Age: 25
BS sustainable urbanism ’15
Executive director, Code for Philly
Where does a degree in sustainable urbanism get you? It got Dawn McDougall deeply involved in improving Philadelphia through big data as head of Code for Philly.
Dawn McDougall has an enviable problem: She has too many good ideas.
“I’m constantly distracted by new ideas,” says McDougall (BS sustainable urbanism ’15), who propelled herself in two years from member to the first executive director of Code for Philly, a civic-minded hacking collective.
Her solution? Stuff as much as possible into a 24-hour day.
“I don’t sleep,” says the 25-year-old California transplant to Northern Liberties. “I just have panic attacks all the time. It’s great.”
Indulge McDougall a bit of gallows humor. She easily spends 30 hours a week on Code for Philly — a volunteer gig. More of her time is consumed as a board chair for the networking organization Professional Women’s Roundtable. Oh, and she has a 40-hour day job as a product marketing associate at GovDelivery, a digital communications platform for government.
“You learn a lot about time management and boundaries when you’re an overly involved person,” she says, happily. You also learn to speak a mile a minute, she adds.
But McDougall wouldn’t have it any other way. She spends her nights and weekends on strategic plans for Code for Philly and how best to move it from a “primordial ooze,” as the grassroots group has been called, to a full-fledged nonprofit. “We’re so close,” she says.
Under her leadership, the offshoot of Code for America has held six civic tech hackathons that produced at least 25 projects and facilitated 75 datasets available to the public. One standout is CyclePhilly. The app, which won a Code for America Technology Award, tracks a user’s biking habits; the aggregated data is used to plan bike lanes. Another project, WhoWonPhilly.com, was designed partly by a city official to provide timely results from the recent elections on a more user-friendly website than the city’s official portal.
McDougall has succeeded in this arena even though the sustainable urbanism major has zilch coding background. It is a testament to her status as an influencer and her days at Drexel.
As a custom design major, she learned to pave her own path. “That experience was transformational in how I approach problems,” McDougall says. She says she learned to think for herself, rather than spit back fill-in-the-blank answers. “Being able to experiment with ideas, just the welcoming of that in my college career, made me bolder to demand it in my professional career.”
McDougall first connected with Code for Philly as part of a senior-year research project to study the public sector app movement. The non-techie was hooked.
“There’s something about being surrounded by people using their talents and skills to help not only one another but this cause for greater good, because they care about the place they live,” McDougall says. “It really gave me a sense of hope.”
Now she continually spreads the gospel (via blogs, Meetups, virtual town halls, etc.) that technology — and perhaps more important, collaboration — can make the world a better place.
“You can make a difference,” she says. “You can have influence. You can get things done. You just have to roll up your sleeves and do it.”
For McDougall, that’s the mission every waking minute. — Lini S. Kadaba