Our journey to build Government Experience (GX) capacity continues this week with attendance at this year’s Code for America Summit in Washington, DC.

We’re sending a small team to attend 2 days of conference sessions and maybe a few social events around the edges. If you’re attending, keep an eye out for:

• Caitlyn Coughlin, GX Content Strategist

• Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager

• Kathryn Moon, GX Developer

• John Proffitt, Chief Digital Officer

We arrive late Wednesday and are staying at the conference hotel, so drop us a note if you’d like to get together. We love to talk shop and want to learn what you’re doing with product thinking, in UX research, in service design, and really anything around civic tech.

Stay tuned for updates from the conference as we share discoveries and impressions.

For a little more than a year the GX Foundry team has been working in what we call a “Seasons” model. Based loosely on Shape Up by 37signals, we break up the year into 8-week periods, and inside those 8 weeks we have 1 week of prep, 6 weeks of work, and 1 week of wrapping things up. We punctuate the end of the season with a “Finale” event where the teams share their accomplishments from the past 8 weeks.

To make themodel slightly fun, we use TV show seasons as a theme, where “GX+” is our streaming service, and we have “premiere” weeks, a “finale” week, and we have “episodes” in between. Teams that really get into it can name “show runners” and talk about “plots,” “character arcs,” and more.

With all that in mind, we gathered this past week to share updates from our teams, talking about what was accomplished, and a bit of what’s to come, since Season 8 just completed on Friday, May 2.

First, about our teams

For those out there that are curious to know what our government digital team does and how we do it, this is the nerdy deep-dive you’ve either been waiting for or dreading. But to give you some orientation first… Our Government Experience (GX) Foundry team is currently divided into 3 sub-teams:

We’ll introduce each team and share their most recent accomplishments below.

GX Concourse in Season 8: Let’s get ready to rumble (on May 14)!

This team of 4 is building our public-facing unified county website and is leading the charge toward digital service delivery in collaboration with agency partners.

The GX Concourse team is rapidly preparing to launch the “One Franklin County 2.0” website on May 14. To ger ready they spent Season 8 chasing down content providers from about 14 (out of 40+) county agencies, testing the pre-live site, tweaking settings, and collaborating with Granicus, the OpenCities platform provider that undergirds the new site.

This project has been in flight for nearly 2 years now, with the “1.0” site launching last year and a lot of work behind the scenes with the first 14 (of 40+) partners. It’s a lot of relationship-building and leading a community of public servants—people that typically have lots of other jobs to do, too. So it takes time.

But this month is the big reveal. We expect it will be a little rocky as we shutdown more than 25 existing websites at once, redirecting their traffic to the new site and collapsing their resources into the new One Franklin County. People will be confused, surprised, and probably lost at times. But we believe—wholeheartedly—a singular destination that exposes public services in ways that make sense to the actual public (not to the agencies or their elected leaders) is the way to go. After all, “public service” doesn’t mean much if you’re really just serving yourself.

So for this Season, the GX Concourse team has been keeping their powder dry, aiming for the big reveal on May 14. Their Season 9 accomplishments should be pretty bonkers.

GX Platforms in Season 8: A legal victory opens doors

This team of 6 takes off-the-shelf commercial solutions and wraps them in customizations and direct user support, mostly for internal government teams.

• After more than 18 months of fighting with lawyers (!), we signed a deal with Atlassian to get many of their products renewed or licensed. Interestingly, part of the deal, which may be replicated by governments across the U.S., lets us buy third-party add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace under our Atlassian legal agreement, allowing us to bypass negotiations with each individual vendor (many of whom are tiny and don't negotiate legal terms. We've been an Atlassian customer since 2020, but this new agreement opens up a lot of doors for many years to come. The new licensing we pick up will also allow us to spread Atlassian tools to even more partner agencies.

• We added Adobe Sign to our document signature options, alongside DocuSign.

• We've completed the first two phases in an upgrade project for our IntelliCloud document management platform. Plus, the project is accelerating and should finish early—perhaps by Season 10.

• We've completed the transition away from AgilePlace toward Jira for work management across the organization. We'll expand Jira dramatically in the months ahead because we are adding "full" Jira to the toolbox, rather than being held back by the (now deprecated) Jira Work Management.

• Confluence adoption continues apace, with our own HR team taking to it alongside a partner agency that’s building our a knowledge base.

• Our use of Jira Assets continued its semi-hidden expansion into all corners of our operations this Season. Interestingly, this is one that’s growing organically, use-case-by-use-case, rather than being pushed out in a concerted project. I hope we continue this “organic” approach, because people that think asset management is a destination (rather than a lifestyle) really don't understand the value of assets.

• Our Analytics sub-team put Power BI in the hands of our Security team, so they can gather and analyze large piles of "signal" data from our various security tools and sensors.

• We supported an expansion of SurveyMonkey usage with a couple more agencies, though I wish we saw a much faster adoption of the platform. Government folks need to gather more data more consistently from constituents (and even peers) to guide choices and priorities. Yes, there are “better” user research tools than surveys, but surveys are at least easy to deploy and understand for those unfamiliar with UX research.

• For the first time since Microsoft Teams was launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (and less than a year after we went live on M365), we have finally named a Product Owner for the platform. We're spreading more Teams to more agencies in the months ahead as we shutdown an ancient employee portal originally built 20 years ago (!) on ColdFusion.

GX Development in Season 8: Cigarettes, vaccines, and recruiting some friends

This team of 6 creates original software both for government teams and the public using a mix of tools and platforms ranging from low-code/no-code up through full-stack solutions.

• Working with the Auditor’s office, our team completed a Cigarette Licensing app, used to track business licenses for cigarette sales. The original app was written decades ago in Visual Basic and was desperately in need of modernization. We rewrote the app in Quickbase and completed all the work this Season, but due to slow engagement from the users we may not see full adoption of the app until Season 9.

• In a victory of code-reuse, we developed a mini-app to allow our Animal Control (dog shelter) team to schedule vaccination clinics with the public, with multiple options per-quarter-hour, and with far less manual intervention. This app, also built on Quickbase, was assembled in under 2 weeks using similar code we developed for another agency 2 years ago. In that case it was scheduling free box fan pickups via the Office on Aging, but the challenge was so similar we were able to clone big parts of the app to get it done ASAP.

  • Bonus Achievement: This mini-project was executed without assignment of a formal Business Analyst or a Project Manager.

• One of our “developers” is actually a designer (who can do some coding, too), and he’s been hard at work on a couple projects. The smaller of the two was development of a “challenge coin” design for our CIO. He will use the challenge coin as a reward for staff that have worked on particularly impactful projects over the past year. I’d show the coin design here, but it’s still under wraps and will be revealed mid-year.

• Speaking of designs, we completed another annual report website and printable PDF report called State of the County 2025. It launched April 30 and contains profiles and accomplishments from most (but not all) of Franklin County’s agencies. This was a two-season job that involved herding a lot of cats. Plus, it was a physical object (a printed publication) in addition to a digital destination.

• The nascent outline of a Citizen Developer Academy came into focus this Season (with more work to come, of course). This is our first attempt at creating a Community of Practice around light software development. We’ve gotten a handful of folks to raise their hands and we are providing assistance, guidance, and access to key tools like Quickbase and the Power Platform. We’re not yet sure how this will play out, but we’re already seeing some positive word-of-mouth. We suspect empowering agencies to serve themselves may act as a force multiplier that’s far beyond what we could develop and manage ourselves.

• We had some additional accomplishments this Season around Jira Forge, retiring outdated ColdFusion-based employee portal apps, and working with our Security team on grabbing data via API and moving it into analysis via another platform. There’s a lot of “knitting things together” that comes this team’s way, and we’re delighted by the little puzzles.

That’s a wrap, but how does it compare?

So that’s Season 8 for the GX Foundry team. If you participate in a government digital services team, we’d love to hear how this compares with your experience.

• Do you use commercial platforms in your work, too, or is that all handled by another team?

• What are you doing that we are not doing? For example, we know we’re too light on UX research and service design, but what else are we missing?

• Does your team release an impact report or blog about your work regularly?

Drop us a note in the comments, on LinkedIn, or meet up with a few of us at Code for America Summit 2025 at the end of this month!

When we developed a starting mission statement for the GX Foundry, we knew the word “trust” needed to be included, no matter how short the statement might be. And while it’s not the first word, it’s in there, as the goal of our work (boldface added):

It’s a lofty goal. Hard to do. Hard to measure. But vital to keep in focus because we've known for years that trust in government in particular has been falling, based on lots of different surveys and studies.

And recently communications firm Edelman released their "Trust Barometer" report and it, like many before it, documents the continuing fall of public trust in government (and nonprofits, and businesses, etc.). It's sobering, and us government folks need to consider how to reframe all our missions and tactics to rebuild trust, now more than ever.

With surveys completed in 2024 (before the election), a broad measure of “trust” in government in the United States hovered at about 41%. Even Argentina (42%) fares better than we do, after a dramatic jump of 21 points since the prior survey. Even Mexico (47%) had more trust in their government than we do in ours.

Edelman’s report goes into some depth about “grievances” and how they drag down trust levels. Basically, if the people are upset about a disconnect between what they expected and what they perceive they are getting from government or business or others, it can lead to hardened opinions and cynicism that distills into a grievance. This irritation grinds down trust from an individual’s perspective. One chart in the report shows how those with “high” grievances have the least trust in their leaders:

Given how the 2024 national elections played out in this country, I think one can assume there were a lot of grievances on all sides.

How do we rebuild trust?

Fixing trust is not a simple thing, of course. It's hard to build and easy to lose. Not surprisingly, the Edelman report is not too prescriptive in their assessment. (This makes sense, as it’s survey data and analysis, not a how-to-fix-it report.)

Their recommendations come in a single slide:

The most relevant parts for government include:

• Grievances must be addressed. The institutional failures of the last 25 years have produced grievances around the world, stifling growth and innovation in turn. To lead through this crisis, understand the economic realities of your stakeholders, champion shared interests, and create opportunities for optimism.

• With trust, optimism overpowers grievance. When institutions can’t be trusted to do what is right, grievances fester and outlooks darken. To dissipate grievance and increase optimism, prioritize and rebuild trust across your organization and local communities.

How we think about rebuilding trust

For local governments in particular, we think a few recommendations are good for all of us, whether you’re developing digital services at a distance or providing direct service in contact with the public. We believe in:

• Transparency. Trust dissolves in the shadows. Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of easily-digestible and easily-accessible information. Expose policies, processes, outcomes, and rationales. Show your work. Connect the outcomes of your work to the policies and policy-makers that created the conditions for those outcomes. Don't sugarcoat anything and expose the problems alongside the resolutions. Redirect or resist the efforts of elected politicians as much as possible if (when) they attempt to hide anything.

• Alignment with Public Needs. Visibly connect how public needs in the real world are linked to the work your agency performs. "Because of this, we do that." Use studies and survey data (turned into plain-language observations) to show how your work is aligned with publicly-expressed and visible problems or opportunities. No, you can't solve all problems or satisfy all the wishes out there, so call out where you are falling short, too. Owning what you're not doing can be as powerful as showing what you've accomplished.

• Proactive Communication. This one is hard, as we live in an environment of extreme attention-seeking and a collapsing professional media sphere. But do your level best, with contemporary tools to get the word out. Email lists, blogs, newsletters, videos, podcasts, and in-person public presentations and meetings are critical message delivery systems, and yeah... you have to master them all. It sucks the local media landscape has evaporated, but it has, and you still need to get the word out. Stop complaining about the loss of local media, roll up your sleeves, and do it yourself.

• Go Digital. Whether it’s delivering services via digital platforms or putting communications and information into the channels the public will see, technology must be the first tool you grab from the toolbox. Of course “digital” is a huge landscape, with a lot of things to learn, starting with first principles like human-centered design, user experience, and empathy before you even start erecting any technical solutions. To get started, I can recommend the new, short-but-dense volume Platformland. But more broad training is needed. Hopefully more on that this year.

