Skip to main contentVidya Spandana didn't aim low when she first started trying to make government more efficient. She took on the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Her creation, DMV.org—which took her college years and a good portion of her 20s—would have been far easier to create today. Sixteen years ago, there wasn't much focus on making public data publicly accessible with APIs, nor were there simple-to-deploy website solutions like WordPress. Spandana and her team built it all, from the ground up.
Her next project was a technically simpler, but far more dangerous. CrisisNET uses data scraped from crisis zones for first responders and journalists on the ground, allowing them to spend more time helping or getting the word out and less time collecting and parsing information. When CrisisNET revealed where Syrian rail bombers were most likely to strike and the analysis turned out to be as accurate as the CIA's own intel, the world noticed.
Spandana, who served as a presidential innovation fellow in 2013, learned that people want the insight that her data collection methods and API produce, not the technology itself. So, she moved away from the nonprofit CrisisNet and earlier this year founded Popily, a cloud tool that analyzes data. In one example, a spreadsheet of information on Portland's heritage trees reveals thousands of visualizations Popily thinks might be useful. Users can quickly sift through them to pick out options such as heritage trees by location, average size of each leaf, or ground covered by each tree's shade.
Born in Visakhapatnam, India, Spandana knows life is about more than data, and that people are more than data points. âStaying connected to local people doing real life thingsâ¦is a profound grounding piece to mental and emotional stability,â Spandana tells us. âThe human side is just as important as the machine side.â
Spandana, who will be speaking at TFNW on how tech can be used to build a stronger democracy, says that participation in public services by private citizens is key. âParticipation is critical because democracy is critical,â Spandana says, adding that her next project is a design school focused on inclusion, built for and by the design community in Portland.
Until then, Spandana will continue to do what she does most days, which is use Slack and text messaging to keep up with her Popily team, have fun making progress and moving forward in the world, and evangelizing tech literacy in diverse groups, especially minority and other under-represented populations.
WWeek 2015