# Abhi Nemani: full text > Every essay, Public Innovation Academy lesson and portfolio case study on https://abhinemani.com, as Markdown. Curated index: https://abhinemani.com/llms.txt # Data-Driven Policy Making > Myth versus Reality in two slides URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/data-policy/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: government, policy, data --- ## An Introduction For all the talk of "data-driven policy" and "data-driven government," the details can get lost in the hype. In this simple breakdown, we explore the way people **"think"** data-driven decision-making works, and then describe in detail how it **"really works."** ![](https://abhinemani.com/img/policy-1.png) ### The Myth: Data & Policy are Different Pieces ![](https://abhinemani.com/img/policy-2.png) ### How Data & Policy Actually Work: A Cycle ![](https://abhinemani.com/img/policy-3.png) **Featured Essay** [**Three Kinds of Data:** Dashboards, Performance Management, and the Trouble with Different Kinds of Data](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/) If you're interested in learning more, get in touch: [@abhinemani](https://twitter.com/@abhinemani) --- # Working with City Hall > Guides to the politics and operations of local government URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/city-hall/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: startups, government --- ## Guide: City Hall 101 Whether you sell to government or not, your startup is going to be bound up in the public sector wherever you are and whatever you do. The question you have is to take advantage of it or not. That starts with an understanding of the structure of local governments, who does what, who controls what, and who you should know. Here's a primer: Embedded slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAEu0mNGTIE/view?embed ## Guide: Government Relations Strategy In the US alone, governments spend over $200B annually on technology, and that only scrapes the surface of the technology industries they affect in their jurisdictions: logistics, mobility, drones, social, communication, etc. You may not know of an angle to engage a public agency, but there is. Knowing how governments work, and what opportunities they hold, are essential for 21st century entrepreneurship. Having worked with hundreds of cities, here's how to work with local governments: for approval, revenue, or (ideally) both: Embedded slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAEguqvT_KM/view?embed If you're interested in learning more, get in touch: [@abhinemani](https://twitter.com/@abhinemani) --- # Ecosystem Map: Permitting > An example how to map the full value chain within agency workflows URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/permitting/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: software, agile, procurement --- Good government tech maps to (and ideally improves) the operations of government — the entire workflow, which always involves many people and typically different agendas and needs. This simple point is often overlooked when people assume there's just one piece of technology an agency needs to operate. Few offering are truly "full stack" solutions for an agency. Instead, it is common practices to stitch together multiple pieces of software to cover every need. That patchwork presents a number opportunities for technology innovation — the full **value chain** available within a department or sector (e.g., fire, parks, etc) and the **ecosystem of players** in that market. The process is best understood with an example. ### Example: Permitting Ecosystem The planninng department — the permitting process in particular — illustrates the value in this approach. The permitting, licensing, and code enforcement (PLC) space is a source of both public and market interest. However, no one tool (even Accela with its market share) offers full cycle, end-to-end functionality, so agencies need to manage and connect multiple systems such as electronic plan review (e.g., ePlanSoft), citizen engagement (POLCO), or mapping/analytics (Esri or Tablaeu). their needs around advanced needs such as electronic plan review or present maps or analytics. What emerge then is a fuller picture of the PLC ecosystem that's not only more accurate for on-the-ground reality, but also more attractive for innovation and investment. ![](https://abhinemani.com/img/permitting-ecosystem.png) --- If you're interested in learning more, get in touch: [@abhinemani](https://twitter.com/@abhinemani) --- # GovTech Market Sizing > How to build realistic models for valuations in local government technology URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/market/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: market, data, startups --- One of the advantages of the government technology market is that it’s *knowable.* Local governments are a fixed universe — about 90,000 entities nationwide — each with budgets, responsibilities, and operational needs that technology can meaningfully improve. The complexity comes from **variation**, not uncertainty: size, staffing, capacity, and willingness to pay differ dramatically across jurisdictions. These variations make determine total addressable market (TAM) or serviceable addressable market (SAM). That’s why historical or comparative market estimates for GovTech — in my experience — overestimate realistic growth. Instead, I take a bottom-up willingness and ability to pay approach to give more realistic estimates based on agency size. Here's how... (So I've also [a simple calculator](https://abhinemani.com/govtech-market/), where you can models yourself.) ![GovTech Market Sizing](https://abhinemani.com/img/marketi-size-header.jpg) ## **The Shape of the Market** Most U.S. cities are small, while SaaS adoption is highest among large jurisdictions. CivicPulse’s survey shows: **City size distribution** ![Most cities are small. CivicPulse](https://abhinemani.com/img/localgov-count.png) **SaaS adoption by size** ![SaaS Adoption is Skewed. CivicPulse](https://abhinemani.com/img/saas-adoption.png) This “wide base, narrow top” structure is exactly why **bottom-up modeling** is the most accurate way to size the GovTech market. ## **How Bottom-Up Works** Instead of assuming every government eventually buys something at the same price, bottom-up sizing uses: * real counts of governments * different prices by tier * different adoption rates by tier This lets you see which segments actually drive revenue and what is realistically addressable. ## **A Quick Walk-Through Example** The key is to realistically set **adoption** estimates for each customer category, from small to large. It's critical to keep in mind the direct relationship between size and adoption rates, and the inverse relationship between size and number. I recommend starting with which categories have the ideal product-market, focus estimates there, and build possible growth trajectories in new tiers, summing into reasonable TAM and SAM projections. Using the **[GovTech TAM/SAM Calculator](https://abhinemani.com/govtech-market/)**: ### 1. Set Tiered Pricing & Adoption Assumptions ![TAM Calculator Example - Inputs](https://abhinemani.com/img/tam-inputs.png) ### 2. Total Revenue by Tiers ![TAM Calculator Example - Analysis](https://abhinemani.com/img/tam-analysis.png) ### 3. Total TAM & SAM ![TAM Calculator Example - Outputs](https://abhinemani.com/img/tam-outputs.png) The calculator lets you adjust adoption and pricing on the fly — making bottom-up modeling a fast, interactive exercise rather than a one-time estimate. 👉 **Try it:** [https://abhinemani.com/govtech-market/](https://abhinemani.com/govtech-market/) ## Takeaways - There 20k+ local governments, each with different purchasing rules — and different financial reporting mechanisms, making national analysis very cumbersome (or impossible). For instance, in some jurisdictions “economic development” is called “community development” or there isn’t even a department; it is just handled by some people or someone in the city manager’s office. - Big cities have big budgets, but small numbers. Although it may be easier to look at big city purchasing trends (which are more accessible) to determine TAM, that would skew towards bigger cities that have disproportionately long sales cycles and atypical contracts. The reality of local government is that most cities are small (>12k), which compounds the top-down TAM calculus. - Many new technologies are just that, new. Thus, looking at previous budget allocations for technology misses the point: government spending is only growing so consider willingness to pay (WTP) for bottom-up analysis. --- # Civic Tech Career Resources > Whether you're breaking into civic tech or building the next wave of government innovation, start here. URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/careers/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: jobs, hiring --- ## Overviews [**"More Than 'Good Enough for Government Work'"**](https://www.canva.com/design/DAExCVJ9z_g/view?utm_content=DAExCVJ9z_g&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=embeds&utm_source=link) (November 2021): Overview of strategies and specific resources for getting hired or promoted in civic technology, inside government, in the private sector, and in academia/philanthropy. [**"Forecasting GovTech 2025-2026: Headwinds & Tailwinds"**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinemani/) (July 2025): Analysis of the current landscape including AI adoption, fiscal pressures, and emerging opportunities in government technology. Embedded slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAExCVJ9z_g/view?embed ## Fellowships & Programs > **⚠️ 2025 Landscape Note:** The civic tech fellowship landscape has changed significantly. 18F was shut down in February 2025. USDS was reorganized as "United States DOGE Service" in January 2025. Code for America restructured its Community Fellowship to shorter community-based engagements. Many new programs have emerged to fill the gap. ### Federal Programs - [**Presidential Innovation Fellows**](https://presidentialinnovationfellows.gov/) — 12-month senior-level fellowship embedding entrepreneurs in federal agencies. Now runs two cohorts annually including AI-specific tracks. 260+ alumni since 2012. - [**U.S. Digital Corps**](https://digitalcorps.gsa.gov/) — Two-year paid fellowship for early-career technologists (0-2 years experience). Grown to 70+ fellows annually with 95% retention rate. Strong AI/data science focus. ### State & Local Digital Service Teams - [**California Office of Data and Innovation**](https://innovation.ca.gov/) — Merged digital innovation with CalData. Runs CalAcademy training (5,000+ state workers trained) and Governor's Innovation Fellows Program. - [**Colorado Digital Service**](https://oit.colorado.gov/colorado-digital-service) — Active hiring with embedded teams across state departments. - [**New Jersey Office of Innovation**](https://innovation.nj.gov/) — Led major wins: unemployment time reduced from 4 hours to 25 minutes; NJ AI Assistant used by 15,000+ workers. - [**Digital Service Network Tracker**](https://digitalgovernmenthub.org/) — Beeck Center's comprehensive tracker showing 45% of states now have digital service teams. ### Professional Fellowships - [**Fuse Corps**](https://fuse.org/executive-fellowship/) — 1-2 year fellowships for experienced professionals (15+ years). $80,000 annual salary. Operating across 26 states with 400+ completed projects. - [**Govern For America**](https://www.govforamerica.org/fellowship-program) — 2-year paid fellowships ($45,000-$75,000) for recent graduates in state/local government across CT, CO, MD, MI, and MO. - [**Georgetown Beeck Center Fellowships**](https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/) — Multiple programs expanded with $8M Ballmer Group gift: Innovation + Incubation Fellowship, Federal Alumni Fellowship, Digital Service Alumni Fellowship. - [**Coro Fellowship**](https://www.corofellowship.org/) — 7-9 month program in SF, LA, NYC, and St. Louis. Now 100% tuition-free with monthly stipend. ### Student Programs - [**Coding it Forward**](https://codingitforward.com) - Summer fellowship program for early-career technologists to innovate in local, state, and federal government offices nationwide. - [**Cornell Tech PiTech Initiative**](https://www.pi.tech.cornell.edu/) — PhD Impact Fellowships, Visiting Practitioner's Program, and PiTech Impact Studio for graduate students. - [**Princeton CITP Summer Fellowship**](https://citp.princeton.edu/) — Places 16-20 rising juniors/seniors in tech policy work. - [**Media Democracy Fund Fellowships**](https://mediademocracyfund.org/public-interest-technology-fellowships) — Technology Exchange (12+ months at civil society orgs) and PhDX Fellowship (PhD students at DC policy orgs). - [**Paragon Policy Fellowship**](https://www.paragonfellowship.org/) - Fellowship connects university students and recent graduates with opportunities to work on technology policy and digital governance ### Volunteer & Crisis Response - [**U.S. Digital Response**](https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/) — Pro bono technologists supporting government COVID response and beyond. - [**Alliance of Civic Technologists**](https://civictechnologists.org/) — Successor to Code for America Brigade Network. Members include SF Civic Tech, Code for Philly, BetaNYC, Chi Hack Night. Active [Discord community](https://discord.com/invite/EM6ywtMhkP). ## Graduate Programs ### Data Science & Policy - [**UChicago MS-CAPP**](https://capp.uchicago.edu/) — The gold standard. 2-year joint program between Harris School and Computer Science. 97% employment rate. Also offers 5-year BA/MSCAPP pathway. - [**Arizona State MS in Public Interest Technology**](https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/graduate/public-interest-technology-masters/) — First degree designed specifically for the PIT movement. 100% online, 30 credits. - [**UIC MS in Civic Analytics**](https://cuppa.uic.edu/academics/pa/pa-programs/master-of-science-in-civic-analytics/) — First-of-its-kind combining civic tech and data analytics. Core courses include AI/ML and Coding for Civic Data Applications. - [**Cornell Tech Urban Tech Concentration**](https://tech.cornell.edu/programs/masters-programs/jacobs-technion-cornell-dual-ms-urban-tech/) — 2-year dual MS (Technion + Cornell) applying ML, data science, and HCI to urban challenges. ### Smart Cities & Urban Science - [**NYU CUSP**](https://engineering.nyu.edu/academics/programs/applied-urban-science-and-informatics-ms) — 36-credit, 2-year program with seven tracks including AI, Smart Infrastructure, and Urban Technology Management. - [**Pepperdine Smart Communities Certificate**](https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/davenport-institute/certificate-leading-smart-communities/) — 6-week online certificate ($750) covering AI, IoT, cybersecurity, and ethics. ### Digital Government & Technology Policy - [**Harvard Kennedy School**](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/) — Offers courses ("Digital Government," "Digital Governance and Leadership") and executive education. Belfer Center launched new Emerging Technology program 2024-25. - [**UMass Amherst Graduate Certificate in PIT**](https://www.umass.edu/itprogram/graduate-public-interest-technology-certificate) — Fully online 9-credit certificate from School of Public Policy and Manning College of Computer Science. - [**Carnegie Mellon MS in Privacy Technology and Policy**](https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/) — Part-time online format for working professionals. ## Book Recommendations ### Essential Reading (2021-2025) - [**Recoding America**](https://recodingamerica.us/) by Jennifer Pahlka (2023) - NPR's Best Books of 2023. Ezra Klein called it "the book I wish every policymaker would read." The Code for America founder and former U.S. Deputy CTO argues government must be recoded from the ground up. - [**Hack Your Bureaucracy**](https://www.hackyourbureaucracy.com/) by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai (2022) — 56 practical tactics from former VA CTO and US Deputy CTO. - [**Power to the Public**](https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691216638/power-to-the-public) by Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank (2021) — Endorsed by Barack Obama. Defines public interest technology around Design, Data, and Delivery. - [**We the Possibility**](https://www.wethepossibility.com/) by Mitch Weiss (2021) — Framework for shifting from "Probability Government" to "Possibility Government." - [**Solving Public Problems**](https://solvingpublicproblems.org/) by Beth Simone Noveck (2021) — Four skills public problem solvers need. Includes exercises and free online course. - [**A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide**](https://cydharrell.com/book/) by Cyd Harrell (2020) — The essential field guide for technologists entering public sector work. ### AI & Technology Policy - [**The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance**](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-ai-governance-9780197579329) edited by Justin B. Bullock et al. (2024) — 49 chapters covering value foundations, regulatory ecosystem, and implementation. - [**Rewiring Democracy**](https://www.schneier.com/) by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders (2025) — How AI is reshaping lawmaking, regulation, courts, and civic participation. - [**A Hacker's Mind**](https://www.schneier.com/books/a-hackers-mind/) by Bruce Schneier (2023) — Expands "hacking" concept to economic, political, and social systems. ### Foundational Works - [**Beyond Transparency**](https://beyondtransparency.org/) edited by Brett Goldstein & Lauren Dyson — Code for America anthology on open data. - [**Lean Startup**](https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation-ebook/dp/B004J4XGN6/) by Eric Ries — Essential methodology applicable to government innovation. - [**Cognitive Surplus**](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus) by Clay Shirky — Understanding collective action in the digital age. - [**The Information**](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_Theory,_a_Flood) by James Gleick — The history and theory of information. - [**Democracy in America**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America) by Alexis de Tocqueville — Still relevant for understanding American civic life. ## Capital Sources & Accelerators ### Venture Funds - [**GovTech Fund**](http://govtechfund.com/) — $50M+ under management across two early-stage funds. 30+ investments with portfolio companies raising $500M+ in follow-on capital. - [**Govtech Ventures**](https://govtechventures.com/) — Early-stage focus on state/local government modernization. ### Accelerators - [**Leading Cities**](https://leadingcities.org/) — Global Smart City non-profit organization connecting government leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors around sustainability and resillience; funds pilots for winning startups. - [**PUBLIC**](https://www.public.io/) — UK-based, operating across UK, France, Germany, Denmark. GovStart accelerator has supported 36+ companies. - [**SmartCityX**](https://en.smartcity-x.com/) — Stage-agnostic community led by Scrum Ventures with Japanese corporate partners. - [**Smart City Works**](https://smartcityworks.io/) — Washington DC-area accelerator named Top 12 Global Smart City Accelerator. ### Foundations - [**Bloomberg Philanthropies**](https://www.bloomberg.org/government-innovation/) — The largest funder in government innovation. Distributed $3.7B in 2024 alone. Key programs includ [What Works Cities](https://whatworkscities.bloomberg.org/), the [Mayors Challenge](https://www.bloomberg.org/government-innovation/spurring-innovation-in-cities/mayors-challenge/), [Innovation Teams (i-teams)](https://www.bloomberg.org/government-innovation/spurring-innovation-in-cities/i-teams-and-innovation-programs/), and the [Local Infrastructure Hub](https://localinfrastructure.org/). - [**Knight Foundation**](https://knightfoundation.org/) — Relaunched Knight Emerging City Champions in 2024. Over $25M invested in civic tech since 2010. - [**Luminate**](https://luminategroup.com/) — ~$320M across 240 groups in 18 countries; ~$50M in U.S. civic tech. Part of the Omidyar Group. - [**Ford Foundation Technology and Society**](https://www.fordfoundation.org/) — $80M budget. $20M+ commitment to PIT in 2024. - [**Public Interest Tech Infrastructure Fund**](https://www.publicinteresttech.fund/) — Pooled fund with Ford, McGovern, Pivotal Ventures, Siegel Family Endowment. 24 grants, $16M+ disbursed. - [**Schmidt Sciences**](https://www.schmidtsciences.com/) — Social Safety Net Product Studio ($13M initiative) supporting 12 grantees including U.S. Digital Response. - [**Rockefeller Foundation**](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/) — Launched AI Readiness Project (November 2025) expanding to all 50 states. - [**Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN)**](https://pit-un.org/) — 63 academic institutions. Over $16M deployed to 154 projects since 2019. ## Networks & Communities ### Professional Networks - [**Alliance of Civic Technologists**](https://civictechnologists.org/) — Successor to CfA Brigade Network. Members include SF Civic Tech, Code for Philly, BetaNYC, Chi Hack Night, Code for Boston. [Join Discord](https://discord.com/invite/EM6ywtMhkP) (500+ members). - [**ELGL**](https://elgl.org/) — 4,800+ members across all 50 states. Programs include GovLove Podcast, Morning Buzz blog, Top Influencers awards, and Analyst Academy. - [**GovLoop**](https://www.govloop.com/) — 300,000+ members. Featured Contributor Program, annual NextGen Government Training Summit. - [**All Tech Is Human**](https://alltechishuman.org/) — Slack community, job board, mentorship program for responsible tech careers. - [**Civic Tech Field Guide**](https://civictech.guide/) — World's largest collection of civic tech projects. Field Guide Friday newsletter (4,300+ subscribers). ### Newsletters Subscribe to stay current on civic tech jobs, news, and opportunities: - [Field Guide Friday](https://civictech.guide/): Weekly curated jobs, product launches, funding deadlines. 4,300+ subscribers. - [#PublicSectorJobBoard](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/): Rebecca Heywood's monthly curated tech and innovation government jobs. - [Dave Guarino's Substack](https://daveguarino.substack.com/): Deep analysis on government technology accountability. - [Interweave Gov](https://interweavegov.substack.com/): Global digital government developments. - [Digital.gov](https://digital.gov/): Official GSA resource. 