at E Pluribus Unum: “18F, the federal government’s new IT development shop, has launched a new look at the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the form of a open source application hosted on Github. Today’s announcement is the most substantive evidence yet that the Obama administration will indeed modernize the Freedom of Information Act, as the United States committed to doing in its second National Action Plan on Open Government. Given how poor some of the “FOIA portals” and underlying software that supports them exists is at all level of government, this is tremendous news for anyone that cares about the use of technology to support open government.
Notably, 18F already has a prototype (pictured above) online that shows what a consolidated request submission hub could look like and plans to iterate upon it. This is a perfect example of “lean government,” or the application of lean startup principles and agile development to the creation of citizen-centric services in the public sector. Demonstrating its commitment to developing free and open source software in the open, 18F asked the public to follow the process online at their FOIA software repository on Github, send them feedback or even contribute to the project….”
Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation
Jeremy Goldberg at Governing: “Innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets. Fortunately, the opportunities for nurturing cross-pollination between the public and private sectors have never been greater, thanks in large part to the growing role of organizations such as Bayes Impact, Code for America, Data Science for Social Good and Fuse Corps.
Indeed, there’s reason to believe that we might be entering an even more exciting period of public-private collaboration. As one local-government leader recently put it to me when talking about the critical mass of pro-bono civic-innovation efforts taking place across the San Francisco Bay area, “We’re now riding the second wave of civic pro-bono and civic innovation.”
As an alumni of Fuse Corps’ executive fellows program, I’m convinced that the opportunities initiated by it and similar organizations are integral to civic innovation. Fuse Corps brings civic entrepreneurs with experience across the public, private and nonprofit sectors to work closely with government employees to help them negotiate project design, facilitation and management hurdles. The organization’s leadership training emphasizes “smallifying” — building innovation capacity by breaking big challenges down into smaller tasks in a shorter timeframe — and making “little bets” — low-risk actions aimed at developing and testing an idea.
Since 2012, I have managed programs and cross-sector networks for the Silicon Valley Talent Partnership. I’ve witnessed a groundswell of civic entrepreneurs from across the region stepping up to participate in discussions and launch rapid-prototyping labs focused on civic innovation.
Cities across the nation are creating new roles and programs to engage these civic start-ups. They’re learning that what makes these projects, and specifically civic pro-bono programs, work best is a process of designing, building, operationalizing and bringing them to scale. If you’re setting out to create such a program, here’s a short list of best practices:
• Assets: Explore existing internal resources and knowledge to understand the history, departmental relationships and overall functions of the relevant agencies or departments. Develop a compendium of current service/volunteer programs.
• City policies/legal framework: Determine what the city charter, city attorney’s office or employee-relations rules and policies say about procurement, collective bargaining and public-private partnerships.
• Leadership: The support of the city’s top leadership is especially important during the formative stages of a civic-innovation program, so it’s important to understand how the city’s form of government will impact the program. For example, in a “strong mayor” government the ability to make definitive decisions on a public-private collaboration may be unlikely to face the same scrutiny as it might under a “council/mayor” government.
• Cross-departmental collaboration: This is essential. Without the support of city staff across departments, innovation projects are unlikely to take off. Convening a “tiger team” of individuals who are early adopters of such initiatives is important step. Ultimately, city staffers best understand the needs and demands of their departments or agencies.
• Partners from corporations and philanthropy: Leveraging existing partnerships will help to bring together an advisory group of cross-sector leaders and executives to participate in the early stages of program development.
• Business and member associations: For the Silicon Valley Talent Partnership, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group has been instrumental in advocating for pro-bono volunteerism with the cities of Fremont, San Jose and Santa Clara….”
Just how well has the 'nudge unit' done?
Broadcast at BBC News: “Nudging – concept of changing people’s behaviour without recourse to the law but to psychology – has been one of the big policy ideas of the last few years
The coalition government set up a “nudge unit”, officially called the Behavioural Insights Team, in 2010. But just how successful has it been?
