Call for Proposals
The call for mainstage, breakout session, and lightning talk proposals will be open November 13–24, 2025.
We’re excited you want to be a part of Code for America Summit 2026. To help you submit a great proposal, we’ve put together some pointers.
Who should apply?
We welcome submissions from anyone whose work touches government technology and civic innovation. Whether you’re a government employee, a technologist, an academic, or anyone else in the civic tech space—if you’re doing the hard work of improving people’s lives through technology and government, your knowledge and passion have a place here.
Summit is the place where experts and leaders learn from newcomers and beginners, and vice versa. We invite anyone to share their story, regardless of career stage or level of experience.
What can contributing to Summit look like?
There are three ways to present at Summit:
- Breakout session: 60-minute deep-dives with a maximum of four speakers
- Lightning talk: Five minutes to tell us about your bold idea, one speaker only
- Mainstage content: Lightning talks, fireside chats, or 20-minute panel discussions that speak to a broad audience or cover a huge recent milestone in civic tech
- Please note that mainstage content will be reviewed on a separate timeline, and we’ll follow up with next steps at a later date.
Think about the format you’re going for when you submit your proposal—but if you’re open to it, we may reach out and see if the session you submitted might work better in a different slot on the Summit agenda.
Theme
The Future We Build
All across the country, technologists, policy changemakers, community organizations, and leaders at every level are laying the foundation for what’s next in our nation. This moment demands bold ideas, cross-sector collaboration, and vision that supersedes difference. Together, let’s create the tomorrow we know is possible when we innovate today.
Conference tracks
Service Design + Delivery
This track focuses on the end-to-end design and delivery of government services, which are at the core of what matters most—where people experience government. Delivery of services, technical or non-technical, was once viewed as an afterthought to policy decisions. Today, we know that a ready, responsive, and resilient government must get implementation right.
Policy + Administration
In many ways, policy and technology are two sides of the same government coin. Policy is how the government creates the guardrails for our society, and technological implementation is how those policies are brought to life. But there’s often a disconnect between the intention of a policy and its impact when implemented. This track focuses on bringing policy and administrative decisions closer to their desired real-world outcomes.
Emerging Technology + Innovation
It’s critical we leverage the latest advancements to build more effective and efficient public services. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence have the power to transform government services, but we must ensure that they are deployed thoughtfully and ethically. This track showcases the latest technologies and forward-thinking strategies that are driving positive change and reshaping the future of civic technology.
People Power + Community
Code for America was founded over 15 years ago on the belief that government can work for the people, by the people, in the digital age. This track is for anyone who believes that our best creative problem solving comes from bringing people together. It spotlights change agents and innovators who influence government to better serve all people.
What does a winning proposal look like?
For years, Summit attendees have been asking for it, and we’re looking to you to make it happen: we want more advanced sessions that dive into the specifics of technical implementation for government innovation projects. That means we want you to get granular, lean into the complexity, and give your peers something challenging to think about.
“Why open sourcing improves innovation” is a 101 level presentation—and we love to have some of those at Summit for people just entering the space! But we’re really excited about those well-developed, unique 201 or 301 level sessions. Take that open source idea and turn it into something like “How to transition to open source when your projects depend on more traditional cloud computing services” and “Navigating privacy requirements in open source data repositories.”
Here are some examples of what a specific, advanced technical submission might look like. We’d love to see proposals like these:
- In the Emerging Technology + Innovation track, we’d love something like “Evaluating LLMs for different applications in government.” Walk attendees through the evaluation criteria you used when assessing different LLMs for a project you piloted and the lessons you learned applying this type of AI in different contexts.
- In the Service Design + Delivery track, we’d love something like “Deciding between traditional machine learning and AI while building an integrated benefits portal.” Show attendees how you designed an integrated benefits portal and the methods you used to decide between different technical approaches for each component of the tool, from client support pages to document uploading.
- In the People Power + Community track, we’d love something like “Conducting outreach for programs with automatic enrollment.” Show your attendees how you used already available program data to locate participants for a new benefits program, the communications strategies you employed to get them to use the benefit, and how you handled challenges like address validation and other barriers to program implementation.
- In the Policy + Administration track, we’d love to see something like “Piloting entity resolution for data cleanup.” Give a presentation on the basics of entity resolution, the steps agencies would need to take to clean up their data before deploying this tool, the administrative benefits of having an easily navigable data infrastructure, and the internal data policy changes you had to make.
Any Summit proposal should show us how you’re addressing four criteria:
Timeliness
How does the topic address emerging trends or pressing issues within the civic tech community?
Audience engagement
Are there interactive elements—such as Q&A segments, live polls, and group activities—planned to foster participation?
Clear takeaways
What actionable insights or tools will attendees gain from your session?
Uniqueness
What have you thought of that we haven’t seen at Summits past?*
*One of our favorite proposals of recent years included a custom-made tarot deck for helping civic tech practitioners make decisions!