At a time when trust in government is low and likely to crater in Edelman’s next annual report, it’s time to shake up our local government To Do lists. Even if you already had Trust on the list, it may not have been at the top. It’s time to change that.

January 2025 Update: Following this late 2024 post we hired two great new colleagues and they have started on our team. Congratulations to Amy, our new GX Communications Strategist and to Bradleigh, our new GX Product Owner!

The GX Concourse team has been small but mighty for the last year - just myself and Caitlyn Coughlin. We’ve both been wearing many different hats as needed to get this project up and running, but more importantly to build relationships and a community with our stakeholders. This initiative is a big change not just in technology, but in how we as a county are approaching service delivery.

We’re on track to launch our 2.0 website with an initial cohort of 14 agencies in Q2 of 2025, which means we are ready to add staff to our team’s numbers. We’re hiring for a Digital Product Owner to manage the website, analytics, and platform governance, among other things. And we’re hiring a Digital Communications Strategist to help our county agencies implement their communications strategies with our current tools, and piece them all together on the website.

Digital Communications Strategist LinkedIn Post

Digital Product Owner LinkedIn Post

Below I’ll go into detail about the team, but want to give you the important information up front. You can find the slide decks explaining each role in our LinkedIn posts: Digital Product Owner, Digital Communications Strategist. And the application is on the Data Center’s NEOGOV page here. If you don’t meet all the qualifications but are interested - please apply!

Legalistic Requirements

It’s important to get these out of the way, first.

• This job is located in Columbus, Ohio; we do not pay for relocation

• We require in-office work each week (currently 2 days in-office)

• Interviews are in-person at our office during November

So… you need to be in the Columbus area already or you need to get here ASAP. We have hired people that relocated on their own, so if you already have plans to move and are interested in this role, reach out. But if you don’t plan to relocate, don’t apply. There’s already lots of tech talent in central Ohio. Additionally…

• You must be authorized to work in the U.S.

• We do not sponsor work visas or other immigration processes

• Employment is contingent on background checks and drug testing

Yes, recreational marijuana went legal in Ohio this summer, but our policies have not caught up with that reality yet. But given we handle a lot of sensitive information about citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure our employees are not impaired. We are serving the public, after all.

Okay, now on to the good stuff about the job!

What does the GX Concourse team do?

We’re here to center the needs of our communities as we build a public-facing web presence for Franklin County that serves every resident, every day. That’s the tagline, sure, but it’s also true. We use low-code/no-code digital platforms designed with government in mind, so that staff editing content in agencies don’t need to have developer-level skills to make quick updates.

What this allows us to do—as the centralized owners of the platform—is find the overlaps, points of connection, and cross-agency pain points the public experience when interacting with Franklin County online. This is why all of our roles are focused on supporting our colleagues in county agencies to own their own content, while we coordinate those cross-over points to find solutions together.

Below is more detail on each role on the team, but I want to call out a few characteristics we need in every role. We are…

…mission-driven. We’re here to meld contemporary digital experiences with local government services, collaborating with teams that make our communities better every day. You’ll prioritize real transformation over mere digitization, you’ll seek meaningful impact rather than flashy metrics, and you’ll help us build long-term public trust. Join us to make an impact, not fill a seat.​

…curious, inventive, adaptable, and determined. To make government better, you’ll learn (and respect) the status quo, then start asking the questions to help everyone adapt. When we hear “that’s not how we do things,” we (politely) stick to our guns while ensuring everyone makes it to the other side intact. You’ll need bottomless curiosity to learn context, sincere compassion for overworked public servants, and eyes locked on the prize.

…emotionally mature communicators. Yes we work in technology, but our solutions are only as good as how much they help people. We understand how to listen to learn, not just refine your point. Every role on this team will be training, writing documentation, and collaborating closely with each other and our agency colleagues.

…interested in finding joy and fun together along the way. Look: this work is tough. We take the work seriously, but not always ourselves.

Without further ado, meet the team!

Subscribe now

GX Concourse Manager

Hi, I’m Sarah. As the manager, I always see my role as helping everyone meet the standards of our best selves in the work we do together. I’m here to identify the strategic direction, clear roadblocks, and hold us accountable to our professional values and the goals of this project - to help build public trust in the government. That is a tall order, I know. But even if we make an inch of progress, it’s worth it.

Digital Content Strategist

Caitlyn Coughlin, who’s title has been Product Owner up to now, is going to continue the good work she’s been doing building relationships with our agency colleagues to be our Digital Content Strategist. She’s the perfect person for this role, and we’re so excited to have her in it.

Digital Product Owner

This role is going to be the backbone of our website that we will be able to build off of with our other roles. The tools we use are low-code/now-code, but you’ll need to bring some technical chops to help us continue to grow our digital service delivery.

You’re a good fit for this role if you are…

…as analytical as you are empathetic. This role is at the heart of our insights and data-driven strategy. We’ll need you to be able to understand how to build reports and read data not just for the numbers, but the story they tell about how people are feeling and behaving while on our websites.​

…an impeccably organized technologist. You’ve got the technical chops to manage our sitemap, build reporting dashboards, or update the CSS on our design theme, sure. But you understand the tools you own are only as good as they are understandable to the staff using them. You love to create documentation, think about how to scale governance structures, and help people understand how the tools you own can help solve their problems.

Qualifications Summary​

• At least a couple of years working in digital, web editor, or product management-type roles​

• Comfortable with some CSS and HTML​

• Experience building reporting dashboards​

• Understanding of product roadmaps and backlogs in a Product Ownership model​

• Experience working with customers and building relationships a big plus​

• Great documentation and training skills – we need you to help people learn the tools you own​

• Collaborative problem solving – be okay not knowing the answer and asking for help​

You can find the slide deck explaining the role here, and the application is here. If you don’t meet all the qualifications but are interested - please apply!

Digital Communications Strategist

This role is new to the county, and so has a ton of opportunity. You’ll be building out a county-wide event calendar on Eventbrite, submission guidelines, promotion guidance, etc. You’ll also be scaling the county’s use of govDelivery, our e-news platform. This will include training, guidance, and occasionally writing content for agency communications. We also want to build a county communications calendar to help coordinate our communications so they don’t compete with each other.

You’re a good fit for this role if you are…

…a data-driven digital communicator. Crafting perfect messaging and great visuals are just as important as identifying the behaviors and needs of the segment you’re targeting. You understand that communication is only as effective as what people hear and understand, and you love finding ways to measure that.​

…a true teacher and collaborator. This role isn't just about writing great emails. It's about supporting our agency partners in implementing their own strategies and helping them build their own communications skills. It will require teaching, training, and listening more than anything. We're here to help the public feel taken care of while they find what they need.

Qualifications Summary​

• At least a few years in a digital communications or email marketing role​

• Experience managing audience segments and email reporting​

• Experience developing and managing meaningful relationships with customers (internal or external)​

• Familiarity with digital design tools and creating email templates​

• Impeccable communications – writing, editing, training, documentation​

• Multi-lingual is a plus​

You can find the slide deck explaining the role here, and the formal application is here. If you don’t meet all the qualifications but are interested - please apply!

Our Hiring Process

1. We review resumes and conduct initial informal calls with candidates that may be a fit; the calls are not interviews, just info-sharing from us to you

2. We invite selected candidates to a first interview about technical skills, project work, and other experience; it's a panel format including staff and parallel managers, and we do it on-site in our offices

3. We invite finalists to a second interview that expands on themes from the first interview (also a panel format, also on-site)

4. We want to identify our preferred candidates in November and formally hire in early December, but every role is vital to our success, so we’ll take extra time if needed

   1. Our intended timeline is to make a job offer in late November, then make the offer official in early December (long story), then the start date would be early January 2025.

Our Hiring Team

Here are some key people you may meet during chats about the job or via interviews:

• Sarah Gray - GX Concourse Manager (hiring manager)

• Eric Nutt - GX Development Manager (parallel manager)

• Caitlyn Coughlin- Digital Content Strategist (peer)

• Harrison Ponce - GX Product Owner (parallel peer)

• Renee Mascari-Bauer - Delivery Services Manager (parallel manager)

• John Proffitt - Chief Digital Officer

• Lacey Pahren - People Experience Specialist (HR)

• Kimberly Carroll - People Operations Manager (HR)

Questions?

If you have any questions, please feel free to connect with Sarah Gray or John Proffitt on LinkedIn (see above). We’re happy to help anyone figure out whether this is the right opportunity for you.

I am a proud CX professional who has learned so much from my (albeit kind of strange) career.

• I worked in the Beyond section at Bed Bath & Beyond as a teenager, and was promoted to supervisor when I turned 18 and could legally work until close. 

• During college and after graduating during the recession, I held various roles managing the service and operations of a major tourist attraction.

• I worked in one of the best art museums in the world (not hyperbole), progressively helping to build our relationship and engagement strategies with members, donors, and visitors. 

• I pivoted into helping lead the support team for a global healthcare regulation organization. 

• And now I’m building out the strategy for my local government's website to meet the needs of our residents. 

All of these roles are very different, but they are all focused on helping people navigate complicated systems, buildings, industries, and services. And the core of it all is building trust. 

Warning - CX Rant Incoming!

I've spent my whole career in #CX primarily working directly with the public and leading teams and strategies to improve our customer’s experiences, but to be honest it took me a long time to say that proudly. Sadly, this work gets dismissed easily and often. Throughout my career I’ve been told “any teenager can do customer service.” I’ve been told my teams of smart, dedicated, caring professionals weren’t in a career that was considered “professional.” I’ve had to code my work that is focused on building relationships as “General admin - non-technical” instead of the “Work” category. I've seen people try to hide their customer-facing experience from their early career when they're trying to make a transition to a more Technical or Serious role in interviews.

So I want to take today, #CXDay, to outline some of the skills I’ve developed, and seen in my colleagues and teams in my 20+ year career working in customer experience.

Skills Any Good CX Professional Will Bring to Your Team

Communication. Working with the public we learn how to explain things in the simplest terms, from different angles, and repeating it all day like it’s the first time we’ve said it. But more important in communication than talking, is how much we learn how to listen. The words people use will tell us what’s important to them, and how we can understand their problem or needs.

Patience. This is a tough one because everyone’s patience has a limit, and working with the public (especially in any kind of high volume environment) will test those limits. Good CX people understand how to manage ours. Not to mention nothing will phase us.

Collaboration. CX work never happens in a vacuum, and no CX worker is an island. We’re the entry point for problems to be solved, so we end up building relationships across the organization. We have to rely on our teammates to get through the day together, problem solve, keep shared equipment clean, even. And outside of our team, we collaborate with other teams throughout the organization from database teams, developers, marketing, housekeeping, etc. to make sure problems get solved.

Prioritization, Multitasking, and Organization. The receipt printer breaks, someone skips the line to ask us a “quick question,” the person we’re helping needs to switch the names on their member cards - where do you start? Or we only have the resources to fix one bug this month, so how do you know which is the most important? We have to make quick prioritization calls while handling multiple systems and people. And to be able to handle all of that and still follow up, we have to have top-notch organization skills.   

When you hire a CX professional, you hire someone who knows how to navigate chaos while making people feel heard.

Data. Any good CX leader understands how important it is to collect quantitative and qualitative data to be able to advocate for customer needs. Not to mention how much work goes into education and coaching on data integrity and hygiene with our teams capturing the information.

A sense of humor. Working with the public or with customers can be draining and stressful. The best way to make it through the day is to find ways to make each other laugh. I want to be really clear though, that I don’t mean that lowest-common-denominator form of bonding where we laugh at the customers. I’m talking about finding the silly little delights in the day with our colleagues and our customers. In my experience, that type of humor and joy builds much more resilient bonds than the former.

Last but by no means least…

Emotional Intelligence. I often say that service roles perform the emotional labor of our economy. The work of CX is emotional labor, which is why it often gets dismissed as “soft” and not taken as seriously in the job market. But the emotional intelligence it takes to work with people is exactly the skill needed to build systems, processes, and even governments that work for people. De-escalating conflict, managing expectations with clear communication, and - again - making people feel heard are some of the hallmarks of good CX professionals. And those skills are applicable to any career.

