GX Notes 2024-03-31
A roundup of Government Experience (GX) links and comments from the past week
Here’s a roundup of links, comments, and other items we found over the past week or so that may be interesting to digital Government Experience (GX) practitioners out there. If you have any recommendations for more articles we should see, hit us up in the comments.
Quote of the Week
To err is human, but to really screw things up, you need a computer.
—Alex Lindsay, This Week in Tech (podcast), 2024-03-17. He was paraphrasing a famous quote from writer William E. Vaughan, written in 1969. It’s still apt today.
#FCDC launches its first newsletter
Our own host organization—Franklin County Data Center—launched it’s first LinkedIn Newsletter over the weekend. This is the start of what should be a monthly series telling stories about the people that work in FCDC, our culture, and the agency partners we serve. See the first issue now, and subscribe for future releases.
Congratulations Columbus!
Our local government comrades in central Ohio announced they’ve won a funded program from the Bloomberg American Sustainable Cities project. This includes up to 3 FTEs for 3 years, working on innovative efforts around sustainability. Complete details are posted on the Columbus website here.
Beeck Center’s impact report for 2023 is out
I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the great work done by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, now hitting their 10th anniversary. (By the way, “Beeck” is pronounced “beck”.) They’ve convened digital leaders from across multiple government levels to talk shop, and I’ve been privileged to join them for a few events. Indeed, I’ll be joining a gathering of about 20 such leaders in Washington, DC in a couple weeks.
Last week they released an annual report covering their efforts from 2023, and it is, naturally, impressive. It includes a few interesting data-based reports right in the report to show you their efforts. For example, here’s their assessment of which States have Chief Data Officer roles:
Report Announcement: Beeck Center Releases Impact Report Highlighting a Year of Sustained Growth and Innovative Partnerships
Report PDF: https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/report/2023-impact-report/
Get the report. It’s good stuff. And God bless them for not requiring a sign-up to download the report!
Enterprises appear to be hitting the pause button on AI… mostly
Two surveys appear to show big corporate shops are experimenting with AI but are halting big investments or rollouts, likely in response to missteps with the technology that have landed companies and governments in some embarrassing headlines. I commented on this article on LinkedIn…
AI is not dead. But it also isn't going to succeed as wildly as the hype suggests. For now, government teams need safe policies to prevent security leaks and reputational damage. Policies should limit AI applications to:
experiments without direct public contact
creative efforts like writing text or creating images to be edited by humans, and
small feature enhancements integrated into existing apps.
Other than that, steer clear until things normalize.
AI @ UN
Speaking of Artificial Intelligence, check out this tech press article on a non-binding resolution on AI usage that passed last week at the United Nations:
World’s first global AI resolution unanimously adopted by United Nations
It doesn’t establish any draconian policies or breathless endorsement, and in fact AI industry players even claimed to like it. So… mostly it’s interesting that AI is getting this much attention, despite being a nascent technology that, truthfully, no one yet knows how to handle.
Can we procure better technology procurement?
Oh procurement in the government realm. What a mess! There’s a fair bit of innovation on this front popping up all over the country, at the federal level and in States, though not so much in the local space (that we’ve seen so far).
Being in tech and dealing with procurement for ourselves and on behalf of our partner agencies in local government, we feel the pain of procurement policies and the cover-your-ass thinking common to public servants afraid of being accused of misappropriation of public funds. That’s why we found this new pre-release event so interesting.
This is a new resource being assembled by writer, Internet gadfly, and former Code for America consultant Dan Hon. He’s offering an early-bird look at the creation of a new guide for tech procurement. Since he’s not in a government role, this should be really interesting. I signed up for the April 10 presentation so I can get the slide deck and recording (I’ll be at a conference in DC that day, so I can’t attend live).
The webinar has limited seats, so you probably can’t sign up now. But you can follow his writing at Things That Caught My Attention, where he might announce future runs of the webinar or the actual release of the guide. Worth watching.
Storytelling session at SXSW 2024
The practice of storytelling is on our radar for internal and external purposes, so this session at the recent South by Southwest caught our eye:
I’ve been taking at Storytelling class with IDEO U that’s been pretty good. This 1-hour video captures all the same highlights (but of course, there’s no homework). Recommended if your role involves convincing others to pay attention and care about your cause.
Young people in government: It’s a thing
Also from SXSW 2024 was a 1-hour session exploring how young people are getting into government jobs and how things are changing. Although according to OMB, at the federal level less than 7% of employees are under 30.
Young & in Gov: How the Next Generations Are Leading the Way
Panel participants included: Zac Barger, National Park Service; Julie Crump, OMB; Greg Shanahan, USAID; Louisa Sholar, Facing Financial Shock Team, HHS / GSA
Thanks for U.S. Digital Corp for calling out this event on LinkedIn.
Re-indexing on qualitative user research
Recoding America author Jennifer Pahlka (increasingly active on Substack) posted a note about boosting qualitative (rather than quantitative) user research to boost digital GX efforts.
This prompted my own comments, as we’ve been learning the same thing:
I’ve been learning this over the past year as well as our team learns more about UX methods to drive creation of better digital experiences. We all tend to default to surveys or analytics to get “data” to guide us. We were taught to believe data gathered in these ways are “objective” and therefore more reliable or perhaps defensible.
However, if the goal is to build better human experiences, those quantitative research methods are only good at pointing in a generalized direction. You then have to get out there and talk to real humans in real situations at length, in a meandering conversational approach. The surveys can tell you who to talk to, but that can’t tell you what you’ll find once you go out there and listen.
Sounds like journalists might be figuring this out, too.
Oh, the irony that just as artificial intelligence is exploding in popularity and capacity we’re figuring out how incredibly valuable, special, and vital natural intelligence can be.
Branding: It’s for governments, too
Former government communications pro turned Substack journalist Will Hampton posted a detailed look at branding in government entities, with examples and explanations of how and why to do it.
Will is a writer worth following for everyone in the digital government world. Subscribe for sure.
I shared my own thoughts on Will’s post in a Substack comment here:
Meanwhile, branding is something we care a lot about at the GX Foundry! Even though we’re just a team inside the Franklin County Data Center, we established a clear team name, an independent mission statement, our own logo, and our Substack presence to share our work and thoughts. So yeah… we care about branding a little. 😎
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