On your website you describe yourself as a user researcher and as a civic technologist. How would you define those terms?
A user researcher is someone who works to improve technology (or sometimes services) by observing real people trying to use it and understanding their needs. That one's easy. Part of why I wrote the book was to help define civic technologist - it's someone who works in tech in the public sector, but more specifically it's someone who participates with a particular goal of bringing the best of private-sector tech to government or community spaces. In my book, I say "We want to access services, exercise rights, and build communities with the ease and respect that the best digital technology can afford." and also that we want public digital goods to be as good as the ones offered by Apple or Google.
What made you decide to write your book, “A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide”?
The field has needed a grounding document for a while. It's a new field - I date the start of it to around 2008, when Vivek Kundra, as CIO of Washington DC, convened the first public data hackathon. There are thousands of contributors, but I'm one of relatively few people in it with as much tech seniority and experience at multiple levels of government. The immediate spark came during a conversation late last year with a friend who is trying to write a grounding document for a new stream of design education; I realized I could probably do that for civic tech, and wrote an outline in the taxi on my way home. (Gdocs mobile, thank you.) When I got home, I told my husband about it and he pointed out that it would be a really good idea to publish the book before the election this November - if we get a new administration, there's likely to be a rush of new people into the field, and they'll need a guide.
How did you end up pursuing your professional path? How did your high school, college, and early career experiences prepare you for your work today?
After I lost the dream of becoming a professional dancer at the beginning of high school, it took me a long time to find my way again. I wanted independence, and I was a privileged, if angry, white girl, so I did well in school to secure that, but I didn't really have any idea what I was going for. I've been largely opportunistic in my work choices, without a special goal. I credit my writing skills to my 10th and 12th-grade English teacher, Ms. Jurgenson, and some of the core skills for user research and work communication to my sociolinguistics studies in college. In the light of hindsight, I really value my early career experience in a lousy service job doing phone customer support for software (it taught me some important things about customers and also about management) but at the time I was miserable. I got out and trained for book publishing, which turned out to be a hidebound and deeply sexist industry - but I did learn to work on websites, and that brought me into a new phase of doing tech work as a day job with my real goal being a career in poetry. I never got there on poetry, but eventually I discovered that many of the metaphorical capabilities I enjoy stretching in poetry are important in the kinds of qualitative analysis I do now. And as I turned 40 and was looking to do more for my community, the civic tech movement was taking off.
What are some of your favorite examples of governments getting civic technology right? Are there any especially creative or successful ways they’ve used technology to make governments more responsive to the people they serve?
I think in terms of creating a connection between citizens and an abstract government function, NASA JPL does an amazing job with the social-media "voices" of the Mars rovers, for one.
There are a lot of different models of project. Streetmix.net, a website that lets members of the public design streets and print or send them to officials during planning processes, is very cool from a citizen engagement perspective.
Cloud.gov, which is essentially a white-labeled Amazon Web Services that meets all government compliance requirements, is really interesting as an infrastructure play. It makes it easier and faster for government agencies to set up web services. It was jointly developed by 18F and the US Digital Service over the last few years, and now several of the top 10 federal governments sites (in terms of traffic) are hosted there.
In simple terms, the really excellent, mobile-friendly, plain-language coronavirus websites for San Francisco and the state of California are great examples too. These were both created by internal teams. It's harder than it may seem to create this kind of simple, accessible web service - you need top-flight design, multi-lingual content, a solid CMS, a robust set of release processes, ways of handling large amounts of data...I don't know if these are the most creative, but both the city and the state were able to release them in a matter of days, because of civic tech teams they had in place.
We recently had a presidential election. Do you have any thoughts on the role of technology in elections and campaigns?
Well, for one thing, I subscribe to Ursula LeGuin's definition of technology: "Technology is the active human interface with the material world." So even paper balloting is a technology. And it does matter how we choose, and use, different technologies to achieve the goal of fair, transparent elections where voters can confidently express their intent. My friend Dana Chisnell, who I've worked with before, has some really good reading on election tech if you want to go into more depth.
The interesting piece with campaigns has been continuity - you remember the Iowa caucus app mess this past February? It turned out that an app had been rebuilt from scratch (and it failed) even though there was one from 2016 that worked well. Major campaigns are episodic enough (and minor, city-level campaigns are small and high-touch enough) that there aren't obvious groups to steward excellent, robust campaign tech across the gaps in years. That's a very short summary - I can find you further references if you're interested.