So let’s remind ourselves to put some respect on our skills. Celebrate how much we bring to our work and the unique perspectives we’ve learned from spending our careers helping people. 

And the next time you’re tempted not to talk about your customer-facing work in an interview, or we want to skip over that candidate that has too much “soft” experience - I hope you reconsider.

#HappyCXDay!

Invited to present on our countywide website overhaul project—intended to unify 40+ sites and refocus all content around public-facing services rather than agency identities—Sarah Gray prepped a combination presentation to address both a concrete project outline and the underlying ideas powering our Government Experience (GX) work.

The presentation was a team effort:

• Juan Torres, CIO for the Franklin County Commissioners, and a member of the “steering committee” for the One Franklin County project. Juan has been part of the project since we started thinking about it in 2022. He opened the session and kept engagement with the multi-agency audience going.

• Caitlyn Coughlin, GX Concourse Product Owner. Caitlyn ran the slide deck and provided some real-time user journey mapping with audience input.

• Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager. Sarah was the lead presenter and covered both the outline of the One Franklin County project and the baseline human-centered design and UX research concepts.

What we covered

With only 50 minutes in a room of 30 people, we couldn’t cover a lot, especially when some content depended on direct audience engagement. Nevertheless, we buzzed through 2 major areas:

• An overview of the One Franklin County project and its goals

  • collapse 40+ websites into a single, unified site

  • refocus all content around public-facing services, not agency identities

  • build human-centered design, plain language, and UX research capacity in a centralized shared-services team while supporting a robust community-of-practice model to engage agencies with internal digital capacity

• PLUS: A sneak preview of the proposed design for the new countywide home page, set for launch in early 2025

• An introduction to two key UX research concepts, with interactive discussion

  • User Personas

  • User Journey Mapping

Audience reception and what we learned

The presentation was well-received, with active participation from the assembled group from across multiple county agencies.

We discovered two key things from this group:

1. Our project is unknown to the general employee population. One Franklin County has engaged perhaps 100-150 people in the last year or so, but there are 6,000 employees across the county. With very little launched to the public eye (so far), and all the old websites remaining online, few employees know this work is in progress.

2. Ideas around user experience (UX), user research, journey mapping, user personas, human-centered design, plain language writing, service design and so forth are new to most employees in most agencies—by a long shot. Most had never heard the terms at all. (Which is common across the country, really.) But the ideas were very well-received. Attendees self-selected to attend an all-day internal professional development conference, so these were some of the most-engaged public servants in the county. This was an ideal audience for us—the folks most willing pick up ideas to boost public service and trust.

What we need to do next

To make One Franklin County a success in the long run, we have to address the two deficiencies we discovered. We need awareness of the project and its goals to spread across the county. But more importantly, and more impactfully, we can only achieve our Government Experience (GX) mission if we spread the core concepts of human-centered design to every agency.

Project Awareness

Clearly we have some marketing to do around the project itself. Sarah is ramping up to make periodic presentations with county leaders. And with the public site launch for the first 14 agencies in the first half of next year (and the shutdown of their old sites) we’re on a trajectory to getting a lot more attention.

And we may need more buttons.

GX awareness

Following the presentation one of the attendees caught me and asked where she could learn more about these human-centered design concepts. She felt our presentation was only just starting to address how to use these ideas and she instinctively recognized there was a lot more to learn.

To date, however, we’ve never even attempted to teach these concepts or consult with our partner agencies on how to apply them to their practices, with or without websites. We don’t have a “class” ready to go.

In the moment I advised there were plenty of resources online that talk about these ideas and give examples. But that’s cold comfort for someone that’s warming up to the ideas, wants to learn more, and wants to spread the ideas further. I didn’t have something to hand them, nor something to invite them to attend.

What our most-engaged public servants need is a “101” course they can take with their colleagues. Civilla offers something like this to get folks started. And the Beeck Center has countless resources. And there’s my new favorite: the annual Code for America Summit. But none of these are in Franklin County. None of them can be responsive to our specific needs. And people need support post-training, too.

A new goal for the GX Foundry?

I am loathe to assign myself and my team more work. But… if the shoe fits…

I think we have to address the lack of GX training for local government practitioners and leaders ourselves. We appear to need a three-pronged model to begin to lead this change. I’m not sure how we’ll have the time to do it, but we’ll start with the ideas now and maybe we can find the resources over time.

Teach : Develop a GX concepts “101” class

While there are places to learn core concepts of Government Experience (the government-focused instance of User Experience), they are not yet gathered in one place, and to make the concepts stick, students need some personal interaction and practice. We love what Civilla has done, for example. We love the resources from Beeck, 18F, USDS, USDR, and others. But our partners need a personalized introduction and local context.

I suspect we need to develop a class that introduces some key concepts and teaches them with some hands-on exercises:

• human-centered design

• User Experience (UX) and the government twist on it, GX

• UX research

• user journey mapping and empathy mapping

• user personas

• plain language writing

• service design

The course format could point to external resources in a self-paced training model. But it does feel like students should come together for some practice and knowledge-sharing in the real-world, too.

Consult : Engage agencies directly to apply GX concepts

Like so many things people learn, students may need help applying what they’ve learned, perhaps in a small pilot project. That’s a great way to take book learning and turn it into real knowledge. But even getting a pilot project going can be daunting. We probably need to help.

Post-training we should engage with each agency / student and discuss ways to apply the new concepts to a service they provide. We have a variety of folks that can engage in this process, including our Partner Experience team, our Business Analysts, and different GX disciplines.

Best case, we find something small, concrete, and visible to analyze and potentially change, sharing results across the agency, building support for more GX work.

Evangelize : Connect partners to resources and each other

While the training and consulting will expose students to GX concepts and get them some hands-on experience, it doesn’t scale well if our team has to own the entire GX ecosystem and all engagements. We need students and former students to both connect to national resources and groups and to one another. We need a Community of Practice.

We’ve already started this with our Voice of the County (VoCo) group, which is focused on our public-facing web properties and services. But this would go wider. Anyone that consistently wants to apply (and re-apply) human-centered design principles and practices will need support.

They should attend the annual Code for America Summit (and we could advocate for that expenditure). They should be provided updates about new resources and examples from the national players. They should hear what other teams are doing across the county and cheerlead those efforts openly.

For now, we’ll talk internally about how to attack these issues. despite having very full plates already. I don’t think we can just brush this under the rug.

We cannot be the only Government Experience team in our local government. We need supporters and cheeleaders. We need participants, too. We need our GX concepts to filter into the agencies to ensure they are building and evolving services that build trust with the public. With 6,000 people out there, the notion that we can make an impact with just 14 folks is nonsensical. We need force multipliers. We just have to craft them ourselves.

UPDATE 2024-09-05 : We’ve had a great response so far, with a lot of applicants in well under a week. If our job application is not available any longer, but you want to reach out anyway, catch up with John on LinkedIn.

After 3.5 years, we are wishing developer Josh Wood the best as he takes on an exciting new software opportunity! We are proud to have provided Josh a place where he could stretch his skills after a successful career reboot at local coding bootcamp Tech Elevator.

We’ll miss Josh, for sure, but with his departure we now have an opening to hire a new Application Developer (which we call a GX Developer internally). The job is now posted and available for review and application. We need folks to apply by Friday, September 13 so we can hit an internal hiring timeline in early October.

Our Target Audience

You can help us out by forwarding this opportunity to anyone you know that fits this general profile:

• Early-career software development professional (1-2 years experience is great)

• Resident in central Ohio (in and around Columbus)

• Wants to make a community impact through digital work, not just make some rich folks richer in a corporate job

• Wants a stable job with great benefits and career development options

The legalistic requirements

There are a few job requirements we should get out of the way first:

• This job is located in Columbus, Ohio; we do not pay for relocation

• We require in-office work each week (currently 2 days in-office)

• Interviews are in-person at our office during September

So… you need to be in the Columbus area already or you need to get here ASAP. We have hired people that relocated on their own, so if you already have plans to move and are interested in this role, reach out. But if you don’t plan to relocate, don’t apply. There’s already lots of tech talent in central Ohio. Additionally…

• You must be authorized to work in the U.S.

• We do not sponsor work visas or other immigration processes

• Employment is contingent on background checks and drug testing

Yes, recreational marijuana went legal in Ohio this summer, but our policies have not caught up with that reality yet. But given we handle a lot of sensitive information about citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure our employees are not impaired. We are serving the public, after all.

Okay, now on to the good stuff about the job!

What would I work on?

Franklin County Data Center (FCDC) has provided software solutions to our local government teams and users in Franklin County, Ohio for decades. But honestly… we have to raise our game. We want you to help us fundamentally change how we design, deploy, support, and extend both full-stack solutions and custom low-code/no-code apps. For that, we need an Application Developer that has a penchant for Product Ownership.

Our Application Developer will help our designers, platform engineers, and product owners live up to our Government Experience (GX) ideals, and ensure our customers are getting the mission-focused value they need from our products.

We need your keen problem-solving skills, your technical acumen, and your dedication to user-centric experiences. You’ll help us write and maintain code for dozens of products and projects. You’ll work with business analysts, graphic designers, platform engineers, and project managers to analyze business requirements, determine the appropriate stack for each project, and craft solutions.

With 6,000+ users and 40+ partners across Franklin County, there’s a lot to do. If you like a challenge, like tech, and want to be on a dynamically-growing team on a mission, join us for the adventure!

Example Development Tools

• Quickbase

• Microsoft’s Power Platform (Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, etc.)

• C# / .NET

• JavaScript

• React

• JQuery

• Kentico

• SQL Server

• GitHub

• Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, etc.)

• ColdFusion (legacy)

• ...and more

Each development tool allows us to build vital apps and services used by tens, hundreds, or even thousands of users.

Who are we seeking?

The best candidates for this role will have a passion for public services that build trust with our customers and community, a strong bias for action that gets work across the finish line, and an enthusiasm for continuous and incremental improvement.

YOU ARE...

...mission-driven.

We’re here to meld contemporary digital experiences with local government services, collaborating with teams that make our communities better every day. You’ll prioritize real transformation over mere digitization, you’ll seek meaningful impact rather than just using the newest tool for the sake of it, and you’ll help us build long-term public trust. Join us to make an impact, not fill a seat.

...curious, inventive, adaptable, and determined.

To make government better, you’ll learn (and respect) the status quo, then invent better processes and help everyone adapt. When we hear “that’s not how we do things,” we (politely) stick to our guns while ensuring everyone makes it to the other side intact. You’ll need bottomless curiosity to learn context, sincere compassion for overworked public servants, and eyes locked on the prize.

...a personable communicator and collaborator.

Development may require a lot of skills in logic to write code and create solutions, but it also requires a lot of intuition and imagination. You’ll be doing in-person discovery, process mapping, questioning, and collaborative knowledge creation with real people doing real work. This isn’t just a keyboard warrior job – you’ll be meeting our clients where they are.

...awesome at process analysis, problem solving, and organization.

We’re not looking for the biggest rock star developer, but we are looking for someone who is an excellent critical thinker, understands how programming works, and can work collaboratively with other developers on maintainable solutions that make peoples’ lives easier.

Qualifications

• 1-2 years in an IT organization, preferably in a software development role

• A professional developer certification is ideal

• Familiarity with Agile, Scrum, and/or Kanban

• Some work with low-code/no-code environments such as Quickbase or Microsoft Power Platform preferred

• 1-2 years experience in a programming language, preferably C#, but a JavaScript library such as React or Node would be acceptable

• Experience with code repositories and ALM tools such as GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitLab, or Octopus

• Killer documentation skills, including clear writing and clean diagrams, shared in online collaboration spaces

• Verbal and presentation prowess

• Relentless growth mindset, evidenced by your career path to date

About Franklin County Data Center (FCDC)

Our "Data Center" name doesn't tell the whole story.

FCDC is a team of nearly 100 people (up from 40 in 2019) providing a full stack of IT services to Franklin County agencies, who in turn support the 2.5M+ residents of Ohio's most dynamic economy and diverse community.

