Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

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  • Design and Delivery: Two Sides of the Same Coin

    What makes it hard to deliver good digital services in government? It’s not just a lack of design talent, it’s the difficulty of getting good designs into the hands of users quickly and learning from them.

  • Revisiting an Old Idea: Building a Rules Engine with CouchDB

    Recently, I decided to dust off this old project and give it the attention it deserves. Using CouchDB’to build a sophisticated, scalable, easily managed rules engine.

  • The Third Wave of Government Disruption

    It’s both inaccurate and potentially dangerous to view AI’s rise in government as an isolated phenomenon. What we’re witnessing is the latest wave in a historical pattern with profound implications for the way that governments operate and how they serve those in need.

  • The end of civic tech’s interface era

    We are at an inflection point in civic technology. The same AI capabilities transforming other sectors will revolutionize how people interact with their government. It’s time to rethink the way we think about interfaces.

  • Letting Go: A Retrospective on Without81

    As Syracuse’s I-81 transformation continues to advance, it’s time to retire the tool that once helped residents envision life without the viaduct.

  • The Quiet Crisis in Legacy System Modernization

    AI offers some new hope for tackling government legacy systems—but we can’t afford to focus only on the biggest, flashiest ones. The real crisis is quieter, deeper, and much more widespread.

  • The Great Flavorless Web

    We are entering an era where a huge and growing percentage of what we read is engineered to be palatable at scale. And that’s a problem.

  • Accountability and the Challenge of Government Technology Reform

    The concept of an “accountability sink” can help us understand why some government processes move so slowly and what steps we can take to change them.

  • Conway’s Law and the challenge of building software in government

    Good news, you’ve discovered that Conway’s Law is what is causing issues with your government software development team. Bad news is the typical approach to addressing the problem doesn’t work well inside government.

  • Vendor Lock-In: Shadow Technical Debt

    Vendor lock-in is one of the most under-appreciated forms of technical debt, and it isn’t reserved just to custom solutions. Agencies need to understand this in order to better avoid taking on more technical debt.