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**Nadia Eghbal:** Whoo! Dan Herrera! |
**Max Ogden:** He taught me everything that I know. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That’s a really lucky opportunity. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that’s awesome. When you did PDX API, one of the premises of it was, “Don’t try to provide data to developers in something that they can't understand. Just give me the data, and I’ll make it accessible to developers.” \[laughs\] Which was interesting, because you didn’t have a lot of inroads wi... |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah. The human side of code that I learned through that process was… Previously, I think you nailed it in the question, actually. Previously, I was an outsider. I was a volunteer and I didn’t feel like I could actually influence the things the people that were working for the government could do, techni... |
I think the stroke of genius in the model of Code for America… I mean, they copied Teach for America, it’s very overtly modeled on that. I think the Teach for America model is you embed people. The Code for America model is about embedding. One of the really cool things about the Code for America program was you show u... |
\[08:02\] So the fact that Code for America didn’t have us do a bunch of technical things on our first week, but instead they had us talk about being change agents, being effective negotiators, I think speaks a lot to us about how they knew that it was essentially about embedding us inside of government, and having us ... |
Going into it, I thought it was a technical thing. I thought I was going to be like, “Okay, I’ll go make a bunch of cool APIs, or build a bunch of cool apps.” By the end of it I realized that people inside of governments aren’t exposed to ideas like open source as much, because the hiring and procurement systems are es... |
The Code for America model is you literally get people to quit their jobs at Google for a year, or go on a sabbatical, and then you get them to become government employees. I didn’t come from Google, I came from this smaller company, but the general idea is practicing people from the tech industry get to go and do a ye... |
That was really empowering for me, because now I was on the other side of the wall, so to speak. When I was in Portland, I was just this random person that was volunteering; I didn’t feel like I had any power to actually change anything. Now suddenly I was a City of Boston employee, and I felt my opinions were valid on... |
The Code for America hacked two things at once; they gave me a lot of confidence that my opinions did matter, because it made me feel like I was the expert coming in, and trying to help people understand they don’t have to buy horrible software, and hire people with horrible credentials; they can actually do things in ... |
The point of it was you go into a city for a year, and you try to make some cool things. By the end of the year, you don’t just leave and the things go away. The idea is that by the end of it, you’ve given the city a different lens to view the process for developing software. |
Actually, the hardest thing about it was that we had to come up with a way of contracting for support for the open source apps that we did, because they were deployed on Heroku and they didn’t know how to maintain Heroku services. It turned out that the biggest outcome of the entire thing was we had to draft a new proc... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[12:06\] That’s an awesome story. That was 2011, right? You started Dat a couple years later, right? |
**Max Ogden:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I’m assuming some of those experiences ended up feeding into the kind of work you ended up doing/living for? |
**Max Ogden:** The last couple months when I was working at the City of Boston, I ended up working on a bunch of different little prototype applications. We were working with the public school system, so we ended up… Another big thing we didn’t see was how much time we spent talking to lawyers about student data, and l... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So it sounds like the genesis of it was around government data, but the project now is mainly focused on scientific data, and science. How did that transition get made? |
**Max Ogden:** It was also this fortuitous meeting. I had gone to the Mozilla festival, which is an awesome festival. It’s basically nine conferences at once in this big building in London. And it’s all these different open knowledge, open culture, open science, open source, open journalism, open data... It’s all these... |
And I was like, “Well, I think science is really cool, but I’m a college dropout; I have no credentials, I don’t really know…” |
\[15:58\] He actually said, “I think what you’re doing is exactly what a lot of scientists need right now, but you don’t know it yet.” \[laughs\] |
I was like, “Whoa, okay. That’s interesting.” I think he ended up being totally right. So the funder actually approached me, and convinced me to work on their social issue, so to speak. I thought that was really interesting; just getting a prototype out there, and going to the right conference where you have this inter... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Awesome. We’re about to head into our break, but when we return, we’ll dive into the grant process, and some of the more organizational aspects. |
**Break:** \[17:10\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we’re back with Max Ogden of the Dat project, and we’re talking about grant funding. So I’m curious, Max, when you started doing this, it sounds like you fell into this fortuitous meeting with a grant funder, but how did you know that grant funding was right for you with this project? Why did... |
**Max Ogden:** I would give a lot of credit to the Knight Foundation. They have been doing a lot of work to try to make grant funding less scary. One of the things that they’ve done, which… I think I was the first person to get one of these, just because I was a right-place-right-time thing. It was called the Knight Pr... |
I think progressive-thinking around smaller funding is really interesting. The only reason I got into this was because I could start small. I didn’t know enough to write a huge grant at the beginning. ‘Huge’ meaning more than one person for six months. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[19:51\] Yeah, definitely I want to explicitly plug the Knight prototype thing, because I’ve heard really good experiences around it. We’ll get into it later, but why grants are so scary to people. I think part of it is because you have these enormous amounts of money, or you have these multi-year co... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So let’s get into that a bit, and deconstruct this. What is grant writing? How does this even work? \[laughs\] |
