Epistemic status: this post summarizes much of my priors about the potential of more digitally native government. Those priors stem from a decade of experience. I initially wrote this in 2016-2018 and forgot about it. The specific statements below were developed in collaboration with the startup team I worked with then. I'm sharing it now as a follow up to the post I recently wrote about state capacity.
Fifteen theses about the near future of government operations
“Citizens of the 21st century need public technologists like citizens of the 19th century needed municipal engineers to build the drains and clean water supplies.”
-A manifesto for public technology
ARGO believes modernizing government operations has a unique urgency and importance. The flames of today’s tribalistic politics are fueled by a deep distrust in government and not unfounded skepticism that we can still deliver big public works. That reality will only be exacerbated as transformational technology like human augmentation with brain computer interfaces split our species into pure and post human tribes.
Those digital technologies offer tremendous potential to uplift the human condition, though as we have seen in recent events, also tremendous potential to fracture humanity further along old fault lines. The fifteen theses below articulate ARGO’s vision for how to achieve that necessary modernization in government operations to help navigate today’s transformational shifts brought about by the digital revolution.
1. Inspiration from nondigital public technologies
Why not manage public data like water — a common resource required for all life? We too quickly forget that “legacy” institutions like plain vanilla public water utilities were radical innovations for their time. The new concept of a public utility enabled (near) ubiquitous access to clean water and pioneering infrastructure that safeguarded water supplies for future generations (not to mention building some of the few man made structures you can see from space!). So what might we learn from the water industry as we look to take the public technologist movement to the next level?
2. Making public technology a priority
California needs to pioneer a new deal for public technology. Creating A Public technology Corps inspired by FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps who planted nearly 3 Billion trees to help reforest America and its green infrastructure could serve local California communities and public services with state of the art technology skills.
A Public Tech Corps, funded by the State and Local Government could manage public data professionally, and like US Army Corps of Engineers build the digital equivalent of the physical infrastructure that we take for granted. The California State Water Project wasn’t built on nights and weekends. Building modern public data infrastructure does not require new resources so much as seed capital to catalyze change, raise new revenues and reallocate existing funds.
3. Building public data infrastructure
Legacy systems and an excel-for-everything mindset not only cost more but preclude new approaches to tackling civic challenges by scattering key information across local machines. Public data can pipe through integrated infrastructure, flowing seamlessly and securely across municipal jurisdictions. This integration should be purpose-driven and build upon collaboratively developed data standards to ensure the resulting infrastructure supports meaningful measurement of important public outcomes.
4. Streamlining data sharing
While open by default, sensitive personally identifiable data can be securely shared with the academic researchers and other qualified analysts that can make use of it for public benefit using proven models for sharing sensitive data and conducting independent research that measures what works.
5. Measuring outcomes by default
By streamlining data sharing, measuring impact through “little speedometers” becomes as regular and routine as professional budgeting, addressing the massive impact gap that NYU Gov Lab identifies in that only $1 out of every $100 in US spending is actually backed by rigorous evidence. While it is unrealistic to expect all of America’s tens of thousands of municipalities to hire Chief Data Officers and public technologists in-house, integrating public data across cities and sharing the cost of technical talent can make such pioneering practices the new normal in city government operations.
6. Improving public service delivery
Building from the Effective Altruism movement, this outcome-oriented public service enables more creativity and a new standard of excellence in public service. For example, optimizing inspections like fire safety are routine and expected, helping to make tragedies like the ghost (Oakland) fire a thing of the past.
7. A lever for grassroots change
Demonstrated results provide a lever to take the heroic civic technology movement to the next level. That is key as reallocating resources requires votes by city councils, school boards, water district boards and other municipal governing bodies. Those changes need to have obvious benefits to everyday citizens and aim for systemic change. For example, government services like getting your driver’s license renewed at the DMV have Airbnb caliber service quality or better by default.
8. Addressing obsolete institutional artifacts
In addition, increased measurement helps illuminate obsolete municipal structures like four water districts serving a town of ten thousand people or the extreme administrative fragmentation present in cities like Los Angeles, providing a catalyst for common sense modernization. It also sheds light on the potential inequities and economic segregation often enabled by “the fragmented local government crazy quilt” that can frustrate integrated approaches to tackling entrenched civic challenges.
9. Modernizing government to tackle big challenges
Echoing the bipartisan progressive reform movement a century ago, this renewed spirit of municipal reform provides the foundation for the much bigger changes our world urgently needs in times of uncertainty and upheaval. For example, every member of the Under 2 MOU could band together to share actual metered water, electricity and gas data to power creative, bottom up collaborations to achieve the common sense efficiency humanity needs to address climate change.
10. Taming the autonomous vehicle
The nascent age of automation provides a tremendous opportunity — and massive challenge — for cities looking to reduce the 27% of US emissions that go to transportation. In cities like Los Angeles, autonomous vehicles and transportation networks like Uber and Lyft have the potential to (seriously) end stop-and-go traffic by making buses and high occupancy ride sharing rather than single occupancy vehicles the new normal in mobility.
11. Need for a stewardship ethic from the technology industry
Such transformative potential also risks enabling a new era of robber barons, a challenge increasingly apparent as tech mega-platforms increasingly own everything. The ongoing debate about fake news demonstrate the huge need for a greater stewardship ethic from the tech giants.
12. Ensuring the digital revolution works for everyone
Growing inequality also highlights how it is in the enlightened self-interest of tech elites to support pragmatic reforms. Arguably Silicon Valley’s greatest threat is the mundane but massively impactful issue of housing prices. The increased technology community engagement on the issue and YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is encouraging. Greater leadership however is needed to highlight how the digital revolution enables new creative approaches to streamline permitting and break through the entrenched interests that make systemic regulatory reform rather challenging (exhibit A the California Environmental Quality Act).
13. Human learning
Further, with in-demand digital skills rapidly changing, the knowledge economy requires radically greater connection between industry and schools. There is no better opportunity to realize the oft repeated call to move beyond our factory-like one-size-fits-all education system than improving how we connect skilled professionals to public schools.
14. Importance of historical humility
Still, the long history of efforts to improve education with digital tools and a user design perspective argue for great humility in the movement to modernize government operations. The successes and failures of not only smart cities and e-government but also the many, many initiatives to modernize, reform and “fix” government operations hold deep lessons for public technologists. Change is hard. Yet history shows that big systemic change — like the shift to (near) ubiquitous clean drinking water — is possible.
15. The future of government operations
The revolutionary potential of the internet means that we can do more than simply build a more beautiful user interface for antiquated government operations. Two decades after Gov works and five years after healthcare[dot]gov, today all the pieces are in place to truly transform government operations. Cities everywhere need integrated public data infrastructure in the spirit of the excellent UK Administrative Data Research Network. No one is better positioned than the grassroots civic technology movement to provide the glue to link together the many, many emergent urban and issue specific data collaboratives (see here for a great Gov Lab overview of the explosive growth in data collaboratives across the globe). Flowing like water, public data can power a common set of facts and deliberative discourse that enables us to tackle the massive public challenges we face in the twenty-first century.