Welcome & Talk from Greg Jordan-Detamore (How government can better serve the public in the digital age)

2:38PM Oct 15, 2022

Speakers:

Ben T.

Greg Jordan-Detamore

Keywords:

people

government

brigade

survey

oftentimes

contracted

session

private sector

centered

common

code

work

procurement

improve

hear

projects

technology

practices

greg

zoom

but that is a thing we hear about a lot. Like right and in the last couple of years

Good morning Hello. Welcome to day two of brigade Congress. Saturday brigade Congress Saturday. We have a good morning sorry to fall on camera. We're ready to get started brigade Congress day two. If you don't know me, my name is Ben Trevino I am the Senior Program Director for the network. And I'm very glad to introduce our first speaker of the day longtime network member, hero to all Greg Jordan day tomorrow we'll be talking about human centered government.

Thank you, Ben. Is this good? Now you can hear? It seems good. Okay. Hi, everyone, and welcome to day two. We'll go ahead. So my name is Greg. I am the Associate Director for human centered government here at Code for America. I also have been involved in the brigade network for about seven and a half years, first at the old brigade in Providence, which was called Code island like Rhode Island, but code and also code for DC. And so this talk is about how government can better serve the public in the digital age. So you've probably heard this before, but here at Code for America, we see ourselves as people centered problem solvers, showing that with the mindful use of technology, government can work well for everyone. And so in this quick talk today, we're gonna go over some of the common problems with government tech projects and solutions to them. We're gonna go into code for America's vision for human centered government and then do a quick survey. So for the first part, I'd actually love to see you with a show of hands. How many of you have ever struggled to use a government website? Great. So most people, and I know certainly that's something that it's it's constantly cropping up in the news, you know, when COVID hit and there was a huge spike of people applying for unemployment. That was in the spotlight healthcare.gov and 2013 was, you know, on TV screens all over the country. So they're constantly stories we hear about this and experiences that we have ourselves and so there are three. There are many ways of describing this. I don't know some of you may have had discussions with friends or family. But the way I like to break it down is that there are three key problems that cause a lot of government websites, but also just government tech projects in general to have challenges. The first one is clunky approaches and practices to planning, budgeting, procurement and development. So governments need all sorts of things to function. They need pencils, fire trucks, legal services, all sorts of things. And one of those other things is software and traditional budgeting and procurement and planning. Treat software, oftentimes, like it's the same thing as a big physical item like a bridge by requiring a very long timeline for planning and budgeting and the procurement process as well. As the actual delivery. Oftentimes, this is many years long, requiring a precise understanding of how exactly people will use it before it's before anything is ever built by having a very long detailed list of requirements specified at the very beginning of the process and having a clear definition of exactly when it's done. The problem is this doesn't work very well for software for a number of reasons. So here's a quote from our friends at ATF and the federal government, technology changes government policies change regulations change, laws change and leadership's priorities change. And so any project that's planned in great detail upfront will be unable to adapt to those changes, and will be at significant risk of failure, significant costs and deadline overruns or costly change orders. And so a way to do this better is to treat software as a service that's constantly being improved rather than a big item that's bought once one approach to this, that some places have taken as the idea of funding teams of people as opposed to sort of projects since a lot of this work. is contracted out to the private sector and approach that's been gaining popularity in recent years is something called modular contracting, where you have several smaller contracts rather than sort of one big mega contract.

The second common issue is not focusing on what you might call people centered tech practices. And by that I'm referring to user research, design and product management. So a lot of times you encounter things that do technically work, technically, they're just very difficult to use. So that could be anything from my website where the text is super tiny. To hopefully I don't have any super tiny text on my slides, too. I mean, really a wide range of things. And so the issue is that a lot of times both for work that's done internally, as well as for work that's contracted out there. Literally aren't people or are very few people, or at least not enough people who are focusing explicitly on doing user research on doing design work and product management. And so, you know, you can have all the engineering work but still have something that's very very difficult for people to use in practice. And so, when you don't put people's needs and experiences at the front of the process, and throughout the process, you oftentimes may end up with something that doesn't deliver on what the real need was. The third big thing I would say is insufficient technical capacity and expertise inside of government. And so the issue here is that despite digital technology being a key part of government and everything that it does, it's very common for governments internally to lack people with the knowledge is with the knowledge and skills that are needed to both plan and oversee this work as well as to implement it. And so the way that this shows up, I would say is at that high level legislators, executives and policy staff often don't know the kinds of things that are needed to do a good job of planning and writing laws, budgets. For digital technology work, and then when we talk about implementation, for for internal and external, if you look at the external side, where you're procuring this and having a private sector vendor do the work. Staff and Procurement Offices oftentimes are not experts in digital technology. And so they'll write RFPs that are similar to lots of other things without really knowing the types of things that are needed for this specific domain and then for work that is done internally or that could be done internally. Oftentimes, there just aren't enough staff to really do that or to do it well or to have types of expertise, like what I discussed in terms of user research, design and product management. And in particular, governments face a lot of challenges in hiring these types of people. This includes things like complicated and long hiring timelines, outdated job titles that don't match what people might be searching for, below market salaries, degree requirements, and various bureaucratic work rules. And so if you work on addressing not even all of these, even just some of them, that can help make headway on hiring more of the types of people that you need to be able to plan and deliver these projects well. So we have a nice graphic that we've made that sort of summarizes all of these key points. We're actually going to be publishing a blog post, hopefully within the next week or so, that breaks all of this down so you can read that, send it to your friends, send it to people in government, whatever you want. And then over the next few months, we're going to be publishing a series of blog posts that go into each of these specific issues, and really gets into solutions because I know I talked a lot about problems, but we do have more details on solutions and resources that people can use to get started on this to get started on addressing them. So that was a lot of talk about sort of problems and solving problems. I want to take a step back and talk about more broadly the vision that we have for government here at Code for America and we call it human centered government.

