Month: August 2019

Policy hackathon in SF to address U.S., European city challenges

Posted on by Luke Fretwell
Photo: Code for America
Photo: Code for America

A policy hackathon will be held in San Francisco on September 24 to “tackle problems brought by cities from the U.S. and Europe.” The event is part of Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley.

Details below:

What: Policy Hackathon addressing challenges brought by cities

Who: Government leaders, including from Spain, Italy and Norway, bring real challenges.  Policy hackers will include entrepreneurs from Europe and the United States, investors, policy makers, and academics.

When: Tuesday afternoon, September 24, followed by a reception and light dinner.

Where: Headquarters of Mind the Bridge, 450 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA

Roles: government representatives with a specific challenge to be hacked; policy hackers to develop and present possible responses to the challenge; judges to determine the best response.

The Policy Hack brings together experts from across the startup ecosystem to design solutions to policy challenges faced by local governments and is part of Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley. 

Several teams composed by entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives, academics, and policy makers will be discussing challenges in these areas.

After a couple of hours of brainstorming (“hacking”) within each team, the solutions are then pitched to a panel of judges, who select the most convincing one.

How civic hackers helped California’s DMV get digital momentum

Posted on by Luke Fretwell
DMV website

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has experienced its fair share of criticism lately, which caused Governor Gavin Newsom to set up a DMV Strike Team to focus on reviewing and recommending “new long-term leadership and reform at DMV.” The team released a report in July.

Part of that effort focused on improving DMV’s digital experience, which has a long way to go.

Earlier this year, I worked on a prototype and wrote up my ideas (here and here) of how DMV should think about digital transformation, including working outwardly with the community.

Subsequently, the strike team collaborated with the Code for America Brigade Network on a series of state-wide series of user experience tests, which ultimately confirmed what everyone already knew, that “the end-user experience of the DMV website was not a priority.”

DMV Strike Team member Jacob Roper has a great post on the Code California blog about how my work, CivicDMV and the Brigades helped inspire DMV to “unlock” California’s DMV Web Services.

This is an inspiring story of how government can work with the community in gathering ideas, cultivating expertise and insights from those beyond the bureaucracy to contribute meaningful contributions to government in their own ways. In this case, it drove the momentum for change in ways we don’t often see with government.

Hopefully, DMV will continue this effort, and other agencies — inside and outside California — take this case study and build frameworks for engagement to help them get out of their own boxes.

The future of government is one that is a culture of open, and this is a small example of the possibilities.

From Jacob’s post:

By late July, the Strike Team worked with DMV to fix bugs, refresh content on the most commonly-viewed pages and restructure the homepage by creating clear navigational channels for users, emphasizing what CAN be done online. The team and staff also improved access to translation services, which jumped by 300 percent only a week after the change was made.

These were the first iterations of a larger redesign, with many more to come. As a result of this effort, we sensed the shift of energy within the team behind the DMV website. They were empowered, and are now driving forward their own ideas like streamlining content and improving customer service with a Chatbot (and eventually live chat services) to the department’s website.

Read more: How Civic Engagement Is Unlocking California’s DMV Web Services

The Government We Need: Code for America founder Jen Pahlka on how we can code a better government

Posted on by Luke Fretwell
Jen Pahlka
Photo: Code For America / Drew Bird

Government has historically been challenged in effectively leveraging technology to best serve the people. There are numerous, well-documented cases of public sector mishandling of technology projects, from the very public failed launch of Healthcare.gov to the many unseen, ineffective IT implementations that occur on a daily basis.

The Government We Need talks with Code for America founder Jen Pahlka about how technology can be a force for civic change.

Listen: How we can code a better government

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Intelligence community names privacy, civil liberties leaders

Posted on by Luke Fretwell
Wat is Privacy graffiti (Photo: Cory Doctorow)
Wat is Privacy graffiti (Photo: Cory Doctorow)

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and U.S Central Intelligence Agency named new leaders of their respective privacy, civil liberty units.

ODNI named Benjamin Huebner the chief of the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency. Huebner previously worked as the privacy and civil liberties officer at the CIA. The CIA named Kristi Scott to replace Huebner.

From ODNI:

CLPT leads the integration of civil liberties and privacy protections into the policies, procedures, programs, and activities of the IC. Its overarching goal is to ensure that the IC operates within the full scope of its authorities in a manner that protects civil liberties and privacy, provides appropriate transparency, and earns and retains the trust of the American people.

And CIA:

The PCLO serves as an independent, primary advisor to the CIA Director and other senior Agency officials to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are integrated into the day-to-day conduct of the Agency’s mission. Ms. Scott serves as CIA’s primary liaison with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and as the lead Agency officer for implementing the Principals of Intelligence Transparency for the Intelligence Community. In addition, Ms. Scott will serve as the designated CIA Senior Agency Official for Privacy.

A playbook for government as a platform

Posted on by Luke Fretwell
Government as a Platform
Photo: UK Government Digital Service

To paraphrase Portlandia, “put a playbook on it.”

There seems to be a playbook for all things digital government, and now there’s the “Government as a Platform Playbook” that provides deeper insight into the wonky word technologists often use to describe a more exponential approach to government service delivery.

The playbook is helpful for anyone — particularly government leaders who need a primer on the platform analogy — interested in building scalable, sustainable government.

As the authors of Government as a Platform Playbook define it:

Government as a Platform holds out the promise of radically better services for the public. And to do so in a way that makes it simpler and faster for both civil servants and politicians, the private sector and non-profits, to meet people’s needs. A world of government reorganized around shared components, APIs, standards and canonical datasets.

Read more: Government as a Platform Playbook