Community-minded hackers code well for the future On a recent day at work in a San Francisco loft, Moncef Belyamani was sporting a hipster "LOVE" T-shirt and riffing, with obsessive detail, on the evolution of vinyl record production. The Android coder and sometime dance-club DJ wrapped up by explaining how Google's language translator could be rigged to produce an excellent beat-box. Belyamani isn't exactly the kind of guy you expect to bump into in a government building. But if you happen to be hanging out in San Mateo County offices, that's exactly where you'll find him many days. The 38-year-old is part of an experiment in municipal government driven by hackers like him who want to help make the public sector as responsive as the Yelp app on a smartphone. From their buzzy loft, these 28 tech wizards spend their days tapping on laptops, scribbling formulas into spiral notebooks and "ideating" - hacker-speak for tossing ideas around. Then they fan out across the country, embedding themselves within the beige conference rooms, dense procedure manuals and maddeningly slow pace of the machinery of municipal government. They call themselves the Peace Corps for Geeks. Code for America, as the nonprofit they work for is called, condensed its improbable mission down to a few words in its recent annual report: use technology to make government "simple, beautiful, easy to use." In Boston, for example, thousands of hydrants were getting buried in snowstorms, obstructing firefighters. A Code for America hacker built an app so Bostonians could "adopt" a hydrant and agree to keep the snow off it. The app isn't just functional. It's fun. It went viral. Honolulu seized on it. Folks there adopt tsunami sirens, keeping their batteries fresh. Seattle citizens began adopting storm drains to unclog. At least nine cities have built on Code for America's work to create "Adopt-a" apps. It's as the group intended: The code is open source, and anybody interested is encouraged to rehack it. Rarely do things work so organically in the public sector, a place of rigid org charts, layers of contracting rules and bewildering cost overruns. There are bureaucracies within bureaucracies and computers so old that nobody makes the parts anymore. Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka readily acknowledges the inherent contradiction: I started a program to try to get the rock-star tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate. The Code for America fellows, as they are called, have been lured to this aggressively unhip domain by Pahlka, a Bay Area innovation fanatic. Hers is a quintessential California story. The charismatic 43-year-old Yale grad from Maryland fell into the tech world by happenstance and built a brand around evangelizing outside-the-box thinking. Pahlka easily blends with any other activist you might bump into at a Berkeley farmer's market. She has a taste for eclectic patterned clothing, singer-songwriters and sustainable agriculture. But her lack of conceit is disarming. Light conversations with her quickly become intense. Pahlka and her 10-year-old daughter, Clementine, raise eight chickens. One is named Lady Gaga. Another is Hillbilly. One thing Pahlka doesn't know how to do is code. It's her "dirty little secret," she jokes. But that doesn't matter to some of the most talented coders in the world, who insist few people better grasp its possibilities. It bothers Pahlka that people can perform complex financial transactions across continents on a smartphone but often can't get a municipal parking permit without a long wait at City Hall.