Civic Tech | Civic Innovations

Process Eats Culture for Breakfast

Famed management consultant Peter Drucker is often credited with the phrase “culture eats process (or strategy) for breakfast.”

You can’t change organizations by implementing new processes alone, so the thinking goes, you have to foster a new culture in order to drive real change. To understand the degree to which this idea is accepted as management philosophy gospel, we have but to count the number of times it is repeated at conferences, in meetings, or on social media by various thought leaders.

But when we think about changing the way public sector organizations work, particularly in how they acquire and manage new technology, this idea gets flipped. In the world of government technology, process eats culture for breakfast.

Towards Ethical Algorithms

Posted on January 16, 2019 by mheadd

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 decades.

As we begin constructing ethical frameworks for how data and algorithms are used, it is important that we understand how governments have traditionally employed these tools. By doing so, we can more fully understand the challenges governments face when using larger data sets and more sophisticated algorithms and design ethical and governance frameworks accordingly.

Driving Innovation Beyond The Big City

Posted on April 11, 2017 by mheadd

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 the City of Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the country. But my focus that day was not on big cities like Philadelphia—but rather on smaller cities that had not yet started down the road of leveraging data to spur innovation and inform better policy decisions.

In 2014, the delta between what large cities were doing with data and what small and mid-sized cities were doing was pretty stark.

Read My Book

Posted on February 14, 2017 by mheadd

Late last year, I wrote a book devoted to civic hacking based on my experience working in state and local government, and inside civic tech communities.

book-picture

It’s a book meant for public servants and people working inside government who want to connect with innovators and technologists outside of the bureaucracy. The premise is simple – governments need to find more effective ways of collaborating with members of their local civic tech communities:

Governments must develop strategies for engagement that can help direct the efforts of outside technology experts to issues or challenges that will have the broadest impact and the largest potential payoff. They will need to learn how to rally people with special talents to a particular cause or challenge, and then to turn those outside efforts into tangible outcomes for government agencies. They must learn to view the technology community as a potential talent pool from which they can draw a new generation of public servants who possess unique expertise in digital service creation.

It’s open source and available on Github. If you have a suggestion for how I can make it better, send a pull request or open a new issue.

I hope you enjoy it.

Building the Engine of Change

Posted on July 5, 2016 by mheadd

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Bart Heird.

The term “civic tech” gets used a lot, and it often means different things to different people. To me, this has always meant that the work being done in this area is dynamic, growing, and evolving rapidly – all good things that suggest the impact of civic technology will ultimately be broad and durable. I’ve never been prone to excessive handwringing.

I believe very firmly that the most important thing about civic technology has nothing to do with technology at all. Real people – with empathy and a desire to make their community better – are the most important kind of civic technology. A recently released report on civic technology by Omidyar Network entitled Engines of Change underscores this idea, and helps emphasize that the connections between people – both inside the civic tech community and outside it – are what’s most important to its future growth.

Meeting in the Middle

Posted on June 21, 2016 by mheadd

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Spiterman

There’s an interesting piece on open data APIs on GovTech that echos a lot of the things I’ve thought and said about government APIs over the past few years. It’s worth a read.

APIs are an increasingly important way that governments make their open data available to outside users. Typically, when we talk about open data APIs (and I am as guilty of this as anyone) its almost always with a focus on either the technical underpinnings and data on one side, or the benefits that citizens will ultimately reap from the data being made available on the other.

There are far too seldom discussions of what lies in the middle of these two ends and how this critical piece ultimately helps make government open data APIs better and citizens better off.

The Last Mile of Public Service Delivery

Posted on June 7, 2016 by mheadd

Photo courtesy of Flickr user fallsroad.

The most important thing about civic technology has nothing to do with technology at all.

The term “civic technology” gets used a lot, and it may mean different things to different people. I think this highlights the fact that the work being done in this area is dynamic, growing, and evolving rapidly — all good things that suggest the impact of civic technology will be broad and durable.

For me, the term civic technology is inextricably related to the world of civic hacking. I began my career in government in what I would describe as the “old fashioned way”: graduate school to study public administration followed by work on political campaigns. Having now worked for three different state and local governments in both the legislative and executive branches, I consider civic hacking and civic technology to be the future of how governments will deliver services.

Civic Tech Organizing: A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on May 24, 2016 by mheadd

Civic Hack Day in Baltimore – February 12, 2011

In early 2012, I had the opportunity to present at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. The focus of my presentation was the lessons learned from two civic hacking events in late 2011 that I had helped organize in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

This was an exciting time for me professionally. After leaving government to become a professional software developer and technology evangelist in the early 2000s, I had been drawn back into the world of government a few years prior through the open data movement. By 2011, I was working regularly with budding civic tech communities in two different but geographically close cities. I was able to collaborate with groups of people who cared deeply about the future of their cities and who were committed to making a difference.

It was also an exciting time for civic tech—Code for America was launching its Brigade network at the 2012 SXSWi conference and while there I had a chance to meet and talk with Jen Pahlka, Tim O’Reilly, and Kevin Curry (who went on to build out the Code for America Brigade program and scale it nationally). I was so moved by Jen’s vision for civic tech that I ended up leaving my job with a telecommunications startup and joined Code for America myself a few short weeks after SXSWi ended.

Thinking back on this time, it strikes me that the experience of the two cities I got to talk about then can tell us a lot about what it takes to build and grow a civic tech community. I think it’s exciting that there are places where leaders have essentially figured out how to nurture and sustain civic tech. But I would argue that there are many places where this issue has not yet been resolved, and even some places where civic tech groups once flourished by have have since gone dormant.

Of interest to me personally, there are also a great many places—particularly small and mid-sized cities—where civic tech organizing has not yet begun.