David Halpern, who heads the unit, told the Today programme’s Evan Davis that it has enjoyed a wide range of successes. He said that by adding the line “‘most people pay their tax on time’ to a letter you get a significant increase in the number of people who pay their tax on time and you get a reduction in complaints.
“It turns out it’s a nicer way, to encourage people than to threaten them.”
But Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told the programme that he did not “object against nudging per se but against the philosophy underlying it, namely that basically that people are born more or less stupid.”
There is, he said, a real alternative to nudging, that of educating people to become “risk-savvy citizens: to invest in to making people competent”.
Detroit and Big Data Take on Blight
Susan Crawford in Bloomberg View: “The urban blight that has been plaguing Detroit was, until very recently, made worse by a dearth of information about the problem. No one could tell how many buildings needed fixing or demolition, or how effectively city services were being delivered to them (or not). Today, thanks to the combined efforts of a scrappy small business, tech-savvy city leadership and substantial philanthropic support, the extent of the problem is clear.
The question now is whether Detroit has the heart to use the information to make hard choices about its future.
In the past, when the city foreclosed on properties for failure to pay back taxes, it had no sense of where those properties were clustered. The city would auction off the houses for the bargain-basement price of $500 each, but the auction was entirely undocumented, so neighbors were unaware of investment opportunities, big buyers were gaming the system, and, as often as not, arsonists would then burn the properties down. The result of this blind spot was lost population, lost revenue and even more blight.
Then along came Jerry Paffendorf, a San Francisco transplant, who saw what was needed. His company, Loveland Technologies, started mapping all the tax-foreclosed and auctioned properties. Impressed with Paffendorf’s zeal, the city’s Blight Task Force, established by President Barack Obama and funded by foundations and the state Housing Development Authority, hired his team to visit every property in the city. That led to MotorCityMapping.org, the first user-friendly collection of information about all the attributes of every property in Detroit — including photographs.
Paffendorf calls this map a “scan of the genome of the city.” It shows more than 84,000 blighted structures and vacant lots; in eight neighborhoods, crime, fires and other torments have led to the abandonment of more than a third of houses and businesses. To demolish all those houses, as recommended by the Blight Task Force, will cost almost $2 billion. Still more money will then be needed to repurpose the sites….”
Our future government will work more like Amazon
Michael Case in The Verge: “There is a lot of government in the United States. Several hundred federal agencies, 535 voting members in two houses of Congress, more than 90,000 state and local governments, and over 20 million Americans involved in public service.
We say we have a government for and by the people. But the way American government conducts its day-to-day business does not feel like anything we, the people weaned on the internet, would design in 2014. Most interactions with the US government don’t resemble anything else we’re used to in our daily lives….
But if the government is ever going to completely retool itself to provide sensible services to a growing, aging, diversifying American population, it will have to do more than bring in a couple innovators and throw data at the public. At the federal level, these kinds of adjustments will require new laws to change the way money is allocated to executive branch agencies so they can coordinate the purchase and development of a standard set of tools. State and local governments will have to agree on standard tools and data formats as well so that the mayor of Anchorage can collaborate with the governor of Delaware.
Technology is the answer to a lot of American government’s current operational shortcomings. Not only are the tools and systems most public servants use outdated and suboptimal, but the organizations and processes themselves have also calcified around similarly out-of-date thinking. So the real challenge won’t be designing cutting edge software or high tech government facilities — it’s going to be conjuring the will to overcome decades of old thinking. It’s going to be convincing over 90,000 employees to learn new skills, coaxing a bitterly divided Congress to collaborate on something scary, and finding a way to convince a timid and distracted White House to put its name on risky investments that won’t show benefits for many years.
But! If we can figure out a way for governments across the country to perform their basic functions and provide often life-saving services, maybe we can move on to chase even more elusive government tech unicorns. Imagine voting from your smartphone, having your taxes calculated and filed automatically with a few online confirmations, or filing for your retirement at a friendly tablet kiosk at your local government outpost. Government could — feasibly — be not only more effective, but also a pleasure to interact with someday. Someday.”
