Technology and Trust: The Challenge of 21st Century Government

@codeforamerica

Technology and Trust:The Challenge of 21st Century Government

Tim O’Reilly@timoreilly

Social Innovation SummitNovember 20, 2013

codeforamerica.orgWednesday, November 20, 13

When you see the title of this talk, Technology and Trust, you perhaps think of Edward Snowden and the ongoing scandal of NSA spying on the American people and our allies. But I’m actually here to talk about something that is perhaps even more fundamental. And it starts here...

Wednesday, November 20, 13How many of you are old enough to remember a time when you had to physically walk into a bank and talk to another human being in order to get cash?

I remember….

And that memory seems quaint to all of us because we know how much personal finance has been revolutionized over the last 25 years because of digital, networked technology.

Wednesday, November 20, 13Leave Bitcoin to the side for a moment, I’m still amazed that I can take a picture of a check with my phone and the money will show up in my account a few hours later.

The same digital, networked technologies, it seems obvious to say, have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives. Not just banking but everything from education to how we interact with our friends.

Wednesday, November 20, 13But there’s one place where that revolution has largely not yet taken place: in government. This is the Department of Motor Vehicles, which in the US is a symbol of bureaucracy. Just about everyone has to go at some point in their lives and almost no one has a good experience.

91% of Americans own a cellphone67% use Facebook, 33% have a tablet...

Why is this how we engage with government?

Wednesday, November 20, 13And this is a microcosm of the problem we try to address at Code for America--when the tools are available for people to connect with anyone in the world and access every piece of information one could ever want, why do we make it so hard to access government?

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Wednesday, November 20, 13Even when government tries to do digital, we get messes like healthcare.gov.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But when the government does end up building technology that doesn’t work and costs way too much, not only do ci=zens get gypped, but it breaks our trust in government.

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Wednesday, November 20, 13Democracies get their strength from the people’s trust. When the interactions that people have with government are so divorced from how they live their lives, or are hard and unpleasant, what is that doing to the trust that underlies our democracies? Obviously, the decline of trust in government has to dowith a lot of other factors besides technology, but the way government is so out of step with ordinary life certainly is symptomaticof the deeper problem.

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Wednesday, November 20, 13

There are lots of people doing great work in government, and we see alterna=ves star=ng to appear to thebroken way that government acquires and deploys technology. In the last couple of years, the UK’s Government Digital Service has replaced something like 1700 bad government web sites with one that has more usage than all 1700 combined had before. The service has had ci=zen sa=sfac=ongo through the roof, and has won plaudits from everyone.

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In the US, the Consumer Financial Protec?on Bureau has similarly built simple, effec?ve interfaces to government, inplain language, that gets results.

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Wednesday, November 20, 13And that’s what we’re all about at Code for America. The organization was founded to change the culture inside government that supports bureaucracy, breeds disengagement with citizens, and makes it hard for government to come up with innovative solutions to longstanding problems--all using modern networked, digital technology and user-centered design principles.

We take four approaches: 1) we work directly with government officials (at the local level) to create the capacity inside government to build innovative solutions to hard problems; 2) we build communities of technologists and citizens who want to lend their skills to help build their governments; 3) we build tools that make citizen interactions with government easier, simpler, and more elegant, so that the experience of government is positive and breeds trust. 4) We incubate and accelerate civic startups to create new economic models for those tools. In this, we’re influenced by the idea that government should act like a platform. Before the iPhone, phones had twenty or thirty applications; now they have millions. When governments open data, for example, private companies can deliver innovative services. (Eg GPS, weather, healthcare innovation)

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Wednesday, November 20, 13One big reason governments don’t innovate is because there is no benefit to taking risks on new approaches. The price of failure is too high. So we support cities in creating departments modeled on the Mayors Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, which acts as a risk aggregator for city governments. These departments, which exist in some form in thirteen cities in the US and at least one city--Mexico City--outside the US, are specifically mandated with taking on the projects that other departments fear are too risky or experimental. If they work, those departments get the credit. If they don’t, New Urban Mechanics takes the blame. It turns out, when you give city officials permission to experiment they are really eager to try new things. So we place a premium on creating spaces that empower them to experiment (and I’ll tell you a story about one of their tools in a moment).

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Wednesday, November 20, 13We’ve worked with 25 ci=es so far. We’ve worked on problems ranging from blight in New Orleans and Detroit, to beOer management of alterna=ves to incarcera=on in NYC, status repor=ng on 311 requests in Chicago, access to public records in Oakland, business permiSng in Santa Cruz, and access to social services in San Mateo and San Francisco.

Wednesday, November 20, 13The second way we approach the government innovation problem is by building new avenues for citizens to participate. We started in 2011 with one program, our fellowship, which remains our flagship program. This year we have 27 fellows… We recruit talented coders,designers, and urbanists to do user research and build applications that serve real citizen needs. But the output of the fellowship isn’t really theapplications. It’s culture change in government, and a change in what people think is possible.

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Our fellows do write code and build apps, and open up public data for re-‐use, but what they mainly do is help ci=es learn how to approach government ITwith a different mindset.

A lot of our work is informed by the UK’s Government Digital Service Design Principles.

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The first of these is to start with needs -‐ user needs, not government needs. This is so cri?cal.


For example, we worked with Honolulu last year on rethinking their website. With only three fellows, we couldn’t take on the task of rebuilding the en?re website. So what they did instead was build a site that beTer conformed to the way people look for informa?on. They’re usually looking for quick answers or steps for ac?on they need to take and a site that looks like this is really frustra?ng to navigate. How oVen have you come to agovernment website like this, full of press releases (mee?ng government needs, not ci?zen needs).