18,000+ subscribers covering federal digital services. ## Job Boards - [**All Tech Is Human**](https://alltechishuman.org/responsible-tech-job-board) — Leading replacement. Jobs in Responsible AI, Trust & Safety, Tech & Democracy, and PIT. - [**Tech Jobs for Good**](https://techjobsforgood.com/) — 2,650+ mission-driven organizations with required salary ranges. - [**Bill Hunt's "Cool Govtech Jobs"**](https://billhunt.dev/jobs/) — Curated USAJobs listings. Best resource for federal tech positions. - [**GovernmentJobs (NEOGOV)**](https://www.governmentjobs.com/) — Largest aggregator for federal, state, local, and tribal governments. - [**CIO.GOV Technology Jobs Portal**](https://www.cio.gov/government-technology-jobs/) — Official federal CIO Council gateway. - [**Tech to Gov**](https://www.techtogov.org/finding-jobs) — Job fairs and recruitment events for tech-to-government transitions. ## What's Next? Recognizing that your time in public office will eventually come to an end — fellowships end, elections happen — it is just as important to plan on how to take advantage of your experience for your career. Here are some tips for ending your tour of service you should consider even when you begin: Embedded slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAEmMuWbgl8/view?embed --- # Government IT Spending > A practical overview of the trends in the $200B+ in government IT spending URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/it-spending/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: data, market --- ![2021 US Government IT Spending Overview](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-overview.png) Everything we do now uses technology — same goes for government. It just uses bad and old technology and spends too much money on it. Companies provide technology to execute policy such as business permitting apps for economic development or social services text-message systems for the safety net. Understandably, the market for government technology is massive: **nearly $200B annually**. ![2021 US Government IT Spending Overview](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-trends.png) ## Breaking down the~$200B market opportunity Overall [Federal IT Spend](https://itdashboard.gov/drupal/summary/000) seems huge: $90.9B (and it is). ![2021 US Government IT Spending Overview](https://abhinemani.com/img/it-spend-1.png) But sans DOD, that Federal Spend of $53.2B is actually lower than State ($60.6B) OR Local ($58.1B). ## Pulling out DOD, federal, state, and local spending are similar (~$53-60B) ![2021 US Government IT Spending Overview - Without DOD](https://abhinemani.com/img/it-spend-2.png) So much attention goes to the feds/DC, but market opportunity is larger in [State + Local Government](https://www.govtech.com/navigator/data/2019-state-and-local-annual-it-spending.html) ($118.7B) than Federal Government, and that number should only grow with post-COVID investments... ### ...and it's growing In President Biden’s 2021 stimulus plan: additional $9 Billion for technology — specifically $200M for staffing up federal technologists. (More to come.) If you're interested in learning more, get in touch: [@abhinemani](https://twitter.com/@abhinemani) --- # Building Open Data Products > Key design principles for meaningful transparency tools URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/open-data/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: market, data, startups --- Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149984557 ### 1. Focus on the User This is a picture of our first data portal from the city of Los Angeles. ![DataLA open data portal homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_XagIg9Nsbjy3rC04R3K-Gw.png) This was launched in June 2014. I started a few months after the launch — in September — and I figured it was a good opportunity to get some feedback and do some user testing. I went around and started doing some basic user feedback. “What is data?” was the question that I got asked the most. So we decided to show, not tell: ![Los Angeles open data map of February building permits](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_P1-8oirxs26tsm-wTFoqDQ.png) We just put a map, we put points on a map that’s kind of beautiful and simple. It shows building permits that you can actually zoom in and find them near you. We keep it relevant too; if there’s a particular event one week, like this last weekend in Los Angeles we had a big bike festival called CicLAvia, where they shut down parts of the street to let people just bike all along the street, so we put a map of the route front-and center. We made the data portal relevant and visual, and here’s what happened when we did that: ![Chart: data.lacity.org bounce rate fell from 50% to 5% after the redesign](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_iLBUZy5JvXlk-XixLNrt9g.png) When building open data products, focus on the user. ### 2. Change the Citizen Experience We tend to think of open data as something that’s on a portal or maybe on an app that someone’s built, or maybe you download to your computer and do some research on. I think that’s just the start, because the open data that we’re providing can be really meaningful to private businesses, and the interactions you all are creating every day for citizens. Can we take this data that typically is hidden, and put it into the palm of your hand? Here's what's possible when government data goes to work inside consumer platforms: ![Trulia listing with a House Facts panel showing past code violations](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_W8oGyMmncIiI3y7QGQpP9g.png) --- # Data and Dashboards > Dashboards, Performance Management, and the Trouble with Different Kinds of Data URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/dashboards/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: market, data, startups --- Government dashboards have taken many forms, but all struggle with the fact that civic data takes different forms and accordingly have different values when it comes to building useful data products, specifically dashboards. With renewed interest in government data and analytics, developers and designers should be mindful of the different kinds of data and their limitations independently and together for enabling data-driven decisions. [![Data Sweet Spot](https://abhinemani.com/img/data-venn-diagram2.jpg 'Venn Diagram of Data Alignment')](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/) (For an in-depth review, see ["What I've learned: Three Different Kinds of Civic Data".) ### Transactional / Raw Data First is transactional or operational data. This is what the city’s doing on a day-to-day basis. Easiest metaphor for that is crime: what crime is happening in the city and where? ### Performance Data The next kind of data is performance metrics. This area is popularized by initiatives such as COMPStat or CitiStat where they look at service delivery levels for performance management through what the private sector would describe as KPIs. In contrast to transactional data, this is aggregate. Instead of looking at every single call that came in to 311, say, you would ask, “What’s our average wait time for it to go in call?” Or “What’s our average time to resolution for a pressing call?” ### Quality of Life The final piece of this puzzle is probably the most obvious to real citizens: quality of life. How are things going in the city, and more directly, how do people feel about it? Organizations like Pew and others try to collect that data usually at the national level, rarely at the local level, but this is the kind of information we need to know as we govern cities because that’s the *ultimate* barometer of our success. ## The Trouble with Dashboards These three kinds of data -- raw, performance and quality of life -- are simply and clearly related. ![Data Process](https://abhinemani.com/img/data-flow.jpeg) More importantly, alignment of transactions, performance, and quality of life promises to be the "sweet spot" for data-driven decision making in the public sector. But the fact that these datasets are decidedly of different kinds means that straightforward dashboarding attempts with transformative ambitions may fail. Indeed, many have, suffering both from user indifference and structural barriers. Cvic data has historically been too messy and the decision-making processes around them less direct, making the promise of clear causal inteventions more of a dream than reality. (See "Open Data: Did We Go the Wrong Way?".) ![Data Challenge 1](https://abhinemani.com/img/data1.png) ![Data Challenge 2](https://abhinemani.com/img/data2.png) ![Data Challenge 3](https://abhinemani.com/img/data3.png) And that's putting aside the technical issues of data access, reliability, recency, accuracy, and collection: ![Data Process](https://abhinemani.com/img/data4.png) ![Data Process](https://abhinemani.com/img/data8.png) ![Data Process](https://abhinemani.com/img/data6.png) The dashboards that have found success have targeted focus on key stakeholders, and are built around a decision-making process (or person), such as the Mayor of Los Angeles' dashboard](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/): Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FYnWs0jE0YI?si=UNA79vxlGS_kaCC-&start=578 But as the digital transformation becomes more real as does the potential for new opportunties to connect the dots with good government data. ![Connecting the Dots](https://abhinemani.com/img/data7.png) --- > **Deep Dive: How Civic Data Works** > [Open Lecture in Browser](https://abhinemani.com/decks/lectures/CAPP6.pdf) > > Embedded PDF: https://abhinemani.com/decks/lectures/CAPP6.pdf --- # GovTech Buyer Trends > Overview of the structural enablers for technology innovation, and the new buyers driving change URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/trends/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: themes, GovTech, hiring --- ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/2021-spend-growth.png) Based on dozens of interviews with CIOs, CTOs, and other departmental heads, along with a [unprecedented survey of 400+ local government decision makers](https://www.civicpulse.org/it-trends), three trends have been fundamentally changing the buyer landscape in government technology over the last ten years, which are now coming to a head: new leadership, personnel turnover, and SaaS expectations. And indeed the pandemic accelerated those drivers. Together, these demand-side shifts not only promise continued growth for the industry, but also more activity, innovation, and competition in the marketplace. ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-overview.png) ## A New Brand of IT Manager Historically, the IT department was considered a secondary administrative function. In cities, that meant an IT group (a manager and a few analysts/engineers) would report into an Operations Director, then a General Manager, and finally a city manager, or city council. As the role of technology has elevated throughout society, the same has happened structurally within government. After the White House in 2009 by appointing the first Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer, states and cities — that could — followed suit. Various senior technology roles — CIO, CTO, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Digital Officer, etc — now exist in over 40 of the 50 of the largest cities, and in every single state. Along with those roles came the elevation of the IT departments to “cabinet-level” meaning that at the very least technology was more publicly visible as a priority for the government. Also, it promises to enable smarter and broader use of technology as the interdepartmental connections grow deeper — and the operational leaders (e.g. GM of Buildings) better understand technology themselves. These reinforcing trends — new IT roles, elevated departments, and technical operational leadership — should open up the previously entrenched, legacy-dominated government technology market to new players on the outside, just like on the inside. ## Empty Seats, Open Opportunities Strong leaders cultivate strong teams, but government CIOs have had a tough time, especially at the local level. Indeed, hiring technology talent is difficult for even the most financially generous tech companies. The last few decades have seen a "hollowing out" of government technical talent, with budget crises and political conflicts leading to IT departments sometimes with more job openings than current employees. (Furloughs and early retirements enable agencies to reduce spend but maintain opportunity.) Thus, governments struggle to staff against the systems they are required to maintain. (In part because COBOL engineers are just as hard to recruit as data scientists maybe harder.) During 2020 through early 2021, the pandemic exacerbated this challenge. These empty seats strain the whole organization, making innovation more difficult. CIOs must keep the lights on, not change the wiring. Indeed, many entrepreneurs reported that contracts slowed in 2021 because their government contacts had turned over or were furloughed. But based on interviews with 20+ government C-level leaders, governments are looking to turnkey SaaS platforms to enable a reorientation of their IT shops. Having had experience with SaaS tools — more below — many CIOs see the opportunity to hire generalists, both technical or not, in "digital service" teams that focus less on custom code and more on the user experience, leveraging a host of vendors to get the job done. Currently, the White House, some states, and many large U.S. cities have a digital service or innovation team, and more are surely on the way in 2022. As modern, digital professionals fill the empty seats in government IT, they will be looking for modern, digital partners in the private sector. Accordingly as IT departments evolve — effectively turning over — the software systems they had been support will need to change as well, a rare chance for churn in a typically stagnant buyer marketplace. ![GovTech Market Trends Tailwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-trends.png) ## New SaaS Expectations: Fast, Simple & Modern The fear coming into the pandemic within local government was profound. Local governments live off their businesses, and are responsible for the majority of public health: the nightmare scenario of no revenue and unprecedented expense. The reality, fortunately, was not so bleak — in fact, most report the budget surpluses through the pandemic. And the federal and state recovery dollars continue to flow (unevenly, however) into local coffers. ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-it-spending-snapshot.png) That said, this budgetary windfall should not be seen as a free lunch for software vendors. Over the three dozen local government leaders engaged, none specified that recovery funds were being allocated for IT “capital projects," which is how IT has historically been procured. Many governments did, however, find money during the first two years of the pandemic for **rapid deployments, which is where SaaS tools found traction**. Across the board, governments were forced to adopt and support new digital tools — primarily productivity tools for remote work — and many even rapidly integrated quick deploy SaaS solutions to enhance the digital experience for engagement with residents. As government technology moves from admin-facing to public-facing, the expectations change, and so CIOs have begun to expect private-sector grade digital experiences from their technology vendors. But because many legacy vendors have not been able to modernize their citizen/customer experiences, governments have begun to look at new solutions, including many SaaS solutions "layering" atop the legacy solutions. On the other hand, some have turned to the private sector: A few even reported more substantial, yet rapid deployments of ZenDesk. The combination of limited funding for capital projects and the heightened expectations for digital should persist and intensify moving forward, opening the door for innovation or disruption. --- *This briefing is based off of interviews and research from over 20 government officials, a handful of universities and research centers, and a number of GovTech entrepreneurs, conducted in Fall 2021.* --- # 2025-2026 GovTech Forecast > Headwinds and Tailwinds shaping the market. URL: https://abhinemani.com/academy/2025/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: themes, GovTech, hiring --- ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/2025-cover.png) Over the last decade, I’ve had the privilege—and challenge—of watching the GovTech market grow from fringe experiment to investment-grade category. I’ve seen cities digitize procurement, rewire permitting, rethink budgeting. I’ve helped build platforms, brief mayors, and launch labs. But today, something feels different. We’re at an inflection point. Not just a product cycle shift, but a structural moment—a redefinition of what the public sector can do, what it should do, and who it can do it with. The signals aren’t always obvious. They emerge in fiscal policy reports, PE prospectuses, and job vacancy data. But taken together, they form a coherent picture: one of constraint and opportunity, of headwinds and tailwinds, and of a market that will reward those who understand both. ## I. Headwinds: The Structural Limits of Innovation ![2025 GovTech Headwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/2025-headwinds.jpg) ### 1. The Fiscal Cliff is Now Structural ![2025 GovTech Headwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/2025-priorities.png) What began as temporary pandemic stimulus has become an expectation—one that cities can no longer meet. The expiration of federal relief dollars has left a vacuum in local budgets, forcing painful recalibrations. This isn’t just belt-tightening—it’s structural erosion. Big cities, in particular, find themselves boxed in. Revenue tools are capped. Labor costs are rising. Capital markets remain jittery. In this environment, innovation becomes an unaffordable luxury—unless it’s framed, from the outset, as a form of cost control. ### 2. Policy Instability Breeds Institutional Paralysis When federal and state policies change direction every election cycle, local governments stall. Recent attacks on DEI programs, sustainability targets, and inclusive civic design have forced agencies to abandon carefully crafted strategies in favor of legal triage. Meanwhile, even well-intentioned reforms (like new grant frameworks) have introduced friction into adoption. Innovation thrives on consistency. But cities today are being asked to sprint while the pavement shifts beneath their feet. ### 3. Government Capacity Is Reaching a Breaking Point Vacancy rates in state and local government remain alarmingly high—often double historical norms. The “Silver Tsunami” is no longer on the horizon; it’s here. And with it goes decades of institutional knowledge, technical fluency, and reform leadership. Even the best tools in the world are inert without people to implement them. The bandwidth to pilot, train, and scale has become the new bottleneck. ![2025 GovTech Headwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/2025-hiring.png) ## II. Tailwinds: The Forces Enabling a New Civic Infrastructure ![2025 GovTech Tailwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/2025-tailwinds.png) ### 1. Philanthropy is Widening Its Aperture For years, foundations have funded public outcomes. Today, they’re funding the means to those outcomes. Infrastructure. Capacity. Technology. MacArthur, Ford, Knight, and others are stepping in—not just to close programmatic gaps, but to reimagine public service delivery itself. > “Philanthropy cannot sit aside.”— MacArthur Foundation CEO Their money moves faster, with fewer strings and more ambition. And increasingly, they want to fund things government might not yet be ready to buy—but desperately needs. ### 2. Private Equity is Betting Big on Integration A decade ago, GovTech was a curiosity. Today, it’s an asset class. Investors now understand that what makes the public sector difficult—its complexity, its procurement inertia, its regulatory depth—is also what makes it sticky. And profitable. The latest wave of acquisitions isn’t about siloed point solutions. It’s about assembling interoperable platforms—integrating budgeting, procurement, payments, and permitting under one operating system for local government. This isn’t consolidation for efficiency’s sake. It’s platform-building for resilience. > “The GovTech market rebounded significantly in 2024 and is poised for a record-setting 2025.”— Jeff Cook ### 3. Public-Private Partnerships Are Entering Their Third Wave The first wave was physical infrastructure. The second was digital access. The third, now underway, is administrative capability: grant administration, citizen engagement, business licensing, revenue recovery. Governments are increasingly willing to outsource what they don’t need to own. But unlike legacy outsourcing, this is a co-creation model. Vendors are expected to share risk, design collaboratively, and deliver results—not just code. ## III. Strategic Guidance: What It Takes to Thrive Now Drawing from ten years of market watching, product building, and public advising, I’d offer three imperatives for anyone operating in or adjacent to this space: ### 1. Be a Capacity Builder, Not Just a Vendor The question every government buyer is silently asking: Can you help me do more with less? If your product adds complexity, extends onboarding, or requires massive retraining, it won’t survive—even if it’s brilliant. The best tools are those that blend into workflows, automate pain points, and free up staff to focus on higher-order work. Innovation must compound—not consume—capacity. ### 2. Design for a Post-Funding Future Grant cycles are fickle. Budgets get cut. But the need for modernization persists. Design your product or service so it doesn’t require a federal grant to get off the ground. Show a path to sustainability in year two. And treat philanthropy or stimulus funding as acceleration, not dependency. It’s time to stop selling pilots—and start delivering platforms. ### 3. Build for the Ecosystem, Not Just the End User The most resilient companies in GovTech are those that integrate deeply—with upstream systems, adjacent vendors, and the client’s internal infrastructure. APIs are now table stakes. So are clean data exports, accessible UIs, and SOC compliance. And beyond the technical layer, the best firms design for partnership. They understand procurement cycles. They offer shared services. They know when to lead and when to support. ## IV. The Future is Already Arriving—Unevenly, Urgently The past decade in GovTech has been about proving what's possible: that governments can be smart, data-driven, digitally responsive. The next decade will be about proving what’s sustainable. Can cities modernize without breaking their budgets? Can vendors scale without extracting trust? Can public institutions adopt innovation without losing their soul? The answers aren’t pre-written. But they will be shaped by those who show up now—with humility, with clarity, and with a deep respect for the complexity of the public sector. This moment isn’t just about new technology. It’s about rewriting the social contract between government and those who seek to serve it. And after a decade in the field, I can tell you: the real work is just beginning. --- # An easy way to launch your AI strategy: become bot friendly > As an experiment, I spent some time optimizing my own site for AI. Here's how, and what I learned. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2026/10/20/AI-Readable/ Published: 2026-10-20 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: AI, GovTech, Technology --- Paul Graham put the stakes in two sentences: > To publish something on a paywalled site is to make it invisible. If AIs can't find it, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist. > > These two sentences aren't 100% true yet, but they will only get truer. > > — Paul Graham ([@paulg](https://x.com/paulg/status/2111827351608725669)) Paywalls are rare in government. But a permit guide buried in a scanned PDF is invisible to an AI in much the same way. Residents already ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity how to get a permit or what the council decided, and if the answer isn't readable, the AI answers anyway, from worse sources. Right now everyone is thinking about building their own bot, government especially. I understand the instinct, but a question comes first: is your content readable by the AIs your residents already use? A bot is only as good as the content behind it, and clean content gets you found everywhere else too. It's an old argument of mine. In 2020 I wrote "[Ubers as Ambulances?](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/08/28/Ubers-as-Ambulances/)" ("And other ideas to make consumer apps more civic"), arguing for fewer new civic apps and more effort making the platforms people already use more civic. AI assistants are the newest of those platforms. So over the weekend I tried it on my own site, working with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, while I directed and made the judgment calls. Here's what we built, what broke, and what I'd tell anyone weighing the same project. ### Same address, two readers The core idea is simple: a person and an AI agent can ask for the same page and each get the version built for them. Flip between them below to see what each receives for my recent essay on declining trust in local government. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-two-readers.html People get the designed page. An agent needs clean text, a title, a date and a link it can cite, not 40 KB of styling and scripts. Every browser and AI agent announces the format it prefers, and a growing number of agents now ask for Markdown, a plain-text format language models read easily. So I set up three small rules at Cloudflare, which sits in front of my site: two serve a page's Markdown copy at the same address when asked, and one adds headers pointing agents to my site guide and skills. Browsers see no difference. Agents get pages that are, on average, **77% smaller**. The trust essay goes from about 40 KB to 7.4 KB, every word intact. (N.B. Cloudflare sells a one-click version of this on a paid plan. Three rules on the free one did the job.) ![Same address, two readers: a person gets the designed page, an AI agent gets clean Markdown, 82% smaller](https://abhinemani.com/img/ai-readable-two-readers.png) Poke at it yourself. Pick a page and a request type, and you'll see the real response my site returned. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-request-playground.html ### The essays, research and tools Most of the work went into the writing itself: more than a decade of essays, plus [my research, lectures and tools for the GovTech field](https://abhinemani.com/academy/). **A welcome mat and a map.** My robots.txt now names 13 AI crawlers outright. An [llms.txt](https://abhinemani.com/llms.txt) file, an emerging convention, acts as a front door: a short bio, how to attribute my work, and 111 links to every essay, lesson and case study, each with a one-line summary. **A clean copy of every page.