Greetings from the new cohort of Digital Transformation fellows. We’re here because the Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT) is using fellows as an innovative way to get more people working on their key initiatives. ODDT is tackling big pieces of work by hiring fellows for a few months at a time to focus on specific projects. This post is the first in a series about why these fellowships are a good fit for ODDT, and what we’re doing here.

Fellows provide focus and flexibility

ODDT is working toward a City government that serves its residents by publishing open data and making services easy to find for people who need them. In practical terms, that means changing the current website into a service center for residents, businesses, and visitors, and thinking about how to make data from City government departments readily available to people like researchers, community leaders, and policy experts. We focused on smaller chunks of these big projects, so we could jump into our work quickly. Also, when our fellowships end on June 30, we’ll be able to hand off the products of our work to permanent team members easily.

Fellowships aren’t just a way to add temporary staff members to a team. Fellows contribute outside expertise. Among the ten of us, we have experience in behavioral economics, software engineering, journalism, education, advertising, and service design. That means that when questions come up in our team meetings, we can draw on a wealth of experiences and perspectives to answer them. Since ODDT wants this work to reach a broad audience, it’s valuable to have many different people thinking about connecting the tools we’re creating with the people who can use them.

Fellowships are also a great way for an organization to form new relationships and to identify potential leaders in an industry. The design and tech industry in Philadelphia has so many talented people, and through these fellowships, the City gets to borrow that talent without asking them to make a career change. We fellows, in turn, have a great opportunity to pitch in on a project that will have a positive, concrete impact on the public.

The dream team

Enter our team of fellows. Working on the open data portal, we have Vito Salerno and Miguel Perez. For user experience design, we’re looking to Priya Tirtha and Kim-Thao Nguyen for their great ideas. Hanya Moharram is tackling design strategy. On content design, we’re relying on Clare Cotugno, Toni McIntyre, Arin Black, Lauren Galanter, and Carolyn Caine. And leading the way on project management is Jacqueline Siotto, who coordinates landing page efforts with more than fifty departments and offices in the City.

In the coming weeks, we’ll share details about this work through a series of posts. Next up, you’ll learn more about what user experience and design strategy are, and how essential they are for a government trying to serve its residents better. You’ll learn about what it means to audit a large and complex website, and why it matters that people who are building a new website know the ins and outs of the current website. We’ll also discuss what exactly open data means, and why making open data accessible is so important. When our fellowships end on June 30, we’ll tell you about the projects we’ve completed, what’s next on the horizon for ODDT, and what opportunities there are for you to become involved in our work.

We’re excited about the work we’re doing. The City’s website is like Philadelphia’s digital front door. We want people who live and work here to have City services that are easy to access and empowering to use. We’re excited to help ODDT complete the next phase of this important project and prepare for what’s coming next.