So they built Honolulu Answers, a super-‐simple and elegant search interface that allows ci?zens to enter keywords or ques?ons and get quick answers.

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They applied another one of the GDS design principles, to design with data.They mined the visitor logs of the existing site and the city’s call center to find out what people are really looking for, instead of what government departments want to say about themselves. And one of the things that they found was thatdriver’s license information was one of the top searches. (In Hawaii, the city manages this for the state.)

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Take a look at the city’s exis=ng start page of driver’s license informa=on, complete with such “need to know” informa=on as thefact that the driver’s licensing sta=ons have a new statewide computer/camera licensing system! We even have a link to a picture of a driver’s license. But the informa=on about how to get one is hard to find.This is the kind of thing that breaks trust with government.


And get back plain language answers that direct a user toward ac?on.The site itself was easy enough to build. But the team was faced with the challenge of how to populate all the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long ?me, especially considering none of them were from Honolulu.

So they did something that’s actually preTy radical when you think about how government is used to working.


They asked ci?zens to write the content. You may have heard of a hackathon. Well, they held a writeathon


Where members of the community picked from among the most popular topics and ques?ons and wrote the answers to them.Over the course of a Saturday aVernoon they had created almost all of the content for the site.But more importantly than that, they created a new way for ci=zens to par=cipate in—to build—their government.


I think that’s a great story in itself, but it doesn’t end there.

In June, on the Na=onal Day of Civic Hacking, in Oakland (where I live) we held our own writeathon for Oakland Answers. The Code for America Oakland team took the code base from Honolulu Answers and redeployed it.


I got into the act, along with other Oakland ci?zens, including Code for America founder Jen Pahlka, Brigade Director Catherine Bracy, (who worked with me on this slide deck), and who authored the answer shown here. By taking our small acts and s?tching them together with the thousands of other small acts of par?cipa?on we’re enabling through civic hacking we think we can re-‐energize ci?zenship and restore trust in our governments.

“Interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use.”

Scott Silverman, 2011 Fellow


There’s another key idea that drives our work: INTERFACES to government can be simple, beau=ful and easy to use.

These interfaces will emerge because we the people offered input into the design and the result is something relevant.

Wednesday, November 20, 13Our work in Boston in 2011, our first year, was unexpectedly driven in a new direction by a piece of investigative reporting by the Boston Globe aboutthe nightmarish school choice system in Boston.

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Wednesday, November 20, 13Parents were struggling with a 28 page brochure, well meaning and full of informa=on, but that, in the end, didn’t tell them which schools their children were eligible for.

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In two months, one of the Code for America Fellows built a simple, modern web app that lets parents explore the school system, including such factors as the reputa=on of each school, the distance from your home, and the likelihood of your children geSng in.

The City of Boston told us that if they were to go through tradi=onal channel to procure such a site it would have taken the city more than a year, probably two, and approximately two million dollars. That’s obviously a huge win.

“DiscoverBPS changed the way we relate to parents.”

Superintendent Carol Johnson

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But the real win is described in this quote from Boston School Superintendent Carol Johnson

That’s ul?mately what we want to hear, that as a result of our work, we’ve changed the rela?onship between government and ci?zens.

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But the impact of what we do needs to go deeper and faster. I wrote a blog post about this recently on the Code for America site.

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“One privilege the insured and well-‐off have is to excuse the terrible quality of services the government rou=nely delivers to the poor. Too ohen, 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


It was fundamentally a reflec?on on this quote from Ezra Klein, wri?ng in the Washington Post, to the effect that all the furor overthe failure of healthcare.gov hides a far deeper problem. He wrote:

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That’s why I’m par=cularly proud of the work we did with San Francisco this year to build a system that uses text messages to remind social service recipients of required repor=ng and other alerts, to make sure they don’t lose their services. One of the things the Fellows learned in their ini=al month of user research was how ohen CalFresh (Food Stamp) recipients didn’t learn that their benefits hadn’t been renewed un=l they tried to check out at the grocery. We built a similar system in Louisville KYto remind people of court dates. We also built a system in New York to help the criminal jus=ce system help evaluate candidates for alterna=ves to incarcera=on.

Sadly, that’s not an uber-like timeframe. But at least knowing is a big help.

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And a system called TextMyBus in Detroit that lets schoolkids in Detroit know when buses are coming. They don’t all have smartphones, and messaging letsanyone with an SMS-‐enabled phone get informa=on about when the next bus is due. This photo was taken in summer, but our fellows no=ced this as a real problem last winter.Some=mes kids were wai=ng in the dark, in freezing weather, for half an hour, to get to school. Knowing when the bus is coming really maOersin a situa=on like that. Of course, the fact that the bus comes only every half an hour may be a problem of another sort.

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“The legi=mate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854


I want to end with this reminder from Abraham Lincoln. Government is one of the key plaforms for improving the quality of oursociety. Bringing modern technology and user centered design to government, so that it truly serves its ci?zens, is one of the great opportuni?es of the 21st century. It is key to restoring faith in government, repairing the breach between government and itsci?zens, and delivering the services that will make our society more just, fair, and prosperous.

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•Don’t stop believing that government can work, and can be a force for good•2015 Fellows Applica=on Deadline July 31, 2014•Get your city involved -‐ codeforamerica.org/ci=es•Join a Brigade near you -‐ codeforamerica.org/brigade•Follow @codeforamerica for news and progress•Donate -‐ codeforamerica.org/donate

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Technology and Trust: The Challenge of 21st Century Government

Technology

Transcript of Technology and Trust: The Challenge of 21st Century Government