What’s a Season?
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!
Impressive organizational and operational growth, John! Congrats!