghai team and the other with the more state government focused Great Lakes Leadership Academy Advancement Program. Legendary examples of spaces that bring people together include the Aspen Ideas Festival, a historically groundbreaking and beautiful gathering of brilliant mind melding in Colorado, and the Allied Media Conference, a force that has shifted paradigms at the intersection of social innovation and technology in Detroit. I am honored to have been part of these experiences that put meaningful spaces at the forefront and go above and beyond those maroon hotel ballrooms or conference center rooms. We need more of them.
Which brings me to this: how might we, in the government, improve our fellow American citizen’s experience by creating more opportunities to activate innovation within our internal experience? What kind of spaces do we need on the inside that help us work better so that on the outside, we’re saving not only American lives, but American time and tax dollars? In 2018, I look forward to learning more about what kind of community and innovation spaces the DC area has to offer around health, like the Technology Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins. I was inspired by the Department for Health and Human Services’ recent Innovation Day and code-a-thon to understand the power big data can have on a global health crisis.
A recent trip to the DC West End Library left me speechless as it is an exemplary example of a highly accessible and well designed public space that speaks of the openness required for more collaborative work habits. We can further extend and draw inspiration from spaces that blur lines from leaders like Muriel Cooper, who helped shape the MIT Media Lab with her work leading the Visible Language Workshops. While my work with the Media Lab was well after we lost Muriel, I will always look to her as one of my mentors.
The desire to create more collaborative processes, however they end up taking shape, is my home. I’ve lived here in this idea of home for a long time. And as I write this in the air between DC and Seattle, ironically a charming indy pop iteration of This Must Be the Place popped up on my Spotify. Even if I can’t give you the address of my future house, this is the home where I want to be.
