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What Lies Beneath
Procurement challenges don’t end when a government agency selects a vendor to fulfill a contract. In many ways, they are just beginning. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the world of civic tech for the last 5–10 years then you don’t need to be told that one of the major challenges to…
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PFC: A Cautionary Tale for Civic Tech
In a month of chaotic vaccine distribution rollouts, no government’s effort has been more dysfunctional, or controversial, than that of Philadelphia. To spearhead delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to city residents, the City of Philadelphia decided to partner with a young startup called Philly Fighting COVID (PFC).
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On Unbecoming a Hotshot
My four-year anniversary at my current job snuck up on me a few weeks back. It’s not an anniversary I have a lot of experience with — it’s been a while since I worked somewhere for four years in a row. My professional career has taken me on an interesting journey, and I’ve bounced around…
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Virtuous Roadblocks and Digital Service Delivery
If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and…
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Filling up the Civic Tech Toolbox
It’s sort of a cliche to say it these days, but digital transformation in government is largely not about technology. It seems like this is an idea that has broad consensus, but much of the work that gets done in and around government technology modernization still views problems solely through the lens of technology. What…
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Amplifying Administrative Burden
How Poor Technology Choices Can Magnify the Challenges Faced by Those Seeing Government Services For every 10 people who said they successfully filed for unemployment benefits during the previous four weeks three to four additional people tried to apply but could not get through the system to make a claim. Two additional people did not…
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Process Eats Culture for Breakfast
Simply telling agencies what they need to do misses the influence of existing processes — all working exactly as designed — on technology project outcomes. The need to reform these fundamental processes underscores that our most important work is not about technology.
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Towards Ethical Algorithms
Old tools & new challenges for governments There is a common misconception that data-driven decision making and the use of complex algorithms are a relatively recent phenomenon in the public sector. In fact, making use of (relatively) large data sets and complex algorithms has been fairly common in government for at least the past few…
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Driving Innovation Beyond The Big City
In late 2014, I had a chance to present on the main stage at the annual Code for America Summit in San Francisco. To the surprise of very few people, I was there to talk about cities and data. Earlier that year, I had finished up my term as the first Chief Data Officer for…
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Operation Data Liberation
I’ve had the opportunity recently to talk to people in several different city governments that are facing a common challenge — how to liberate operational data from a legacy system. This is a challenge that lots of city governments face, and it strikes me that there are some common lessons that can be derived from cities that…
Civic Innovations 