We deliver networks, server and cloud infrastructure, collaboration systems, live support, digital services development, tech procurement, security, and more and need highly skilled project managers to lead our teams in building these services.

Though we’re proudly part of local government, our culture is not what you might expect. We actually think and act like a private IT services firm.

Learn more about FCDC at our website: datacenter.franklincountyohio.gov

About the GX Foundry

Our new Application Developer will join the GX Foundry – Franklin County’s first digital services team. We’re dedicated to building great Government Experiences (GX).

OUR MISSION: We forge digital experiences to build trust in Franklin County

OUR WORK: Write full-stack and low-code solutions that enhance services for County colleagues and residents, one human-centered experience at a time.

OUR PEOPLE: We’re scrappy, inventive digital makers. We don’t tinker in an ivory tower or mass produce parts in a faceless factory – we craft code and compassionate processes in collaboration with real users.

Learn more about the GX Foundry here on our our website — you can browse around starting with the home page—just click the site title above.

Our Org Chart

As of this posting, the GX Foundry has 14 full-time employees plus the Chief Digital Officer. We’re part of a larger technology services organization (FCDC) of about 100 people (including our 14).

Why Join the GX Foundry?

Work / Life Balance

• Tech work can be stressful, but we balance that with flexible schedules, comp time, and 40-hour weeks, not insane hours.

• We‘re a hybrid office with mixed in-office and remote work, allowing both collaboration time and focused work from home.

  • All staff in the GX Foundry work in-office 2 days per week—Wednesdays and Thursdays—and are remote the other 3 days.

  • Exceptions to the remote schedule come up from time to time, whether that’s once every 8 weeks for an all-team meeting, or for individual customer or project meetings that need in-person attention.

  • Our hybrid schedule is subject to change and requires participation in a “Telework Agreement,” but our model been stable for nearly 2 years now.

• We ensure your vacations are really vacations – no calls or emails or other interruptions while you’re recharging.

Extensive Benefits

• Pay range for this role is $68K - $88K annually, depending on experience.

• Our healthcare plans are superior to what you’ll find in the corporate sector. In short, we get more care for less money.

• Retirement benefits are provided via OPERS with unparalleled contribution and matching rates. (Additional deferred comp available.)

• Our generous sick time benefits are separate from vacation time and can be used for medical appointments, too.

• We offer 6 weeks paid leave for new parents or other Family Medical Leave (FMLA) needs (after 1 year of service).

Career Development

• We invest in your professional development with instructor-led training, conferences, certifications, a self-paced training library, and tuition reimbursement options.

• Our digital services make an impact. Your work will support 6,000+ Franklin County employees providing vital public services to 2.5 million people across central Ohio.

• You’ll build an impressive resume for your next opportunity as you work on career-defining projects using the best IT industry solutions on the market.

A Seriously Great Culture

• This is your chance to join a growing team of creative designers and engineers that are smart, entrepreneurial, supportive, and fun. Everyone says it. But we mean it.

• We only hire smart people with a growth mindset and a desire to learn new things – especially from one another. No jerks.

• We have all the tools we need to be successful. We spend millions on top-tier infrastructure and contemporary software, with active support to upgrade and expand when needed.

• To get a sense of FCDC's culture, check out our We are #FCDC newsletter

• And for a sense of the GX Foundry’s culture, here’s our Culture Code:

Our Hiring Process

1. We review resumes and conduct initial informal calls with candidates that may be a fit; the calls are not interviews, just info-sharing from us to you

2. We invite selected candidates to a first interview about technical skills, project work, and other experience; it's a panel format including staff and parallel managers, and we do it on-site in our offices

3. We invite finalists to a second interview that expands on themes from the first interview (also a panel format, also on-site)

4. We want to identify our preferred candidates in September and formally hire in October, but every role is vital to our success, so we’ll take extra time if needed

   1. Our intended timeline is to make a job offer no later than 9/27, then make the offer official on 10/7 (long story), then the start date would be 10/28.

Our Hiring Team

Here are some key people you may meet during chats about the job or via interviews:

• Eric Nutt - GX Development Manager (hiring manager)

• Sarah Gray - GX Concourse Manager (parallel manager)

• Luke McCormac - GX Developer (peer)

• Kathryn Moon - GX Developer (peer)

• John Proffitt - Chief Digital Officer

• Lacey Pahren - People Experience Specialist (HR)

• Kimberly Carroll - People Operations Manager (HR)

Questions?

If you have any questions, please feel free to connect with Eric Nutt or John Proffitt on LinkedIn (see above). We’re happy to help anyone figure out whether this is the right opportunity for you.

On August 15 Sarah Gray and John Proffitt joined a National Association of Counties (NACo) webinar to talk a bit about how we’ve transitioned our thinking away from projects and toward products, especially in digital services. We’re still on that journey, and we’re still learning, but we took a breather to share the experience so far and discuss the challenges.

As with most webinars these days, it was recorded and is now available to watch online. It runs about 1 hour and covers a lot of ground. We also handled some Q&A.

You can get the slide deck and watch the video on the NACo website here:

Transforming County Services: From a Projects to Products Mindset - Insights from Franklin County, Ohio

NOTE: You must supply an email address and name to watch the video. NACo uses that to track viewing performance, but does not sign you up for anything.

Thank you!

Special thanks to Luke Norris and the Granicus team for suggesting this topic, inviting us to join the conversation, and playing host. And another big thanks to Rita Reynolds, CIO for NACo, for including us on their busy webinar calendar and leading the team that pulled all the logistics together.

Readers of this blog may remember we sent a 4-person team to our first Code for America Summit earlier this year. We were so thankful to learn from our peers and we enjoyed being challenged to think differently about government tech and digital community practices. In fact, we shared our thoughts from each of the 3 days of the conference in Oakland:

• Code for America Summit 2024: Day 1

• Code for America Summit 2024: Day 2

• Code for America Summit 2024: Day 3

#CfASummit 2024 Videos

Well, if you couldn’t attend the Summit, now you can get at least a taste of the event through a collection of 19 videos shared by Code for America within the last week. Here’s the full YouTube playlist:

My own favorite videos…

Unraveling the threads of algorithmic influence: A fireside chat with Dr. Safiya Noble (22 min)

Dr. Noble makes a convincing case for how algorithms underlying AI and other applications need much more scrutiny and oversight because they can create or re-create social problems like racism and sexism in code, making these kinds of problems ever-harder to solve.

Leading the way forward (13 min)

Anytime you can hear folks from the Beeck Center or U.S. Digital Response, you should probably do it. They are doing the best work in the country for those of us trying to apply modern digital techniques to government services. Lynn Overman from Beeck and Hillary Hartley from USDR address a variety of topics. Their points around AI are particularly important for government tech folks to hear.

Procurement for the people (7 min)

It’s not a long video, but it’s vital for folks in government to see and think about. For many of us, procurement is a god-awful mess in government because it’s an accretion of decades of “stopping bad things from happening” instead of enabling innovation with just enough controls to prevent waste or malfeasance. In this case Michael Owh shares a story from his time leading procurement efforts in big cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Making tax filing free and easy with Direct File (14 min)

It’s been a long time coming, but the work Code for America and others have been doing with the IRS has finally been launched in the first wave in 2024. And we already know it’s expanding for 2025 and will remain a permanent option. This is a triumph of innovation at several levels, both because it’s a new government program that solves real problems for millions of people, but also because the IRS did the right thing by developing this program in an agile, iterative way, launching small changes, testing, getting feedback, adjusting, and growing with each wave of development. I’m probably more excited at their success in the process than in the outcome.

Looking forward to 2025

We expect to see the Summit swing back to the east coast (D.C.) next year, and we’re already thinking about who to send. There’s so much more to learn, and this is such a great place to do it. We’ll register as soon as we can!

Our very own Franklin County, Ohio was included in the survey of counties with 1,000,000 or more residents. Counties were evaluated on a variety of factors, including “…initiatives that streamline delivery of government services; provide data analytics to allow decisions based on performance and outcomes; enhance cybersecurity; and apply innovative and emerging technologies to county priorities.”

And Franklin County took the number 10 spot on the list, due to investments in cybersecurity, data analytics, and… digital services (that’s us!).

How the GX Foundry played its part

The summary in the award announcement points to our team (boldface added):

IT leadership in Franklin County, Ohio, last year focused on improving the government experience for residents. To accomplish this, county enterprise IT created a team called the GX Foundry in 2022, which last year helped move the county to a new content management system and worked with 44 agencies to overhaul the county’s website so services would be easier for residents to find. The team also created a “state of the county” website with which the commissioners can share information about what the county is doing. For bookkeeping and financial management, they used the low-code tool Quickbase to build an application for identifying unclaimed county funds, which allowed the county to retire technical debts and build interfaces for apps used by both the public and internal staff.

Huzzah! We’re thankful for the recognition and we’ve been honored to do the work we’ve done so far.

But we’re not done.

Indeed, we’re excited to keep moving ahead, because wow… there’s so much more to do! That centralized county website? It’s still being developed behind the scenes, with a small launch earlier this year and a much, much bigger launch coming in early 2025.

And we have more ideas for expanding our impact for the public and internal teams across the county. Hopefully we’ll be able to make the required investments to bring modern, human-centered digital services to more county teams and residents.

Thanks to the Center for Digital Government, and special thanks to our fearless CIO, Adam Frumkin, who supports our mission and highlighted our work for the award.

Check out the full list of winners in the 1,000,000+ county category. Or check out the list of #1 winners in all the county size cohorts.

It was posted on LinkedIn by Luigi Ray-Montañez, Director of Engineering at Coforma.

And I couldn’t “Like” the post fast enough.

This speaks to my growing concern about our infatuation with AI as a panacea for #govtech and public service challenges.

To me, LLM-based AI is something you sprinkle on top of a well-organized, well-written, human-centered government digital service. Or you use it to generate specific types of content under controlled, and human-edited, circumstances.

But AI tools cannot take the place of doing our homework with human-centered design, user research (not just surveys), an iterative approach to everything, a deep commitment to solving real problems for real people, and a rejection of the artificial—but necessary—organizational boundaries we setup between government teams.

Learning the fundamentals

As with any profession, the civic tech space is collecting an alphabet soup of ideas and frameworks. We can talk about UI, UX, CX, EX, HCD, PO or PM, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and we’ve even coined our own: GX (Government Experience).

I’m convinced the #govtech or #civictech space needs some kind of leadership to emerge that teaches a core set of principles and concepts so civic tech teams can form faster, with support from above, all over the country. Otherwise, we’ll be awash in “AI solutions” that do not address the fundamentals and won’t actually improve our public services.

Let’s consider some scaling issues for civic tech.

The Code for America conference in late May hosted about 1,000 people. But there are 3,000+ counties and 100,000+ municipalities of various sizes across the United States (and there are many more in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand). Most of these governments do not have a digital services team or anything similar. At least not yet.

My own home state of Ohio—8th most populous in the U.S.—doesn’t have this figured out yet. So there’s plenty of fundamental education to get out there.

Hell, my own team only formed in the last couple of years, and we’re still learning, still trying to evolve to meet the challenges in front of us (while also battling technical debt and trying to make the case for how more resources could solve more problems). And if one of the richest counties in Ohio is struggling to get going, what hope to the thousands of smaller entities have to dodge the AI bullet and build a viable digital services team?

Can we build a “101” course?

So hey there Beeck Center and USDR (or anyone else working in the field) — who’s going to establish some kind of Civic Tech Academy (or something similar) to bring all these ideas, frameworks, and methods together and make them accessible to the “civic tech curious” out there? Who could build and host a sort of “101” course to build civic tech and digital services capacity across the country?

These teams need to know some fundamentals. And they need help learning how to sell these ideas to distracted government leaders (I do, too!). Rather than piecing together a build-your-own curriculum in isolation, could we build an academy? Could we establish cohorts of learning and development?

I’ve been blown away by the quality of people I’ve met at various events over the past year or so. There’s a ton of talent out there, with folks doing some amazing work.

But I’m betting there’s a far larger group out there that hasn’t yet emerged. Can we help them?