Not just the government’s playbook
at Radar: “Whenever I hear someone say that “government should be run like a business,” my first reaction is “do you know how badly most businesses are run?” Seriously. I do not want my government to run like a business — whether it’s like the local restaurants that pop up and die like wildflowers, or megacorporations that sell broken products, whether financial, automotive, or otherwise.
If you read some elements of the press, it’s easy to think that healthcare.gov is the first time that a website failed. And it’s easy to forget that a large non-government website was failing, in surprisingly similar ways, at roughly the same time. I’m talking about the Common App site, the site high school seniors use to apply to most colleges in the US. There were problems with pasting in essays, problems with accepting payments, problems with the app mysteriously hanging for hours, and more.
I don’t mean to pick on Common App; you’ve no doubt had your own experience with woefully bad online services: insurance companies, Internet providers, even online shopping. I’ve seen my doctor swear at the Epic electronic medical records application when it crashed repeatedly during an appointment. So, yes, the government builds bad software. So does private enterprise. All the time. According to TechRepublic, 68% of all software projects fail. We can debate why, and we can even debate the numbers, but there’s clearly a lot of software #fail out there — in industry, in non-profits, and yes, in government.
With that in mind, it’s worth looking at the U.S. CIO’s Digital Services Playbook. It’s not ideal, and in many respects, its flaws reveal its origins. But it’s pretty good, and should certainly serve as a model, not just for the government, but for any organization, small or large, that is building an online presence.
The playbook consists of 13 principles (called “plays”) that drive modern software development:
- Understand what people need
- Address the whole experience, from start to finish
- Make it simple and intuitive
- Build the service using agile and iterative practices
- Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery
- Assign one leader and hold that person accountable
- Bring in experienced teams
- Choose a modern technology stack
- Deploy in a flexible hosting environment
- Automate testing and deployments
- Manage security and privacy through reusable processes
- Use data to drive decisions
- Default to open
These aren’t abstract principles: most of them should be familiar to anyone who has read about agile software development, attended one of our Velocity conferences, one of the many DevOps Days, or a similar event. All of the principles are worth reading (it’s not a long document). I’m going to call out two for special attention….”
City Service Development Kit (CitySDK)
What is CitySDK?: “Helping cities to open their data and giving developers the tools they need, the CitySDK aims for a step change in how to deliver services in urban environments. With governments around the world looking at open data as a kick start for their economies, CitySDK provides better and easier ways for the cities throughout the Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to re-use.
Taking the best practices around the world the project will foresee the development of a toolkit – CitySDK v1.0 – that can be used by any city looking to create a sustainable infrastructure of “city apps”.
Piloting the CitySDK
The Project focuses on three Pilot domains: Smart Participation, Smart Mobility and Smart Tourism. Within each of the three domains, a large-scale Lead Pilot is carried out in one city. The experiences of the Lead Pilot will be applied in the Replication Pilots in other Partner cities.
Funding
CitySDK is a 6.8 million Euro project, part funded by the European Commission. It is a Pilot Type B within the ICT Policy Support Programme of the Competitiveness and Framework Programme. It runs from January 2012-October 2014.”
The city as living labortory: A playground for the innovative development of smart city applications
Paper by Veeckman, Carina and van der Graaf, Shenja: “Nowadays the smart-city concept is shifting from a top-down, mere technological approach towards bottom-up processes that are based on the participation of creative citizens, research organisations and companies. Here, the city acts as an urban innovation ecosystem in which smart applications, open government data and new modes of participation are fostering innovation in the city. However, detailed analyses on how to manage smart city initiatives as well as descriptions of underlying challenges and barriers seem still scarce. Therefore, this paper investigates four, collaborative smart city initiatives in Europe to learn how cities can optimize the citizen’s involvement in the context of open innovation. The analytical framework focuses on the innovation ecosystem and the civic capacities to engage in the public domain. Findings show that public service delivery can be co-designed between the city and citizens, if different toolkits aligned with the specific capacities and skills of the users are provided. By providing the right tools, even ordinary citizens can take a much more active role in the evolution of their cities and generate solutions from which both the city and everyday urban life can possibly benefit.”