** All 105 full-text pages now have a Markdown twin, and even pages with no article text return a short summary instead of an error. For agents that want everything at once, [llms-full.txt](https://abhinemani.com/llms-full.txt) holds the whole archive in a single file. **Charts as sentences.** Most agents can't run the JavaScript behind my interactive charts. My first pass left raw chart code in the Markdown, more than half of the trust essay's file. Now each chart arrives as one sentence carrying its data: trust in local government fell 13 points, from 54% to 41%, with the source attached. Flip the card to compare. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-before-after.html?card=charts ### The calculator and two agent skills This is the part I'm most excited about. Being *readable* is table stakes. The next step is being *usable*: teaching an AI to do something the way I would. "Agent skills" are short instruction files an AI can load when a task calls for them. I published two, each with a checksum so an agent can confirm it hasn't been altered. [**GovTech market sizing**](https://abhinemani.com/.well-known/agent-skills/govtech-market-sizing/SKILL.md) replaces the usual top-down guess from total public spending with my bottom-up method: size the market by jurisdiction tier, using real counts of governments, tiered pricing and realistic adoption. It points to my [GovTech TAM/SAM calculator](https://abhinemani.com/govtech-market/), built on 2022 Census of Governments finance data. [**Citing my work**](https://abhinemani.com/.well-known/agent-skills/cite-abhi-nemani/SKILL.md) tells an AI how to quote me faithfully, never to invent a quote, and to describe my role as of an essay's date, so a 2015 piece is credited to LA's Chief Data Officer, not whatever my title is today. Here's the path an agent now takes through the site, from checking whether it's welcome to reading the whole archive. Step through it to see the real file at each stop. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-crawler-route.html ### Saying clearly who I am I asked ChatGPT to review the site cold. Its verdict was "very AI-friendly," and it caught something I'd missed: my site described me four different ways. The homepage, the About page, my structured data and my CV each had their own version, and an AI stitching them together got four answers. Now one sentence leads everywhere, and my homepage, which had no main headline in its code, finally has one that starts with my name: > Abhi Nemani is a GovTech and finance entrepreneur, advisor and scholar with more than 15 years building technology and scaling innovation for the public sector. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-before-after.html?card=bio ChatGPT also offered a fair caveat: files like llms.txt and agent skills are "useful experiments," and ordinary, crawlable HTML still matters most. ### Testing it like it matters Configuration isn't the same as working, so a suite of 100 automated tests checks the live site the way a browser, an AI agent and a crawler would see it. Looking at what an agent actually received surfaced problems no checklist would have: four links that pointed nowhere, and one of the AI's own fixes briefly stripping the address from every link. A before-and-after comparison caught that before it shipped. Humbling, and exactly the point. Today the site passes all 100 checks. Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/agent-scorecard.html ### What I'd tell public-sector leaders and GovTech founders **Before you build a bot, make your content readable.** A chatbot answers from what it can read, and so does every other AI your residents already use. (None of this is a knock on the clerks and webmasters working with the tools and procurement rules they were handed. It's a reason to give them better ones.) **Readable comes first, then usable.** Clean text, clear headings, dates and canonical links matter more than any AI-specific file. After that, a procurement office could publish a skill for its bidding process, or a city one for its permits. You aren't only being found, you're shaping how the work gets done. **Say who you are, once, and verify.** Pick one description and use it everywhere. Then test what a bot actually receives, because real problems hid in pages that looked fine. ### What I don't know yet Readability is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. The open question is whether AI systems will actually cite this work. Each month I'll ask the same handful of questions ("Who are leading GovTech advisors?" "How big is the local government software market?") and see whether I show up, and how I'm described. Graham is right that none of this is 100% true yet. But if AIs can't find your work, it doesn't exist for a growing number of readers, and I'd rather mine exist. It's early yet. If you're working on making government information readable by AI, I'd love to compare notes. Ask your favorite AI about GovTech market sizing, and let me know what it says. --- # We don't trust local government anymore. > Trust in local and state governments has dropped to an alarming rate URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2026/09/21/Trust/ Published: 2026-09-21 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: AI, Transparency, Public Service --- For years, the most reliable line in local government was some version of *we're not Washington*. Congress could melt down and the White House could dominate every news cycle, but the city still plowed the streets, and residents gave it credit for that. New data from the Partnership for Public Service's [State of Public Trust 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026) report suggests that line is losing its power. ### "We're not Washington" has stopped working *Trust in local and state government has fallen 12 to 13 points in four years, and it now rises and falls with Washington. That leaves less room for the service-first story cities have always told.* **Chart: Four years, three levels of government, one direction.** From 2022 to 2026, trust in local government fell 13 points (54% to 41%), trust in state government fell 12 points (50% to 38%), and trust in the federal government fell from 35% to 27%. *Source: [Partnership for Public Service, State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026).* ## The numbers, without the noise The year-to-year swings in this survey are distracting, so ignore them. Compare 2022 to 2026 instead. Trust in local government fell from 54% to 41%, and trust in state government from 50% to 38%. Put plainly, about one in four people who trusted their city four years ago have stopped. ## The lockstep problem The drop isn't even the most worrying part. It's that local trust now moves in step with federal trust. Last year, federal fell six points, local seven, state four. Cities used to be graded on their own curve. Now, when Washington's reputation sinks, city hall sinks with it, regardless of whether the buses ran on time. ## The waste paradox Here's the strangest number in the report, and it says a lot about the reputation local governments are now inheriting. **Chart: How Americans describe the federal government.** In 2026, 75% of Americans call the federal government wasteful (up from 61% in 2025) and 72% call it corrupt (between 67% and 74% every year since 2021). 57% say it is accountable for what it does (up from 42% in 2024), 50% say it keeps them safe, and 37% say it has a positive impact on the country. *Orange marks negative traits, blue marks positive ones. Source: [Partnership for Public Service, State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026).* After a year in which the federal government made cutting waste its loudest priority, the share of Americans calling it wasteful *rose*, from 61% to 75%. Nearly as many call it corrupt. You can't cut your way to a reputation for competence, it seems, and local governments inherit whatever reputation "government" has. ## An X marks the spot Plot trust by party and the lines form an almost perfect X. **Chart: Trust in the federal government flips with the presidency.** From 2024 (Biden's last year) to 2026 (Trump's second), Republicans' trust in the federal government rose from 10% to 42%, Democrats' fell from 39% to 17%, and independents' went from 19% to 18%. *Source: [Partnership for Public Service, State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026).* Republicans went from 10% to 42% trust in the federal government; Democrats went from 39% to 17%. Independents stayed stuck under 20% the whole time. Trust in government has stopped being a judgment about performance and become a statement about identity. That's exactly the lens local leaders spent decades staying out from under. ## Everyone else is having a terrible time Now for the finding that should keep every city manager up at night, in a good way. **Chart: Good experiences build trust, but they stay private.** In 2026, 49% say their own experiences with government are mostly positive, but only 37% think most people's are. Among those with positive experiences, 45% trust the federal government, versus 10% among those with negative experiences. *Source: [Partnership for Public Service, State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026).* Nearly half of Americans say their own experiences with government have been mostly positive. But only 37% think most *other* people's have been. We've collectively decided the DMV is miserable for everyone except ourselves. And experience matters enormously: people with good experiences are more than four times as likely to trust government as those with bad ones. ## The people beat the institution Meanwhile, views of public servants hit their highest point since the Partnership started asking. **Chart: People trust the workers more than the institution.** In 2026, 65% say civil servants are competent (57% in 2025) and 61% say they are committed to helping people like them (56% in 2025), while only 27% trust the federal government overall (33% in 2025). *Source: [Partnership for Public Service, State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026).* Two-thirds of Americans now call civil servants competent. Americans are perfectly able to distrust "government" while respecting the people who work in it. That distinction is an opening. ## Why a dashboard won't fix this The obvious prescription is transparency: publish the metrics, show the work. I built LA's first Mayor's Performance Dashboard, and I've also written about the limits of dashboards since. A chart of permit turnaround times doesn't change how a resident feels. What changes it is the experience itself, and whether anyone hears about it. The OECD research cited in the report backs this up: everyday service delivery drives trust in local government, while big-picture policy drives trust nationally. So the lever is in cities' hands, but it's not a data portal. It's closing the loop when someone reports a pothole. It's letting residents see the people who fixed it. It's making one good experience visible enough that the neighbors stop assuming theirs would be bad. ## One honest caveat The 2026 survey had 1,000 respondents, a ±3.1 point margin, and was fielded during the Iran war and a partial shutdown, which likely pushed trust down across the board. Treat any single year with caution. The four-year slope, though, is hard to wish away. "We're not Washington" was never really a strategy. It was a gift from the public, and they're taking it back. The cities that keep their residents' trust will be the ones that earn it one visible interaction at a time. --- *Data: Partnership for Public Service and Impact Research, national surveys of U.S. adults, 2021 to 2026. The 2026 survey of 1,000 adults ran March 31 to April 5, with a margin of error of ±3.1 points. Read the full [State of Public Trust in Government 2026](https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library/reports/state-of-trust-2026) report.* --- # From "Bowling Alone" to Coding Alone > AI coding tools are eroding the mentorship, code review, and community that built software's social capital — and why we need to rebuild it on purpose. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2026/05/17/Bowling-Alone/ Published: 2026-05-17 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: AI, Society, Engineering --- I learned software through other people. Not just from classes or manuals, but from strangers who answered questions, maintainers who pushed back on bad assumptions, colleagues who thought out loud, and civic technologists who believed that building together was part of the point. Some of the most important lessons I learned about technology were not really about code. They were about judgment, patience, trust, and the habits of working in public. That is why AI coding tools feel both thrilling and unsettling. I use them constantly. [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/), [Claude Code](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code), [GitHub Copilot](https://github.com/features/copilot), and tools like them make me faster. They help me get unstuck. They let small teams and solo builders do things that used to require far more time, money, and institutional support. But they also make it easier to bypass the people, practices, and public conversations that once formed developers. Now we can code alone. What worries me is not that AI makes us code alone in a literal sense. The worry is that it lets us solve problems without passing through the social rituals that once made software a community: asking, explaining, reviewing, arguing, mentoring, and leaving traces for the next person. ![Changing the conversation](https://abhinemani.com/img/coding-alone-2.png) ## The Social Capital of Useful Strangers When Robert Putnam published [Bowling Alone](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bowling-Alone-Revised-and-Updated/Robert-D-Putnam/9781982130848), his sharpest observation was that Americans had not stopped bowling. They had stopped bowling in leagues. The individual act persisted. The communal scaffolding disappeared. Putnam’s concern was not bowling itself. It was social capital: the trust, reciprocity, shared norms, and weak ties that make cooperation easier. Leagues mattered because they taught people to show up, coordinate, disagree, forgive, and do small things for people outside their closest circle. Software had its own version of that. Open-source projects, issue threads, code reviews, forums, hack nights, and standards bodies were not just places where technical work happened. They were places where technical social capital accumulated. Marc Dunkelman’s [The Vanishing Neighbor](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393352078) helps explain the specific layer being lost. We have not lost all relationships. We have lost the middle ring: not close family or friends, not broadcast audiences, but the people [“not as close as kith or kin, but not as distant as a mere acquaintance.”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-where-goes-the-neighborhood/2014/08/10/8a137cde-1f39-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html) Software culture once produced those relationships in abundance: the [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/) stranger at 2 a.m., the open-source co-maintainer in another time zone, the senior engineer whose blog post taught you something years later, the person at a hack night who understood the weird API problem before you could explain it cleanly. That was social capital in practical form. Not friendship exactly, and not professional networking in the LinkedIn sense. It was a loose web of trust and reciprocity among people who might never meet but still made one another better. You learned because someone else had left a trace. You contributed because someone else eventually would need one. I [wrote earlier](https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/12/28/Organizational-Kid/) about the collapse of institutional trust. Software’s commons was a strange exception: a place where showing up still meant something. The visible artifact was code. The invisible output was judgment. A person learned what a good bug report looked like, how to ask a question without wasting other people’s time, why backward compatibility was moral as much as technical, and why “working” was not the same as “ready.” Cleverness was not the same as stewardship. AI can explain these things. But explanation is different from participating in the practices that sustain them. ## What it Means to Code Alone Software is entering its own bowling-alone moment. Developers are writing more code than ever, with astonishingly capable tools. The output looks healthy. The social layer is weakening. The loss is easy to miss because nothing looks broken at first. The code still gets written. The bug still gets fixed. The developer may even be happier. What disappears is the small social transaction that used to surround the work. You no longer have to explain your confusion to another person. You no longer have to wait for a maintainer. You no longer have to search through old threads and slowly discover how a community thinks. You no longer have to turn your private problem into public knowledge. In many ways, that is a relief. But it is also a loss. Those rituals were not just inefficient ways of getting answers. They were how software created social capital. They turned strangers into a profession. [Pair programming](https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/pairing/) made the old ideal literal: one driver at the keyboard, one navigator thinking out loud. Companies like [Pivotal Labs](https://tanzu.vmware.com/labs) treated that practice as central to how software teams learned and worked. AI increasingly occupies the place once held by the second human. The driver is still there. The navigator is now a model. The developer using an AI coding assistant is not alone in the old sense. They are in constant dialogue. But the dialogue is private, instantaneous, and unreciprocated. It solves the immediate problem while leaving little public residue: no searchable thread, no comment history, no record of false starts, no trace of the judgment that led from one approach to another. The technical evidence points in the same direction. The [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/technology/ai-code-overload.html) [has described](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/technology/ai-code-overload.html) a wave of AI-generated “code overload,” where companies struggle to review, secure, and assign responsibility for AI-generated work. A peer-reviewed study in [Nature Scientific Reports](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-61221-0) found that Stack Overflow traffic declined sharply after ChatGPT’s release, while Reddit developer communities did not see the same drop — a contrast the authors attribute to stronger social bonds. Stack Overflow question volume is reportedly [down roughly 76% from its 2017 peak](https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/10/1729248/stackoverflow-usage-plummets-as-ai-chatbots-rise), while [81.5% of GitHub contributions](https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-developer-joins-github-every-second-as-ai-leads-typescript-to-1/) now happen in private repositories. Projects like [cURL](https://www.itpro.com/software/open-source/curl-open-source-bug-bounty-program-scrapped) and [Godot](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/open-source-game-engine-godot-is-drowning-in-ai-slop-code-contributions-i-dont-know-how-long-we-can-keep-it-up/) have faced growing burdens from low-quality AI-generated submissions. But the core problem is not technical. It is social. AI gives us the answer without the relationship, the solution without the public trace, the productivity without the apprenticeship. ![Commons is going private](https://abhinemani.com/img/coding-alone-3.png) ## Rebuilding the Leagues The deeper problem is that AI is drawing from a commons it may also weaken. The models that make private development so seamless were trained on the public web: mailing list arguments, issue threads, Stack Overflow answers, and blog posts where developers thought out loud. That public record taught the models. Now the models answer questions privately. The answer is not nostalgia. It is institution-building. ![Individual Outputs vs Community](https://abhinemani.com/img/coding-alone-4.png) Putnam’s later work, [The Upswing](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Upswing/Robert-D-Putnam/9781982129156), argues that civic infrastructure is not inherited. It is built. Software’s “we” period was built too. Open-source norms, code review culture, Stack Overflow, hackathons, and civic tech brigades were civic inventions. If they are eroding, we have to build new ones. That means treating human software culture as infrastructure, not overhead. The question is not just how much code we can produce with AI. It is whether we can keep producing the trust, norms, mentorship, and social capital that make code worth relying on. Hackathons, pair programming, open source, technical writing, and code review become more valuable, not less, because they preserve something AI does not automatically provide: a reason to be accountable to other people. In the old world, the work produced the commons. In the new one, the commons will have to be built on purpose. People are still bowling. The leagues will only come back if someone builds them. --- # How I built GenAI to listen, not just make. > What happens when you are interviewed by a machine. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2026/02/04/GenAI-Research/ Published: 2026-02-04 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: AI, Data, Product, Research --- I spend an unreasonable amount of time answering market research questions. Sometimes I’m responding directly—city leaders trying to make sense of a crowded GovTech market, investors probing for traction and risk, researchers looking for signal in what increasingly feels like noise. Other times, I’m building the research itself: conducting interviews, reading budgets and procurement documents, triangulating reports, trying to understand how institutions actually behave rather than how they describe themselves. The questions themselves aren’t the problem. They’re usually reasonable, often thoughtful. What wore me down was the sense that my answers weren’t getting better—even as the tools around me supposedly improved. Too often, what I offered was stitched together from half-remembered conversations, secondhand analyses, and PDFs I’d skimmed but never fully absorbed. I wasn’t being careless. I was operating inside a system that makes accuracy expensive and confidence cheap—where [conviction can outcompete evidence](https://abhinemani.com/blog/2025/03/14/Confidence/) when everyone feels pressure to move fast. At some point, I stopped trying to answer faster and started wondering why—after all this data, all these dashboards, all these tools—it was still so hard to answer *well*. That frustration is what led me to build **Cronkite**, a simple AI-powered market research tool designed to help retain and interrogate context across fragmented sources. I initially thought of it as a workflow improvement: a way to reduce friction, retain institutional memory, and avoid starting from scratch every time a familiar question came back around. I did not expect it to change how I think about generative AI itself. ![Homepage of demo site](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-start.png) What surprised me wasn’t what the system could generate. It was what it made visible. ## How market research usually works Most market research today relies on a familiar mix of expert networks, structured interviews, and surveys. Expert networks connect experienced people to urgent questions, but each conversation starts with little shared context. The same background is re-established again and again, insights are delivered verbally or summarized in notes, and the reasoning behind them disappears once the engagement ends. What looks like accumulated expertise is often just repeated improvisation. Surveys promise scale, but usually at the cost of depth. Questions are simplified to fit response formats, follow-ups are rare, and statistical rigor is frequently sacrificed for speed. The results look precise—percentages, charts, benchmarks—but rarely get to the underlying constraints shaping behavior. This is what happens when we confuse access with understanding—when [data is treated like the point instead of the starting line](https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/02/18/Open-Data-AI/). Across both approaches, context resets, nuance flattens, and confidence fills the gaps. ## Limits of the Current Thinking We’ve come to describe this moment as the rise of “Generative AI,” and it’s easy to see why. The most visible capability of these systems is their ability to produce language—summaries, drafts, strategies—quickly and fluently. In many contexts, that alone feels transformative. But the way a technology first enters common use isn’t always where its most durable value lies. By focusing so heavily on generation, we’ve implicitly positioned large language models as writing engines—tools that sit at the end of the research process. We ask them to help articulate conclusions, compress complexity, or refine arguments. Evidence gathering, context-building, and verification are still assumed to be human responsibilities. A similar tension is beginning to surface in fields that depend heavily on research and judgment. In healthcare market research, for example, analysts are already noticing that as AI becomes better at producing content, something else quietly becomes more valuable: the authenticity and traceability of the underlying data. One useful way to frame that shift is this piece on [how generative AI is changing market research incentives](https://www.physicianleaders.org/articles/how-gen-ai-is-transforming-market-research): >Among all the managerial functions, marketing is likely to be the one that’s most disrupted by generative AI. Recognizing the technology’s potential, academics and practitioners alike have been investigating new ways to apply it to customer service and content creation for some time now, but recently the business world has started paying attention to the impact it could have on other marketing activities. The most exciting of these is market research, the processes by which firms gather data and generate insights about customers and competitors. This observation captures something important. The risk isn’t that AI floods the world with bad answers. It’s that it makes **unearned certainty cheap**. In that environment, the scarce input isn’t articulation—it’s grounding. ## From Generation to Listening ![Mobile Render](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-mobile.png) This distinction shaped how I approached building Cronkite. I wasn’t trying to automate insight or replace judgment. I was trying to reduce the friction involved in gathering and holding evidence—especially in local government, where the data is public but deeply fragmented. Procurement records, budget documents, council agendas, vendor registries, interview transcripts, policy memos—all of it describes the same institutional reality, but rarely in ways that align naturally. ![Desktop Render](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-home.png) Traditional research methods compensate for this fragmentation by relying on people: analysts conducting interviews, experts offering perspective, teams synthesizing findings into reports. I’ve worked with expert networks like GLG and Third Bridge, and while the people involved are capable, the process itself is often redundant. Each project starts close to zero, context accumulates unevenly, and much of the underlying evidence disappears once the final deck is delivered. Rather than responding with synthesized conclusions, the system repeatedly returned adjacent material—documents, excerpts, and references that complicated the original claim instead of resolving it. I wanted to take a different approach. Instead of asking the system to generate conclusions, Cronkite focuses on **listening**: continuously collecting material, normalizing incompatible formats, and structuring information so that context compounds rather than resets. The AI’s role is not to decide what matters, but to ensure that what exists is visible and accessible. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-share.png) This can sound like a modest shift. In practice, it changes the entire posture of the system. You can ask questions that matter. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-interview.png) ## Being Questioned by a Machine The system worked in unexpected ways; it pushed me harder and gathered more information than a human interviewer has in my experience. And it seems that we can take broad ideas like AI into specific examples. The clearest signal that this approach was different didn’t come from a dashboard. It came from the experience of being questioned. Here's an example: * **Cronkite App**: How are cities thinking about AI right now? * **User:** There’s a lot of interest. * **Cronkite App**: “Interest” isn’t actionable. What did they do as a result of that interest? * **User:** Some conversations, a few pilots. * **Cronkite App**: Were those pilots funded as ongoing programs? * **User:** No, mostly one-time. I expected the interaction to feel constrained or mechanical. Instead, it was more demanding than many human-led conversations. The system didn’t politely fill in gaps or smooth over ambiguity. What stayed with me wasn’t the quality of the questions so much as how they felt to answer. The model wasn’t confrontational, but it was unyielding. It didn’t let me rely on shorthand or professional muscle memory. Answers that would pass unchallenged in a meeting—“budgets are tight,” “cities are interested,” “it depends”—simply didn’t move the conversation forward. Each time I tried to generalize, the model slowed things down and asked me to be specific in ways that were mildly uncomfortable, because they forced me to notice where I was leaning on experience rather than evidence. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-goodrobot.png) There was also something subtly disarming about the interaction. A human interviewer often gives you cues—agreement, skepticism, impatience—that shape how much you explain or defend. The model did none of that. It just kept asking, calmly and precisely, until the answer either became grounded or collapsed under its own vagueness. I found myself thinking more carefully, not because I was being judged, but because there was nowhere to hide. In that moment, GenAI stopped feeling like a tool for producing output and started feeling like a mirror for my own reasoning—one that reflected back not what I meant to say, but what I had actually substantiated. For the first time in my research work, I wasn’t deciding when a line of inquiry was “good enough” — the system was. When an answer relied on shorthand—terms like “risk,” “support,” or “momentum”—it asked for clarification. When examples were missing, it didn’t move on for the sake of flow; it treated that absence as something worth examining. When evidence was incomplete, the system did not compensate. It stopped. Missing information was treated as a condition to resolve, not an inconvenience to bypass. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-sentiment.png) That experience reframed how I think about common concerns around generative AI, particularly the risk of hallucination. In this context, the more salient risk wasn’t that the system would invent facts, but that humans would rely too heavily on confidence when evidence was incomplete. Used as a listening tool rather than a generator, the AI didn’t obscure those gaps. It made them harder to ignore. ## Implications for Research and the Market ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-data.png) As AI-generated content becomes more common, fluent text is likely to become less distinctive. When anyone can produce a confident-sounding memo in seconds, the value of the memo itself declines. Scarcity shifts elsewhere—to provenance, cross-source synthesis, institutional context, and a clear understanding of what remains uncertain. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-sentiment.png) What the system consistently resisted was premature closure. It privileged traceability over polish, and specificity over speed. This suggests a gradual change in where value accrues in the research market. Tools that emphasize synthesis without evidence may struggle to differentiate themselves. Tools that reduce the cost of assembling, contextualizing, and interrogating real-world information become more important—particularly in domains where decisions carry public consequence and scrutiny. For government, this matters not because AI promises efficiency, but because it offers a way to make complexity more manageable without oversimplifying it. Lowering the cost of evidence gathering doesn’t eliminate judgment. It creates the conditions for better judgment. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-dash.png) ## But sometimes, it doesn't work. ![Cronkite Homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/cronkite-generation.png) Any tehnology leader will be quick to remind you that most tools are buggy, and AI's habit of hallucinating ideas, we should be especially concered. All AI tolls will grapple with this—bad code, bad chats, and bad robots. The challenge for AI builders, especially government ones, is how to balance risk versus reward. And in the market research context, not just risk and reward, but also cost. Public sector organizations should be open to exploring ways to minimize risk and cost while improving scale and quality. Turning human interview functions into machine-led approaches may help, but there are still a lot of questions. ## Repositioning the Technology None of this requires rejecting the generative capabilities of these systems. Writing, summarization, and synthesis remain useful. But they are most valuable when they rest on a stronger foundation. Rather than thinking of generative AI primarily as a tool for producing answers, it may be more helpful to see it as **infrastructure for understanding**—something that helps recover, organize, and hold reality in view long enough for people to reason about it. The future of research, at least in complex domains like government, is unlikely to hinge on generating more content. It will hinge on making existing information easier to assemble, examine, and trust. --- # The Fiscal Cliff Arrives > According to a 2025 National League of Cities survey, less than half of municipalities (45%) feel confident about meeting next year's budget — the lowest since COVID. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2025/11/25/Fiscal-Cliff-Confidence/ Published: 2025-11-25 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- Municipal governments oversee the systems that keep daily life functioning—public safety, water and wastewater operations, streets, sanitation, and emergency response. Each year, the [National League of Cities](https://www.nlc.org/) surveys the finance officers who manage these systems, offering an early view into how prepared cities feel for the fiscal demands ahead. This year’s [**2025 City Fiscal Conditions Report**](https://www.nlc.org/resource/city-fiscal-conditions-2025/) shows a meaningful shift. For the **first time since the COVID-19 period, a majority of cities — 55% — expect to be less able to meet next year’s budget needs.** Earlier this year, I wrote that many city leaders were operating in an **["age of uncertainty,"](https://abhinemani.com/blog/2025/03/14/Confidence/)** where familiar patterns were giving way to more fluid conditions. Now, the new data suggests that the mood is shifting once again — **from uncertainty to concern**. ### How do you measure fiscal confidence? Each year, the National League of Cities surveys city finance officers and asks a simple question: _Do you expect to be better able or less able to meet next year’s budget needs compared to last year?_ It’s essentially asking a city’s CFO whether projected revenues will cover projected expenses in the year ahead. If they think the budget will be easier to balance, they answer “better able.” If they expect rising costs or slowing revenues to make things harder, they answer “less able.” Embedded content: https://abhinemani.com/embed/2025-fiscal-confidence.html The chart tracks these responses over more than four decades. When the “less able” share rises above 50%, it means most cities expect next year’s budget to be harder to balance — a clear signal about the broader fiscal climate local governments are facing. It's important to note that it’s not a technical forecast: it’s a sentiment measure grounded in the people who manage the day-to-day realities of municipal budgets. It's easy to see that crossings below the 50-percent line have been **rare** historically and tied to major recessions or early-pandemic disruptions. Seeing the same pattern emerge today — during a period of relative economic stability — suggests that city finances are being shaped by deeper structural forces. ## Three Structural Forces Behind the Decline in Confidence 1. **Rising and Rigid Costs Are Outpacing Stabilizing Revenues**: Cities are contending with sustained increases in wages, public-safety spending, and long-deferred infrastructure needs. These are essential, recurring costs that grow each year. Meanwhile, key revenue sources — sales, income, and property taxes — have returned to modest, pre-pandemic growth trends. The mismatch between rising obligations and stabilizing revenues is widening, prompting cities to reassess their capacity. 2. **The End of Federal Relief Has Revealed a Tighter Fiscal Baseline**: Federal relief programs, particularly ARPA, provided temporary stability during a volatile period. As those supports expire, cities are facing a clearer picture of their underlying fiscal condition. Some, like Dearborn, MI, have already seen measurable revenue declines as federal inflows ended. With no comparable federal relief on the horizon, cities are adjusting to a baseline that is more constrained than the last several years. 3. **Capital and Procurement Costs Remain Volatile, Complicating Long-Term Planning**: Tariffs, supply-chain shifts, and inflation continue to affect the cost and timing of capital projects. Even modest disruptions require cities to delay work, increase contingencies, or scale back scope. Concerns about the tax treatment of municipal bonds add uncertainty to long-term financing. Together, these forces make it harder to plan with confidence, especially for infrastructure. Taken together, these dynamics help explain why cities’ posture has changed: uncertainty has now become concern, driven not by crisis but by structural imbalances. ## Why This Matters Beyond City Hall Fiscal confidence shapes not just budget strategy but the everyday reliability of public services. When cities anticipate tighter conditions, it affects the timelines for infrastructure maintenance, the stability of staffing, and the ability to invest in improvements. The impacts are gradual, but they accumulate across communities and across years. ## Looking Ahead This year’s shift does not point to crisis, but it does signal that cities are entering a different phase—one where the assumptions of the last decade no longer hold. In an environment marked first by uncertainty and now by concern, cities will need to plan more flexibly, prioritize more deliberately, and build resilience more intentionally into their choices. The crossing of the 50-percent line offers a clear indicator: the pressures shaping city budgets are changing, and cities are responding. The work ahead is adapting strategies and expectations to the fiscal realities now coming into view. --- # The Age of Uncertainty and the Upshot for Public Service > Cities leaders are worried they cannot pay the bills URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2025/03/14/Confidence/ Published: 2025-03-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- If 2020 was the year of crisis, and 2021 the year of recovery, then 2025 may go down as the year of **uncertainty**. Not just an emotional state, but a measurable, structural reality — one that's reshaping how governments budget, plan, and serve. According to **Google Trends**, searches for the term *“*[*uncertainty*](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-01-01%202025-05-01&geo=US&gprop=news&q=Uncertainty&hl=en)*”* have soared in recent months, outpacing historic spikes from the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. These are not idle clicks. They reflect an ambient, national anxiety — political, economic, and institutional — that is especially acute in state and local governments. ### "Uncertainty" as a Google Search Topic In **news searches**, the spike is sharp and unprecedented. Interest in “uncertainty” has surged to the highest levels Google has recorded since 2008, when the Great Recession rattled global markets and municipal budgets alike. Even when viewed as a broader **topic**, incorporating related terms and contexts, “uncertainty” has never seen greater search volume. This is not a momentary blip — it’s a signal of a deeper instability in the civic imagination. ![Line chart of the index rising from 2004 to 2020](https://abhinemani.com/img/uncertainty-2.jpg) But public perception is only part of the picture. The structural data behind city budgets tells the same story. ## Fiscal Optimism is Fading — Fast ![2024 NLC Fiscal Conditions Survey Results](https://abhinemani.com/img/confidence-large.jpg) In its [**2024 City Fiscal Conditions**](https://www.nlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024-City-Fiscal-Conditions-Report-WEB.pdf) report, the **National League of Cities (NLC)** confirms what many public finance officials already feel: even amid strong performance in FY 2023, the path forward is clouded. > “City finance officers’ confidence in meeting fiscal needs has declined significantly since last year… Cities are entering a period of structural imbalance.” — *NLC, 2024 Fiscal Conditions Report* Consider just a few highlights: * **64% of city finance officers** said their city was better able to meet financial needs in FY 2024 than the year before. * But **confidence drops to 50%** when asked about FY 2025. * Meanwhile, **public safety now accounts for 28% of general fund expenditures**, up from 23% in 2018. * **Revenue growth**, bolstered by post-COVID rebound and inflation-driven property tax gains, is **expected to stagnate or decline**. * And while **ARPA dollars bridged many gaps**, the sun is setting on that federal aid — and cities face a tough question: *What now?* In short: [city governments are sailing into 2025 with weaker wind](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decline-city-fiscal-confidence-why-matters-everyone-abhi-nemani-x6sqc/) at their backs and heavier ballast below. ![Chart: declining confidence in city budgets, 2021 to 2024 (National League of Cities)](https://abhinemani.com/img/budget-confidence.jpg) ### Uncertainty Is Not a Bug — It’s the System Now Historically, government systems were built for predictability. Budgeting followed annual cycles. Grant funding came in regular appropriations. Civic hiring was stable, if slow. Even political transitions followed relatively known rhythms. Today, **those assumptions are failing**: * **Federal funding pipelines** are inconsistent and politically fragile. * **Labor markets** have shifted dramatically, with vacancies, retirements, and burnout challenging service delivery. * **Cost structures** are volatile, driven by inflation and capital market disruptions. * **Technology and public expectations** are accelerating faster than governments can adapt. And yet, much of the civic infrastructure — both literal and administrative — still assumes certainty. This is the heart of the disconnect: **our institutions are built for stability, but we live in ambiguity**. ## From Uncertainty to Adaptability If “uncertainty” is now the backdrop for civic decision-making, then **adaptability** must be the new benchmark for success. Public sector leaders must move from managing to maneuvering — building institutions that are not only fiscally sound, but *strategically flexible*. This demands change across four dimensions: ### 1. Budgeting for Scenarios, Not Just Line Items City budgets must reflect a range of futures. Sensitivity analyses, reserve strategies, and contingency planning can no longer be back-office exercises — they must be front-line tools of governance. ### 2. Procurement That Allows for Pacing Long, fixed RFPs may work for bridges — but not for innovation. Modular procurement, cooperative contracts, and pre-negotiated vehicles give cities the tools to move at the pace of opportunity (or crisis). ### 3. Grants That Respond to the Present Federal and state grants must be rethought to allow for **adaptive implementation**. Awarding funds is one thing; ensuring they are deployed quickly and equitably in unpredictable contexts is another. ### 4. Communications That Inspire Confidence Without Certainty Leaders often feel pressure to provide answers — but the public is more ready for candor than we give them credit for. Saying “we don’t know yet, but here’s how we’re planning for the unknown” is a strength, not a weakness. ## Why This Moment Matters As I wrote [earlier this year](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decline-city-fiscal-confidence-why-matters-everyone-abhi-nemani-x6sqc), *the decline in fiscal confidence among local government leaders is not an academic metric — it’s a civic risk.* When city leaders are unsure of their footing, investments stall, hiring freezes, and the most vulnerable communities bear the brunt. But data, when read honestly, can be empowering. Because if this is indeed the **Age of Uncertainty**, then this is also the moment for governments to modernize for it — to lead not just despite ambiguity, but through it. ### A Final Word: Uncertainty Isn’t Going Away — But Neither Is Public Leadership Let’s not pretend this is a storm we can wait out. The fog isn’t lifting next quarter. The question is not whether we return to certainty, but whether we build **systems and leadership practices that thrive without it** --- # The Mona Lisa Paradox for AI > Why Real World Data Becomes More Valuable in an Age of Perfect Copies URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/12/30/Mona-Lisa/ Published: 2024-12-30 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- As artificial intelligence reshapes our information landscape, we are witnessing a paradox reminiscent of what happened in the art world with the advent of photography: the better our technology becomes at creating reproductions, the more valuable the verified original becomes. Just as the ability to create perfect photographic reproductions of the Mona Lisa only increased the value of the authentic painting, the rise of synthetic data is paradoxically increasing the value of verified real world data. ### The Core Paradox At first glance, the proliferation of synthetic data should decrease the value of real world data collection, just as photography was expected to decrease the value of realistic painting. After all, if AI can generate infinite variations of any dataset, accurately mimicking real-world patterns and relationships, why invest in expensive and time-consuming data collection? But this intuition, however compelling, misses a fundamental shift in how data derives its value in an AI-driven world. Consider what happened in art. The invention of photography didn't diminish the value of original artworks—it enhanced it. The very fact that perfect reproductions became possible made authenticity more precious, not less. The Mona Lisa's value doesn't stem from its ability to depict reality (which a photograph might do better) but from its provenance: its verifiable connection to a specific artist, time, and place. Similarly, the value of real world data is transforming from being primarily about the information itself to being about its provenance and accountability. ### The Nature of Truth in a Synthetic World This transformation reflects a deeper change in how we establish truth in an increasingly synthetic information environment. Real world data, particularly when collected by accountable institutions like local governments, serves as an essential anchor point—a ground truth that keeps our AI systems tethered to reality rather than drifting into synthetic abstraction. Consider a city's building permit database. While AI could generate plausible permit data that matches historical patterns, the value of the actual permit database lies not in its content alone but in its role as a legally binding record of reality. Like a master painting hanging in the Louvre, its value comes not from what it depicts but from its authenticated connection to actual events and decisions. ### The New Data Hierarchy What emerges is a new hierarchy of data value. At the foundation lies synthetic data—abundant, flexible, and increasingly sophisticated, much like digital art reproductions. At the apex sits verified real world data, distinguished not by its volume or even its accuracy, but by its provenance and institutional backing. The key attributes that create this value are: * Institutional Accountability: The existence of an organization that stands behind the data's accuracy * Legal Standing: The data's role in official decision-making and governance * Democratic Oversight: Public scrutiny and verification of collection methods * Error Correction Mechanisms: Formal processes for identifying and correcting inaccuracies The implications of this shift extend far beyond