Thank you

[caption id=”attachment_20481” align=”alignnone” width=”1024”] Photo: White House/Pete Souza[/caption]

Every day I get to engage with entrepreneurs, public sector innovators and journalists on re-imagining and re-energizing how government works, what it means to be “civic,” and this year has been an incredible one for many friends and colleagues.

Special congratulations and thank you’s to public and private sector organizations, including CivicActions, NuCivic, Agile Government Leadership, DataSF, 18F, U.S. Digital Service and the California Government Operations Agency.

Thank you to the many entrepreneurs that reach out and share their ideas, enthusiastically accept feedback and believe there is no greater business venture and way to leverage your technical talent than trying to make a more pleasant, civil society. There’s startup life, and there’s civictech/govtech startup life. Speaking from experience, the latter takes much more empathy and mettle.

Thank you to my friends and colleagues in the media including, but not limited to, Alex Howard, Micah Sifry, Goldy Kamali, Camille Tuutti and Troy Schneider for continuing to cover progress and make the industry more timely, relevant and beholden to principles of openness and innovation.

Thank you to Dustin Haisler, Brian Purchia and Alissa Black for regularly checking in and serving as sounding boards.

Thank you especially to Aaron Pava, Henry Poole, Elizabeth Raley, Kevin Herman, Jeff Lyon, Alex Schmoe, Andrew Hoppin for being collaborators and friends throughout 2015. I’ve never looked forward to a new civic year like I am with 2016.

For those of you reading this or have ever read or shared anything here on GovFresh, thank you <insert fist bump here>.

The work we do is hard and often thankless. Keep plugging away.

Thank you.