Accelerating innovation

In 2020, Ashlee Sellung was no stranger to public service. As a disaster response team member with the Red Cross, she had done everything from battling wildfires to helping residents apply for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross disaster-relief benefits. But one interaction in a parking lot in the fall of that year fundamentally changed her understanding of how government systems impact community safety. 

While distributing supplies to fire victims, Sellung encountered a woman who lost her RV and everything in it, despite living in what was considered a low-risk area—far from brush and other fire hazards. A malfunction in the local alert system had failed to warn her in time to evacuate. 

“All these folks did all the work themselves to stay prepared, be involved, be informed, and be ready… but the system in place that their local government set up failed,” Sellung said.

Beyond emergency alerts, Sellung saw firsthand how outdated and inefficient systems could impede access to essential services. The digital forms for shelter, food, and water stipends were archaic and difficult to navigate, she said, often requiring identification and paperwork that victims had lost in the fire.  

This experience opened Sellung’s eyes to the broader issues of how people interact with government systems during crises. It was a turning point, eventually leading her to civic technology as a means to improve disaster response and public service delivery. 

“[I learned] the ways that folks interact with government or systems around them to try to receive different services and benefits, and how it can be a really terrible process,” Sellung said.

After finishing a degree in political science from California State University, Northridge, Sellung came to Georgetown University to complete her Master of Professional Studies in Emergency and Disaster Management. While on campus in the fall of 2022, she discovered the Beeck Center’s Student Analyst program, and saw the opportunity to increase her knowledge and experience in the civic technology space. 

Sellung joined Beeck’s Data Labs team as a student analyst and worked hands-on with state agencies to improve their efforts to track and manage data across key areas like safety net benefits, student outcomes, and workforce development. After graduating from Georgetown in 2023, Sellung stayed on as a contracted analyst, supporting the final programming of the Data Labs cohort before finishing her time at the Beeck Center. 

But she couldn’t stay away. When Sellung heard about an open role to work on the Digital Government Hub with the Digital Service Network and the Digital Benefits Network, she decided to throw her hat in the ring. The next thing she knew, she was returning to the Beeck Center. 

Today, Sellung is the coordinator for the Hub and her role incorporates a range of functions—from curating and sharing relevant content, to informing new features and addressing technical issues with the site, to connecting technologists and government practitioners with resources and tools through demos, training, and inbound requests. Sellung’s ultimate goal is to create a sense of community for individuals working toward similar goals across civic technology, all with the aim of improving the government’s ability to serve people. 

“Rather than solve for a specific problem, [we are] trying to get all of the brightest minds and best people in the room together talking about the problems each of them are having, and collectively finding solutions together,” Sellung said.   

For Sellung, both her education and her experiences—with the Red Cross, and with the D.C. Homeland Security Emergency Management’s Resilience Bureau—have equipped her with many skills she continues to use in the world of civic technology. Most importantly, Sellung learned how crucial it is to listen deeply and communicate effectively, and to always center people in her approach so that “the procedures and systems that we set up to help people are actually fulfilling their real needs … instead of just needs that we predict or assume.”

Compared to the fast-paced nature of emergency management, working on civic tech at the Beeck Center feels like a “marathon, rather than a sprint,” Sellung said. While there was an initial learning curve, she values the opportunity to expand her capacity to serve the public in new and exciting ways, she said. 

“Not only do I love the work, but I love the people,” she said. “Everybody just really cares about this work and what they do—and making a meaningful change in the world.”

When Hurricane Karl struck the state of Veracruz, Mexico in 2010, Alberto Rodríguez Alvarez sprang into action. He was working for the Veracruz government at the time, and was tasked with locating people who had been displaced by the hurricane or whose homes had been flooded. But the rapidly changing situation on the ground in the aftermath of the hurricane rendered the paper maps and resources at his disposal immediately useless.

“I knew that if … [I had] a digital document, it could have been easily updated and consulted so that … more lives could be saved,” Rodríguez Alvarez said. 

He carried that lesson with him all the way to the Mexican president’s office, where he worked on implementing the country’s digital strategy at a time when governments across the world were becoming attuned to the role of civic technology, digital services, and AI. The experience crystallized for Rodríguez Alvarez just how important technology is for effective governance. 

“I really wanted to study and work [at the intersection] of policy and tech, but always with the people at the center,” he said.

In 2018, Rodríguez Alvarez came to Georgetown University to earn his Master’s in Public Policy from the McCourt School. Before even arriving at Georgetown, he researched centers on campus and zeroed in on the Beeck Center, recognizing it as a place with a mission that aligned deeply with his own drive to make systems work better for all.  

“The first thing I did when I stepped foot in Georgetown was …  go to the Beeck Center and try to talk to [Founding Executive Director Sonal Shah] directly, and we hit it off almost immediately,” Rodríguez Alvarez said. 

Shah offered him a role as a student analyst working on the Digital Service Collaborative, a project launched in 2019 to bring together digital service leaders and conduct research on the emerging digital government ecosystem. Rodríguez Alvarez immediately got to work documenting the increase of digital innovation efforts at all levels of government. Tapping into his own personal and professional experience, he soon expanded his research to include Latin American countries, writing case studies on the Mexican and Argentine governments’ experiments with digital innovation. 

“It was something that was really interesting to me, because it meant that all of the skills that I had from my previous employment and previous experience, I could bring to the Beeck Center and apply them there,” he said.

After completing his degree, Rodríguez Alvarez knew what he wanted to do and how to do it, thanks to his experience at Beeck. He joined the digital services team at New America and picked up where he left off with much of the work he had begun at the Beeck Center.

“Even though public interest technology is growing, it’s still a small piece of the puzzle … You will see the same people in different jobs with different positions, but doing the same work,” he said.  

For Rodríguez Alvarez, the progression of his post-Beeck Center career brought a broader focus to his commitment to public service. In addition to his work at New America, he also co-founded Datamorfosis, a start-up focused on helping state and local governments in Latin America be “data ready” by creating data governance structures and building innovation teams so they are able to “implement digital government solutions safely and reliably.” Two years in and the team has already worked with the Organization of American States, CAF Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, UNICEF, and others.

Now, as director of partnerships at InnovateUS, Rodríguez Alvarez coordinates with cities and states to provide free training on responsible AI use in the public sector. 

For Rodríguez Alvarez, cultivating and educating the next generation of leaders who can ethically harness digital tools and technologies for the public good is crucial. To this end, he said, one of the most valuable contributions to the social impact and civic technology space is the Beeck Center’s efforts to engage students, starting early in their undergraduate years and continuing through the end of their graduate programs. 

“You have to work on capacity building, and this means training the students of tomorrow, not just with technical skills … but also the ethics and the social impact,” he said. “We have to marry those two in their minds.”