And we have five key principles which are build equitable systems, put people first Empower for action, informed with evidence and improve continuously. So build equitable systems is about making sure that the systems of government and the services that we're developing and delivering are ones that are just an equitable for all of the people that we need to serve. And that's really important, especially when we talk about compared to the private sector, you know, if your Facebook or Google or whoever, you don't actually have to worry about serving everyone, but government does. Everyone including people who don't have mailing addresses or can't see a screen or don't speak a certain language or all sorts of different things. In terms of putting people first. We really, this relates to a lot of what I was talking about, about user research and design. It's really important to learn about people's needs, uncover them, talk to them, and make sure that we're centering that throughout our processes, both you know, for developing technology, but in general for government service, design and delivery. Another one that I think doesn't get nearly as much attention as it needs is empowering for action, empowering our government employees, especially when we talk about in the domain of technology. We often think about public facing websites, but we forget that government employees themselves oftentimes have to deal with a lot of really difficult systems and beyond. technology specifically just issues of you know, empowering government workers, empowering them, giving them more decision making power, trusting them and really using them as collaborators and not just sort of passing down mandates from the talk without hearing what's going on on the ground, and others informing with evidence and this is really about using data and evidence to inform everything that's being done, making sure that you're collecting data to help you monitor and improve your services and acting upon it, and then finally improve continuously. So that's just about starting small and improving iteratively which is very common in the private sector, specifically with regard to tech development, and we would like it to be more common all over the place. So we have a quick survey for you, which is about what kinds of questions your brigade gets from people in government. And the reason that we're doing a survey is that we'd like to find out, you know, are there certain common questions that you're hearing, you know, a city council person emails you and it's like, I want to make X thing better, like how do I do that? Or some, you know, I don't know CIO wants to know, like, Do you know anything about open data or any number of other topics? And so, by having this information, we can use this to potentially develop resources to help answer some of these common types of questions. So we have a quick link here. The survey should honestly only take like two to five minutes. Am Are you posting this on Zoom? Perfect. So our Zoomers will have this in the Zoom chat. So if you could quickly just go on your phone, laptop, whatever and fill out the survey we would really appreciate it. Also don't fill out the survey if you're not in a brigade or have no idea what your brigades interactions with people in government

are not like. You Oh, sorry. That is que je. I apologize. I when I was making it, I didn't think about the fact that it was gonna have a line under it. So maybe I should do a better job of these people centered practices.

stands for questions from government, by the way. Is are you as is the survey working? Are you accessing it?

Yes. More yeses. Just a quick show of hands. How many people are still working on the survey? Okay. Give it like another minute. or so.

Okay, everyone. Everyone, thank you so much for filling out the survey. For those of you fill that out. We really appreciate it. If you want to follow the work that we're doing on human centered government. You can do so at Code for america.org/human centered. You can also email me at DJD that G JD at Code for america.org. And now I believe M is going to take us to the next thing.

Thank you, Greg. So we're gonna have three sessions happening now. Right? Yeah, right here. We're gonna do a direct democracy teaching with Ciara who's at this table here. This is gonna be really fun. If you participated in a cohort, or if you watched any of our webinars, this is going to be a great maybe I should talk to the camera. There's going to be a great overview of a lot of the like tools, tips and tricks that were gained during those sessions. Downstairs. We're going to have a session on somebody have the name of this is three and Shana session. Case studies learning from state partnerships, and then I believe there's also a session with mica and Gabrielle at the same time, you know where that one is? Do we know in Ghana town? Okay. Okay, that means at 1145. So if you're here in person and want to check out the state partnerships session, you can go downstairs to the main room. If you're on Zoom, you can check out the discourse link that I posted, and join there, same process, register for the webinar. And then we want to do like a little three minute break before starting. Let's do that. And see you then