Can we establish a strong civic tech fundamentals foothold across the country before the AI vendors warp our missions into something unrecognizable?

We’re ready to help.

As with any tech-related conference these days, the Code for America #CfASummit last week was filled to the brim with AI references and sessions. Most presenters heralded “AI” (which is, helpfully, whatever you need it to be) as a panacea—the lynchpin to solving all kinds of government and public service problems. Only two voices I heard offered a counterpoint, the most strident of which amounted to, “Well, we should probably be careful with this technology.”

A local conference in Columbus a week prior was similar: AI—without describing any specific, documented project or outcome—was going to change all our lives, jobs, and public service itself. (Although the message fell a little flat since it was delivered by a mid-level Deloitte drone hawking consulting contracts.)

Despite all the jazz-hands and prognostication at civic tech conferences, I remain skeptical. And I’m not alone. On May 31, just one day after Code for America made a splashy AI announcement, the Wall Street Journal (of all places) summarized a quiet alarm that has been rising in the shadows of the tech industry for the past 6 months or so:

Commentary on social media was, predictably, more pointed and a lot funnier:

My concerns with AI in the civic tech sector…

• are not purely environmental, even though we’re discovering AI platforms burn far too much energy for their limited benefit

• are not purely ethical, even though they may be used to eliminate jobs merely to turn billionaires into trillionaires

• are not about the human biases injected into the platforms by data sets and developers, even though that could disenfranchise whole classes of people on a massive scale, and

• are not about the factual errors the systems generate, which are totally predictable since AI doesn’t actually know anything.

Government is different

No, my chief concern is that some civic tech and government players are missing two key perspectives and they shouldn’t be moving so fast anyway.

First, nearly everyone misunderstands how LLMs and algorithmic analyses work, which leads to unrealistic expectations around what can be done with AI tech. Can AI help identify homes in Flint, MI that may have lead pipes? Yes, it can via algorithmic processing of prepared data sets (which may not even be “AI” anyway). AI can even help with limited language translations, with fairly high success rates for very basic communication. Indeed, processing text (especially in English) is what LLMs do best. But they can’t handle analyzing or representing facts or policies or generalized decisions because they don’t actually know anything. They can merely spot and/or generate data patterns.

Second, some leading-edge civic tech folks appear to have failed to learn a lesson the tech industry has been teaching for the past 30 years. Gartner explained it long ago with their Hype Cycle model:

The underlying point of the Hype Cycle: new technologies arrive on the scene, get attention far in excess of their value, and everyone jumps to a “this turns the world upside down” conclusion. Change instigated by the introduction of an innovation does take hold, but it’s never as fast or as intense as predicted.

And in government such changes take even longer. And they should! Government is not designed to extract maximum value for shareholders at maximum speed. We should be skeptical of rapid change because government must represent the needs and interests of everyone, and new tech never gets distributed evenly from the start. To this day, 30 years into the Internet “revolution,” broadband remains unevenly distributed and the only thing pushing it to the last mile in low-income areas are subsidies or direct government service. Indeed, our digital teams must consider how the public will get service if they don’t use the Internet.

AI : FOMO

So why is “AI” the hottest topic at civic tech conferences…

• despite having very few proven use cases

• despite being a clear example of the “peak of inflated expectations” and

• despite government having a responsibility to slow down and include everyone?

I have to assume the biggest factor is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Everyone is talking about AI, the stock market is rewarding AI-related moves, and the AI (LLM) parlor tricks—available for free to anyone—are entertaining and impressive. Consulting shops are also pimping the tech to get the next wave of consulting dollars.

Plus, we’re public servants—if we see a way to boost public service without growing payroll, we’re gonna look into it. We get frustrated with the slow pace of change, too.

AI gets all the oxygen

This fixation on AI-derived solutions is absorbing all the oxygen in various conference sessions when we still have fundamentals to master.

• We could dedicate more time to training our govtech colleagues in Human-Centered Design (HCD).

• We could boost utilization of Agile development and deployment approaches.

• We could teach Customer Experience (CX) and UX research methods and tools, all readily available today.

• We could work on professionalizing training for end users, teaching Product Management concepts, sharing Lean examples, showing low-code tools governance… the list goes on.

Instead, we spend lots and lots of time dreaming of how AI will save us.

Hey, I’ve used AI tools! I know others in my organization have, too—some regularly and on the sly. It’s popular. But is it truly useful most of the time in most roles? Consider this observation from the WSJ article (boldface mine):

A recent survey conducted by Microsoft and LinkedIn found that three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey… shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.

This suggests there is a massive gulf between the number of workers who are just playing with AI, and the subset who rely on it and pay for it. Microsoft’s AI Copilot, for example, costs $30 a month [per person].

We’re all playing at AI. But these are distractions. Consider…

There are 100,000 municipalities, 3,000 counties, 50 states, and seemingly countless federal agencies. Only a small fraction of them have organized themselves around HCD, CX, UX, Agile, Product Management, low-code solutions, and other modern approaches. Pennsylvania only launched CODE PA a year ago, and my own state of Ohio doesn’t even have a digital services team.

Indeed, our team’s use of the term “GX” (Government Experience) is a foreign idea to the vast majority of government entities out there. But the civic tech world is spending more time talking about the potential of AI rather than how to clean up our websites with plain language or standardize our data sets for good analysis or work on inter-agency process flows and data exchanges.

AI is getting all the oxygen. It’s leaving the rest of us dizzy from oxygen deprivation. And it’s not serving the public with the fundamentals.

Okay, so what do we do, smart guy?

I know. Being anything but an AI booster makes you sound like an AI crank. Like so many things in 21st century America, it feels like everyone has to pick a side and suit up for war.

But I’m not anti-LLM / anti-ML / anti-AI. I’m anti-hype. And I’m pro-fundamentals. I’m a fan of crawling before walking before running before biking before driving before flying.

So what am I advocating?

Well, for a good example, let’s pay attention to the work presented by U.S. Digital Response’s Marcie Chin at the #CfASummit this past week.

In the talk Marcie presented alongside colleagues from New Jersey, they called out using LLM-based ChatGPT to assist with translations of Unemployment Insurance forms and service explanations into Spanish. But they didn’t just slap some ChatGPT Spanish on a web page and walk away. They carefully analyzed what was going on and made choices about how to apply a mix of technologies and human techniques to get the best results for real Spanish-speaking users navigating the arcane world of unemployment. They used real humans to control the final product, but still tapped into AI tools to generate some initial inputs.

That’s how they got these results (among others):

Their bottom line? LLM-style AI tools can speed up development of text products, including translations, but for the best and most reliable experience—especially for multiple Spanish dialects—the work still requires human intervention. An automated AI translation is better than nothing, but that can’t be a government team’s stopping point. Not if they want the services to actually reach the intended recipients. Not if they care.

A path forward

Perhaps my conclusion is obvious. Maybe I’m wasting my time writing all this, as I’m sure others have said something like this before. I certainly don’t feel like I have a corner on the market for a reasonable take.

No more boosters. No more hand-wringers.

But it feels like the only voices I hear out there are the boosters and hand-wringers. AI will kill us all or AI will save us all. And it’s all just nonsense when you look at the tech and the (greedy) people promoting it.

As I noted on LinkedIn recently, journalist Julia Angwin had a ridiculously smart take on what the AI players are doing in the market today (lying) and how that's going (emphases mine):

The [AI] companies... did themselves a disservice by coming out with this technology and saying, "It's so good... the main concern here is that it's actually going to take over the world and kill humans." When you start with that level of hype it's actually really hard to walk back to where it can barely answer a question accurately. I'm sure it seemed like a great marketing strategy at the time because it did make [AI] seem so sexy and dangerous...

I honestly think that OpenAI disbanding their [safety] team is a little bit of an acknowledgement, like "that isn't actually the issue we're facing here right now. We are actually facing the fact that it's kind of unreliable, it's not consistently accurate, and we have to kind of solve those problems."

—as heard on the Pivot podcast

Even the loudest-mouthed proponents of generative AI are realizing the limits of their creation.

Where to go in civic tech

The path forward for AI in civic tech is kinda simple, really:

• Before any substantial investments in AI tech, invest in the fundamentals first.

  • Get good at HCD, UX, CX, Agile, user training, low-code tools, plain language writing, basic web pages and information architecture, and so forth.

  • Get your data sets cleaned up, centralized, and get your data analytics capabilities on point. You need this to make a lot of AI tools work anyway.

  • Before translating anything, fix the damn English! Make your English language content plain, readable, and comprehensible to non-government types.

• Pay attention to developments in AI via news articles, but stay skeptical and demand to “see the receipts.”

  • What was actually done with AI, and how did the tech play into the solution?

  • Did humans check any of the results?

  • How much processing energy did the AI solution take? What’s the environmental impact?

• If civic tech colleagues are talking about AI, make sure to dig into the practical details in conversation with them, to find out if what they are describing is relevant to your real-world issues.

  • For example, Marcie at USDR had a very detailed story to tell because they used AI tools, tested the results, checked with human translators, and compared multiple approaches. They did the work. That’s the standard.

  • If it feels like a presenter is imagining the future rather than pointing to real work done in the real world for real people, take it with a block of rock salt.

• Read sample AI policies and guidelines from multiple sources and develop guidelines that are meaningful and useful to your own organization.

  • Set a schedule to review/revise your policies / guidelines every 6 months, for the foreseeable future.

• Depending on the scale of your organization, consider hiring a role that focuses on AI usage, whether the AI use is sanctioned or not. Gather info on use cases. Classify the AI types (some “AI” isn’t really AI). Educate government leaders on AI topics and concepts.

And I’m sure there are more recommendations I could offer, but all that is plenty to do. (But share your ideas in the comments.)

Final thoughts

The following post on Bluesky got me thinking about how we anthropomorphize soooooo hard about inanimate things, including AI:

Bingo. All the talk of AI being a savior or a demon are just us humans wanting to believe our own press. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were gods?"

It’s time these lofty notions are brought back down to Earth. Not because that will “save” us as a species, but because it will save us all the energy we’ll otherwise expend gaslighting ourselves for the next 10 years.

I still think LLM-style AIs have targeted utility, but turning civic tech upside down to put AI at the center of our work will prove to be wasteful at best and folly at worst. I hope Code for America and all of us will slow down and stay focused on the fundamentals of building a civic tech ecosystem that solves human-scale problems humanely.

Perhaps writer Mims says it best in the WSJ article:

None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend.

Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.

So let’s breathe a little easier, focus on digital fundamentals, data analytics fundamentals, collaboration and workflows, and keep our eyes open for targeted opportunities—particularly in text processing—where LLMs or other AI tools can help speed up some processes.

I’ll be happy to attend more conference sessions where folks show what they actually achieved with AI tools in the real world, and how they kept a tight leash on the tech and their own expectations.

Am I nuts? Did I miss an entire idea? Hit me up in the comments.

Four of us from the GX Foundry made it out to Code for America’s annual Summit this week, and we attended all 3 days. We’re back in Ohio now, after a delayed red-eye flight on Thursday night into Friday morning. Below are some notes and thoughts from Day 3 (sadly our final day in Oakland).

Kristen

Day 3 of the Summit brought many insights into community-based research, engaging your users throughout the entire development process, and developing trust with your constituents. We discussed how imperative it is to put your users at the heart of it all — allowing your community to form the vision for the product or service you’re creating. Taking the time to really hear your community members, and meeting them where they want to be met, should be at the forefront of any work you’re doing.

During the last session of the day, How to Tame the Loudest Duck: Using Listening to Ensure Inclusion in Local Government, I genuinely shed a tear! Throughout the conference, folks kept mentioning the importance of having a North Star that guides the work you’re doing. Our speaker, who has been working to revitalize the city of Corona’s (CA) government space, shared such a heartwarming story about his mother’s path towards citizenship in the US. She was so excited to vote for the first time because she got to have her voice heard. His mother passed a few years ago, so she never got to see the wonderful work he’s doing to support his community, but he knew she would want him to give people a voice, and that’s the reason he tries so hard to have the members of his community inform every decision he makes.

Seeing so many people so passionate about helping others, and so passionate about fixing broken systems, was really inspiring.

