Civic tech... Public interest technology... Digital service team... Human-centered design...
I could fill this entire post with buzzwords around digital government and innovation. It would be easy.
But what does it all mean? Why does it matter to you as an everyday citizen?
At its core, civic tech is how policy goes from just a bill to a technology implementation that functions the way it is intended, and prioritizes the user experience above all else. I’ll give you an example of this process.
Say your state government passes a bill that mandates 10 hours per week of universal pre-school to every 4 year old child in the state. You have a piece of legislation with a signature. The challenge now is avoiding the creation of just another poorly designed government website. What does that look like?
Well, it’s simple: You need an application hub that is secure, accessible, and intuitive, where parents, pre-schools, and other stakeholders can interface with each other so that children are actually able to attend their families’ preferred pre-school at the end of the process. All without the website crashing. Oh, and you don’t have 10 years.
Okay, so maybe not so simple. This exact situation is happening right now in the State of Colorado. But this is only one example, and technology is always involved to varying levels whenever government acts on anything. As you may know, government isn’t always successful at making the transition from legislation to working technology (see Healthcare.gov). The wild part is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Colorado Digital Service (CDS), a team of product experts, human-centered design specialists, and engineers, is leading the effort to stand up the Universal Pre-K program. Digital service teams like CDS bring modern tools and processes—ubiquitous in the private sector but rarely seen in government—to the forefront of solving critical problems.
This work has been around for a long time, it just didn’t have a flashy name. However, the “modern” civic tech world traces its roots back to 2014 with the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), an agency born out of the Healthcare.gov debacle. USDS, housed within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with improving and simplifying the way the federal government builds and deploys technology. Since then, smaller “digital service teams” with similar mandates have shown up in states and cities, and even internationally in countries including Canada and the United Kingdom.
So why have a digital service team?
A successful digital service team brings cross-functional leadership to critical and complex government technology projects. They use an agile product management approach, accommodating pivots while focusing on project outcomes over box-checking. Perhaps most importantly, digital service teams focus on user outcomes and experiences long neglected by the traditional government procurement process, by asking questions like:
Who is the end user and what are they saying?
Is this product or service going to function as intended for its stated purpose?
Regardless of where a digital service team resides, the mandate is always the same: modernize and improve how government delivers products and services to citizens.
This work equips government - your government - with the operational capability to enact real change in an increasingly complex world, and that matters.
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My name is Ryan Powers, I escaped the financial services industry in 2021 and am currently in graduate school at Georgetown University focusing on the intersection of technology & public policy. I’m a competitive swimmer turned trail runner, lifelong musician, and novice (but newly obsessed) climber. Subscribe for musings on where tech meets politics and society.