Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

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  • Black Holes & Government Tech Debt

    Lines are the physical manifestation of technical debt. And like black holes, technical debt can have an immense gravitational pull, trapping those that need government services in a long cycle of confusion and frustration.

  • Municipal Residency Requirements and Tech Worker Recruitment

    I’m re-upping this post I wrote a while back about municipal residency requirements and my time working as the Chief Data Officer in the City of Philadelphia. In light of current sentiment among tech workers, it’s more essential than ever that governments not only support remote work, but that they actually seek out ways to…

  • I-81 Obstructionists Say the Quiet Part Out Loud

    This week, in response to State Supreme Court Justice Gerard Neri’s ruling that additional studies are needed before work to remove the I-81 viaduct through Downtown Syracuse can commence, lawyers for the shadowy group obstructing this important project made an inadvertent admission.

  • Subsidizing Exclusion

    Exclusionary zoning reduces affordable housing and exacerbates racial segregation. Adding insult to injury, taxpayers actually subsidize these outcomes through special tax breaks and incentives for suburbanites.

  • The Federal Government Needs Platform Evangelists

    If shared services like Login.gov are going to be successful in the long run, they need a healthy, vibrant, and growing community of users around them. This is a job that is perfectly suited for a platform evangelist.

  • Revisiting “Density and Destiny”

    Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to change the way affordable housing is approved in New York State is sorely needed and will help not only alleviate the current affordable housing crisis, but address factors at the heart of segregation and income inequality.

  • A Resolution for Digital Transformation

    No one gets fit overnight, or even in a whole month. It is a process that takes time and requires consistent commitment and the right approach to be successful. Digital transformation are the same. If you approach the process correctly, you’ll change the way your organization works forever.

  • A cloud migration is like a kitchen remodel

    It just so happens that things like renovating a kitchen or putting an addition on your house can hold valuable lessons for moving systems to the cloud.

  • Bad choices, good reasons

    Sometimes government make poor technology decisions for good and entirely rational reasons. Understand this dynamic is important for those of us working to make government adoption of technology more successful.

  • Back to the 90’s, the Hard Way

    If you need an object lesson to demonstrate how inextricably linked technology is to the basic functioning of government, just look at the municipal governments that have been hit with cyber attacks recently and forced to shut down their digital systems. For these governments it’s like a bumpy trip back to the way they used…