“My first experience with public service, I was working for a newspaper in my town in Jackson, Tennessee, and the mayor asked me to run his campaign. And so I did it, it was my first kind of political experience. But the night before the campaign, the town got hit by a tornado, a really bad tornado. And he put me in charge of the recovery. That was a really unique moment. And anyone who’s ever worked in disaster response knows what I mean, where just status quo is suspended. You have to put one foot in front of the other. You can’t default to, well, this is the way we’ve always done it because that’s no longer a possibility. And you have to think about how we will do things now, what we should change, how we will build going forward.”

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ykYczkc3WqfN80celH6Gd

Marci Harris, this week’s guest on Why Public Service?, is CEO and Co-Founder of POPVOX, shares with listeners her path through local government, Capitol Hill, and outside advocate for fixing the policy process.

POPVOX is a company that develops technologies and platforms to better connect the public and government officials, and to improve governance. Marci has served as a tornado recovery coordinator in Tennessee, worked as legislative counsel for a member of Congress, and held internships with a federal judge, as well as the U.S. attorneys office  and a subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives. She also has been a think-tanker at Harvard’s Ash Center and New America. Follow her on Twitter @marcidale.

(Subscribe to Why Public Service? on Spotify or Apple, by RSS feed or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Transcript: 

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Why Public Service, a podcast of the R Street Institute, a free market think tank in Washington, D.C. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar. In each episode, I speak with an individual who made the choice to participate in governing our nation. Some of my guests have worked for the government. Others have toiled in various private sector organizations, including think tanks, philanthropies, and political groups. All of them share the same goal, however, which is to improve our country through public service.

Kevin Kosar:

Today’s guest is Marci Harris, CEO and co-founder of POPVOX, a company that develops technologies and platforms to better connect the public and government officials and to improve governance generally. Marci has experienced public service by holding a variety of positions. She has served as a tornado recovery coordinator in Tennessee, held internships with a federal judge in the U.S. attorney’s office. And she has worked for a member of Congress. Marci also has been a think tanker at Harvard’s Ash Center and at New America. You can learn more about Marci Harris by visiting popvox.com. Marci, welcome to the Why Public Service podcast.

Marci Harris:

Thanks so much, Kevin. It’s great to be with you.

Kevin Kosar:

As our listeners have heard, you’ve held a variety of positions in public service. For today’s episode, I want to speak to you about both your leadership of POPVOX and your career in governance reform generally. So my first question for you is, why did you create POPVOX and what is it?

Marci Harris:

Well, thanks for the question. I actually got the idea for POPVOX when I was working as a staffer on Capitol Hill. I had come to the Hill after law school and was working both in a personal office and for chairman of the committee of Ways & Means Health subcommittee. And it was at the time of health reform and we were being bombarded with incoming input from organizations, from constituents. There were meetings, there were one pagers, there was so much information flowing through and not really a good system for pulling it all together in one place. And I kept this list of all the things I thought someone should fix and everyone I brought it to said, “That sounds great. Good luck with that.” So it ended up just being the idea that I couldn’t get out of my head and ultimately had to end up leaving the Hill in order to start POPVOX.

Marci Harris:

But basically, the original purpose was to solve my problem as a congressional staffer, which was when it came time to provide advice to my boss about a bill, I was asked three main questions. Number one, who’s on it. So, who are the co-sponsors, which members are supporting this bill, because usually that’s a good kind of signal to a member, which members they normally line up with.

Marci Harris:

Number two, where are the groups? So the organizations that I like to call the American association of absolutely anything, usually a member knows that they frequently line up with the environmental groups or the business groups or the customer advocacy groups, et cetera. A good place to find what positions various organizations were taking either to support or oppose.

Marci Harris:

And then the third and frequently most important question was, are we hearing about it from the district? Are people who live in our district calling or writing in to tell us that this is an issue that’s important to them. And usually with those three questions, my boss would know where he was going to land on that bill even before he saw it. POPVOX was originally set up as a place where that information was available, not just to congressional staffers, but to the public at large.

Kevin Kosar:

You’re the chief executive officer of POPVOX, what are your responsibilities?

