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PR Tech Summit 2015 - Jennifer Pahlka
- 1. TITLE if you want
- 18. 39 “One privilege the insured and well-off have is to excuse the terrible quality of services the government routinely delivers to the poor. Too often, the press ignores — or simply never knows — the pain and trouble of interfacing with government bureaucracies that the poor struggle with daily.” Ezra Klein, Washington Post
- 19. If government can’t implement its policies, it can’t govern.
- 28. [CLEAN]
- 44. HONOLULU ANSWERS
- 49. HONOLULU ANSWERS
- 54. Interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use.
- 55. Participating in government means offering your hands, not just your voice.
- 58. Solutions can come from anywhere and spread frictionlessly.
- 67. Government can work for the people, by the people, in the 21st century, if we make it so. `
Editor's Notes
- This is where I work now, and it’s where I’ve worked for the past few years, except that in June 2013, I left and worked….
- Here. The EEOB.
- I said yes to something totally crazy, to spending a year in DC as the Deputy Chief Technology officer of the US. Todd Park, the US CTO, had created a program modeled after CfA and wanted me to help run it, but I reversed pitched him; I told him what we really needed in the federal government was an American version of the Government Digital Service. I took a year leave of absence from CfA, my amazing board of directors rallied to keep the organization moving in the right direction while I was away. And last June, I showed up in DC and got to work. But a few months in, something even crazier happened.
- So we’re out of Savagely and depressingly accurate territory now, but this is one out of literally tens of thousands of IT investments our federal government makes every year that total $80B just in contracting fees (Many people think this number is actually much higher) and as we know, a shockingly high percentage of them fail, and don’t get rescued. We are still far from government interfaces that work for the people. Is this a happy story yet?
- So we’re out of Savagely and depressingly accurate territory now, but this is one out of literally tens of thousands of IT investments our federal government makes every year that total $80B just in contracting fees (Many people think this number is actually much higher) and as we know, a shockingly high percentage of them fail, and don’t get rescued. We are still far from government interfaces that work for the people. Is this a happy story yet?
- Gov.uk is the work of the truly breakthrough Government Digital Service, a part of the Cabinet office, so positioned at the very center of the UK government. The GDS was formed after a $10B IT failure in the National Health Service. Essentially they got fed up and decided there had to be a better way of doing digital for the British people, so they hired the head of Digital from the Guardian and gave him complete authority and control over how the UK government spent money on IT.
- Gov.Uk basically reorganizes government information around what users need, instead of what government wants to say, On the surface, this doesn’t look like a revolution, but neither did google when it started. Now it is also where citizens go to transact with the government, whether its paying taxes or doing a lasting power of attorney. They do the hard work to make complicated processes easy.
- The most important outcome of the GDS in London has been showing the world that government services can be as easy and intuitive as Amazon or Uber, but its worth noting that this kind of quality is actually far less expensive. They are spending about a SIXTH of what they were before to have far more users, and happier users. And they’re inspiring the rest of the world.
- This happened.
- Todd pulled together an amazing team of people and they got to work on fixing the site. Some worked 20 hours a day for 100 days straight. One team duct taped the current site to make it through open enrollment; the other team rebuilt it from the ground up. Both are heroes. But why they did that gets back to why I asked about health insurance. One time we were in the office reading letters from folks who had had to choose between healthcare for themselves and healthcare for their kids.
- There was a time late at night at the office when I found out about traffic to the site late at night. LESSON HERE IS if you want the most talented technologist in the country to come work for you, ask them to do something that really matters and they will not fail. The second lesson is a grim one:
- It’s not just
- This is what it takes to apply to the food stamps program
- The messages are confusing, and result in people being dropped from the rolls.
- The messages are confusing, and result in people being dropped from the rolls.
- Promptly fixes that.
- But then they didn’t stop there.
- This is what it takes to apply to the food stamps program
- There are three things you can do today: Balance in your state [GO TO XYZ] SNAP Census - Join us in showing how our own government services work (citizenonboard.com) Share your ideas. RIGHT NOW. c4a.me/ideas (Problems and Partners)
- Not just the poor. Enterpreneurs too. Really much less dire day to day frustrations with govt that led me to start CfA but also put me on a path to learning about what’s really at stake when govt fails that brought my work at the federal level and the local level together.
