I am spending two days this week with the Capital One DevExchange team outside of Washington DC, and they’ve provided me with a list of questions for one of our sessions, which they will be recording for internal use. To prepare, I wanted to work through my thoughts, and make sure each of these answers were on the tip of my tongue–here is one of those questions, along with my thoughts.
The number API that gets me out of bed each day, with an opportunity to apply what I’ve learned in the API sector is with the Human Services Data API (HSDA). Which is an open API standard I am the technical lead for which helps municipalities, and human service organizations better share information that helps people find services in their communities. This begins with the basics like food, housing, and healthcare, but in recent months I’m seeing the standard get applied in disaster scenarios like Hurricane Irma to help organize shelter information. This is why I do APIs. The project is always struggling for funding, and is something I do mostly for free, with small paychecks whenever we receive grants, or find projects where we can deliver an actual API on the ground.
Next, I’d say it is government APIs at the municipal, state, but mostly at the federal levels. I was a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration, helping federal agencies publish their open data assets, take inventory of their web services. I don’t work for the government anymore, but it doesn’t mean the work hasn’t stopped. I’m regularly working on projects to ensure RFPs, and RFIs have appropriate API language in them, and talking with agencies about their API strategy, helping educate them what is going on in the private sector, and often times even across other government agencies. APIs like the new FOIA API, Recreational Information Database API, Regulations.gov, IRS APis, and others will have the biggest impact on our economy and our lives in my opinion, so I make sure to invest a considerable amount of time here whenever I can.
After that, working with API education and awareness at higher educational institutions is one my passions and interest. My partner in crime Audrey Watters has a site called Hack Education, where she covers how technology is applied in education, so I find my work often overlapping with her efforts. A portion of these conversations involve APIs at the institutional level, and working with campus IT, but mostly it about how the Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Dropbox, Google, and other public APIs can be used in the classroom. My partner and I are dedicated to understanding the privacy implications of technology, and how APIs can be leveraged to give students and faculty more control over their data and content. We work regularly to tell stories, give talks, and conduct workshops that help folks understand what is possible at the intersection of APIs and education.
After that, I’d say the main stream API sector keeps me interested. I’m not that interested in the whole startup game, but I do find a significant amount of inspiration from studying the API pioneers like SalesForce and Amazon, and social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. As well as the cool kids like Twilio, Stripe, and Slack. I enjoy learning from these API leaders, studying their approaches, but where I find the most value is sharing these stories with folks in SMB, SME, and the enterprise. These are the real-world stories I thrive on, and enjoy retelling as part of my work on API Evangelist. I’m a technologist, so the technology of doing APIs can be compelling, and the business of doing this has some interesting aspects, but it’s mostly the politics of doing APIs that intrigues me. This primarily involves the politics of the humans involved within a company, or industry, providing what I always find to be the biggest challenges of doing APIs.
In all of these areas, what actually gets me up each day, is being able to tell stories. I’ve written about 3,000 blog posts on API Evangelist in seven years. I work to publish 3-5 posts each weekday, with some gaps in there due to life getting in the way. I enjoy writing about what I’m learning each day, showcasing the healthy practices I find in my research, and calling out the unhealthy practices I regularly come across. This is one of the reasons I find it so hard to take a regular job in the space, as most companies are looking to impose restrictions, or editorial control over my storytelling. This is something that would lead to me not really wanting to get up each day, and is the number one reason I don’t work in government, resulting in me pushing to make change from the outside-in. Storytelling is the most important tool in my toolbox, and it should be in every API providers as well.