data management. As AI systems increasingly influence decision-making across society, the quality and provenance of their training data becomes crucial for democratic accountability. When AI helps shape urban development, resource allocation, or public policy, the difference between training on synthetic data versus verified real world observations becomes a matter of public interest. This is particularly evident in local government, where data collection isn't merely administrative record-keeping but becomes critical infrastructure for maintaining democratic accountability in an AI-driven future. Just as museums serve as custodians of authentic art, local governments become custodians of authentic reality—their data collection creating verified records that carry institutional weight and public accountability. ### Looking Forward As we move deeper into the age of artificial intelligence, the institutions that can verify and validate reality will find themselves at the center of our new information economy. Their role evolves from passive record-keepers to active arbiters of truth in an increasingly synthetic information environment. Just as the Louvre's value comes not from its ability to display images (which can be done anywhere) but from its role in authenticating and preserving originals, these institutions' value will come from their ability to verify and validate reality. The paradox of real world data thus reveals itself not as a contradiction but as a natural consequence of how we value truth and accountability in an increasingly synthetic world. In a future where synthetic data is abundant, the ability to authoritatively verify reality becomes the scarcest and most valuable resource. For local governments and other institutions that collect and verify real world data, this shift demands a fundamental rethinking of their role. They are no longer merely documenting reality—they are becoming the essential infrastructure of truth in an AI-driven future. Their ability to provide verified, accountable data becomes not just an administrative function but a crucial public service in maintaining the connection between artificial intelligence and reality. This new understanding of data value suggests that investments in real world data collection and verification systems are not merely administrative overhead but rather strategic investments in the infrastructure of truth for an AI-driven future. Just as the value of the world's great museums has increased rather than decreased in an age of perfect digital reproduction, the value of institutions that can verify and validate real world data will only grow as synthetic data becomes more prevalent. --- # Death of the Organizational Kid > The Decline of Modern Institutional Trust URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/12/28/Organizational-Kid/ Published: 2024-12-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- For most of the 20th century, institutions like governments, universities, churches, and civic organizations were the foundation of societal stability and progress. They fostered trust, mediated collective action, and provided pathways for individual success. By the late 20th century, however, the bonds of community and trust that sustained these systems began to fray. In [*Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam*](http://bowlingalone.com/) documented this decline in social capital, showing how Americans were disengaging from civic life and each other. A year later, D[avid Brooks’ essay The Organization Kid](https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~bmayes/pdf/The_Organization_Kid.pdf) painted a portrait of a generation seemingly immune to these trends. Brooks’ young elites, shaped by disciplined upbringings and rigorous academic environments, thrived within institutions and trusted them to deliver success. These students embodied a belief in meritocracy, structure, and the fairness of the systems they inhabited. Yet this faith was already fragile, resting on an assumption that institutions would remain stable and just. Fast forward two decades, and that assumption has unraveled. Institutions have faced repeated crises of legitimacy—economic, political, and environmental—while the rise of technology and decentralization has further eroded trust. [Jean Twenge’s Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents (2023)](https://www.amazon.com/Generations-Differences-Millennials-Silents_and-Americas/) captures the culmination of this decline: Millennials and Gen Z are far more skeptical of authority, disillusioned with traditional institutions, and determined to find alternative pathways to power and progress. The shift in generational attitudes is more than a story of changing values. It reflects the long arc of institutional transformation: from the community-centered trust described by Putnam, to the meritocratic faith of Brooks’ organizational kids, to the widespread skepticism documented by Twenge. This essay examines the decline of institutional trust, the virtues and flaws of institutions, and the urgent need for their renewal in an era of growing challenges. ### The Foundations of Institutional Trust Robert Putnam’s *Bowling Alone* provides a crucial starting point for understanding the crisis of institutions. Putnam argued that the mid-20th century was a high point for social capital—the networks of relationships, norms, and trust that bind communities together. During this period, Americans participated in civic organizations, neighborhood associations, unions, and churches at unprecedented levels. These activities reinforced communal ties and trust, which in turn bolstered institutions. When people feel connected to each other, they are more likely to trust and invest in the systems that govern them. By the late 20th century, however, these bonds began to unravel. Putnam identified several reasons for the decline of social capital, including suburbanization, increased mobility, the rise of television, and generational changes. As Americans became more isolated, trust in both local communities and larger institutions diminished. Civic organizations saw declining membership, voter turnout fell, and participation in communal activities like bowling leagues dropped precipitously. This erosion of social capital set the stage for the rise of the organizational kid. Without strong community ties to reinforce trust in institutions, young people turned inward, focusing on personal achievement. Brooks’ organizational kids were products of this shift: disciplined and ambitious, but operating in a world where institutional trust was increasingly transactional rather than communal. ### The Organizational Kid and the Promise of Meritocracy In *The Organization Kid*, Brooks described young people who excelled within highly structured environments. These students trusted institutions not because they were deeply connected to them, but because they viewed them as reliable vehicles for personal advancement. Meritocracy promised that hard work would yield success, and organizational kids played by the rules to secure their futures. This worldview had significant virtues: 1. **Discipline and Productivity**: Organizational kids exemplified an extraordinary work ethic, mastering the demands of academic and professional life. Their rigor fueled innovation and contributed to societal progress. 2. **Faith in Systems:**They trusted institutions to function as intended, reinforcing stability and continuity. When young people believe in the legitimacy of systems, they are more likely to participate in and sustain them. 3. **Meritocratic Optimism:**The belief that effort and talent would be rewarded encouraged ambition and self-improvement, creating a generation of individuals invested in their own success and the broader systems they inhabited. These traits aligned well with societal needs, producing disciplined leaders who strengthened the institutions they served. But this faith depended on a critical assumption: that institutions would remain effective, fair, and responsive. When that assumption was shattered, the foundation of the organizational kid’s worldview began to crumble. ### The Erosion of Institutional Trust The years following Brooks’ essay were marked by a series of crises that exposed systemic flaws and eroded trust in institutions. Jean Twenge’s *Generations* documents how these failures profoundly shaped Millennials and Gen Z, fostering skepticism and disillusionment. 1. **Economic Inequality and the 2008 Financial Crisis:**The global financial meltdown revealed deep inequities in economic systems. While banks and corporations received bailouts, millions of ordinary people lost homes, jobs, and savings. Millennials, entering the workforce at the time, faced stagnant wages, rising debt, and limited opportunities. The crisis exposed the prioritization of corporate profits over public welfare, undermining faith in economic institutions. 2. **Political Dysfunction:**Increasing polarization and gridlock in government further alienated younger generations. Scandals and perceived inaction on critical issues—like climate change and social justice—deepened this mistrust. Twenge notes that only 35% of Gen Z express trust in the U.S. government, compared to 70% of the Silent Generation at their age. 3. **Climate Inaction:**For Millennials and Gen Z, climate change is not just an existential threat but a symbol of institutional failure. Decades of inaction by governments and corporations have reinforced the perception that these systems prioritize profits over long-term sustainability. 4. **Technological Disruption:**The rise of smartphones and social media has amplified institutional flaws. Scandals, corruption, and inequalities are now broadcast in real time, eroding trust and fueling critiques. These failures shattered the meritocratic optimism of Brooks’ organizational kids. Where they once saw institutions as reliable partners, Millennials and Gen Z increasingly view them as barriers to progress. ### The Need for Institutions Despite widespread skepticism, institutions remain indispensable. They are the scaffolding for societal stability, enabling collective action and ensuring continuity. Their decline poses significant risks: 1. **Stability and Legitimacy:**Institutions provide frameworks for resolving conflicts, enforcing rules, and upholding rights. Without them, societies risk fragmentation and chaos. 2. **Addressing Complex Problems:**Challenges like climate change, economic inequality, and public health crises require large-scale coordination. Grassroots movements, while powerful, often lack the infrastructure and resources to implement systemic solutions. 3. **Equity and Accountability:**When reformed, institutions can ensure fairness and representation, providing mechanisms for marginalized voices to shape policy and governance. Rebuilding trust in institutions is not just desirable—it is essential. Younger generations’ critiques, while disruptive, offer an opportunity for renewal. By demanding greater transparency, inclusivity, and responsiveness, Millennials and Gen Z can help transform institutions to better serve the common good. ### The Long Arc of Institutional Decline and Renewal The story of institutional trust spans three critical works: 1. **Putnam’s *Bowling Alone* (2000):** The erosion of social capital weakened the communal bonds that sustained institutions, fostering a more individualistic society. 2. **Brooks’ *The Organization Kid* (2001):** Brooks captured a transitional moment when trust in institutions persisted but was increasingly transactional, focused on personal advancement. 3. **Twenge’s *Generations* (2023):** Twenge documents the culmination of this decline, as Millennials and Gen Z grapple with the failures of institutions and seek alternative pathways to power and progress. Together, these works reveal the historical forces shaping generational attitudes toward institutions—and the potential for renewal. ### A Crossroads for Institutions The decline of institutional trust reflects both the failures of the systems themselves and the broader societal changes that have reshaped our relationship to authority. While Millennials and Gen Z’s skepticism is justified, the loss of trust in institutions poses significant risks for societal stability and collective action. The task ahead is not to abandon institutions but to rebuild them. Reforming institutions to be more transparent, equitable, and effective will require the very virtues that Brooks’ organizational kids embodied: discipline, optimism, and a commitment to collective progress. At the same time, younger generations’ critiques must serve as a catalyst for transformation, ensuring that institutions are not only preserved but made worthy of trust. The crisis of institutions is not just a story of decline—it is a call to action. If society can harness this moment of reckoning, it may yet create systems capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century. --- # How AI entrepreneurs are getting The Lean Startup wrong > Stop acting like things are easy when they are supposed to be hard URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/12/28/Lean-Startup/ Published: 2024-12-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, AI --- [Eric Ries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries)'s [Lean Startup](https://theleanstartup.com/) methodology made such an impression on me during his time on my board at [Code for America](https://codeforamerica.org) that I went on [to teach it to grad students](https://abhinemani.com/civictechcourse) at the [Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago](https://abhinemani.com/civictechcourse/lectures/). Which makes me particularly bemused watching today's**AI startups completely misinterpret its core principles**. The contradiction is striking. Ries advocated for using human "concierges" as temporary solutions to validate business hypotheses before investing in expensive automation. Yet today's AI startups are doing precisely the opposite – deploying expensive, general-purpose AI as a temporary solution without a clear path to economic sustainability. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of both technological progression and business model validation. In the current gold rush of generative AI startups, a curious paradox has emerged. While many founders rush to build businesses atop large language models like GPT-4, a quieter but potentially more revolutionary trend is taking shape: the rise of small language models (SLMs). This shift isn't just about technology – it represents a fundamental rethinking of how AI startups should approach building sustainable businesses. ### The Current Landscape: The Concierge Trap Today's AI startup landscape is littered with what we might call "GenAI concierge" businesses. These startups follow a familiar pattern: they leverage powerful general-purpose AI models to automate services that traditionally required human expertise. It's an appealing pitch – replace expensive human labor with AI that can work 24/7 at a fraction of the cost. But there's a critical flaw in this logic. Unlike traditional "Wizard of Oz" startups that used human labor as a temporary stand-in for eventual automation, these AI concierge startups are using expensive, general-purpose AI as a temporary solution for... what exactly? The unit economics often don't improve with scale, and API costs are more likely to increase than decrease over time, as we've already seen with recent price hikes from major providers. ### The Small Language Model Opportunity This is where small language models enter the picture. Instead of using heavyweight, general-purpose AI models for every task, forward-thinking startups are beginning to deploy smaller, specialized models that are: * Trained on specific domains * Optimized for particular tasks * More cost-effective to run * Faster and more reliable in their narrow focus * Easier to control and customize This approach isn't just more economically sustainable – it's often more effective. A small model trained specifically on medical terminology will likely outperform a general-purpose model on medical tasks, while consuming far fewer resources. ### Economic Advantages of Going Small The economic benefits of this approach are compelling: **1. Lower Operating Costs** * Reduced compute requirements * Potential for on-premise deployment * Less dependency on expensive API calls **2. Better Scaling Economics** * Costs grow more linearly with usage * More predictable unit economics * Easier capacity planning **3. Greater Business Control** * Less vulnerability to API pricing changes * Better data privacy and security * Ability to optimize for specific business metrics ### Beyond Economics: The Strategic Advantage The shift to smaller models isn't just about cost savings – it represents a fundamental strategic advantage. By focusing on specific, high-value tasks rather than trying to build general-purpose AI assistants, startups can: **1. Build Deeper Competitive Moats** * Domain-specific training data becomes a valuable asset * Specialized optimization creates barriers to entry * Closer alignment with customer needs **2. Deliver Better Results** * More reliable and consistent performance * Faster response times * Better error handling for edge cases **3. Create Sustainable Differentiation** * Clear value proposition * Harder for competitors to replicate * More defensible market position ### The Path Forward: Right-Sizing AI Solutions The next wave of successful AI startups won't be built on the premise of replacing humans with general-purpose AI. Instead, they'll focus on augmenting human capabilities with highly specialized, efficient AI tools. For startups looking to capitalize on this trend, the path forward requires a shift in thinking: **1. Start with the Problem, Not the Technology** **2. Build for Sustainability** **3. Embrace Specialization** By focusing on specialized, efficient solutions rather than trying to replicate general intelligence, startups can build more sustainable, effective, and valuable companies. --- # Adapting Web 2.0's 1+9+90 Rule for AI > Setting realistic and proven expectations for growth in a new age URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/12/27/90-rule/ Published: 2024-12-27 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- In the mid-2000s, the term **Web 2.0** emerged to describe a shift from static websites to interactive, participatory platforms. This era saw the rise of blogs, wikis, social networks, and other technologies that turned **users into creators** of content. Jakob Nielsen, a leading web usability consultant, observed a recurring pattern that became known as the [**1/9/90 rule:**](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/) * **1%** of users routinely created original content (e.g., posting on forums or publishing blog posts). * **9%** of users participated by commenting, editing, or lightly modifying existing content. * **90%** of users remained “lurkers,” consuming content without engaging in visible ways. This concept, documented on Nielsen Norman Group, helped explain why the majority of activity on early platforms (e.g., Wikipedia, Reddit) stemmed from a relatively small group of dedicated contributors. ### From User-Generated Content to AI Development Fast forward to the present day, and the internet is no longer about passively reading blog posts or occasionally posting status updates. Instead, the focus is on advanced technologies like **artificial intelligence**—large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, and more. But the underlying participation dynamic remains strikingly similar. 1. **1%** (Foundational Model Creators) – AI’s equivalent to the power contributors in Web 2.0. These are organizations and researchers building fundamental AI models. Today’s large language models or sophisticated neural networks often come from this small group (e.g., OpenAI, Google DeepMind). 2. **9%** (Specialized Solution Builders) – They adapt and customize these foundational tools for specific industries and use cases, analogous to those who, in Web 2.0, took existing ideas and extended them (e.g., writing plug-ins or curating niche communities). 3. **90%** (Off-the-Shelf Users) – The majority of businesses or individuals who consume and deploy AI “as is” without major modification, much like how most users in Web 2.0 simply read posts or watched videos without actively contributing. ⠀ ### Customization vs. Commoditization A key driver of AI adoption today is the tension between **customization** and **commoditization**, which also mirrors what happened during the Web 2.0 boom: * **Customization**: In the Web 2.0 context, customization might have meant building your own blog platform or cultivating a community around a particular niche. In AI, it means tailoring an existing AI model to one’s domain—like refining a language model for healthcare diagnostics or creating hyper-specific image recognition systems. * **Commoditization**: Once a few major players (e.g., WordPress, Myspace, later Facebook) dominated Web 2.0, publishing and engaging online became “plug-and-play.” Similarly, many AI tools are now provided via easy-to-use interfaces or APIs, making it cheaper and simpler to deploy standard solutions. The upside is accessibility; the downside is a reduced opportunity for competitive differentiation if everyone else is using the same off-the-shelf product. ### Usage and Utility: Parallels from Then to Now **Cost Structure** * **Web 2.0**: Hosting a blog or operating a small forum became cheap as infrastructure costs plummeted and platform providers (e.g., Blogger, WordPress) commoditized the creation process. * **AI**: Foundational model creators bear massive compute and R&D expenses, while most users pay for usage through subscriptions or API calls. This keeps entry costs manageable for the 90% and powers a long-tail of niche AI integrations for the 9%. **Participation Bottlenecks** * **Web 2.0**: Users required motivation and some technical know-how to move from lurker to contributor. * **AI**: Companies need data engineering expertise and a level of AI fluency to go from off-the-shelf usage to specialized solution-building, leaving many to remain “lurkers” in the 90%. **Innovation Concentration** * **Web 2.0**: A handful of platforms set the agenda (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), while others followed their lead. * **AI**: A few major labs and tech giants shape the development of leading-edge AI technology. The rest depend on their breakthroughs, mirroring the same disparity in “creation vs. consumption.” ### Looking Ahead Just as Web 2.0 eventually evolved into social networks, ubiquitous mobile apps, and new media models, AI is poised to continue its metamorphosis toward broader accessibility: **Lowering Barriers** No-code and low-code platforms allow more organizations to adapt AI to their own needs. Over time, this may shrink the 90% category as more companies gain the expertise—or at least the toolkits—to do some customization themselves. **Ongoing Commoditization** Similar to how social media platforms became virtually indispensable, AI models will continue to integrate deeper into everyday products—from CRMs and ERPs to consumer-grade apps. This will reduce friction for adoption but also intensify competition among solution providers. **Ethical and Regulatory Considerations** With AI’s increasing ubiquity, the 1% of AI creators find themselves under scrutiny for data privacy, algorithmic bias, and potential societal harms. This mirrors content moderation battles in Web 2.0, but the stakes are higher given AI’s power to shape decisions at scale. ### Conclusion From user-generated content to cutting-edge AI, the **1/9/90 rule** consistently appears wherever participation and expertise have a high barrier to entry. A small fraction invests heavily in creating the core technologies—whether that’s publishing a majority of the content or building foundational AI models—while a slightly larger group refines or adapts those innovations, and the bulk simply consumes them. Understanding how this dynamic has evolved from **Web 2.0** to modern **AI ecosystems** can help companies and innovators decide where they want to stand on the customization-commoditization spectrum, and how they might move up the curve to unlock greater strategic advantage. --- # Cognitive Surplus in the Age of AI and Abundance > What do public goods look like in a post-Web 2.0 era URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/11/30/Cognitive-Suplus/ Published: 2024-11-30 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- When I first entered the tech industry, **“cognitive surplus”** was the rallying cry—[a concept coined by Clay Shirky](https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Technology-Consumers-Collaborators/dp/0143119583) to describe the untapped reserves of human time and talent that technology could channel into collaboration and creativity. It was an era defined by optimism, when the democratization of information promised to unlock new possibilities. Today, with artificial intelligence (AI) dramatically expanding the boundaries of human cognition, it’s clear we’ve moved beyond cognitive surplus. We’ve entered the era of **cognitive abundance.