Sarah

I really loved the sessions I went to on the last day of the summit because they were all pretty interactive and I got to have some good conversations with folks. I can be a bit of an introvert with an RBF, especially if I’m thinking about something or squinting to see, so not that many people come up and just start a conversation with me (and I don’t always have the social energy to do the same). So I appreciated the facilitators giving us this more structured opportunity to connect with each other.

I loved the session about winning hearts and minds with a design brief (by Cities Reimagined) - it was tactical while also giving us the storytelling ethos we all wanted.

The state of Utah’s CX team expertly facilitated a really engaging session that helped us all connect to the perceived barriers we put up for ourselves by allowing us a sticky note venting session first.

And I am truly jealous of the city of Corona’s storytelling. The maturity level of their community engagement and feedback loops were impressive. But how they’re using the data they collect to engage and improve the lives and communities of their residents is really inspiring.

Overall the #CfASummit was an incredible experience. It felt so good to be around hundreds of smart people who care about the same things I do, are experiencing the same difficulties, and hearing how they’re keeping people at the center of solutions.

Eric

The major theme for me on the last day of #CfASummit has been keeping things human-centered, whether it is for application design, providing services, or advocating for future change.

One session about human-centered design for a system shared across disparate government entities focused heavily on doing end-user research, specifically members of the public. Capturing the user experience helps to gather ideas for the preferred customer journey. I am also inspired to spearhead extending the user feedback function already in place on our new county home page onto other online applications.

Another session discussed the roadblocks Customer Experience (CX) teams face within their government institutions and how to navigate around them. I was thrilled to be able to share with the session our own challenge involving being told something was in Ohio Revised Code (our state law), so I kept asking for several years until I got a different answer.

My final session of the day involved the equity in providing government services to immigrant and refugee communities who speak little or no English. This is something I would like to keep in mind as our own local government provides services to many immigrant groups.

John

Paying for research

The “Community-driven product management” session with folks from Seattle was great, although it struck me it was more about user research than product management (of course those are tightly interlinked when done well). But one theme came through loud and clear: pay people for participating in research.

That idea—paying folks for their time and opinions—has come up in multiple sessions over both days. Everyone getting meaningful research done is doing it this way. But we’re betting that may not go over well back home. So we’re already thinking about how to get around likely resistance in the County on this front. County leaders don’t even know what “user research” is, so hitting them with the idea of paying residents directly for that research might get a lot of raised eyebrows.

We believe we may be able to solve this problem by hiring outside firms to coordinate research work, and those third parties would pay research participants, keeping government away from actual payments (and any perceived political implications). We’ll just have to put that into the contracts with third parties.

Fixing systemic failure with actual intelligence

Fellow Beeck Center CDSO member Julia Gutierrez gave a great presentation on her efforts at the city of Boston to vastly improve their 311 services and build more trust with the community. She’s contending with spaghetti code assembled over many years and a contract started long ago with a third-party vendor that spent 3 years building something that was never going to work (which sounds hauntingly familiar).

Julia did a great job, but what I loved about her presentation more than any other I’ve seen this week were 3 things:

• She was done with the core presentation in 30 minutes, which was plenty of time to cover her topic despite being complex

• This left 30 minutes for insightful questions from the audience, which are awesome—these rooms are full of smart, dedicated people and their questions often illuminate the topic in new ways

• The questions also illustrated Julia’s absolute command of the topic and her confidence in leading the solutions to come; I suspect some presenters fear the unpredictable Q&A, but she killed it

My takeaways from the 311 talk?

• Build iteratively and quickly.

• Stay agile, stay lean.

• Get the resources you need to lead and organize your team well. Under-resourced teams are not a badge of honor and will hobble your ability to serve the public and your agencies. (And the agencies want you to succeed.)

AI for government translation

This is a complex topic and there are conflicting perspectives here at the Summit. Kristen attended a 3-hour workshop on Tuesday that was pretty down on AI for translation. But Lord knows we need help in this area, and may need to consider our options to do the most possible good for the least effort.

I attended this last session to learn what New Jersey has done with generative AI to assist with translations for Unemployment Insurance specifically. Remarkably, they took a very balanced, thoughtful approach, with key help from Marcie Chin at USDR.

In short, the approach described compared translations across different AI models and always included some human review. And they did indeed find differences along the way…

But what about the source UI documents?

What no one addressed, however, is whether the source documents and policies have been properly re-written into plain language first. Maybe that was done? Maybe not? But it wasn’t clear.

Honestly, it seems like we should probably use AI and some human writers to translate Government English to Plain English first, then try the Spanish translations (also with human correction).

Still, the good news in all this is that with a trained / tuned AI model the translation work can be sped up considerably. Research is still required. Human translation is still required. But if you imagine the billions of words generated by governments across the country, getting some help from AI makes sense.

And allow me to be clear: I accept AI tech when it comes to language processing because that’s what it was engineered to do — algorithmic / predictive text completion based on a tunable corpus of input material.

It’s still not perfect! It’s still not going to take over the world! But for text processing, sure… pull this tool out and use it. With supervision.

And that’s it for our play-by-play comments on Code for America’s 2024 Summit. It’s been a great experience and we are jazzed at the notion of attending again next year, if possible.

Check out our notes and comments from the other 2 days of the Summit:

• Code for America Summit - Day 1

• Code for America Summit - Day 2

Four of us from the GX Foundry made it out to Code for America’s annual Summit this week, and we’re attending all 3 days. Below are some notes and thoughts from Day 2 (which is actually the first day of the full-blown conference).

Kristen

Day 2 was full of impressively good discussions! The sessions I attended were largely focused on how to best serve your users, whether they be the public or the employees you’re supporting. Here are two sessions of note…

I attended one session titled Making Lemonade: When Well-Intentioned Policy Is at Odds With User Needs. During this session, the speakers discussed legislation passed in Colorado that tasked the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration (BHA) with establishing a tool for providers to track and report their care capacity since it’s so difficult to find an available bed in a mental health facility when an individual needs support. The initial tool the BHA planned on building completely changed after talking to the providers themselves, who pointed out the new challenges the tool would create while only minimally improving the current placement struggle. User research is so important — without doing that research, you might risk implementing a tool that doesn’t support your customers, regardless of your intention.

We also discussed Product Management in a panel titled Unpacking Product Management in Government: What Makes It Unique and Where It’s Going Next. It was really amazing to hear how folks are doing product management across the government, the panel sharing the sentiment that “product management looks like whatever you need it to be.” The tasks involved in managing your product may change over time, or they may be different from one organization to the next, but the core of product management remains the same — you have to focus on delivering customer value through continuous improvement and innovation.

Sarah

I wanted to attend the research-focused sessions to help make my case for adding research staff to my team, honestly. I was able to hear a lot of examples of how research (design, user, community based participatory) was able to bring the problem and potential solutions into focus by centering the people most impacted. Yes, project timelines needed to shift, phased approaches and even changes to scope were all necessary. But in the end real people were able to get real value out of the work done instead of just measuring deliverables. To me, research (which is really just a formalized way of having conversations and listening to the people most impacted by the decisions you’re making) is a way to measure the distance between legislative, policy, or technical intent and real community impact.

The other big takeaway for me was that we’re on the right track. To be honest I’ve never built a website unless you count using GeoCities in 1998, and I’ve had plenty of second-guessing myself leading the website redesign project. But hearing the digital team at New York City talk about their similar website consolidation and improvement project and the questions people asked, I realized that while we may not have all of The Answers™️ we are absolutely asking the right questions, and we are centering people, trust, and relationships in the right way. It feels like a much needed reassurance to keep going.

Eric

In yesterday’s keynote, I really appreciated the focus on accessibility. 48% of federal websites have accessibility errors, and across public and private entities, the top 1 million sites have an average of 60 accessibility errors. It was proposed to go beyond compliance and tackle accessibility by design. Usability testing, questioning vendors’ accessibility documentation during procurement, and changing workplace culture are all part of solving the problem.

Yesterday I was impressed by the procurement session where I heard about how the process is being remedied in Portland, Los Angeles, and Boston. I was overwhelmed to hear that LA County has to coordinate procurement with the 88 cities located within the county. (Conversely, Franklin County contains 16 cities and 17 villages.) All 3 jurisdictions utilized gaining trust through equity and being nimble in dealing with small businesses.

I also attended a panel about designing local AI policy, interestingly without any AI experts. There was discussion on building an understanding of the opportunities and risks of AI, identifying opportunities to engage the public and across agencies, and using AI to drive towards equitable outcomes (think: AI has helped Flint, MI find lead pipes, which helps alleviate the water crisis.)

John

So about AI…

I’m done hearing platitudes and pronouncements about “AI” and how it’s going to transform everything. Thankfully Dr. Safiya Noble capped off the mainstage session with a reality-check around AI’s impact on the environment, it’s questionable value in practice, and the dangers of automatically trusting algorithms generally.

I would encourage everyone in government digital services to do a lot of soul-searching about what you’re doing with AI, what you’re intending to do, and what you think these tools are really going to achieve—and at what price. I suspect we will look back from 2034 and shake our heads wondering how the tech bros here in Silicon Valley duped us so completely into thinking this was another printing press moment.

To be clear, I believe AI-ish features have some value, and there will be further refinements in our application of algorithmic auto-completion bots. But it’s not going to wipe out humanity nor solve our most intractable problems. When the dust settles, we will still have to solve the thorny problems of policy vs. delivery and development of trust with the public ourselves.

Other mainstage notes

• Katie Fiore from New Jersey had a killer section of the mainstage presentation that resonated a lot. She talked about communicating with constituents clearly and directly and with accessibility in mind. The only problem with the presentation was that it was too short; she deserved more time.

• Seeing Kara Swisher was entertaining, for sure. I listen to Pivot every week and enjoy it. Although I have a nagging suspicion the award granted to Swisher was mostly to generate buzz for the conference, since her work is pretty tangential to government digital services. I would have preferred to learn more about the other award winners that were on the stage too briefly. Let’s celebrate the practitioners.

Low-code tools

The low-code tools session was great. I didn’t pick up a lot of new info, mostly because we’ve already embraced this notion (in our case primarily with Quickbase) and we’ll continue to do more with low-code solutions in the future. But it was awesome to see the infectiously positive attitude Melissa House from USDR brought to the presentation. Not a lot of engineers can pull that off, so kudos to her.

Community-based research

The session on Code for America’s “opportunity youth” research project in Shelby County, Tennessee (Memphis area) was stunning. Not enough people attended that session. This project was a real achievement because they were able to connect with local youth and build a powerful report to highlight the needs of community youth that are struggling with a lack of education and employment opportunities.

There’s way too much for me to summarize, but it was wonderful to see a join effort between Code for America, Shelby County government, a local nonprofit, and young people right in the community that actually conducted the research and compiled the results from their peers themselves.

The only problem with this session was we wanted more—we wanted to understand some of the mechanics of how the research was developed and done, how the results were compiled into the impressive report, and so forth. I hope CfA shares more details in the future.

Product Management

Similar to Sarah’s comments above, this session was one where I felt like the direction we started to take nearly 2 years ago was the right one — pivoting toward product ownership (or management). We’re not there yet, but we’re headed that way and I’m happy to see we picked up the thread others laid down ahead of us.

One interesting takeaway, which played into a following session, was the idea of teaching “product thinking” across the board, to agencies and others that provide direct public service. It seems simple, but I think it’s lost on a lot of folks. We need to share these ideas broadly.

Training government workers: a breakthrough

We’ve needed to hire a “trainer” for years in our organization. We spend millions on a variety of software platforms every year, but we don’t support those technical investments in building skills in the employee base using those platforms (which is insane, but here we are). So I wanted to pick up more training delivery ideas from folks here at #CfASummit.

And the bi-coastal presenters — Caitlin Seifritz (Philadelphia) and Amy Martin (San Francisco) — delivered big-time. They had lots of specific recommendations, the best of which may have been this slide about which training approaches carry the most value:

This idea, plus the idea of creating a training coordinator role was a big insight. It raised a question for me… What if we pitched a training role that was more than just training development and delivery? What if all the training they developed was really just cloaked consulting, where the person goes into a specific agencies or team, finds a service delivery problem they are struggling with, and figures out how to apply a technology they already have in hand? That would make the training specific, custom, and focused on an active need the team has in the real world.

