Civic Tech
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Three Projects I’m Proud of in 2025
In 2025, I built a lot of things to help me understand the changes that are happening and the things we need to focus on going forward to make government work better. Here are three I am most proud of. Continue reading
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What Does a Good Spec File Look Like?
I’ve been thinking a lot about spec-driven development lately and that got me thinking: what does a good spec file actually look like? How do we know when it’s good? The answer – it depends. Continue reading
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Proving Out a New Approach to Legacy System Modernization
Government legacy systems hold decades of institutional knowledge that disappears when we focus only on translating old code to new code. I’ve been developing SpecOps—a methodology that uses AI to extract that knowledge into plain-language specifications that policy experts can actually verify. Continue reading
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The Future is Ahead of Schedule
In August, I wrote about just-in-time interfaces as a future vision for civic tech. Three months later, that future seems to be arriving. Continue reading
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Infrastructure as Code for AI: The Rapid Evolution of Agent Instructions
AI coding agent instructions have evolved from simple markdown files to sophisticated orchestration frameworks in months, not years. For government, this rapid maturation offers new opportunities for collaboration that traditional code sharing never achieved. Continue reading
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AI Agents aren’t as radical as they sound
People think AI agents and delegation-based digital services are a radical idea. But people delegate all kinds of interactions with government to third parties today. It’s way more common than you might think. Understanding the kinds of services that people delegate, and the reasons that they choose to delegate are critical to inform how we… Continue reading
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Designing for delegation
Agentic, delegation-based services could reshape how people access government, cutting administrative burden – if agencies start building the right design patterns now. Continue reading
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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. Continue reading
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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. Continue reading
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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. 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 