Sheba Najmi re the process of things like paying the electric bill or going to the post office in her native Pakistan, and it was tedious and difficult. Her father would send her to stand in those long lines (the line for women was shorter than the line for men) and it never felt like receiving a service, but more like a chore.
“Today, we have all kinds of conveniences that help us navigate the world a lot better in private life,” she says, mentioning the ability to go from standing in line at the bank, to opening up an app and banking on your phone. “But there’s still a gap between what we experience as citizens in the public and the private sector.”
That’s where something like civic technology comes in, which uses technology to improve the relationship between people and governments. The focus is on the process of creating tools that enhance this relationship, centering and including the people who will be using the tools in this process. With her nonprofit, Tech for Change, Najmi has taken on this work to introduce and expand the process of civic tech through initiatives like Code for Pakistan (which builds better public services and offers training and internships for women) and Code for All, a global network of civic tech groups in different countries working toward these same goals for public sector improvements.
Najmi, 45, is the founder and executive director of Tech for Change, an executive lead for Code for All, an adjunct professor at San Diego City College where she teaches product design, and previously worked in experience at Yahoo! and LinkedIn. She lives in Hillcrest and took some time to talk about her organization and her desire to help other people in ways that change the systems we live in, for the better.
Q: Tell us about Tech for Change.
A: I founded Tech for Change, but its primary initiative has been Code for Pakistan and its second initiative is hosting the Code for All global network, which is a network of grassroots civic technology organizations that are all trying to make this kind of change in their regions. We’ve opened up new ways for citizens to actually participate in changing their public services, their government, which goes beyond just voting or protesting or g a petition. We can do more than just use our voices to complain, we can use our skills to build solutions and create solutions. You don’t have to be a technologist to do that; you can be a researcher, or a community organizer, or a designer, which is my background. You can make things better for your own communities, especially thanks to technology now. That’s what Tech for Change is trying to do. We’re an organization that’s trying to harness the power of people and technology to create communities that work for everyone.
What I love about Hillcrest…
I moved here in 2020, from San Francisco, during an election year. I was sort of used to a liberal bubble, so Hillcrest felt like a good neighborhood for that. There’s a lot of diversity. It feels like people have liberal, progressive, democratic values. And, I like all of the cafes and the walkability of it. I just wish the ocean were here, in Hillcrest. Aside from that, it’s perfect.
Q: You have degrees in human-computer interaction from Stanford University. First, what is human-computer interaction?
A: My academic story wasn’t linear. I was in medical school in Pakistan and left to come to the U.S. First, I was a math major, then math got really abstract the higher up you go with group theory and field theory. That wasn’t the stuff I enjoyed, so I discovered this program at Stanford that was an interdisciplinary program called symbolic systems, which was basically computer science, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. So, you study the way human beings think and the way that computer systems think. This was ahead of its time because we studied artificial intelligence more than 20 years ago. We studied things like cognitive neuroscience and human rationality and natural language processing. The area that I focused on was human-computer interaction, which is how to make computers and computer systems and interfaces easier for people to use. How do we empower human beings in that?
Q: Where did your interest in technology and design start?
A: You know, I didn’t have a computer growing up in Pakistan. I didn’t have a computer until I was between high school and medical school. In Pakistan, you didn’t have a ton of career options that were considered respectable or viable. It was either you study to become a doctor or engineer, or maybe a lawyer. So, I went to medical school because my parents really wanted me to. I really wanted to come to the U.S. because my older siblings had gotten scholarships and come one by one on their own, and I really wanted to follow in their footsteps, but I also wanted to expand my horizons and merge the humanities and the sciences. Once I realized that I wasn’t doing medical school, I was looking for something that would marry the humanities and the sciences. What I loved about human-computer interaction was that a lot of people who enter experience do it because they have a lot of empathy. Human-computer interaction, by nature, is about empathizing with human beings and making systems better for them. When I was little, there was a three-year famine in a desert in Pakistan in the late 1980s and I being maybe 8 years old and going door-to-door to raise funds for people who were suffering from the famine. Then, in 2005, when I was working at Yahoo! after graduate school, there was an earthquake in Pakistan and millions of people became homeless and 100,000 people were killed. I raising a lot of funds to send back home, so the empathy was always there, but I wasn’t satisfied with it because I was looking for ways to make a meaningful, systematic difference. I wanted things to change systemically, beyond just sending donations, so my skill in the experience field was sort of why I was drawn to that field in the first place-wanting to make things better for people.
Q: Your work with these organizations falls under the descriptor “civic tech.” What does this term mean?
A: The way I describe civic technology to people is that, if you think about our daily lives, things have come a long way in the last 15 to 20 years. We used to stand in line for banks, but now we have mobile banking on our phones. When it comes to government services or any kind of public services, they haven’t quite caught up yet—you still have to stand in line outside the Department of Motor Vehicles.