Marci Harris:

Well, that ranges. We’re really small remote team located around the country. I’m based in California. Most of our folks are in Tennessee, which is where I’m from originally. My job ranges from having ideas about what we should do next to spending a lot of time talking to congressional staffers about their needs, to providing information to the public about what we do and how they can use our tools. And also just to kind of, sometimes it’s digging in and doing the virtual dishwashing, just the little tasks that needed to get done. There are days that I’m the least important person on the team. So I just try to make sure that the developers or the marketers or others have what they need to do what they need to do.

Kevin Kosar:

So what’s the average day in the life of a CEO like?

Marci Harris:

Well, again, we’re pretty strange. Because we deal so much with what’s happening in Congress, our calendar frequently turns on what’s happening in the House and Senate daily. So we send out a daily email update that gives information about what’s on the House and Senate floor every morning. And some kind of highlights of the ins and outs of what’s going on in Capitol Hill. The primary audience for that are Hill staffers, who themselves appreciate the opportunity to get kind of an overview of what’s going on, including, I would say, in more normal times, a list of the lunches and receptions and briefings that are happening across Capitol Hill and various other little tidbits.

Marci Harris:

We also have product meetings. So we get together with the developers and others to talk about how things are going and what we’re working on. Usually we have a very long roadmap of the things we’d like to build or change or improve. And my job working with our CTO and others is to figure out what comes next. I like to tell people when we first started POPVOX, we thought we had one problem to solve. And once we’d solved that we found a list of 20,000 others that we wanted to get to. So the past 10 years has been just really kind of reshuffling that list and trying to work our way through it. We’re never going to run out of issues and things that we want to address when it comes to working with Congress and trying to help government work better and be more responsive to constituents.

Kevin Kosar:

And unlike most leaders, you also research and write. Your name has been on a number of publications recently. What sort of topics have you been tackling?

Marci Harris:

That’s true. I tend to not be able to help it sometimes when I think that there’s something that needs to be said, it’s really nice to have a cohort of folks who are working in this area of improving congressional capacity to help explain what Congress needs to be able to function better and also to even sometimes say what those who work within Congress won’t say for themselves.

Marci Harris:

I think a lot of this goes back to just being a former staffer. It’s a weird thing when you’re a staffer, because rarely do you speak publicly about ways that things can be improved. You let your boss speak. That’s your job. But I think for those of us who really care about helping Congress work better, and some of the under the hood things that are not going to ever be in the major headlines about how to improve processes or technology, or even make the working environment better for the staffers who are there, that’s something that still doesn’t get discussed a whole lot by staffers who are currently there themselves.

Marci Harris:

So those of us who really care about Congress and many of us who had experience as staffers ourselves, it’s an opportunity for us to write about the way that things can be improved. And for me, that also frequently involves the intersection of technology and the legislative process. There are a lot of folks who really understand the legislative process, but are a bit uncomfortable with technology and vice versa. Really for the past 10 years I’ve kind of sat at the intersection of those two parts of the Venn diagram, trying to help get a little palsy understanding in the tech world and get much more technology understanding the policy world.

Kevin Kosar:

What are the major lessons you’ve taken away about governance and government reform?

Marci Harris:

What a good question. I think I would say my first observation is that it’s possible. I think government can feel so big and so unwieldy that sometimes our default is to talk about what’s wrong and complain about it a little bit without the sense that we have the power to change it. I have been really impressed over the past decade especially, but even when I was working in local government before going to work in Congress, how much individual efforts and even more so collaborative efforts can actually make things change.

Marci Harris:

I do understand that frequently the focus is on the policy side of things. So to most people, when they get engaged with government or advocacy, are focused on particular policies that they want to see changed. And that’s very, very important, but sometimes the effectiveness of policy and even the ability for people to have an impact on policy is determined by the underlying ability of government to function and function efficiently and effectively.

Marci Harris:

And so making improvements on how government operates is sometimes the most effective way to even improve policy and its responsiveness to the needs of citizens. I think it doesn’t always come top of mind for people who are imagining a career in government service to think about the underlying processes of how government works, but in many cases that’s the sweet spot for making the other things work better, that you care about.

Kevin Kosar:

That’s true. Implementation and the systems for delivering that implementation are little discussed in college and they’re not readily available to the public. And so when people enter the sphere of public service and government reform, they often just don’t quite know what they’re encountering. No doubt you’ve probably experienced that at one point or another.

