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You're in luck! In most cities, there are Code for America "Brigades" that are meetup groups where people can work on digital public service projects.

http://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/

For example, I'm in the SF brigade and work on the BallotAPI project.

https://github.com/sfbrigade/ballotapi

Well, there is Code for America. That's a volunteer organization not actually within the government, so it's not a terribly close analogy, but it's still one means of digital civic service that stops short of full-time.

Contrary to all evidence of my puny physique, I'd still be afraid of getting dragooned/stop-lossed into overseas adventurism.