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The end of the beginning for IRS Direct File
The next challenge for the IRS, and for other federal agencies working to deploy new digital services, is to sustain the momentum after they are rolled out and ensure that these new solutions continue to meet the needs of users in the years ahead. Continue reading
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Parking Signs and Possible Futures for LLMs in Government
Government agencies adopting generative AI tools seems inevitable at this point. But there is more than one possible future for how agencies use generative AI to simplify complex government information. Continue reading
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Starting to Believe in Central New York
The City of Syracuse, New York is on the cusp of massive change that will remake our city. Are people ready to believe that the change is real? Continue reading
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Preparing for an AI Future in Government Service Delivery
When we hear industry observers and AI experts tell us today that governments can reap the benefits of the latest wave of AI innovation if they organize and prepare their data, they are right – but this is not a new insight. This has always been true. Continue reading
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Additional Guardrails for AI use in Government
Any use of AI or automation in government, particularly as it relates to benefit determinations or claims, needs to be accompanied by policy guardrails that create strong disincentives for improper denials of claims for benefits. Continue reading
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Banning Generative AI Won’t Work
Blanket technology bans spawn shadow IT, and incentivize agencies to hide their use of new technology for fear of having it taken away. Continue reading
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Government Agencies Need AI Laboratories
Governments need ways to safely experiment with new generative AI tools to discover for themselves what works best for those they serve. Continue reading
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Engineering smaller burdens
The performance of a website or digital service has direct implications for the size of the burden placed on users. Reducing the size of this burden requires agencies to think carefully and to engineer services to make potential burdens as small as possible. Continue reading
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Embracing Blamelessness to Improve Government Services
Understanding the root cause of complex system failures can be tricky, and our desire for accountability may sometimes be at odds with learning the root cause. Incorporating blameless postmortems to help identify issues in their own systems, could help government agencies provide better services to those who need them. Continue reading
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What Old Airplanes Can Teach Government About Adopting Artificial Intelligence
Though more than 100 years separates the inception of the U.S. Airmail Service and the launch of AI tools like ChatGPT, we can learn many lessons from the former when deciding how to use the latter. Continue reading
About Me
I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.
Civic Innovations 