Marci Harris:

Absolutely. And I have to say, when I was in law school, I took an administrative law course and just loved it. Not too many people say that, but getting into the nitty-gritty of how the executive branch actually implements changes to rules and the requirements for public notice and comment and how that gets processed and how it gets considered. And this incredible ecosystem of ways that the gears turn, some of them really crazy and frustrating, and some of them amazingly open and transparent and really impressive. It was an eye opener for me. And then seeing that again in certain ways in the legislative branch, there’s just a lot under the hood and people who understand it can really impact the way government works.

Kevin Kosar:

Going back to your position as the CEO of POPVOX, what’s the toughest part about the job? Raising revenue? Is it balancing competing priorities? What is it?

Marci Harris:

Well, I mean, I would start by saying it is a pleasure every day to get to wake up and work on something that feels important and exciting. It doesn’t feel like a job. It is still a challenge I would say, to figure out how to fund especially technology in the public interest. It just doesn’t fit the models that currently exist. When we first started POPVOX, we thought we were a normal startup and we pitched in all the pitch competitions. We actually won at South by Southwest. And I went up and down Sand Hill road, which is where all the VCs are out here in Silicon Valley and pitched, and then realized that if we accepted venture capital money and ran ourselves like a normal startup, we would at certain points be facing decisions that would be in contrast with our civic mission.

Marci Harris:

We kind of altered that route and have figured things out in some interesting ways over the years to be a civic mission startup. And that’s included doing some projects that are philanthropically funded and making decisions based on civic outcomes. But there’s no good model for what that looks like. There are a handful of us of either nonprofits that are working to be sustainable or for-profits that are working to be mission-driven. And we’re all kind of trying to figure out how you make this work, how you continue to fund sustainably civic technology and civic work. That quite frankly you’re not going to charge people for, because one of the civic values that you have at least for public access is that everybody ought to be able to access it.

Marci Harris:

It’s an interesting field that I think is still developing, and all over the world people are trying to figure out what the right model is for funding civic technology. So for me, that side of things is a challenge, but it’s not … And so it’s difficult just because you’re trying to figure out how to do something new, but I really embrace and appreciate that challenge because I think it’s very important that we figure it out and do it right.

Kevin Kosar:

So this brings me to my closing question. Why public service? You could have chosen another career path. You’re trained in law. World’s very big. And yet year after year, you’ve been doing public service. Why is that?

Marci Harris:

It’s a great question, but I honestly don’t think I … I think it chose me. My first experience with public service, I was working for a newspaper in my town in Jackson, Tennessee, and the mayor asked me to run his campaign. And so I did it, it was my first kind of political experience. But the night before the campaign, the town got hit by a tornado, a really bad tornado. And he put me in charge of the recovery. That was a really unique moment. And anyone who’s ever worked in disaster response knows what I mean, where just status quo is suspended. You have to put one foot in front of the other. You can’t default to, well, this is the way we’ve always done it because that’s no longer a possibility. And you have to think about how we will do things now, what we should change, how we will build going forward.

Marci Harris:

It was at a time of immense camaraderie and building. And many of the lessons learned, I think during that time were the same things that made me when I was sitting in Congress, even think that I should be the one having a list of all the things I want to change, that somebody should build to help technology and information flow better within the system.

Marci Harris:

And even now in the time of COVID, I think it’s those very lessons learned in post tornado time that make me think a lot about how can we help Congress work better, even if staffers are not coming into the office every day and communicate with constituents, even when they’re not standing by and manning their telephones or able to have in-person town halls.

Marci Harris:

I get excited about the potential for government to improve people’s lives, make things work better and really be a force for good in the world. I continue to see things that can be improved and I’m just the kind of person that that drives me crazy. I’ve got to go at least try to make it better. And I think a lot of people feel that way. Government and public service is just an excellent outlet for addressing that kind of inner sense that you want to be part of making things work better.

Kevin Kosar:

Marci, thank you for all you’ve done in the public service. And thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

Marci Harris:

Thanks so much, Kevin, and to you for your public service, it’s a pleasure to talk to you.

Kevin Kosar:

Thank you for listening to Why Public Service, a podcast of the R Street Institute. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review us on iTunes, so we can reach more listeners. Tell us what you thought about it and who we should interview next by finding us on Twitter @RSI. If you want to know more about R Street, sign up for our newsletters at www.rstreet.org. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar. Thank you to producer William Gray and editor Parker Tant of parkerpodcasting.com.

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