http://codeforamerica.org

1. Fellowship – 2012
Final Report
Ruthie BenDor – Jim Craner – Tamara Shopsin

2. Introduction
Santa Cruz, California was the smallest city to participate in the Code for America program --
but it’s a small city with a big appetite for the future. It’s a small city with a large base of
talented and committed civil servants and residents. And most importantly: it’s a small city
with a big heart.
The 2012 Code for America
Fellows that partnered with the
City of Santa Cruz -- Ruthie
BenDor, Jim Craner, and Tamara
Shopsin -- recognized these traits
from their first conference call
withheir City partners. Over the
next ten months, the Fellows and
City staff worked together on a
number of projects already demonstrating great benefits for the residents, business
community, and civil servants of Santa Cruz. With a keen focus on sustainability, the Fellows
are confident that the work they performed will remain beyond their Fellowship, and hopefully
spread to other cities seeking to solve the same problems by using new technologies.
The Residency
In late January, the Santa Cruz Fellows finished their pre-Residency training and embarked
on the 70-mile journey to Santa Cruz. At the time, the team’s primary goal was to build a
small business permitting website to ease the registration and compliance burden for local
small businesses. This goal is a perfect example of Code for America’s vision -- leveraging
technology to make common citizen/government interactions more efficient.
The Fellows began the Residency in style by attending the 2012 NEXTies -- a gala civic
awards event held at the Museum of Art and History by local cultural group Santa Cruz NEXT.
Our first night was a night of firsts:
• Jim and Ruthie met Mayor Don Lane and City Contact Peter Koht for the first time
• we had our first Penny Ice Creamery ice cream
• and we had the first of many wonderful conversations with the people of Santa Cruz.
The Residency had two main goals: getting to know the people and processes in City Hall
and getting to know the small business community that would be the primary users of our
application.
Peter Koht spent several days leading us through City Hall and the various departments that
make up the municipal government, then made us at home at our temporary office in the IT
Division. The IT staff, led by City CTO Chris Stathis, was incredibly welcoming and we began
conversations that would lay the groundwork for hosting and integration of our future
applications. Forging connections with city technology staff to support CfA’s work on a long-
term basis is a critical component of a successful Fellowship engagement.
Unlike larger cities in the Fellowship, Santa Cruz City Hall is incredibly intimate: it was not

3. uncommon to run into the Mayor or a few City Council members a few times a week. At the
end of our Residency month, we all truly felt like we were part of a city-wide team and that we
had sincere support from elected officials and department staff.
As part of our efforts to help transform the small business startup process, we conducted four
formal focus group sessions with members of the Santa Cruz small business community.
During these sessions, we listened to architects, restaurateurs, retail shop owners, and other
entrepreneurs describe what they experienced when launching their small businesses in
Santa Cruz. These experiences in the community, combined with our research into the
“behind-the-scenes” operations in City Hall, yielded a solid foundation for our application
planning efforts.

4. OpenCounter - Permitting Portal for Small Businesses
The primary mission of the Santa Cruz Fellowship team was to deploy a tool for local
entrepreneurs to ease the regulatory and compliance burdens associated with launching a
new business. Starting a new venture can involve a bureaucratic maze of red tape, visits to
City Hall to complete paperwork, and stymied attempts to figure out local laws and
regulations. By building a citizen-centric tool focused on the entrepreneur's experience, we
hoped to measurably reduce the time and costs involved with local permitting and regulatory
compliance.
The Santa Cruz Fellows met with dozens of business owners, civic and commerce
organizations, and City employees of multiple departments in an attempt to fully understand
the intricacies involved with starting a business. We also met with local government
employees in neighboring municipalities to ensure that any solution we built could be reused
by other jurisdictions with minimal changes and customizations.
The resulting solution - OpenCounter - provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface to multiple
City processes, including zoning, permitting, and licensing. The tool offers a wizard to guide
entrepreneurs through the business startup process, offering links to non-City resources such
as state and county permitting, and collecting information to be submitted directly to City staff
and systems. As the application is rolled out, City staff will be eager to measure the improved
user experience for small business owners.
http://opencounter.cityofsantacruz.com

5. OpenData - Implementing Santa Cruz’s Open Data
Initiative
Like many cities, the City of Santa Cruz creates and records a large amount of data:
everything from maps of each City-managed park to daily rainfall recorded at the Loch
Lomond Reservoir. Over the past few years, many government agencies have made an effort
to publish this type of data to the public, making it "open" and freely available. This "open
data" can be used by students, researchers, businesses, website developers, journalists, and
any other interested community members.
In the summer of 2011, the Santa Cruz City Council passed a resolution to create an open
data portal and an associated initiative to open data sets held by City departments. Since the
goals of this project are closely aligned with Code for America’s strategic goals, this became a
joint project between the City and CfA. Fellow Jim Craner took the lead as project manager,
working closely with City staff to develop both an open data platform and internal policies for
staff publication of data.
The data server was launched in September 2012 with over fifty data sets culled from City
datastores as well as other sources, such as state and federal data catalogs. The City has
already approved funding for community engagement activities related to the open data
initiative for 2013 – a promising sign for this promising project.
http://data.cityofsantacruz.com