** ### Revisiting Cognitive Surplus In the early days of Web 2.0, Shirky observed a remarkable societal phenomenon: advancements in technology had freed up time and energy on a scale previously unimaginable. However, this [**“cognitive surplus”**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus) was often squandered on passive consumption—hours of television and other distractions. Shirky argued that the internet offered a means to redirect this surplus toward communal and productive ends. Platforms like [Wikipedia](https://www.wikipedia.org/) exemplified this transformation, turning millions of small, individual contributions into a global repository of knowledge. Wikipedia wasn’t merely a database; it was proof of what could be achieved when surplus time and intellect were harnessed for the public good. ### Cognitive Abundance: A New Reality Today, cognitive abundance is not a possibility; it is a reality. Artificial intelligence is no longer simply a tool for extending human effort—it multiplies our cognitive capacity. AI processes data, recognizes patterns, and generates insights at scales previously unimaginable. This abundance of computational power and intelligence has unlocked breakthroughs across sectors, from healthcare to climate science to public service delivery. But there’s a critical shift: the dynamics of cognitive abundance differ from the collaborative ethos of cognitive surplus. In the Web 2.0 era, platforms like Wikipedia improved as more people participated. Contributions inherently benefited the entire community. In contrast, much of today’s AI operates within closed, proprietary systems. Interactions with AI tools—whether through a chatbot or an image generator—often enrich only the private companies that own them. This creates a paradox: while cognitive abundance exists, its benefits are unevenly distributed, often siloed within organizations or offered as individual productivity tools. Unlike Wikipedia, AI lacks a **public good dividend**—a mechanism to ensure the gains of cognitive abundance are shared and reinvested for collective benefit. ### How Do We Use Cognitive Abundance for Collective Growth? If cognitive abundance is here, the question is no longer whether it can solve complex problems but **how we choose to use it.** To align AI with collective growth, we must rethink how it is built, deployed, and distributed. Key questions guide this moment: 1. **How do we make abundance a public good?** Can we design AI systems that, like Wikipedia, improve for everyone through collective usage? 2. **How can governments lead?** What role should public institutions play in harnessing AI to streamline services, improve decision-making, and address inequities? 3. **How do we bridge access gaps?** How can smaller municipalities, nonprofits, and underfunded agencies access the same cognitive tools as large, resource-rich organizations? 4. **How do we ensure accountability?** Should companies reinvest in the open platforms and datasets that made their advancements possible? How do we ensure AI benefits don’t concentrate in private hands alone? ⠀ ### Cognitive Abundance Is a Call to Action The shift from cognitive surplus to cognitive abundance reflects not just a technological evolution but a deeper societal transformation. With tools that can achieve more than we ever imagined, the challenge is no longer about unlocking potential—it’s about ensuring that potential serves everyone. Cognitive abundance is here. The way we deploy it will define whether it becomes a force for collective growth or a missed opportunity. To ensure this era mirrors the spirit of cognitive surplus—where technology empowered communities and democratized knowledge—we must build structures that prioritize equity, openness, and shared progress. This isn’t a question of what cognitive abundance can do, but of who it will serve. Will it deepen inequalities or drive collective progress? Will it remain siloed, or will it transform into a public good that benefits all? The phrase is no longer **“cognitive surplus”**—that chapter is behind us. Today, it’s **“cognitive abundance”**: the unprecedented expansion of human and machine intelligence working together. It’s ours to shape. Let’s ensure that abundance reflects our highest aspirations: systems that improve for everyone, innovation that serves the many, and a future where the dividends of technology are shared broadly and fairly. --- # Why Friction Matters for Local Governments > Why easier is not always better URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/06/15/Friction/ Published: 2024-06-15 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- ![](https://media.licdn.com/mediaD5612AQG0pdkSTG2g1g) In tech, friction is often considered a bad thing, but in reality, and especially for organizations and governments, it can be a tool by design. The *"*[*Friction Project*](https://www.amazon.com/Friction-Project-Leaders-Things-Easier/dp/1250284414)*"* by [Bob Sutton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobsutton1?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAAADyhawBpPwNH6cd0OcvqE3dfyKlnVMloRE) & [Hayagreeva Rao](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayagreevarao?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAABAx4_kBOq3UEIbVr3txBkvceS8fAKWfaJs) how these obstacles can be harnessed to drive better governance. This concept is particularly relevant for public administrators aiming to enhance service delivery and community relations. ### What is Friction? Friction refers to the procedural obstacles that slow down operations, such as bureaucratic procedures and communication barriers. While often perceived negatively, friction can enhance accountability and transparency when managed properly. Think of friction as the grain in wood that, when polished correctly, adds strength and beauty. In my career, from helping start [Code for America](https://codeforamerica.org) to serving as Los Angeles’ first Chief Data Officer, I’ve witnessed firsthand how effective friction management can transform operations. At [Euna Solutions](https://eunasolutions.com), our tools help governments navigate these complexities, ensuring resources are used efficiently and ethically. ## The Dual Nature of Friction Friction can be both beneficial and detrimental: **When to Create Friction** * **Promoting Deliberative Decision-Making:** Thoughtful policies arise from stakeholder consultations and impact assessments. This [deliberative approach](https://eunasolutions.com/resources/abhi-nemani-and-local-government-budgets/) ensures that policies are robust and inclusive, better serving the community. * **Enhancing Accountability:** Procedural checks and balances prevent corruption and ensure ethical standards. I[n Los Angeles, initiatives like the Mayor’s Dashboard](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/) and data analytics training for city staff helped the city achieve the top ranking for data-driven governance. By introducing necessary friction, we ensured that every action was transparent and accountable. At Euna Solutions, [our best-in-breed budget book](https://eunasolutions.com/resources/transforming-your-budget-book-with-budget-book-studio-whats-new-at-a-glance/) makes financial transparency more accessible but still provides context along with data — encouraging deeper understanding through deeper, higher friction engagement. * **Encouraging Innovation:** Obstacles push local governments to find creative solutions. [At Code for America, we tackled bureaucratic inertia](https://abhinemani.com/essays/featured/2014/08/13/Two-Kinds-of-Empathy-the-Gap-in-Public-Sector-Innovation/) with digital tools and policy reforms, making government more responsive and citizen-centric. This approach demonstrated how friction could spark innovation and lead to significant advancements in public service delivery. **When to Reduce Friction** * **Streamlining Bureaucracy:** Unnecessary friction hinders efficiency. Simplifying procedures can foster a dynamic economy, as streamlined application processes save time and resources. For example, automating tax filings in countries like [Estonia](https://thelivinglib.org) has reduced compliance burdens and improved administration efficiency. * **Strengthening Community Engagement:** [Reducing engagement barriers](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-ai-help-governments-burn-paper-aka-sludge-abhi-nemani/) ensures broader participation, enhancing democratic involvement. Simplifying public meeting registrations and feedback processes encourages more citizens to participate in governance. * **Ensuring Equitable Resource Allocation:** [Managing friction in resource allocation](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-control-double-edged-sword-grant-opportunities-abhi-nemani-uannc/) ensures fairness. Involving stakeholders in decision-making processes leads to more just distribution of resources and ensures that all community voices are heard. ## The Broader Context The lessons from the "[Friction Project](https://www.amazon.com/Friction-Karthik-Ramanna/dp/0674239472)" align well with other influential works like [Cass Sunstein's "Sludge](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-ai-help-governments-burn-paper-aka-sludge-abhi-nemani/)" and [Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee's "Good Economics for Hard Times,"](https://www.amazon.com/Good-Economics-Hard-Times-Management/dp/1541762878) which explore how to streamline bureaucratic processes and improve policy implementation. These books collectively argue for a balance between necessary friction that ensures accountability and the elimination of unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles that stifle efficiency. Understanding and leveraging friction is about recognizing its potential to drive better governance. The insights from the *Friction Project* are essential for any public administrator dedicated to serving their citizens effectively. By embracing these principles, local governments can build stronger, more resilient communities, ultimately leading to more effective and trusted public administration. --- # How GovTech AI Can Renew Excitement in Open Data > Delivering on the promise of SaaS Network Effects URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2024/02/18/Open-Data-AI/ Published: 2024-02-18 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: AI, Open Data, Government --- Recently I've seen an uptick in the [number](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/growing-relevance-open-data-generative-ai-marco-vernocchi-vtd8f%3FtrackingId=WMp8vaXnQoWPjGDfem8oKg%253D%253D/?trackingId=XCvDUGr4SQy%2FSm%2BPT%2FPlPA%3D%3D) of [civic](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harnessing-power-generative-ai-world-open-government-data-zaidul-alam%3FtrackingId=CSGQGp2cQFeRkylweY1w%252FA%253D%253D/?trackingId=v6QQnlDbS1aBG6pHnX9I%2Fw%3D%3D) and [government](https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2024/01/preparing-open-data-age-ai) [tech](https://technical.ly/professional-development/data-analysis-llms-ai-guest-post/) [articles](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/experts-urge-govt-to-invest-in-open-data-compute-for-ai-leadership/articleshow/107782457.cms?from=mdr) exploring how AI might breathe new life into the open data "movement" — there was [real, palpable momentum](https://beyondtransparency.org/) around open data in the last decade. I was closely involved in that [open data era](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2015/12/28/Putting-Open-Data-Work/) — with [wins](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/01/Let-s-Move-Beyond-Open-Data-Portals/) and [losses](https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2020/08/28/Open-Data-Civic-Engagement-and-Delivery/) — and wanted to reflect on what has changed and why it (maybe) matters. The resurgence of my enthusiasm for Open Data, catalyzed by the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the widespread adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) within local governments, comes with a tempered perspective. Having served as the first Chief Data Officer for the City of Los Angeles, I'm well versed in [previous open data hyperbole](https://abhinemani.com/academy), attuned to the waves of renewed optimism, and excited about the opportunity for all communities (no matter the size) to leverage open data and AI — thanks to the fundamental advantages of purpose-built government SaaS. ### Benefits of SaaS for Local Governments * **Scalability & Accessibility:** Tailored to fit, SaaS grows with the community it serves, ensuring every town and city has access to cutting-edge tools. * **Economic Prudence:** SaaS transforms financial outlays, replacing hefty upfront costs with manageable, ongoing expenses. * **Innovation at the Fore:** Continuous updates keep local governments at the technological vanguard, eliminating the lag in adopting new features or critical security measures. * **Collaborative Virtue:** By fostering a network where success stories and strategies are shared, SaaS amplifies the collective intelligence of civic entities. ### How GovTech SaaS Can Enable Better Open Data and Better AI The evolution of SaaS solutions for local governments is particularly thrilling. These platforms are not just facilitating the digital transformation of municipal operations; they are creating a fertile ground for Open Data to thrive and be utilized in more meaningful ways. By standardizing processes, enhancing data collection, and improving data accessibility, SaaS is setting the stage for a future where Open Data isn’t just available but is integral to the decision-making process, policy formulation, and service delivery. * **Renewed Optimism with SaaS and AI**: The integration of SaaS and AI into local governance rekindles my excitement for Open Data. SaaS platforms, by simplifying the management and accessibility of data, coupled with AI's ability to process and interpret this data, present a new horizon for Open Data's potential. For SaaS companies with large reach, the opportunity to prepare standardized, structured data for r[etrieval augmented generative AI (RAG)](https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/demystifying-generative-ai-myths-why-it-all-comes-down-to-what-you-feed-it/) is undeniable. And what's particularly exciting is that with SaaS, not every city has to invest in its own LLM: AI models built off SaaS platforms scale by definition. This shift towards a more interconnected and accessible data ecosystem is pivotal for realizing Open Data's potential through AI. * **Skepticism as a Lens for Progress**: My optimism is now tempered with a healthy skepticism, shaped by past experiences. It's crucial to acknowledge that initial high expectations for Open Data led to some disappointment. Despite the promise of transparency and engagement, the practical utilization of Open Data often fell short, primarily due to technological and organizational barriers. This past skepticism isn't a deterrent but a catalyst for a more realistic and focused approach to harnessing Open Data. It drives a commitment to overcoming the barriers that previously hindered Open Data's success. * **New Opportunities for Open Data & Personalized Insight**: AI and LLMs offer a path to transcend previous limitations by turning complex datasets into actionable insights. Their role in analyzing and leveraging Open Data is crucial for informed decision-making and enhancing public engagement. AI can analyze Open Data to understand patterns and preferences at an individual and community level, enabling the delivery of tailored public services. Critically open data can now be more personalized. Instead of visiting spreadsheets on the internet for "transparency," GenAI can produce hyper-relevant content for residents, fostering a more informed and engaged citizenry. Residents can have better insights into how their cities operate, the challenges they face, and the impact of policy decisions, encouraging a more active participation in civic life. As we navigate the renewed journey of Open Data, infused with the capabilities of SaaS and AI, it's essential to carry forward the lessons of the past. This approach doesn't dampen our enthusiasm but grounds it in a realism that seeks to avoid previous pitfalls while unlocking new possibilities for public service. This balanced perspective not only acknowledges the complexity of transforming government operations but also celebrates the potential for meaningful change. --- # Can AI help governments clean out bureaucratic Sludge? > What the real cost of bureaucracy is according to Cass Sunstein URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2023/06/25/Sludge/ Published: 2023-06-25 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Leadership --- ![](https://media.licdn.com/mediaD5612AQFSDA7kq5OrFw) Government services often entail a plethora of paperwork and processes that can be exasperating and time-consuming for citizens. Whether it's applying for a passport, filing taxes, or registering a business, chances are one has encountered some form of **sludge**. Sludge is a term coined by **Cass Sunstein**, in his straightforward book, [*Sludge*](https://www.amazon.com/Sludge-Stops-Getting-Things-about-ebook/dp/B08PYB9XN4), a legal scholar and former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, to describe **unnecessarily effortful processes, bureaucratic procedures, and other barriers to desirable outcomes** in government services. ![](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D5612AQGhbYoHOKtUkA/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1687684380601?e=1760572800&v=beta&t=VilN64hzduINHIY_5RZPjeOZ1FocRHPCDq7Ph1yCIXc)Image Credit: @CassSunstein (Twitter) Sunstein has a unique point of view on this issue, given his work at the White House on eliminating paperwork and unnecessary bureaucracy. He contends that sludge is not only a nuisance, but also a grave threat to human dignity, welfare, and democracy. He asserts that sludge can impair health, perpetuate poverty, obstruct democracy, and forfeit jobs, scholarships, and opportunities. He also cautions that some sludge is intentional and manipulative, designed by companies or governments to exploit or discourage people from making certain choices. One example of sludge in government is the complex and lengthy process of applying for disability benefits in the US. According to a report by the [Government Accountability Office](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-228), applicants have to fill out multiple forms, provide extensive medical and work history information, undergo medical examinations, and wait for months or even years to receive a decision. The report also found that many applicants face challenges in comprehending the eligibility criteria, obtaining the requisite documentation, and communicating with the Social Security Administration. As a consequence, some applicants give up or die before receiving their benefits. [According to Sunstein's estimate](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/sludge-what-stops-us-getting-things-done-and-what-do-about-it), Americans spent **9.78 billion hours** on federal paperwork in 2015. That is equivalent to about 4.7 million full-time jobs. Imagine how much time, money, and energy could be saved if AI could help cut the sludge. ### How can sludge be reduced or eliminated? So how can sludge be reduced or eliminated in government services? Sunstein suggests that one way to achieve this is to conduct [**Sludge Audits**](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/sludge-what-stops-us-getting-things-done-and-what-do-about-it), which are systematic evaluations of the costs and benefits of existing or proposed sludge. He also recommends that governments adopt ethical principles and guidelines for the design and use of public services. He argues that by reducing sludge, governments can enhance the quality of life and well-being of their citizens. One example of sludge reduction in government is the simplification and automation of tax filing in some countries. [According to a study by the World Bank](https://globalethics.ai/), countries that have implemented electronic tax filing systems have reduced the time and cost of tax compliance for businesses and individuals. The study also found that electronic tax filing systems have improved tax administration efficiency, transparency, and revenue collection. Some countries, such as [Estonia](https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/estonia-making-tax-digitalisation-work-for-everyone.pdf) and [Chile](https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/chile-making-tax-digitalisation-work-for-everyone.pdf), have gone further by pre-filling tax returns with information from various sources, such as employers, banks, and other government agencies. This reduces the burden on taxpayers to provide or verify data, and increases the accuracy and completeness of tax returns. ### Future Opportunities for AI in Cutting Sludge AI technology is rapidly evolving, and its potential applications are manifold. Here are a few opportunities for further AI deployment: * **AI-assisted policy design:** AI can analyze vast amounts of data to inform policy design, identifying areas of administrative burden and suggesting improvements. * **Smart contracts and blockchain:** These technologies could automate complex procedures, such as contract execution or asset transfer, reducing the need for paperwork. * **Enhanced citizen engagement:** AI could personalize government services, making them more accessible and less burdensome. **Key Takeaways:** * AI could play a significant role in policy design, contract execution, and citizen engagement. * These technologies hold the potential to significantly reduce sludge. ### Risks of using AI to reduce sludge While the promise of AI is significant, there are also risks and challenges that must be considered: * **Error propagation and appeals:** AI systems can make mistakes, and an increase in errors could lead to more paperwork and appeals. * **Calcifying biases:** AI systems can replicate and amplify historical biases in data, potentially exacerbating inequalities. * **Complexity and inaccessibility:** The complexity of AI systems could make them difficult for citizens to understand and use, potentially adding to the sludge rather than reducing it. * **Bias and discrimination**: AI systems may produce unfair or inaccurate outcomes that affect people’s rights, opportunities, or well-being, based on their personal characteristics, such as gender, race, age, or disability. For example, AI systems that are used to screen job applicants, allocate benefits, or predict criminal recidivism may be biased by the data or algorithms they use. * **Transparency and accountability**: AI systems may be complex or opaque, making it difficult to understand or explain how they work or why they make certain decisions. This may affect people’s trust, consent, or ability to challenge or appeal the decisions made by AI systems. For example, AI systems that are used to diagnose diseases, grade exams, or recommend policies may be based on hidden assumptions or logic that are not disclosed or justified. * **Privacy and security**: AI systems may collect, process, or share large amounts of personal or sensitive data that may be vulnerable to misuse, abuse, or breach. This may affect people’s privacy, confidentiality, or identity. For example, AI systems that are used to monitor public spaces, track online behavior, or identify faces may infringe on people’s privacy or expose them to surveillance. * **Human dignity and autonomy**: AI systems may affect people’s dignity, autonomy, or agency by influencing their choices, preferences, or emotions. This may affect people’s self-respect, self-determination, or well-being. For example, AI systems that are used to nudge behavior, manipulate opinions, or generate content may interfere with people’s freedom of thought, expression, or action. **Key Takeaways:** * AI systems may increase paperwork if they are prone to errors or are difficult to use. * The risk of calcifying biases is a serious concern that needs to be addressed. Finally, there is the risk that using AI to eliminate burden may actually make the process worse. For example, if an AI system makes errors or produces inaccurate results, this may result in increased paperwork due to appeals or other corrective measures. ### Conclusion: Get Excited & Mind the AI hype While AI can offer many opportunities and benefits for cutting sludge, it is important to be realistic and cautious about its limitations and challenges. AI is not a magic bullet that can solve all the problems of bureaucracy and governance. AI is still a nascent and evolving field that faces technical, ethical, social, and legal hurdles. AI is also dependent on the quality and availability of data, the robustness and validity of algorithms, the competence and responsibility of human actors, and the trust and acceptance of users. Moreover, AI may not always be the best or most appropriate solution for cutting sludge. Sometimes, simple fixes or low-tech solutions may be more effective or efficient than complex or high-tech ones. For example, a recent article by Bloomberg highlighted how Code for America (CfA), a nonprofit organization that aims to improve government services through technology, used SMS messages to help low-income people access food stamps during the pandemic. The article showed how remarkably effective this simple fix was in reducing paperwork, wait times, and errors, while increasing enrollment rates and user satisfaction: > "A surprisingly small number of states use texting, which is cheap—usually less than a tenth of a cent apiece—and can include links to application and renewal websites as well as allow recipients to reply with questions. When CfA worked with Louisiana to send texts in 2019, renewals increased by 37% in SNAP and 67% in Medicaid. In Michigan, texting improved approval rates from 53% to 67% and reduced the approval period from 13 days to 10 days. 