- One of the things Code for America does is run a program that allows mid-career developers and designers from companies like Apple and Google to do a year of service with local governments. In 2012, we had the great pleasure of working with the city and county of Honolulu, and so we sent a team of three really remarkable folks, one of whom was from a tech start up in Boulder, to work with the IT department on how it communicates with its citizens. With only three people and a little less than a year to do the work, we insisted up front that we would not be able to tackle a redesign of their many thousand page website. But when the Code for America fellows arrived, they heard over and over again that that was what was most needed, both from inside and outside government.
- So they started by looking at the current website. You can see the navigation at the top, starting with Government, and Agencies and Departments, and the big block of news releases in the middle. But they wanted to know what the people of Honolulu were trying to find out or do when they went to the site.
- So the team analyzed the search logs of honoulu.gov to see what citizens were searching for, and surprising to anyone in govt who knows that states handle motor vehicles, top search was for drivers licenses.
- So they did that search on the current site.
- There are over a dozen pages ABOUT drivers licenses, but nowhere does it clearly tell you how to get one.
- So they built a clean, simple interface just answer to that question and the nine other top searches on the site. They modeled it after gov.uk, a hugely successful effort of a new unit in UK government called the Government Digital Service, which I’ll talk about later.
- When you type DL into this search, this is what you get back.
- But back to Honolulu, where our team of three didn’t have the resources of the UK cabinet office, at that point they only had answers to the top 10 questions. And they knew that among the three of them they could not write the rest of this content. So they held a WriteAThon. Through civic groups and the network they’d built, they invited the people of Honolulu to come to a coworking space near City Hall on a Saturday, and they put the next 60 questions that they’d identified as needs on this window.
- And people spend the day researching, writing and editing answers to those questions, and putting them in Honolulu Answers. The mayor spent some of the day there, people bonded,
- And they had a fantastic time together. City government websites and joy are not two thoughts that often go together, but there was a lot of joy in both the making and using of this resource for the citizens of Honolulu. The volunteers felt really good about their work. They’d shown two important things: that they could make interfaces to government that are simple, beautiful and easy to use, and that they didn’t just have to go to City Hall to complain about what didn’t work, they could fix it themselves.
- So that’s two of our lessons. SBETU & hands. The next step happens in my own town. Forrest Frizzell in IT department in Honolulu had already made my favorite people in the world list by finding an application that a team of fellows in the first year of Code for America had made, and redeploying it in Honolulu., which sparked about a dozen other cities to do the same. When he worked with the fellows on Honolulu Answers, he made his own contribution to the library of open source applications that cities can stand up without going through a long, complicated procurement process. And largely independently of me, my own city of Oakland, CA picked up the ball. A civic group called Open Oakland which is part of the Code for America Brigade program of tech volunteers who help their cities around the country, worked with the staff in Oakland City Hall, invited the community, and held its own Write—A-Thon.
- I’m particularly proud because I contributed. This is one of a few hundred answers that Oakland residents can count on being accurate (the city staff checks them) but also simple, clear and understandable. Those of you who know a bit about government procurement processes know that this kind of speed and low cost are not typical for government programs, but this spread frictionlessly, through the CfA network, not formally.
- Brigades: not open government activists, really. They’re doers and helpers.
- Savagely and depressingly accurate. Well yes and no. First it got better.
- We pulled this one out. How?
- Well its getting a lot happier. Less than 2 weeks ago, we got our own GDS. The USDS, the agency I went to DC to start, was finally announced, and Mikey is leading it. My year sabattical had to end in June, so I’ve been cheering from the west coast, but I’m thrilled its finally public, and that
- Not only that, but the team launched a playbook derived from the prinicples of the GDS.
- I’m not trying to convince you that government can be innovative soo that you can think good thoughts about it. I’m trying to convince you that government innovation is YOUR JOB, whether you work in government or not. If you live in this country and you care about a functioning democracy, then you have a role to play. Because that’s how it works here, govt for the people, by the people, innovation for the people, by the people. And for our kids.
- That iterative approaches means it works FOR PEOPLE>