Putting All the Pieces Together

When Mai-Ling Garcia arrived at Berkeley as a junior-year transfer, she struggled to fit in. Short on cash, she and her then-husband moved into an aging cottage with a leaky roof about a mile west of campus. Most days, they subsisted on bowls of Top Ramen. Her husband’s military paycheck was gone; they were both students now. Each of them had secured partial scholarships, but they didn’t know enough about their financial-aid options to get the maximum possible support. Neighbors took pity on the couple and shared stockpiles of frozen food. To cover expenses, Garcia took a part-time job teaching art at a grade-school recreation center in Oakland.

Finishing college can become impossible when life gets this harrowing. Partway through her second semester, Garcia began tracking down what she now refers to as “a series of odd little foundations with funky scholarships.” People wanted to help her. Before long, she was attending Berkeley on a full ride. Her money problems abated. What she couldn’t forget was that initial feeling of being in trouble and ill-prepared. Her travails were pulling her into sociology’s most pressing issues: how vulnerable people fare in a world they don’t understand, and what can be done to make their lives better.

Simultaneously, Berkeley’s professors were arming Garcia with the tools that would ultimately define her career. She spent a year learning the fine points of ethnography from a Vietnam-era Marine, Martin Sanchez-Jankowski. He had earned a PhD from MIT; at Berkeley he taught students how to conduct field research. He sent Garcia into the Oakland courthouse to watch judges in action, advising her to pay close attention to the ways racial differences tinged courtroom conduct. She learned to take careful notes, to be explicit about her theories and assumptions, and to operate with a rigor that could withstand peer-review scrutiny. Instead of getting mad, she was learning how to dig deeper.

Was Garcia destined to become a researcher—or an advocate? Unsure of her future, she moved between those two roles for several years. First she conducted field research with a Marine community in Southern California, building her senior thesis around the erratic nature of support systems for warriors’ families living on or near military bases. She documented bureaucratic snarls so powerfully that faculty members encouraged her to present her results to the California assembly and to the American Psychological Association.

For the next few years, Garcia tried to fix the system herself. She spent two years working at a nonprofit organization, Swords to Plowshares, that tried to untangle Veterans Administration bureaucracy. After that, three years at the Department of Labor evaluating hundreds of grant applications related to veterans’ employment. She was winning many small battles, but she felt profoundly frustrated working in an environment that was behind the times technologically.

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Garcia constantly faced the contrast between government torpor and the private sector’s giddy embrace of mobile technologies that put an incredible new power into everyone’s hands. Renting a vacation home, booking a restaurant, or arguing online about a news article had never been so easy. Trying to accomplish anything in government—from reporting a pothole to changing a jury-duty date—was utterly different. American democracy remained stuck with primitive online systems that were hard to use. If the VA could work as smoothly online as Instagram, if city hall were as easy to use as Yelp, everything would be different. Instead, nothing was changing.

Could Garcia help fix government? Yes, she decided, but it would require more zigzags in her training. She needed to become a tech enabler rather than someone who merely bemoaned its failings. She started with night-school lessons in digital marketing from General Assembly.

After that, she spent eighteen months as a marketing specialist at Back to the Roots, which sold mushroom-growing kits online. It was hardly the pinnacle of Garcia’s career, but the pay was good and the training even better. She was learning the fast-paced cadence of California’s start-up culture—where new ideas were being tried out all the time, where “failing fast” was considered a virtue, and where raw prototypes were rapidly retooled and relaunched until a winning new product emerged. Power flows differently in such settings, and the sociologist in her needed to know how and why.

By the summer of 2014, Garcia was ready to reenter government, this time as a full-strength agitator for change. She pounced on a job ad in which the City of Oakland announced that it was seeking a bridge builder who could amp up online government services on behalf of the city’s four hundred thousand residents. How would this happen? No one knew exactly, but Garcia—and Oakland—were ready to find out.

Within a few months, Garcia became a co-manager of Oakland’s Digital Front Door initiative. She and communications manager Karen Boyd pinpointed parts of city government that weren’t making full use of modern online technology and coordinated teams of software engineers and department officials who could take city services to a better place.

This wasn’t just an exercise in technology upgrading; it required a fundamental rethinking of the way that Oakland delivered services. Clerks handling paper records at city hall would need to let go of longtime habits in favor of instant electronic access for anyone with an Internet connection. Buffers between city workers and an impatient public would come down. The social structures of power would change. To make this transition, it certainly helped to have a digitally savvy sociologist in the house.

Over coffee one afternoon, Garcia told me excitedly about ways in which Oakland’s city services were already improving and how much more progress was within sight. The technology that powers Expedia’s plane-ticket sales and Instagram’s photo-sharing service needn’t be the exclusive preserve of profit-minded companies. It can be put to use for the public good too. Already, if street-art creators want more recognition for their work, Garcia can drum up interest on social media. If garbage is piling up and requests for timely pickups are being ignored, new digital tools let citizens visit the city’s Facebook page and summon services within seconds. “It’s as simple as zooming in on a map and clicking the exact location where there’s a mess,” Garcia explained.
Looking ahead, Garcia envisions a day when landing a municipal job becomes vastly easier, with cities’ Twitter feeds posting each new opening. Other aspects of digital technology ought to help residents connect quickly with whatever part of government matters to them—whether that means signing up for summer camp or giving the mayor a piece of one’s mind. Each new wave of technology redefines city life, social norms, and the ways that power flows through society. We’re just beginning to recognize the opportunities.