Further, what if this training coordinator drew on the Product Owners we have in place? For example, if you have an M365 product owner, and the target team would benefit from better collaboration using Teams, the training coordinator would make an introduction between the team and the M365 product owner, and the product owner is on the hook to ensure the users get the training they need, tailored to their situation.

Finally, as former librarians the presenters addressed a problem we specifically have: rejecting customer inquiries that are “malformed” according to our own definition. We allow ourselves to get salty about customer requests that come in the “wrong door” or are “incomplete” in vision or description. (This is common for tech teams.)

Instead, we need to focus on developing a Reference Desk model, similar to a library. It’s expected that users come to the Reference Desk with incomplete concepts or questions, then the Reference Desk team will collaborate with the user to clarify their ideas and find resources.

That’s what we need to do in all our work.

There’s one more day at the #CfASummit and we’ll share that tomorrow.

Check out our notes and comments from the other 2 days of the Summit:

• Code for America Summit - Day 1

• Code for America Summit - Day 3

A portion of our GX Foundry team made it out to Code for America’s annual Summit this week, and we’re attending all 3 days. As noted in the prior post, 4 of us made the trip, arriving on Memorial Day, to ensure we didn’t have any travel complications and to give us time to adjust to the 3-hour time shift.

Day 1 was a partial day with focused workshops, and we attended 3 of the 4 available sessions. Our quick impressions of the sessions are below.

#CfASummit : The Power of Multilingual Public Service Delivery

Kristen attended this workshop, and was excited to explore this complex topic, which intersects with her work on digital document signatures and surveys. Her takeaways:

We had some really great discussions about the importance of engaging in multilingual research. Language, culture, and experience all impact how a person interacts with a service, and we have to ensure we understand the needs of all the communities we serve. Through connecting with and learning from those community members, and through creating feedback loops, we can broaden the accessibility and trust in our government services.

#CfASummit : Procurement for the People: Approaches for More Inclusive Services

Sarah attended this workshop, despite not being a procurement expert. However in her first year of government work, she’s already come into contact with some of our procurement challenges and wanted to learn more. Her takeaways:

I attended this workshop because procurement was the topic I knew the least about. I love getting to learn about something from smart people who care about a topic and think deeply about its failures and possibilities. And that is exactly who attended that session!

One thing I’m going to be thinking about more is how to build in human centered metrics into things like contracts that seem to be so stripped of the lived experience through legalese. Alameda County’s probation office, for example—when writing contracts for vendors who provide direct services like housing to the public—includes stipulations about treating residents with basic human dignity. So many of the problems we try to automate, legislate, and contract to solve are deeply human and it’s important to keep that at the forefront of our work.

#CfASummit : Closing Government’s Technology Talent Gap

Both Eric and John took part in this workshop. They’ve done a lot of hiring work for our organization and were looking to find ways to improve our work further. Their takeaways:

Eric

I was given a lot of food for thought about what inspires candidates considering technology roles within government.

The assumption is that an engineer is looking for a high salary, all of the latest and greatest tech, and the ability to work remotely full time. While some of these may be true, potential candidates can also be influenced by how they can have an impact on our community, whether that’s at the local, state, or federal level.

We can help “sell” these positions through telling our story, having clarity in what working for government is really like, being speedy in the interview and decision processes, and supporting not only the person who gets the position, but also all of the candidates by staying in regular contact with them throughout the process.

John

From listening to the presentations and the discussion, I discovered we're doing a fairly good job at explaining our roles in terms that make sense to candidates, but we don't do as well with integrating our new hires with their roles in the first 6 months—that is, our onboarding is not robust enough and needs some tweaks that extend beyond the first week or two.

I also realized I am too analytical in my approach to talking about jobs when promoting them to candidates and instead need to get personal and share stories of impact on a human scale. That is, we need to be telling very direct, visceral stories about how our digital work turns into real-world impacts for real people. This kind of storytelling dovetails with what I'm trying to do in other areas of our organization, so it makes sense to me, but it didn't occur to me to do it in recruiting. That was a real #smh moment for me. Why didn’t I figure this out sooner?

We’ll be back with more from the #CfASummit thoughts over the next couple days.

Check out our notes and comments from the other 2 days of the Summit:

• Code for America Summit - Day 2

• Code for America Summit - Day 3

Our journey to build Government Experience (GX) capacity continues! The next big step—or leap, in this case—is to attend the annual Code for America Summit and pick up lots of ideas for our digital services and teams. And that’s what we’re doing!

We’re sending a small team to Oakland, California this week (May 28-30) to attend 1 workshop day and 2 days of conference sessions.

If you’re attending, keep an eye out for:

• John Proffitt, Chief Digital Officer

• Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager

• Eric Nutt, GX Development Manager

• Kristen Pietras, GX Product Owner

Aside from all the amazing sessions and content, we also plan to attend the Digital Service Network’s fun Civic Tech Trivia Night on Tuesday evening. We hope to see you there, and we hope you don’t know anything so we can win.

Stay tuned for updates from the conference as we share the impressions, insights, and ideas we’re picking up.

Check out our notes and comments from each day of the Summit:

• Code for America Summit - Day 1

• Code for America Summit - Day 2

• Code for America Summit - Day 3

I came to government work from the nonprofit CX (Customer Experience) world where I had to have customer data to tell the story of the impact our initiatives, campaigns, or even bugs that needed fixing were having on our audiences. I built reporting structures and feedback loops for my teams because my anecdotal information was never enough to get change moving. I needed to say it with numbers.

In that world, you have many competitors for your audience's time and donations. So you have to stay ahead of the curve by understanding what your audiences want and need, and using that to inform your strategy—to meet them where they are. In government, it can be easy to forget about the importance of listening to your audience, because it can seem like we don't have competitors for the services we provide or programs we administer.

But, as I was first getting my bearings at the Data Center, leading the redesign of Franklin County's public-facing websites, I came to realize one important thing: our biggest competitor is people giving up because the processes are too complex, too hard to find, and too time consuming to finish or follow-up on. And those stakes are too high not to use every tool at our disposal to meet people where they are.

I can't stress enough the importance of asking your audiences what they want, what they need, and if you're delivering on those needs. Not just once, but asking all of this on a regular basis, and adjusting strategies and tactics based on what you learn. Otherwise are we really hearing them?

In any relationship, listening is necessary to build trust. So if you're also trying to help rebuild public trust in government, below are a few resources to get you started talking, and listening, to your audiences:

• 18F Customer Experience: Beyond Surveys

• Federal OMB CX Guidelines

• Harvard Business Review: Customer Experience is Everyone's Responsibility

While we’re on the topic of listening, I have a question for you about how (or if) you give feedback in your own lives. And feel free to share any thoughts or questions of your own in the comments! I’m always happy to listen.

and will appear at the Quickbase online user conference, called Empower24, on Wednesday, May 8. Registration is free. Our presentation is at 2:15pm Eastern, and we will be around for Q&A after the main 30-min presentation.

Despite being on Quickbase for less than a year, we’re already presenting on the national stage? Okay, sure! 😎

We are sharing details about a fairly complex app we built using Quickbase, JavaScript (ReactJS), and SQL. Called "Unclaimed Funds” this is a simultaneously public-facing and staff-facing app that promotes a database of unclaimed money the county is holding, hoping to connect with the residents and businesses that are owed money from a variety of sources.

This multi-layered app replaced a legacy COBOL app written years before anyone on our team was hired, and that was just the hidden back-end to a heavily paper-based process. We’re still developing the app (using a Product Ownership model), launching some new features lately involving DocuSign and other technologies that are making the money search / apply / pay process fully paperless, after decades of service and boxes and boxes of paper collected.

Please join us!

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This week it’s a bumper crop of links and notes because we’ve missed a few weeks and we’re catching up.

[1] We launched an all-new franklincountyohio.gov

Just over week ago our GX Concourse team re-launched the “core” Franklin County, Ohio website at franklincountyohio.gov.

We wrote up the launch right here.

[2] Can government be too digital?

We have a long way to go until we’ve made even a majority of our government services for the public digital or even digital-friendly. But some governments are a bit ahead of us. Two items:

Local Chinese governments have gotten so mobile and digital, they’re swamped by their own success

Examples of time-suck included government affairs apps that worked at cross purposes, the over-involvement of different departments through the sin of convenience, repetition of online and offline procedures, the uploading of mobile photos to log attendance or task completion — and of course, work-related WeChat groups that dinged incessantly with notifications.

To me, this is a reminder that User Experience (UX) is a two-way street. It needs to be better for the public, but it also needs to be better for the government staffer serving the public. We setup the GX Foundry to deal with both types of platforms and issues — internal and public-facing.

For now, we are a loooooong way from swamping our government teams with too much digital info or processes. But we’ll have to be careful to avoid this issue.

Not everything needs a login

One of the things we’re thinking about for 2025+ is how to handle citizen identity and enable seamless (but secure) re-use of identities across digital services. However, maybe we need to re-think that a little. This Bluesky post got us thinking:

Not every government service is worthy of creating a login. Any service that is a one-time or a very rare service probably could do with a simple timed email verification loop. For example, marriage licenses — hopefully you’re not coming back for marriage licenses regularly. Or coroner reports. But if it’s filing taxes, that’s a different matter — might as well have a sign-up there.

We’re thinking about Login.gov as a possible future service provider (if the feds allow locals to get involved), but short of that, we’ll likely need our own system. But for now, we’ll be thinking carefully about what really needs a persistent login.

[3] Civilla’s project in Michigan called out on Last Week Tonight

Nonprofit digital government consultancy Civilla got national attention earlier this month when a project they worked on in Michigan was praised for keeping people on Medicaid, despite rules enacted during COVID-19 to strike people from the expanded benefits automatically. You can see the full story below (NSFW, as usual):

But if you want to be truly inspired—check out Civilla’s own professionally-produced video on this signature project, which overhauled a 47-page public benefits application for the State of Michigan and made it clearer, simpler, shorter, and more accessible to everyone. It took 2 years, but they solved a decades-old problem that could have been written up in Recoding America.

If you work in civic tech, I dare you not to tear up toward the end of this video:

Finally, you can check out Civilla’s post on LinkedIn about this appearance in national media.

[4] A deeper dive on the collapse of the Ontario Digital Service

Canadians are so nice. And politically astute. Which is too bad, because it means the discussion on this 30-minute podcast spends most of the time talking about the achievements of the Ontario Digital Service (which are numerous) rather than how the ODS was pretty clearly brought down by internal government politics. To me, it’s a classic story of a startup division that gets killed off by the bigger incumbent organization.

Kinda wish everyone was more direct here, but I appreciate how being more careful can help protect the folks left behind, living in the wake of the ODS dissolution. Not everyone can escape, or wants to, and in truth it’s much more courageous to stay and keep hope alive than to head out to the private sector.

Still shaking my head over this development and hoping it remains an outlier rather than becoming a trend.

[5] Powerful leadership podcast episode on building great teams, managers, and self-awareness

Scott Galloway spent time on one of his recent podcasts talking to author and management consultant Claire Hughes Johnson and the discussion is amazing, especiallly if you’re a leader or working to develop leadership skills.

Starting listening around 13:49 to get right to the interview.

And listen starting at 39:27 for thoughts on the hot topic of DEI. Scott is fairly down on DEI, but Johnson takes a pretty smart, balanced perspective and stands her ground. It’s a great discussion.

And Johnson’s excellent book is available as well: Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.

[6] How to tell a story in 2 sentences

My favorite storytelling consultant David Hutchens has a brief post on LinkedIn that explains how to tell an impactful story in just 2 sentences. I keep learning (and thinking) about how stories are far more valuable than sharing data. Recommended.