If you had a magic wand to instantly change one aspect of how governments and citizens interact through technology, what would you do?
I would get governments to view web or app interfaces as critical assets instead of descriptive channels. This is years of work and I'm working on it, but the initial position of the web within government was as a way to provide information *about* services, rather than to provide services. It's hard to invest in what constituents need when you see the medium as mainly descriptive. To do this, I would (and do) bring high officials like agency heads and judges to observe user research sessions where regular people work with the interfaces, and bring in empathic tech people to help with the back-end systems and procurement regulations.
But you said "instantly". In that timeframe, I would give every government access to modern webform-building technology so they could convert all of their hard-to-read paper forms (I estimate 65-70% of interactions with government involve a form, usually a badly-designed one) into web forms that people can easily fill out on their phones. (This is all a little more complicated in practice, but I have many nerd fantasies about it.)
What is the biggest barrier to governments using technology to be more responsive to the people they serve?
The field generally divides on this question between procurement (getting access to the right tech building blocks when government purchasing regulations are massive and often outdated) or personnel (hiring the right people and supporting strong tech people who are already there). Personnel has historical aspects too - Gen X, my generation, came of age during a decade of enormous government cuts, so there is something of a gap in the government right in the age-range of the people who built the commercial Web. Then there is difficulty competing with private-sector tech salaries, and a set of job classes that are part of statute or regulation that don't fit the way the modern tech industry organizes work. I suppose procurement does too, in that many of the regulations are aimed at important goals like reducing profiteering or grift, but are set up for buying things like pencils or fleets of trucks. When you're talking about software, the needs and specifications often change during a project (and it's healthy for them to) so regulations that you'd rely on for making sure you get exactly the trucks you contracted for can instead derail a software project where you need to learn as you go.
There’s a huge push to get more women and members of underrepresented groups to pursue careers in technology. But what if you don’t like coding? What other opportunities are worth considering that might leverage other skills and interests? Is there a place for Humanities majors in the tech world?
Goodness, I hope so! Otherwise I'm out of luck. In all seriousness, I can do a bit of HTML and CSS, but I don't otherwise code - every time I've tried to learn, I've been bored out of my skull. I do understand some key basics of how databases and the web and APIs work, and I'm very comfortable talking with engineers - but I've had a 28-year career in tech so far without coding. I generally resent the notion that coding is the highest and best use of a smart person (if I had a nickel for every dude who's told me I'm "probably smart enough to learn to program" I'd have at least enough for a meal at Slanted Door). But many of the best senior engineers I know would agree with the idea that technical problems are rarely the hardest problems on any technology project - wrangling people, motivations, regulations, business rules, and group dynamics are all areas of huge need that require broader skills. Design, Product Management, Data Science, Marketing - all of these areas are essential. (And as an aside, I would submit that we'd do better to recognize that we have work to do to make technology careers attractive and safe for under-represented young people. Or older career-switchers!)
You are also a poet. Is there a particular poem you think is especially relevant for our times, either by you or by another poet? Do you mind sharing a taste here?
Might be a bit on the nose, but Auden's The Fall of Rome has been on my mind a lot. OTOH, I think Ada LÃmon's A New National Anthem has something to tell us too.
Your website includes haikus. When, why, and how did you start writing haikus?
Well, they're a hack. When my daughter was born, I was just starting to get a few poems published; I really struggled to keep up any kind of artistic practice while raising a child and working full time. But one day - actually at my daughter's 4th birthday party - I lamented to a friend who's a painter and she said "look, I find a way to just...fuck up some canvas every day - what can you do that's like that?". I'd just gotten on Twitter, and I decided I would write a haiku (which would fit in even an original, 140-character tweet) on my commute every day. It helped. It's a way to touch poetry, and a way to develop a more casual, less fraught voice. I may yet have another poetic phase in my life one day. But I haven't written very many during the pandemic - it was so much a part of my routine of being out and about the city, and it's painful to think through them staring out the same window every day.
As a final note, you might be interested in this report, which came out late last year - it's by a group of civic technologists and government partners, including my former boss from Code for America, Jennifer Pahlka. It's a report on what's gone wrong with the California unemployment benefits application system, and what the government ought to do about it. (There's a longer version too if you really want to get deep, but that's 70 pages!)
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