Exclusive Interview
By Mahnoor Makhdoom
Recently, the Daily Mail interviewed Ms. Sheba Najmi; the Pride of Pakistan, for her notable contributions to Pakistan’s democratic system through the introduction of civic hacking, which reduced the rift that had been formed between the government and the people.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Mail, Ms. Najmi spoke of her educational background, particularly her Bachelors and Masters from the internationally-renowned Stanford University in the USA. There she extensively studied the interaction between humans and computers, which later enabled her to take up a job at Yahoo Mail as the lead designer.
She stayed with Yahoo for 6 years before joining the Peace Corps of Geeks as a Code for America Fellow. She led the development of Honolulu Answers, trained city employees, and organized the first ever USA-based civic write-a-thon. Ms. Najmi recounted that it was this experience that motivated her to introduce a similar module back home in Pakistan aimed at improving User Experience and making local governments more responsive, open, and engaging.
She further told The Daily Mail about Code for Pakistan and the civic innovation it had brought to the country while improving the standard of living in its wake.
By restructuring the design and interaction process, citizens were facilitated at every step; be it voter or school registration, buying a house or accessing publicly-funded information.
She remarked that, ‘since so much of our lives are now about interacting with our government, much of civic hacking is about improving the “citizen experience while ensuring effectiveness” Hacking the civic experience means re-imagining how our interactions with government institutions could be improved if they were more considerate about citizens’ dignity, energy and time” and willing to participate in governance.9 Civic hacking isn’t just coding: Hacking the citizen experience is a design problem requiring the amalgamation of both, user friendly and functional, processes and interactions.
She further added that civic hacking; particularly in terms of the government, has extensive implications – the ripples of which are not just limited to them. Civic hacking contributes to the economy at large, helps consumers be more informed, promotes a stronger database of citizens and does away with the tedious bureaucratic hurdles that exhaust citizens requiring assistance.
Moreover, Ms. Najmi confirmed that Code for All (The global network that Code for Pakistan is a part of) is looking into expanding their network to Taiwan and Mexico to streamline and strengthen cooperation between governments and people there. Upon inquiring if she would be personally involved in initiating the project there or taking up this initiative at the World Democratic Conference in Taiwan, she politely declined attending the conference explaining that her role aligns more with actively working on innovating and improvising back at the headquarters in California.
Currently, Code for All has projects in several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, Central America and South America.under its belt.