[7] IDEO U storytelling class review

Speaking of telling stories, I shared a review of my recently-completed IDEO U course over on LinkedIn. I think it’s pretty good, especially for making the case for the fundamental reasons for storytelling. But if you’re already convinced, the tools David Hutchens shares are probably sufficient. That and practice. Lots of practice.

You and find info on the IDEO U class here.

[8] Digital maturity assessment and model from Think Digital

I love a maturity model. Done well, it can give you a sense of where you and your team are now in developing capabilities in a professional endeavor of some kind—usually one that doesn’t lend itself to simple metrics.

For digital teams in government, there really aren’t lots of great models out there (that I’ve seen so far). But Canadian consultancy Think Digital has one to offer, and it’s worth exploring. They introduced the model in this post, but the actual intro slide deck is available here.

[9] Service Standards and Assessments

A key presentation from Danny Mintz (Code for America) and follow-on discussions at the recent Chief Digital Service Officer (CDSO) convening in Washington, DC (hosted by the DSN at the Beeck Center) hinted toward digital maturity in a way we may all want to consider.

Put simply: What if digital services teams at all levels of governments had “Service Standards” for their projects, and then ensured their projects lived up to those standards by employing required Assessments of plans before they are given the green light for funding, staffing, and deployment?

The idea is to replicate what was first done by the UK’s Government Digital Service, which they explain in detail on their website.

Further, the question posed during the CDSO conference was… should Service Standards—and the Assessments to ensure projects meet the standards—be mandated by law at one or more levels of government? Should the federal government, for example, demand that projects they are funding meet appropriate Standards?

For now, no new laws. But the Standards + Assessments discussion is worthy of exploration. Start reading up now.

[10] Start the ADA accessibility countdown

The U.S. Justice Department finally published rules around whether state and local government websites must meet ADA accessibility guidelines under the law. The upshot: Yep, it’s required. Everyone has until early 2026 to be in compliance.

GovTech covered the news here.

Meanwhile, software tools added to websites designed to improve ADA compliance are… not always well-loved. Some report they are big trouble for visually-impaired users in particular, according to this report in the Financial Times: Blind internet users struggle with error-prone AI aids (paywall). The story was also discussed at length on Hacker News.

We added the UserWay tool to our new website, but we definitely recognize it is a bandage not a total solution. It’s best used as a temporary cover while you take time to fix the underlying accessibility problems.

[11] Can we add some humor to digital services?

While we take our work seriously, we don’t take ourselves seriously, and it looks like we’re not the only ones. This post by Tom Orbach is focused on product teams building for the public, in a for-profit context, but it feels perfectly applicable to some elements of government, too.

Product Growth

Humor for Growth: The Strategy You’re Missing

Humor is one of the most cost-effective skills to develop in the tech industry. But PMs aren’t necessarily known for their use of it. So when Tom Orbach reached out to me with his idea to write a deep dive on using humor to grow your product, I was instantly in…

Read more

2 years ago · 53 likes · 3 comments · Tom Orbach

It’s important to remember that government serves everyone and deals with some deadly-serious topics, too. For example, our county operates a Coroner’s office. Not exactly a place for humor (at least as far as public interactions are concerned). Additionally, humor does not always translate well, so if you’re using translation services to reach all corners of your community, maybe avoid any attempts at humor if the audience is multi-lingual.

Still… government could use a dose of easing up on the serious tone, given the public can often approach us assuming we’re humorless robots. It’s a balance, to be sure.

[12] Measuring the “time tax” in government services

This deeply wonky piece by Don Moynihan gets into the nitty-gritty of efforts to measure the impact of poorly-designed services (digital or otherwise) in government. There’s a book coming out, there’s a conference on May 7, there are examples from Australia and our own Code for America is noted as well. Lots of links and resources in this post. Recommended if you’re ready to dig in on cutting waste and building better user journeys via digital services.

This past week our GX Concourse team re-launched the “core” website for Franklin County, Ohio at franklincountyohio.gov. The new site isn’t just a new visual design. It has a new technical back-end, using the OpenCities platform provided by Granicus, and it’s a complete re-thinking of government websites for our county.

This site is not our “final” site, which will gather services from across Franklin County under one roof. It’s more of a “links” site today, which will send you out to the various websites each of our agencies already have. We’re getting our feet wet with this platform and working on yet another re-launch site to debut in 2025.

The big difference between the old site and the new is the way the site is organized.

This post will go much more into depth than our simple LinkedIn announcement. So read on if you’d like the deep-dive.

Designed for citizens, not agencies

The prior design was setup around the names of the various agencies, using their terminology and organized structurally as the county itself is organized. And that makes precisely zero sense to the public, who do not know local government jargon and just want to get stuff done with us, not learn our lingo, structures, or elected officials’ names. This new site is setup around services, using language that is accessible to the general public.

For example, did you know that if you want to license your dog, you have to go to the… Auditor’s website? Yes, we have an Animal Control agency, but they don’t do dog licensing, because… reasons. Does that make sense? Another example… did you know marriage licenses come from the Probate Court, and not from the “General Division” of our courts?

• Question: Why should the public have to know these things?

• Answer: They don’t—if we design digital services for them and not ourselves.

So this new site is the beginning of an overhaul that will plow under more than 40 independent agency websites over the next couple years, bringing all county-based services under one digital roof, and representing those services in ways that will make a ton more sense to the residents and businesses our agencies serve every day.

Highlights from the new site

While this is not a tour-de-force website redesign (we’re using the standard Granicus design with very little additional flair), there are nevertheless a bunch of functional and technical improvements, including:

• As noted earlier, we now offer Service-focused functionality using common language (rather than expecting users to know agency names or county structures)

• Integrated language translation options

• ADA accessibility features

• Vastly improved Search functionality, plus a consistent site design

• Quick Links to the most popular services

• Feedback options available on every page, plus a new Contact Us option (the prior site offered no feedback or contact features)

• Google Maps integration for finding services in the real world

The old site? Yikes.

About our process (a rough timeline of 9 months)

Getting to this 1.0 launch has been challenging. We had to hit several marks, including (but not limited to):

• Hire a leader to launch creation of the GX Concourse team and drive the project. We did that in May 2023. (If we hadn’t hired, this project would have stalled.)

• Negotiated and signed an agreement with Granicus for the software licensing and professional services to get the project going. The signing was in roughly August 2023, but negotiations too several months (mostly because of our federated decision-making and funding structures).

  • The agreement was setup as a multi-phase project (no surprise). But the one thing other digital teams may find interesting is that we deliberately planned to launch one Granicus-based site to replace our “core” site (now), and then we would create yet another website from the ground up that takes over for Site 1.0, replaces about 15 websites, and adds digital services and agencies.

• Gather key people from 14 agencies—all under the Commissioners’ office—that would participate in digital content development for now and the foreseeable future. This included leadership as well as hands-on folks.

  • There’s an additional 30+ agencies beyond those 14. We’ve been sharing info with them, but have not directly engaged. Yet. That comes next.

• Create a digital communications support group called Voice of the County (VoCo) and invite all our content-focused people into it for sharing info, ideas, and discussion. Also create a monthly meeting for info sharing.

• With Granicus’ direct leadership, complete some “light” user research and discovery combining legacy site traffic data, limited surveys, and some in-depth qualitative interview sessions with agencies and (where possible) members of the public. This fed design decisions about the new 1.0 site. (Dec 2023 - Feb 2023)

• Granicus engineers built the new site atop their cloud-hosted solution, copying / recreating content from our source site. (Mar 2024)

• Our team got training on the new tools (Mar-Apr 2024)

• Our team designed the information model for the “services finder” (this is the tool on the home page that starts “I WANT…” and leads users through various thematic and specific options. (Mar-Apr 2024)

• We set a launch date, edited content, tested a beta site, edited more content, tested again… right up to the day before launch.

• Finally, on launch day (April 18) we made DNS changes to point at the Granicus infrastructure, re-listed the old website under a new address (in case we need it), and tested some more. The launch went pretty smooth.

Feedback on the new site started to roll in within a couple hours, which was a surprise.

About the team

This was a team effort, to be sure, but the bulk of the hands-on work was done by two people:

• Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager. Sarah brought CX experience to the table, not to mention a level of emotional intelligence and care for our agencies that few possess, even in an organization setup to serve the needs of agencies. She coordinated the entire effort and worked on it, too. And she only joined the GX Foundry in May 2023.

• Caitlyn Coughlin, GX Product Owner. Caitlyn worked on a website refresh effort in our county courts and brings attention to detail and direct experience with providing tech support to end users tackling complex software tools. She joined us in September 2023.

Of course there’s a cast of characters around this project aside from Sarah and Caitlyn, including:

• John Proffitt, Chief Digital Officer @ FCDC

• Adam Frumkin, CIO, FCDC

• Juan Torres, CIO, Commissioners office

• Joe Curtiss-Lusher and Petra Adams (and lots more folks) - Project and Technical leads from Granicus

• Lots of folks working in the 14 “launch” agencies under the Comissioners’ umbrella, including Public Information Officers and general staff of all kinds with website / digital content responsibilities

What’s next: Keep the 1.0 site alive, build the 2.0 site from the ground up

1. We’ll maintain this new 1.0 site and make minor improvements along the way until we are ready to replace it entirely with a new core site, probably in early 2025. (It will be tough to not upgrade the site in-place, but we must stay focused on Site 2.0 or we’ll never get it done.)

2. We are in the midst of “content rationalization” now, which is basically a review of current sites to build a model for the next site’s structure and content. There’s about 900 pages to be reviewed and revamped, but we think that number will come down dramatically in the 2.0 site.

3. We are starting talks with the “post launch” agencies—those that are not included in the 2.0 launch—to start laying the groundwork for their own education, integration with the project, and then the same processes of research / discovery, content rationalization, etc.

4. We will be learning and testing the “OpenForms” product from Granicus in the next couple months, in the hopes of using it to digitize both forms and forms processing efforts alongside our agency partners. The product looks good, but the real question is whether we can convince the agencies to allow us to replicate current processes in this new digital form.

5. We expect “rationalized” content to be loaded into the 2.0 site (which, again, is separate from our 1.0 site) over the summer and fall of 2024. By the time 2025 hits, we should be on the cusp of launching the 2.0 site, which will be a much bigger deal than last week’s launch.

I guarantee we’re leaving some details out of that list. There’s a lot of meetings, trainings, and info-sharing sessions to be done along the way.

What, me worry?

Going forward, some concerns of ours:

• Staffing. We can’t keep the 1.0 site alive and build a 2.0 site while bringing the 3.0 site agencies into the conversation with only 2 people. That’s not reasonable in a county of more than 6,000 employees spread across 40+ agencies. We are also very aware agencies do not have content- or communication-specific people on staff to do this work, but even if they do, they’re already busy. We need to support our agencies not only with design/research or engineering help, but raw content development help. We’re making a pitch now for more staff ASAP and then more in 2025 as well.

• Hold-outs. Past the first 14 agencies in the 1.0 and 2.0 launches, we may have some that don’t like the idea of moving to a centralized service-focused platform and shutting down their independent websites. That takes away the “me, me, me” factor, and some folks may not want to play ball. Given we have a federated county structure (diffused decision-making across a variety of independently-elected officials), at best we can encourage and directly support a move to the new model, and actively un-support independent sites. But if an agency is adamant about steering clear of the One Franklin County project, well… all we can do is use our new site(s) to link to their site and call it a day.

• Standardizing tone. A big focus going forward with the new sites is using the most basic, plain language we can get away with, to meet the public where they are and also enable cleaner auto-translations to other languages. But there will be lots and lots of people that have access to editing site content, not all of whom are really writers. So how do you standardize the writing style and tone across a sprawling multi-editor site? Well, there are some tools to help, and we can make them available, but at the end of the day it may turn into a big editing job for us.

Stay tuned

This 1.0 site launch is literally just the beginning. Technically it’s not a super-impressive site. But the behind-the-scenes cat-herding by our team has been amazing. There are probably 100 people involved in this project somewhere between one tiny degree or a huge, career-defining degree. So wrangling all those people, their interests, and their participation has required a lot of “emotional labor” and administrative work for the GX Concourse team.

But with the first hurdle passed, hopefully we can really take off.