(Civic technology is) more of a process than a technology. It’s really about being human centered, and citizen centered, in the way that we create public solutions and in the way that we engage fellow citizens in the process of co-creation. We’re trying to bridge that gap between government and citizens because the wider that gap, the less trust there is that government will ever be able to meet our needs in the way the private sector does, and that erosion of trust fundamentally leads to an erosion of democratic values, which we are sort of seeing around the world. That’s what civic technology is aspiring to do.
Q: Your Code for Pakistan initiative includes programs that connect government with technology professionals and public service organizations to improve public services. Can you share any examples of how you’ve been able to achieve this?
A: One example I can share is that, recently, in 2022, there were these devastating floods that happened in Pakistan and these floods submerged a third of the country, directly impacting like 33 million people. (These floods) destroyed 2 million homes, 65% of crops and schools and livestock, and it caused $15 billion in damages in what has been called one of the costliest natural disasters in world history. At that point, if you looked at a map of Pakistan, there’s the northwest province called KP for short (the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province). In the news, people could see that rivers in the north were destroying the valleys and it was just a matter of time before the floods would come to other parts of the province. There was no information on which areas would be affected and which would be safe. Publicly, there was no information out there, so everybody was in a state of confusion about where to go, where to find shelter. One of our team who lived in that province at the time, was searching on the web to find any reliable sources of information so he would know when to evacuate his family. He couldn’t find any, so he developed a simple, open-sourced map using a platform, and made it public. Over the following days, the tech community quickly rallied to help spread the word through social media and other channels. Then, nonprofit organizations that are first-responders began using the platform and inputting critical data. It’s called FloodLight and it quickly grew into a collaborative community effort, spreading organically as the country’s only publicly accessible map that was showing real-time information of where the flood-affected areas were, where the locations in need of aid were, where the supply vendors were, where relief camps and medical camps were. So, it gained a lot of traction. It was shared across TV and social media, and what it enabled was a shelter camp nearby was able to receive cooked meals from a first-responder nonprofit. That nonprofit was able to deliver food and medical supplies to remote communities displaced in another province. FloodLight was all over the country, not just that initial province. Eventually, the federal government reached out requesting to adopt Floodlight as their mapping solution, so we worked with them to integrate Floodlight into the government website. I hope this encourages a shift in thinking toward one that’s more lean, agile, responsive, and participatory, actually using citizens to crowdsource the data.
Q: Why is it important to you to find ways that technology can be used to improve society?
A: There’s a great quote from (American-Canadian journalist and author) Jane Jacobs that has always stuck with me. She said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” and it’s true. We don’t just have a transactional relationship with the places where we live. It’s not like we just put our tax money into a vending machine and we get services, right? It doesn’t quite work that way because the places where we live are living, breathing organisms, if you will. They are places where we give birth and dance and live and die and just experience the entirety of our existence in these places. They’re not labs where you can do control experiments. It’s not going to be perfect, but the only way they can get better is if we engage in them, and this is my training as a experience, or human-centered professional. We have to be part of creating the solution. It’s not going to happen if we just sit back and wait for things to get better. Also, you want your voice in there, you want your input in there, you want your skills in there. You’re doing it, not just for yourself, but to enable others and that means we need all of us bringing all of our skills to the table to make our cities work. When we think about it, “government for the people” can only happen if it’s also “government by the people,” right?
Q: What has this work taught you about yourself?
A: One, is that purpose is so important. For 11 years, I’ve been a volunteer doing this work with Tech for Change and Code for Pakistan. I’ve spent more hours doing this than paid jobs because when you’re driven by mission and purpose, it’s just natural. I don’t even think of it as work, it’s just part of my life. The other is that I’ve seen that the right people, who are committed, what a difference they can make. And, I’ve learned that, as human beings, we have the capacity to do more and more. We are resilient and we have the capacity to keep growing and expanding. It blows my mind. It’s also taught me to accept myself and learn to let go of perfectionism and that it’s OK to not have all of the answers.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: I would say that relationships matter. We’re all still people and I think what really matters is relationships and truly listening to people, being open to understanding their needs.
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: Oh my gosh, so many things. I studied at an all-girl Catholic convent. I ed out while skydiving in Monterey Bay. Yeah, there’s a bunch of random stuff. I am very open to new experiences, so I’ll try anything once.
Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: My favorite weekend would be just being outdoors, in a park or in the water. I like the water a lot, although I learned to swim much later in life. Now, I scuba dive and stuff like that, so just hanging out outdoors with loved ones. Maybe some comedy, picnicking and lying in a hammock. I like a number of parks, like the Trolley Barn Park and other little parks everywhere. And, there are good cafes that I enjoy.
