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Finding Balance In How We Budget for Government IT
When we talk about the government budgeting process, we almost always talk about the first three phases. But the often overlooked fourth phase of the budget process is one reason why cross-agency funding for things like a better customer experience is so hard.
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Frivolous Lawsuit by Shadowy Astroturf Group threatens to Derail Community Grid in Syracuse
We should insist on fair and open processes by our state and federal leaders, and we should dismiss baseless claims against these processes by self-interested parties out of hand.
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Complexity and (Potential) Corruption
The more burdensome, lengthy, or expensive a government process is, the more opportunities there are for powerful individuals to use their influence to obtain more favorable treatment. Complexity is the fertile ground in which the seeds of corruption can find purchase.
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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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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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Read My Book
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. 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 – […]
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Building the Government Data Toolkit
We live in a time when people outside of government have better tools to build things with and extract insights from government data than governments themselves. These tools are more plentiful, more powerful, more flexible, and less expensive than pretty much everything government employees currently have at their disposal. Governments may have exiting relationships with […]
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Civic Innovations 