**Max Ogden:** I probably have a different answer than a lot of people. The word ‘grant’ could mean government grants, it could mean EU grants... I have someone that I work with that’s in Denmark, they don’t have this phenomenon of eccentric billionaires, either alive or dead, that give away all their money away throug... |
So that’s an American thing, the philanthropic private foundations that are like these eccentric, mostly white male, rich billionaire people. All of our grants have been dead rich-billionaires, however there are also alive rich-billionaires, such as Bill Gates. |
I didn’t realize that was an American phenomenon. In Europe, they have a functioning government that makes grants. Most of the grants… Say you’re Danish, and you want to go get a grant. Because everybody pays so much taxes, and they don’t have as much private philanthropy, you end up getting your grants from the govern... |
I don’t think I’ll ever get a US government grant. I think I could get an EU grant if I was an EU citizen, doing what I do now, because they’re targeted at smaller things a lot of the time. The EU grants also get a lot bigger, so it depends on where you’re at. So that’s the first thing - don’t expect… If you’ve heard o... |
To me, it’s not about the grant writing. The grant writing happens once you’ve developed a relationship with the person that you’re writing the grant for. If you don’t take anything away from this entire interview, I would say if you want to go down the path of getting grant money for open source, you have to start bui... |
Because people are like, “Okay, I can go get VC and start a company that does this open source thing” and they figure out ways to make money out of it. What’s really cool about VCs is you get money really quickly, but you have to, down the road, make these compromising decisions, where you have to weigh your values aga... |
With grants, you don’t get money quickly, you get money slowly, but then you never have to make… |
Yeah, sometimes very slowly. But, the cool thing about it is you never have to make those judgment calls. You’re always working on what you want to be working on, because you had to go through this process that you’ve… The grant process to me is finding somebody that trusts you, and then writing… |
\[23:49\] The grant itself is the contract between you and the funder. It’ like, “Here’s the mission that I’m working on", and they’re never going to be like… I haven’t had any experiences like this, at least; I think that some people have had this happen to them, but I guess I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had a funder co... |
You end up doing a grant write-up at the beginning, that’s the pitch. “Here’s what I want to work on, can we agree?” And then you do a report at the middle, and at the end. That all actually comes after you spend a lot of time finding the right foundation, in the US for example. Finding the right foundation, and buildi... |
So that process is… People have different ways of doing it. For me, I worked at Code for America, which was found by I think six foundations. Code for America was pretty well funded in the private foundation space, and because also I was working at Code for America - that was the year I got to start doing open source f... |
If you take one thing away from this entire thing, don’t go… I love JS Comp, for example, and I love NodeConf, but you’re not going to meet people from the Knight Foundation at a JavaScript conference. You meet them at a… I used to go to this conference called the Civic Media conference, MIT would host it. I was living... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I would echo that, like a thousand percent. \[laughs\] Even hearing you talk about it, it reminds me a lot of venture capital. The advice is really similar, which is build real relationships with investors. Ideally, you want them to come to you, saying, “This is a really great fit for us,” versus cold... |
\[27:54\] The way I got my Ford funding was through a mutual connection. I wasn’t even looking for funding, but I explained what I was doing, and that person was like, “Oh, I know who you should be talking to.” |
I think there’s this running theme, even in this conversation, around intersectionality, and going out of your own sector to get inspiration from different sectors, which is both creatively stimulating, but also allows you to meet people outside of your technical network. I think that’s really important. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. You've mentioned… You’ve gotten a lot grants, and they seem to be stepping up in terms of the amount of money that you’re getting over time. I’m wondering if you could just walk us through the grants that you’ve gotten, and any changes that may have happened to the project, or changes in direct... |
**Max Ogden:** So I’ve got four grants to date and working on a fifth, but I can’t really… That one’s not done, so I can’t really talk about that one. \[laughs\] I want to be transparent as much as I can, but the grant people like to wait until it’s announced, so that there can be a PR thing, so I can’t really announce... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You want to be open, but you also want to get that money, right? |
**Max Ogden:** Exactly. I want to be clear though, I am very pro-transparency. If anybody listening has questions that I didn’t cover, feel free to email me or DM me on Twitter, and I can send you my budget, and everything like that. So the four grants that I’ve got, the first one was for the prototype, and that was $5... |
I was like, “Okay, awesome. $50,000 to work on an open source project is pretty cool.” So I did that, and it was just me. That was in the summer of 2013, I think. Then I went to MozFest that winter, and it was at the tail end, so I’m like, “Okay, I’m about to figure out what I’m going to do next” but then I met this fu... |
So far, I’m two-for-two. I had the foundations come to me, find me, and say, “Do you want to work on this stuff?" At that point, I had invested years of unpaid open source work into the ecosystem. At Code for America, I actually took a pay cut to move to San Francisco. So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense financial... |
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