Hi there! I'm Shelby.
I'm a writer and civic technologist currently based in Baltimore, MD, USA. I have a background in writing, community organizing, and software development with a focus on API design + strategy and healthcare interoperability. Throughout my career I have focused on open data, open standards, civic/social/public tech, and civic hacktivism.
I spend most of my day writing, researching, and community building for the Intergovernmental Software Collaborative at Georgetown University's Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, and part-time I also contribute to storytelling and community building work at the US Digital Service. I also write on topics at the intersection of tech, society, and public infrastructure on my blog, Civic Unrest. When away from keyboard, I can be found writing stories, reading, or hiking with my rambunctious pitbull, Osceola.
You can find me on Twitter as @switzerly or on Github as switzersc. You can find my government commits under the Github username switzersc-usds
Current Projects
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Intergovernmental Software Collaborative
As a faculty fellow on the Intergovernmental Software Collaborative project at the Beeck Center, I am building out an ecosystem of experience-informed research and resources to help communities and government teams do collaborative and open source tech better.
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Civic Unrest
Civic Unrest is a blog focused on the intersection of technology and public infrastructure. It's a pretty broad topic, and I'm okay with that.
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Justice40: Screening Tool and Open Source Community
Justice40 is a whole-of-government initiative to address historic issues of environmental, economic, and climate injustice by redirecting 40% of federal benefits to overburdened and underserved communities. As part of my work at USDS, I served as the tech lead and engineering manager for the team building the Justice40 Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and fostered the open source community around this tool and related tech+data efforts to advance environmental justice causes. Now I still help out as an advisor and open source community manager.
Recent Projects
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Pandemic-Ready Interoperable Modernization Effort (PRIME) @ CDC
Born out of a discovery sprint to identify problems with the COVID data pipeline from communities to federal government, PRIME's goal is to build modern, interoperable, pandemic-ready public health IT systems that are open source and modular. I was on the original discovery sprint and helped develop the roadmap and strategy for PRIME. I served as the tech lead for the Data Automation project, which aimed to improve the flow of hospitalization and capacity data as well as COVID test and case data from healthcare providers to local and state authorities.
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Data at the Point of Care
Data at the Point of Care is an API that gets bulk Medicare claims data directly into the hands of providers so that they can make more informed decisions about their their patients' care. I joined this team as part of my work at USDS at CMS. 2019-2020.
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APIs4DGov - European Commission Report
APIs4DGov is a research project by the European Commission aiming to understand and evaluate best practices for APIs in digital government. Publication available for download here
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Open Referral
Open Referral develops data standards and open source tools that make it easier to share, find and use information about health, human, and social services. I helped build data tooling and APIs for community implementations of Open Referral's Human Services Data and API Specifications, including working on open source Ruby tooling to support Frictionless Data's Data Package spec. 2019.
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REST Fest
REST Fest is an international unconference series dedicated to giving people interested in REST, Hypermedia APIs, crafting web service APIs, or any related topics a chance to get together in an informal setting to share ideas, trade stories, and show examples of current work. I help organize and implement these events and expand them to new locations.
Note: REST Fest is going on a hiatus in 2020-21, though we may do some virtual community events.