How you can help build a more agile government
Luke Fretwell at GovFresh: “Earlier this year, I began doing research work with CivicActions on agile development in government — who was doing it, how and what the needs were to successfully get it deployed.
After the Healthcare.gov launch mishaps, calls for agile practices as the panacea to all of government IT woes reached a high. While agile as the ultimate solution oversimplifies the issue, we’ve evolved as a profession (both software development and public service) that moving towards an iterative approach to operations is the way of the future.
My own formal introduction with agile began with my work with CivicActions, so the research coincided with an introductory immersion into how government is using it. Having been involved with startups for the past 15 years, iterative development is the norm, however, the layer of project management processes has forced me to be a better professional overall.
What I’ve found through many discussions and interviews is that you can’t just snap your fingers and execute agile within the framework of government bureaucracy. There are a number of issues — from procurement to project management training to executive-level commitment to organizational-wide culture change — that hinder its adoption. For IT, launching a new website or app is this easy part. Changing IT operational processes and culture is often overlooked or avoided, especially for a short-term executive, because they reach into the granular organizational challenges most people don’t want to bother with.
After talking with a number of agile government and private sector practitioners, it was clear there was enthusiasm around how it could be applied to fundamentally change the way government works. Beyond just execution from professional project management professionals, everyone I spoke with talked about how deploying agile gives them a stronger sense of public service.
What came from these discussions is the desire to have a stronger community of practitioners and those interested in deploying it to better support one another.
To meet that need, a group of federal, state, local government and private sector professionals have formed Agile for Gov, a “community-powered network of agile government professionals.”…
Monitoring Arms Control Compliance With Web Intelligence
Chris Holden and Maynard Holliday at Commons Lab: “Traditional monitoring of arms control treaties, agreements, and commitments has required the use of National Technical Means (NTM)—large satellites, phased array radars, and other technological solutions. NTM was a good solution when the treaties focused on large items for observation, such as missile silos or nuclear test facilities. As the targets of interest have shrunk by orders of magnitude, the need for other, more ubiquitous, sensor capabilities has increased. The rise in web-based, or cloud-based, analytic capabilities will have a significant influence on the future of arms control monitoring and the role of citizen involvement.
Since 1999, the U.S. Department of State has had at its disposal the Key Verification Assets Fund (V Fund), which was established by Congress. The Fund helps preserve critical verification assets and promotes the development of new technologies that support the verification of and compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament requirements.
Sponsored by the V Fund to advance web-based analytic capabilities, Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with Recorded Future (RF), synthesized open-source data streams from a wide variety of traditional and nontraditional web sources in multiple languages along with topical texts and articles on national security policy to determine the efficacy of monitoring chemical and biological arms control agreements and compliance. The team used novel technology involving linguistic algorithms to extract temporal signals from unstructured text and organize that unstructured text into a multidimensional structure for analysis. In doing so, the algorithm identifies the underlying associations between entities and events across documents and sources over time. Using this capability, the team analyzed several events that could serve as analogs to treaty noncompliance, technical breakout, or an intentional attack. These events included the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China, the Shanghai pig die-off and the fungal meningitis outbreak in the United States last year.
For H7N9 we found that open source social media were the first to report the outbreak and give ongoing updates. The Sandia RF system was able to roughly estimate lethality based on temporal hospitalization and fatality reporting. For the Shanghai pig die-off the analysis tracked the rapid assessment by Chinese authorities that H7N9 was not the cause of the pig die-off as had been originally speculated. Open source reporting highlighted a reduced market for pork in China due to the very public dead pig display in Shanghai. Possible downstream health effects were predicted (e.g., contaminated water supply and other overall food ecosystem concerns). In addition, legitimate U.S. food security concerns were raised based on the Chinese purchase of the largest U.S. pork producer (Smithfield) because of a fear of potential import of tainted pork into the United States….
To read the full paper, please click here.”