'This is something we can really vouch for with confidence...'" The article also showed how these sludge problems—particularly when it comes to benefits—will require more than some lines of code: new people, new rules, and time, lots of time, to slowly but surely make progress. For sludge-heavy programs, the immediate benefit of AI to reduce sludge may be limited (or hyped up). However, the article also underscores that truly addressing sludge—especially in areas heavy with it, like benefits programs—will require more than technological fixes. It will need new people, new rules, and lots of time to make slow but sure progress. Thus, while AI may offer some immediate benefits, its potential to cut sludge may be limited—or at least, hyped up There is no doubt that AI has made significant advances in recent years. However, it is important not to get caught up in the hype surrounding this technology. While trying to cut through the sludge with these seemingly transformative technologies, it is important to remember that AI is not a magic bullet. It requires careful design, oversight, accountability — and most of all, thoughtful people focused on the end goal and not the technology of the moment. --- # Embracing AI in Government with Humility, History & Optimism > A primer for governments and entrepreuners on what's next, based on what's come before. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2023/06/20/AI/ Published: 2023-06-20 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Governments, Policy, AI --- The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked a global conversation, filled with both excitement and concerns, about its implications for society. As AI technology becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, it is crucial to not only amaze at its potential but address the technology's underlying issues: privacy, security, bias, and explainability — issues made more acute in the public sector. As a kind of primer and guide, this article charts the (brief but relevant) history of "AI" in government to inform the concerns and opportunities ahead. ### Looking Back: "AI" in Law Enforcement Indeed, AI is not a new phenomenon in government. It has been used, debated, and even litigated in the context of criminal justice and law enforcement for years. From facial and sound recognition algorithms to "black box" decision-making machines, AI has been both a source of controversy and a catalyst for progress. Let's take a closer look at an example that underscores the importance of transparency and fairness in AI systems. Developed by Northpointe in the 2010s, COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is an algorithm used across the United States to predict the risk of a defendant committing future crimes. However, it has faced scrutiny for alleged racial biases. [ProPublica's study](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing) revealed that the algorithm had a high rate of incorrectly predicting future criminal behavior, with black defendants being disproportionately labeled as high risk. This highlights the urgent need for fair and accountable AI systems, particularly in consequential contexts such as criminal sentencing. ### The Rise of Generative AI & City Policies The AI landscape has been revolutionized by the explosive growth of generative AI, with Large Language Models (LLMs) like [OpenAI's GPT-4](https://openai.com/) and [Google's Bard](https://bard.google.com/) leading the charge. Trained on vast amounts of text data, these models possess the ability to generate human-like text, unlocking immense creative potential and opening doors to countless applications. In this space, two cities have emerged as leaders: [Boston and Seattle](https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/boston-seattle-issue-interim-generative-ai-guidance). [Boston](https://www.wired.com/story/boston-generative-ai-policy/) has actively encouraged its employees to embrace Google's Bard LLM system, recognizing the transformative power of AI in improving government effectiveness and efficiency. The focus is not just on how to govern AI, but also on exploring how AI can be used to enhance governance itself. [Seattle](https://techtalk.seattle.gov/2023/05/31/city-of-seattle-adopts-generative-ai-policy/) has adopted a generative AI policy that acknowledges both the opportunities and risks presented by this technology. By requiring permissions for accessing or acquiring generative AI products, validating their output, and avoiding sensitive data inputs, the city demonstrates its commitment to responsible AI use. Furthermore, the formation of a Policy Advisory Team signals their dedication to formulating a comprehensive policy on generative AI. ### Protecting the Public Trust While generative AI holds incredible promise, it is essential to address the significant privacy and security concerns it poses, especially in public institutions and regulated industries. These concerns include accidental data sharing, heightened biases, security threats, and intellectual property challenges. - **Accidental Data Sharing**: Generative AI systems may inadvertently share sensitive data if not properly controlled and monitored. This could result in unauthorized access or exposure of personal information. - **Heightened Biases**: Generative AI models learn from vast amounts of data, including potentially biased sources. If not carefully managed, these biases can be perpetuated and even amplified in the generated content, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes. - **Security Threats**: Outputs generated by generative AI, such as code or video, may contain hidden security threats or vulnerabilities. Adversaries could exploit these weaknesses to compromise systems or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. - **Intellectual Property Challenges**: The use of generative AI raises legal complexities, particularly in the public sector. Protecting intellectual property rights and ensuring compliance with copyright laws becomes a challenging task when AI systems generate content that may infringe upon existing works. ### Lessons from New York City's AI Law As we grapple with these challenges, we can draw inspiration from existing legislation that paves the way for responsible AI use. According to the *New York Times*, [NYC's 2021 AI law](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/technology/ai-hiring-law-new-york.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) offers valuable insights and practical guidelines. The law mandates that companies using AI software in hiring notify candidates, conduct annual independent audits for bias, and disclose the data collected and analyzed. Violations of these regulations are subject to fines. This groundbreaking law has even spurred the growth of the AI audit business, emphasizing the importance of accountability and transparency. One notable aspect of the New York City law is the introduction of the "impact ratio." This calculation measures the effect of using AI software on protected groups of job candidates, sidestepping the intricate details of algorithmic decision-making. As AI systems grow increasingly complex, achieving full explainability becomes more challenging. The impact ratio approach strikes a balance between understanding the effects of AI — through AI audits — and avoiding an overwhelming emphasis on explainability. ## Embracing Opportunities for GenAIs and LLMs As we navigate the complexities of AI integration in government, it is crucial to recognize the vast opportunities that generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) offer. These transformative technologies have the potential to make a significant impact in several areas: - **PR/Communications**: Public Information Officers (PIOs) can leverage LLMs to generate engaging social media posts, compelling press releases, and captivating web content efficiently. For example, [ZenCity](https://zencity.io/) has already harnessed LLMs to enable PIOs to create content at the click of a button, amplifying their outreach. - **Transparency**: Generative AI can enhance government transparency by simplifying and organizing complex city council meetings. [ClerkMinutes](https://clerkminutes.com) by [HeyGov](https://heygov.com) is a remarkable platform that employs AI to summarize and present easily digestible summaries of these meetings, making them more accessible to citizens while saving valuable time for City Clerks. - **Budget Books/Strategic Plans**: The laborious process of creating budget books and strategic plans can be streamlined with generative AI. By automating the generation of these documents, AI can save valuable time and resources, allowing governments to focus on crucial decision-making. [MySidewalk's powerful data retrieval](https://mysidewalk.com) and publication systems illustrate the emergent potential. - **Customer Service/311**: By automating responses to common queries, generative AI can revolutionize customer service in the public sector. Efficiently handling and resolving inquiries through AI-driven systems enhances the overall customer experience and optimizes the efficiency of 311 services. - **Municipal Codes/Laws/Charters**: The interpretation and application of municipal codes, laws, and charters can be simplified with generative AI. By providing clear and concise interpretations, AI systems assist in navigating complex legal frameworks, ensuring accurate and consistent understanding. Companies such as Camino and UpCodes are leveraging advanced tools to speed up the permitting process by parsing municipal codes, a particularly timely innovation as communities race to take advantage of funding for new infrastructure, ranging from [semiconductor plants through CHIPS](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/industrials-and-electronics/our-insights/semiconductor-fabs-construction-challenges-in-the-united-states) to [bridges and roads from ARPA and IRA](https://www.nlc.org/article/2022/05/17/how-communities-are-using-arpa-funds-to-improve-infrastructure/). - **Grant Writing/Matching**: Generative AI can automate the grant writing and matching process, helping public sector institutions secure funding more efficiently. By analyzing vast amounts of data and generating grant proposals, AI reduces the burden on organizations and increases their chances of success. The GovTech consulting firm, [Ad Hoc](https://adhoc.team/2023/06/07/using-open-source-llms-to-optimize-government-data/), has leveraged AI to support agencies' grant management programs, minimizing duplicate data and organizing grants around reliable performance metrics. - **RFP Creation & Responses**: Responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) is another area where generative AI can make a significant impact. By automating the generation of RFP responses, AI systems streamline the process, enabling public sector institutions to secure contracts more efficiently. ### Looking Ahead & Finding Balance As promising as those concepts may be, I suspect they merely scratch the surface of what is possible — for better or for worse. As AI continues to evolve and become more integrated into our lives, we must approach its use thoughtfully, especially in the public sector. The opportunities presented by generative AI and LLMs in government are vast, and with careful planning and implementation, they can significantly enhance efficiency, transparency, and accessibility. And at the same time, careless use of machine learning and generative AI can threaten privacy and security, all the while undermining democratic values of fairness and explainability. So we must find a balance: a balance of principles and practicalities, of policies and personalities, and of means and ends. And finding that balance will be the challenge for good governance — and for good stewards, both public and private — in the age of AI. --- # A Tale of Resilience Civic Tech, Hydrants, and Drains > Cities leaders are worried they cannot pay the bills URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2023/05/27/Resilience/ Published: 2023-05-27 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Back in 2011, I was a part of a fantastic team at a nonprofit organization called Code for America. We embarked on a project to create a tool called [Adopt-a-Hydrant](https://www.boston.gov/departments/innovation-and-technology/adopt-hydrant), a novel initiative designed to encourage civic engagement by allowing residents to "adopt" fire hydrants in their locality and commit to keeping them clear of snow during winter months. This program was started in collaboration with the Boston Fire Department and Emergency Management, and right at launch, we saw about 100 volunteers adopt hydrants across the city. ![Screeshot of original Adopt-a-Hydrant in Boston](https://abhinemani.com/img/hydrant.jpg) Screeshot of original Adopt-a-Hydrant in Boston The whole endeavor was [truly exciting and celebrated as a model for modern civic engagement](https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pahlka_coding_a_better_government), so much so that its opensource code was reused and adapted, meeting different needs across different locales over the next few years, such as Providence, Anchorage, Chicago, and even Honolulu, where the code was adapted for Adopt-a-Siren, a program that allows volunteers to check for dead batteries in tsunami sirens across the city. But, even with city adoption, citizen use was limited. Even the initial implementation in Boston struggled to gain adoption. So at the time, I couldn't help but feel a tad skeptical about its future impact. It just wasn't clear to me that people would sign up, let alone *actually shovel* out nearby hydrants. Indeed, I had been told that "[people don't want up wanting to be civic](https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2020-04-07-SPIDR/)." Maybe. But, I've learned, sometimes people ***have to be civic***. Fast forward to 2015, the city of San Francisco creatively repurposed the same codebase we used for Adopt-a-Hydrant to create [Adopt-a-Drain](https://adoptadrain.sfwater.org/). This program was designed to address the issue of maintaining more than 25,000 storm drains in the city, a task that the city's crews found overwhelming. The system allowed volunteers to adopt a drain and commit to its regular cleaning, offering a little bit of fun by granting naming rights over the storm drain of their choice. This led to amusing and quirky names like [”Thirsty Boi," "You're So Drain," and "Drainmond Green.”](https://www.kqed.org/arts/13923319/you-can-adopt-a-drain-in-san-francisco-with-naming-rights-included) Again, the initial use of this tool was limited, but it set the stage for something inspiring. ![Map of storm drains adopted by residents](https://abhinemani.com/img/drain-map.jpg)Actual screenshot of Adopt-a-Drain SF (May 2023) In the winter of 2022/2023, a massive storm hit the Bay Area, causing severe flooding in many cities. [The storm brought some positive attention to San Francisco's Adopt-a-Drain program, making it onto the local news](https://www.kqed.org/arts/13923319/you-can-adopt-a-drain-in-san-francisco-with-naming-rights-included). Over 4,000 drains were regularly cleaned by local good Samaritans, showing an inspiring testament to civic responsibility. It was heartening to see the tool we had created years ago put to such great use in a time of need. These stories highlight a critical lesson for cities and governments: investing in resiliency and emergency-oriented technology may not provide immediate returns, but these investments can pay off significantly in times of crisis. It's about going long on resiliency, investing early and often in tools and technologies that may lie dormant until a time of need. In conclusion, the journey from Adopt-a-Hydrant to Adopt-a-Drain and beyond has been a humbling and inspiring one. It serves as a testament to the power of civic technology and the potential of open-source solutions to foster civic engagement and bolster our collective resiliency. The joy and sense of community these programs have brought to the cities, even amidst challenging times, are immeasurable. And to the cities and governments out there: remember, when it comes to resiliency and emergency technology, **it's a marathon, not a sprint**. So let's go long. --- # How Cities Can Compete in the Future of Work > Best practices on how to engage and retain the best talent for municipal governments URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2023/01/01/work/ Published: 2023-01-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Economic Development --- As the world continues to recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, municipalities are facing new and complex challenges in the labor market. These challenges are compounded by emerging theories around the [“future of work” (FOW)](https://futureofwork.city), which require innovative strategies for human resources departments to attract and retain top talent. Despite the importance of these challenges, the absence of reliable best practices in the literature has handicapped municipalities’ ability to compete for the best workers, leading to open positions within city hall and impacting the ability of the government to provide essential public services. ![Government Job Losses](https://abhinemani.com/img/jolts.png) To address these challenges, our research team conducted a study to examine the current challenges in recruiting and hiring for municipalities. The study used mixed methodologies, including a compilation of academic, industry, and practitioner best practices, a literature review and content analysis, and a review of job postings and recruitment materials from all 88 “large” U.S. municipalities (cities with over 250K population). The research team analyzed **350 publications** in the academic and gray literature to determine the top best practices in recruitment strategies. The top seven best practices identified were: 1. Flexible Work Arrangements (telework or work from home) 2. Professional Development and Job Training 3. Health & Wellness programs 4. Insurance Plans 5. Paid Time Off 6. Tuition Assistance 7. Transit Subsidies The publication, [Future of Work for Cities](https://futureofwork.city), summarizes the findings. The research also sheds light on the challenges that municipal leaders face when trying to implement these best practices, including resourcing, workforce planning, bureaucracy, and effective job descriptions. ![Government Job Losses](https://abhinemani.com/img/bestpractices.png) To assess the implementation of FOW strategies, the research team analyzed job descriptions and other online recruitment materials from all 88 large U.S. municipalities, totaling over **1,000 individual job descriptions from cities**. ![Government Job Losses](https://abhinemani.com/img/fulltable.png) The analysis revealed that no city featured all of the best practices, with the lowest-scoring municipality being Jersey City. The most common best practices featured in online recruitment materials were insurance, wellness, and paid time off, while the least common were transportation subsidies, telework, and tuition reimbursements. ![Government Job Losses](https://abhinemani.com/img/distribution.png) Based on the findings of the study, the research team has four recommendations for municipal leaders: - Promote data-driven evaluative tools such as the research team's [futureofwork.city](https://futureofwork.city) platform - Modernize and standardize job descriptions - Recruit talent through modern social channels - Highlight and share national FOW best practices, including the development of flexibility policies, investment in professional development and training, and expansion of employee wellness programs and benefits. Adopting these recommendations will help local governments become more competitive in the post-pandemic tightened labor market and attract and retain the best workers. The research team also conducted a linear analysis to explore correlations between municipal characteristics and best practice adoption and found that population and budget can affect a municipality’s ability to implement FOW best practices. By addressing the challenges and implementing best practices in recruitment and hiring, municipalities can ensure that they have the workforce they need to provide essential public services to their communities. --- *Note: This research was conducted by public administration researchers (MPA) from the University of Southern California (USC): Maha Rizvi, Iveth Watts, Estevan Hinojosa, and Abhi Nemani. The project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.* --- # How Governments Can and Cannot Innovate through Challenges > The lessons and outcomes for local government from the flagship federal innovation program. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2023/01/01/challenge/ Published: 2023-01-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Economic Development --- In the late 2000s, futurist Clay Shirky wrote a handful of books describing what we all know as the "Web 2.0.” Instead of simply a resource for searching or reading, the internet now was dynamic, user-generated, and collaborative. In his seminal book, [Cognitive Surplus](https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Technology-Consumers-Collaborators/dp/0143119583), Shirky's observation was that this collaborative layer fundamentally changed the economics of knowledge generation and sharing. Humanity built Wikipedia much quicker than Encyclopedia Britannia and a maximally more useful resource. At the same time, early in the Obama Administration, a team championed the idea termed "ExpertNet" — a simple concept that the government can and should rely on the best ideas out there. The internet now enabled more rapid information sharing. Instead of hiring just one team of consultants, the government should challenge the best to develop innovative solutions. Challenge.gov may be the most visible e-democracy federal government collaborative initiative. The essay examines how this notion of civic participation rises to the definition of collaboration, and how sustainable and effective digital tools such as Challenge.gov have been and can be. Put simply, why was ExpertNet shut down, but Challenge.gov exist — and what does that say about the opportunity for online expert engagement at the federal level? By comparing ExpertNet and Challenge.gov through both legal and theoretical lenses, the analysis reveals that the internet enables a successful competition-based, not consensus-based model for collaborative government, a model proving valuable for innovation, but potentially damaging for social capital. ## Technique Analysis ### Technique 1: ExpertNet & the Problem of the Federal Advisory Committee Act From 2008-2010, [Professor Beth Noveck](https://www.brookings.edu/book/wiki-government/) was part of the team tasking with creating the administration's "open government initiative" (Noveck, 2009). This involved various technology strategies including open data and greater science investments — as well as a commitment to use technology to better engage experts from throughout the country in policymaking. Building upon Shirky's idea of a "public commons," Noveck's team imagined an "ExpertNet," a "directory of directories for public officials to find and connect with academic (or subject-matter) experts outside the typical confines of a consulting agreement. The administration [explained their agenda](http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/trade-journals/white-house-reveals-plans-expertnet-wiki/docview/821730142/se-2?accountid=14749): "We believe that everyone has expertise, experience and enthusiasm which, if shared in manageable ways, will help us make smarter decisions together… We want to make sure that everyone who is interested and has something relevant and useful to share has an opportunity to participate." Indeed, the White House followed collaborative principles in designing this platform, launching a public wiki for anyone to edit shaping the design and architecture on the platform. (Unfortunately, an archive of the Wiki is unavailable, so reports are second-hand.) A parallel could be drawn to LinkedIn or even Reddit but for and by the public sector. The ExpertNet was designed to become the online community where academics and subject matter experts could freely engage with policymakers on problems. #### Legal & Consensus Issues The ExpertNet initiative found short-lived homes within the Department of Defense and within the Food and Drug Administration. [Professor Noveck](https://www.brookings.edu/book/wiki-government/) explains that these departments leverage the thinking — the "directory of directories" — approach to connect their own leaders and experts within the organization. There have been instances of success driving cross-team collaboration (Noveck, p. 228, 2012). These projects, however, like the White House's ambitions from broader ExpertNet vision were hampered by federal legislation. