If the Code for America and its ilk grow, it may an even greater impact beyond local services.
In partnership with Code for America he also co-founded Civic Commons, an initiative to help governments share technology and their experiences using it.
Coders are part of a "privileged class in our society right now, " says Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of San Francisco-based Code for America.
The keynote speakers this year include humorist Baratunde Thurston, "cyber anthropologist" Amber Case, Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
Some of this happens by deploying teams of coders to help government agencies, but Code for America also supports civic hackathons around the nation.
Code For America faces an opposite challenge: convincing techies with opportunities to make gobs of money in Silicon Valley to take comparatively low-paying government roles.
The nonprofit Code for America initiative is helping accelerate civic coding by fostering collaboration between coders, local or state governments, and community groups to solve problems.
That is the premise of Code for America, a budding national organization of software programmers who use public information from local governments to create better civic services.
And look at Code for America that, in my view, is scaling e-Government innovation faster than most other non-profits, consultancies, associations or government agencies.
To help with the graphics part, Code for America teamed up with the Noun Project, an open-source icon repository, and solicited the help of activists and designers in major cities across the country.
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About the guest blogger: Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which works with talented web professionals and cities around the country to promote public service and reboot government.
Louisville is one of 10 cities chosen to participate in Code for America, a national, nonprofit fellowship that provides cities with tech-savvy professionals to help create online applications that use data and technology to bring greater openness, efficiency and participation to local government.
Programs like Fuse Corps, Code for America, and StartUp America are helping to provide the catalysts and energy to focus on entrepreneurial approaches to big problems from the bottom up, including by helping to build the all important ecosystems that support and maintain innovation.
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Meanwhile, three-year-old Code For America, a nonprofit that recruits experienced coders nationally for projects like building databases for local governments, has expanded its annual fellowship program from three to nine projects and last year launched a broad "brigade" of volunteer techies to work on ad hoc civic programs.
In December officials from Britain's financial-services regulator went to New York to study America's bankruptcy code, which has special provisions for investment banks.
He also outlines a simplification of America's mad tax code, bringing the top rate for both individuals and businesses down to 25% by eliminating loopholes.
America's tax code is the country's main mechanism for redistributing income.
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Mr Bush's team wants to eliminate the bias in favour of employer-purchased, low-deductible health insurance in America's tax code, not by reducing the existing tax subsidies for employers, but by increasing the tax subsidies for individuals.
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Mr Obama has let one former tax-avoider through: Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary, who failed to pay self-employment taxes when he was a consultant for the International Monetary Fund. (Foes of America's absurdly complicated tax code were delighted to note that even a reputedly brilliant economic mind failed to comply with it.) But with the financial and economic crisis raging, Mr Geithner appeared simply too important to lose.
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