6. Ancillary Projects
Bike Lockers - Quick Win
Santa Cruz’s new bike lockers are a great feature for the
city’s many cyclicsts -- but they look like utility boxes.
Tamara worked with the Transportation Department to get
approval for a large bike logo on the exterior of each locker,
which she then painted. The project was a quick and easy
win for urban usability.
Read more at http://codeforamerica.org/2012/06/08/utility-
boxes/
Redesign of City Hall Departmental Maps
Tamara worked with the City’s Arts Director as well as numerous departments to update and
optimize the City Hall departmental maps used by visitors. In addition, she created an online
version of the map to be integrated into the city website.
Read more at http://codeforamerica.org/2012/08/28/quick-win/
Bicycle Registration Tool
Santa Cruz's municipal code states that bicycles ridden in the city need to be licensed, but
public awareness is so low that almost nobody -- not even bike shop owners -- has any idea
of this requirement. In 2011, only 180 bicycles were registered in the city of Santa Cruz, but
over 800 stolen bicycles were recovered. Right now, licensing and registering a bicycle
requires that one visit the Finance Department in City Hall, pay a $3 fee (that doesn't cover
the city's expense), and fill out a paper form that is manually input twice: once into the
Finance Department's record-keeping software, and once into the Police Department's
record-keeping software. By eliminating the fee, putting the form online, and integrating it
directly with the Police Department's record-keeping software, the city will actually save
money on each registration by eliminating the personnel time needed to process the
paperwork. By creating a mobile-ready online form, bike shops are able to register bikes for
customers who might not know where to find their new ride's serial #. This should increase
compliance and also make it more likely for stolen bicycles to be reunited with their owners.
IT Skill Building Series
As one of the smallest cities in the CfA Fellowship program, Santa Cruz's municipal IT
department has limited internal resources to adopt some of the new technologies that we're
utilizing this year. I planned and implemented an ITD Capacity Building program to survey
current skills, anticipated required skills for the next 24 months, and deliver training and
learning opportunities to IT staff around those skills.
IT personnel have begun to utilize their new skills in their own system maintenance and
configuration duties day-to-day. Personnel should be more equipped to sustain CfA-inspired

7. and -developed technologies, applications, and services following the end of the 2012
Fellowship
Textizen for Santa Cruz
Using the Textizen software built by CfA Team Philadelphia this year, we deployed a text
message-based polling system in Santa Cruz to help city employees get citizen feedback on
a variety of issues. Our first poll involved use of the city-operated tourist trolley service in
downtown Santa Cruz.
By providing opportunities for citizens to submit feedback via text messaging, Santa Cruz is
making it easier for citizens' voices to be heard by city government. In addition, mobile-based
polls have the potential to target larger numbers of respondents than traditional web-based or
landline-based polls.
Community Engagement
Code Across America: Santa Cruz Hackathon
As part of CfA’s national day of hacking in February, the Santa Cruz Fellows organized an all-
day hackathon hosted by local co-working facility NextSpace. Over 30 local hackers attended
this initial event, with a focus on designing and building applications to improve the citizen
experience. Many connections were forged and snacks consumed.
TechRaising: Santa Cruz
The CfA Fellows participated in this semi-annual event, a hybrid hackathon / designathon /
entrepreneur funding pitch / skill share. Dozens of local Santa Cruz techies and
entrepreneurs showed up to coordinate ideas, skills, and funding.
Meeting with Staff from Center for Data and Democracy
The CfA Fellows and our City contact had a meeting with the staff from the local Center for
Data and Democracy where we gave them information about CfA and specifically the work
we were performing in Santa Cruz.
Cruzio Bounce Hour
Cruzio is a local Santa Cruz ISP as well as a co-working facility for many entrepreneurs in the
Santa Cruz area. One of the company’s weekly all-hands idea-sharing meetings was devoted
to CfA’s mission in Santa Cruz, where the Fellows shared their observations and plans.
Santa Cruz Rotary Club Luncheon
Jim was invited to speak for about half an hour to the Santa Cruz Rotary Club, an audience of
well over a hundred people. He presented information about CfA’s 2011 activities as well as
the hopes for the 2012 Fellowship in Santa Cruz.

8. Santa Cruz Geeks Dinner
Jim and Ruthie were invited to attend the monthly Santa Cruz Geeks dinner, a regular dinner
party attended by technologists and technology professionals. Much of the evening’s
conversation involved discussions of the local technology scene and the upcoming CfA
Fellowship activities.
Santa Cruz City Press Conference
At the beginning of the Residency, the City of Santa Cruz held a press conference with Mayor
Lane to introduce the Fellows to the community. Local broadcast and print journalists
attended, leading to many amusing incidents of Fellows being recognized on the streets of
Santa Cruz. Each Fellow was given the opportunity to speak about CfA’s mission as well as
their personal objectives for the Fellowship year.
Conclusion
The Santa Cruz Fellowship team is incredibly grateful to our contacts in Santa Cruz City Hall,
especially Peter Koht, Economic Development Coordinator, and Chris Stathis, Chief
Technology Officer. In addition, we'd like to thank our program staff at Code for America for
their invaluable support and assistance throughout the year. This project was truly an
example of many dedicated individuals and organizations collaborating on a series of
sustainable projects, united by a shared vision of using technology to improve the citizen
experience.