Teaching civic tech as an antidote to AI infatuation

A funny meme sparks thoughts on building civic tech capacity

So it’s Friday morning and I hop on LinkedIn before the meetings of the day start, and I run across this new meme:

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.