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) handicaps — according to Noveck and others — the ability of federal operators to directly engage with outside groups of experts: FACA was designed in 1972 to establish better guidelines and ethical standards for groups affecting federal operations. In a way FACA's requirements of process may align with collaborative democrats' recommendations for Joint Fact Finding (JFF). That said, even JFF advocates would need to appreciate that the process has limited scope, can be expensive, and is time intensive. That runs counter to the Cognitive Surplus thinking open government experts were driving towards. Simply relying on ExpertNet does threaten democratic legitimacy is not also representative of the people — which in fact is part of the point of the FACA rules. A response would be that the scope of an ExpertNet engagement would not be as significant as a full JFF, and indeed the smaller scale engagement open up access to more participants — where consensus may not even need to be a goal. Conflict might be preferable (Peterson et al., 2006). Indeed, derisive dialogue on Reddit comes to mind, and questions of standards of discourse and level of comfort even arise (Leach, 2006). Further, one could argue a consensus-based approach may not make sense for ExpertNet or the JFF aspects of collaboration since the scientific method may be preference. These questions about the nature of dialogue — consensus or conflict — make one less clear of the potential outcomes of this technique. #### Online Deliberative Theory Even though the fully fleshed out Expert et did not come to life, it is still worthwhile to understand how it might have fit into best practices for online deliberation. Korthagen and van Keulen conducted an extensive study of 22 online deliberation processes and identified 7 ideal criteria for successful online 1) a combination of online and offline engagement; 2) a connection to a formal decision-making process; 3) clear communication; 4) feedback loops; 5) discussion and voting; 6) sustainability; and 7) broad mobilization (2020). It seems the connection to a formal decision-making process seems like the most striking shortcoming in this approach. (Many of the other may not apply.) First, open government advocates such as [Professor Landemore](https://www.amazon.com/Open-Democracy-Reinventing-Popular-Twenty-First-ebook/dp/B0876H66RY/), who helped with the deliberative democracy project in France, suggest these rules may hamper the inclination of government officials or the experts to engage with a platform like ExpertNet. In effect, FACA requires an intensive administrative burden on behalf of the agency to host convening and work with experts on finding a "consensus." Though that definition is unclear — and problematic. As Noveck points out, "But the ambiguity about when FACA should and should not apply has increased restraint among agency lawyers. They fear litigation in the event consultation is deemed improper and in violation of FACA's rules on how a group is convened or how it operates." In this way the legal burden can also become a cultural hesitation — leading to rhe demise of the ExpertNet agenda. Second, looking at the participatory budgeting projects internationally, the monetary buy-in seemed essential to encourage participants to vote. In this case, when working with experts the issue seems even more pressing. Experts may already have consultancies; they may have affiliations with schools that may come in the way; or they may not simply want to work for free. Incentives and game mechanism are critical in creating meaning for participants (Gastil & Broghammer, 2020). More recently, subsequent projects have built in reward mechanisms including public attention, online recognition, or sponsorships. Finally, ExpertNet ran afoul of legal, cultural, and theoretical concerns. There are not outcomes to speak up aside from the comparison it will provide for future examples. One such stark contrast is Challenge.gov, which presents a less radical, more costly, but more sustainable approach to expert collaboration in the digital age. ### Technique 2: Challenge.gov Challenge.gov followed similar intentions to ExpertNet in that it called for "open innovation within government." Historically there has been a process to flip traditional corporate procurement cycles from top-down mandates to crowd-sourced competitions (Mergel, 2018). Challenge.gov brought this thinking into the White House during the Obama administration. "Challenges—or contests—are novel methods to engage external stakeholders in the problem-solving, solution design, and policy implementation processes" (Mergel and DeSouza, 2013). For instance, an agency, such as NASA may put up a request from experts on how to design new 7G networks, and scientists from anywhere compete — all the while the public can view and content. Since inception, the platform has hosted over 100 challenges working with over 700 federal sponsoring teams. #### Legal & Consensus Issues Challenge.gov was hosted in the General Services Administration. Public sector buy-in is critical to collaborative projects generally. GSA is operational and cross-cutting for every federal agency, and given their central role in contracting, they were well positioned to home the operational brunt of the program. This presented more substantial staying power for the program. Legally, it seems like Challenge.gov took a more iterative approach to engaging with outside experts. Instead of envisioning a new communication layer between themselves and advisors, they decided to make little changes to the existing procurement rules and drive — through a top-down methodology embolden by the White House. That said, confounding expectations political changes in the White House did not affect agency participation in the challenges (Hameduddin et al., 2020). Consensus is seemingly a loaded term legally for online deliberation, which Challenge.gov sidestepped. #### Online Deliberation Theory Theoretically, Challenge.gov seems to meet the ideals online deliberation, though data on offline engagement is lacking. Of each of its ideals, the most interesting would be the connection to a formal institution, sustainability and broad mobilization: most other e-governance have launched and passed away many times by now (Aichholzer & Rose, 2020). Challenge.gov has had over 70 from 2011 through 2014, and in 2020, the site lists over 80 archived projects from that year alone. Given the legal positioning, their connection and sustainability is clear. That said, not unlike participatory budgeting projects, the requirement of effort from the convening public agency can be significant (Aichholzer & Rose, 2020). According to a study of challenges from 2011 through 2015, it took federal agencies on average of two years to go through the entire challenge process. This suggests even with a proven online toolkit, and executive buy-in online participation may be difficult to run often. Accordingly, the issue of broad mobilization (and so representativeness) should be examined. Although these techniques are expert-focused, online participation on a deliberative democracy theory demands consideration of representatives and inclusion (Leach, 2006). It might be argued that an online system like this is simply another way for the "usual suspects" to have their role in policy or procurement. Indeed, this could be an area of future research. What is notable, however, is that this open competition approach is still fundamentally democratic — although not in the typically ballot box system. Another form of decision-making for deliberative democrats could be ["open assemblies,"](https://www.amazon.com/Open-Democracy-Reinventing-Popular-Twenty-First-ebook/dp/B0876H66RY/) where individuals self-select to attend certain convening, discuss, and then vote (through various means). The fact that they are self-selected but also transparent provides democratic legitimacy, according to Landemore (2021). The previous Challenge.gov announcements signal a public voting and commenting function, which seems dormant at this writing. Yet strengthening that capacity, and boosting more transparency in the process, Challenge.gov could be a (albeit small) reliable online participation platform for better policymaking. ## Path Forward Both techniques suggest that tapping into the cognitive surplus requires more than a wiki or a webform. ExpertNet failed to launch but illustrated a fundamental challenge in federal policy against less formal collaboration. Challenge.gov was positioned well within the federal ecosystem, but still required bureaucratic maneuvering to succeed — and imposed its own bureaucracy to impede innovation. What is most notable is that these examples overlook entirely the advice consistent across the literaure: online and in-person collaboration must go together (Korthagen and van Keulen, 2020). The promise of something like ExpertNet would have been more informal, social connections — a key ingredient to successful collaborations (Ansell & Gash, 2008). Even with the instrumental outcomes of these online participation tools, and others like it, one must wonder whether we can achieve its intrinsic goals (Leach, 2006). Lest we miss an opportunity to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. ## References - Aichholzer, G. & Rose, G. (2020) "Experience with Digital Tools in Different Types of e-Participation." European E-Democracy in Practice. Springer, pp. 93-140. - Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008) Collaborative governance in theory and practice. *Journal of Public Administration Research and Practice, 18*(4), 543-571. - Chopra, A. (2010). ExpertNet Wiki: An Update. White House Blog Archives. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/12/29/expertnet-wiki-update - Dukes, E., Firehock, K., Birkhoff, J. (2011). Community-based collaboration: Bridging socio-ecological research and practice. United Kingdom: University of Virginia Press. - Gastil, J. & Broghammer, M. (2020). "Linking Theories of Motivation, Game Mechanics, and Public Deliberation to Design an Online System for Participatory Budgeting." Political Studies. - Hameduddin, T., Fernandez, S., & Demircioglu, M. A. (2020). Conditions for open innovation in public organizations: evidence from Challenge.gov. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 42(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2020.1754867 - Korthagen, I. & van Keulen, I. (2020) "Assessing Tools for E-Democracy: Comparative Analysis of the Case Studies." European E-Democracy in Practice. Springer, pp. 295-327. - Landemore, H. (2021). Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century. Kindle Edition. - Leach, W. (2006b) "Theories about Consensus-Based Conservation." Conservation Biology 20(2): 573–575. - McDermott, R. (2013). U.S. implements some Open Government Partnership commitments, ExpertNet falls by the wayside. FierceGovernment. - Mergel, I. (2018). Open innovation in the public sector: drivers and barriers for the adoption of Challenge.gov. Public Management Review, 20(5), 726–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2017.1320044 - Mergel, I., & Desouza, K. C. (2013). Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov. Public Administration Review, 73(6), 882–890. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12141 - Noveck, B. S. (2009). Wiki government how technology can make government better, democracy stronger, and citizens more powerful. Brookings Institution Press. - Noveck, B. S. (2015). Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The technologies of expertise and the future of governing. Harvard University Press. - Peterson, N., Peterson, M. & Peterson, T. (2005) "Conservation and the Myth of Consensus." Conservation Biology, 19(3): 576–578. - Rossini, P. & Stromer-Galley, J. (2020) "Citizen Deliberation Online." The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion. - Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. Penguin Press. - White house reveals plans for ExpertNet wiki. (2010). Informationweek - Online, Retrieved from http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/trade-journals/white-house-reveals-plans-expertnet-wiki/docview/821730142/se-2?accountid=14749 --- # How Cities Can Change the Cost of Doing Business with Camino > Why I’m excited about Camino.ai’s potential to help cities innovate economic development URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2022/10/31/camino/ Published: 2022-10-31 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Economic Development --- _This is the announcement for my joining the GovTech permitting and licensing company, [Camino.ai](https://camino.ai), as an advisor._ I’m asked often what brought me into government work. My coy answer is really good episodes of the [West Wing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRYxQM1HHX0&ab_channel=jayzhelle001). The truth is that in college I was recruited to help work at a research center focused on State and Local government: the [Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna](http://roseinstitute.org/). That inspired me — and challenged me. Their “gauntlet” for new hires was to research the economic development policies in California cities — ie the “Cost of Doing Business Survey”. At that point — at all of 16 years old — I could not define an *ad valorem tax rate* let alone provide substantive judgment on what that rate should be or even why it mattered. After 15+ years in public service, that has changed. ## The Cost of Doing Business The “cost of doing business” is very much a real and important question. I began to see this with our work at [Code for America](https://codeforamerica.org) on supporting businesses — particularly around getting business licenses. Year after year, cities would apply with a focus on economic development, eager for new technologies and approaches. The data I saw in [Los Angeles as Chief Data Officer](https://abhinemani.com/blog/announcements/reflections/2014/08/20/Data-in-the-City-of-Angels/) only made this issue clearer. Recent business licenses were one of the most requested data sets — online and off — which include the mayor. Unfortunately, that data was not updated often enough for a real-time picture of economic growth in LA. And my time as the Chief Innovation Officer building [Sacramento’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship](https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2017-12-21-Sacramento/) confirmed what I had been realizing more and more to be true: we make growth hard (not deliberately) because permits and licenses take time. But they do not need to. Working with the government can delight. And be efficient. Speeding up the permitting process does not just help the entrepreneurs and individuals seeking permits; these innovations grow the economic base for the city overall. This is a win-win. So why does this process take so much time and cause so much grief? My experience in governments suggests many reasons: policies and processes. Development policies and codes layer upon each over time, creating a web of regulation that can be entirely out of step with the city’s economic development goals. (For instance, I recall when licensing with some West Coast cities to consult, I have to show proof of auto insurance — even though I live in St. Louis, MO, and never plan to come on-site! Here’s the rub: My experience in government *also* suggests that good technology can move the needle on modernizing those policies and processes. When technology focuses on the user, the software takes on the responsibility to navigate the complexity, So residents do not have to. The tech does the work. (And the technologists). In so doing, the application of government technology (properly done) should reveal the underlying (often broken) policies that need to change. Technological and policy modernization can and should go hand-in-hand for cities looking to compete in the 21st century. ![Camino Workflow](https://www.camino.ai/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/image-1.png) ## Camino’s Role in Moving the Needle on Technological and Policy Modernization That is why I’m proud to become an advisor at [**Camino**](http://camino.ai), a modern, world-class permitting and licensing solution provider. Camino has helped cities such as [Santa Cruz, CA](https://www.camino.ai/case_study/santa-cruz-county/?case_study_id=santa-cruz-county), build a cannabis licensing application and [Syracuse, NY](https://www.camino.ai/case_study/syracuse/?case_study_id=syracuse), save hundreds of days in permitting processing — as well as working with hundreds of cities to provide [a simpler, more human interface](https://www.camino.ai/development-guide/) compared to the complicated PDFs or legacy software. [Mike](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrosengarten/) and [Nate](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-levine/) (Camino’s founders) have been old friends since the start of my career in GovTech, over a decade ago. Their track record in GovTech entrepreneurship (e.g., [OpenGov](http://opengov.com)) is historic and speaks to [their understanding of what the market needs](https://www.camino.ai/about-camino/). So it is not surprising that Camino’s technologies embody the ethos of what I think should be the standard in government software: [cloud-native, SaaS, secure, continuously improving, and modular](https://www.camino.ai/permitting-and-licensing-system/). This approach makes Camino flexible enough for large cities, but affordable enough for smaller ones. Plus, the Camino interface for businesses and residents is one that a city can be proud of, not hide away. But more than that, I am excited about [**Camino**](http://camino.ai) because of what’s possible next. My time in Economic Development in Sacramento was eye-opening: the opportunities for cities to support and celebrate local businesses only continue to grow. When I work with accelerators, my most [popular lecture](https://abhinemani.com/academy/city-hall/) is on how every startup, not just GovTech, should work with their local economic development office. Indeed, the takeaway is that working with the city is not only a burden but an opportunity. As one former Economic Development Director and CIO recently told me, “When businesses come to us, we are not asking, ‘What will be their licensing fee revenue?’ As a city government, we ask, ‘How can we help?’” That’s the question that excites me about this new collaboration, and I am looking forward to answering them with the Camino team, city leaders, and the broader GovTech community. --- # How do cities lead? > Joining the Leading Cities Board of Directors URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2022/10/04/leading-cities/ Published: 2022-10-04 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Regulation --- My career has been defined by building institutions for better government technology. That started at [Code for America](https://codeforamerica.org) and then continued within government in the [City of Los Angeles](https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2019-12-21-LA-Dashboard/) and the [City of Sacramento](https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2017-12-21-Sacramento/). These experiences opened my eyes to the need for new ideas within government. There’s a talent problem in our public sector, and I decided to focus my career on addressing that. We need to build a better pipeline — a pipeline of builders, of scholars — of leaders. And so I have spent the last few years picking up as many graduate degrees I could get my hands on. The primary motivation was to learn how to lead better for cities — [to understand the gaps in our educational systems for public service](https://abhinemani.com/blog,/featured/2020/07/11/Skills-Gap/). However, another realization came in front of my mind: the line between research and entrepreneurship is not as clear as you would think, particularly in the public sector. Good research is finding a gap in the literature and filling it. Good entrepreneurship is finding a gap in the market and filling it. That is not a remarkable observation. What was more remarkable to me was the alignment between what academics do and what entrepreneurs do. We all answer questions. Moreover when it comes to public interest technology companies: their questions are fundamentally academic: what helps government work better? Every day smart city startups are trying to answer that question. They are living and breathing case studies in the future. That’s a realization that took me about 10 years to realize. [Leading Cities](https://leadingcities.org/about) and its leader, Mike Lake, came to this same conclusion years ago. That is why they transitioned from a purely academic network to an entrepreneurial one. Leading Cities doesn’t just publish research, they make things happen. Its flagship program AcceliCITY puts the best research to work: it funds pilots to show what is possible for better governance. In its short life as a technology and innovation institution, Leading Cities has had an outsized impact: - **Better transportation**: Connecting a smart parking solution from South Carolina with the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts to not just bring handsfree payment options for parking, but to leverage city and privately owned properties to meet the parking needs of the downtown area. - **Better public works**: Sourcing, vetting, and educating a food waste reduction solution for the City of Gainesville, Florida to meet the city’s goals of reaching zero waste by 2040. - **Better sustainability**: Expanding the impact of a wastewater solution to also improve the greening of the private sector by piloting their award-winning, enzyme-based filtration system that removes the micro-organic pollutants from the wastewater of AstraZeneca’s largest manufacturing facility. The future of cities will be written by both professors and engineers, it will be written by scholars and entrepreneurs, by universities and startups. That’s the next chapter for urban innovation. I’m honored to be a part of it at Leading Cities. Let’s write a new book together. And let’s make it great. --- # How the 'Smart City' Failed > Presentation to state government agency leaders on what we all can learn from (good and bad) municipal innovation efforts URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2022/08/06/polemic/ Published: 2022-08-06 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Regulation --- I was asked to speak to the technology leadership for Texas state agencies, and instead of giving the typical "smart cities" pitch, I explained how that model has failed, and what Texas (and other states) can do to drive local government innovation. Takeaways for state leaders (or all government leaders, in fact) are these three ways to **refocus**: - From Open Data to Websites that Work - From an App Store to a Competitive Marketplace - From Recruiting "Rockstars" to Capacity Building ## Presentation Materials Embedded PDF: https://abhinemani.com/decks/TASSCC.pdf [Open PDF in Browser](https://abhinemani.com/decks/TASSCC.pdf) Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/i62WH37KFdg ![GovTech Ideals](https://abhinemani.com/img/smart.png) ## Background materials: - [City Hall 101](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/city-101/) - [New Ways to Build or Buy](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/lean/) - [The GovTech Ecosystem](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/ecosystem/) --- # 2022 GovTech Tailwinds > Why 2022 should be an even bigger year for the government technology industry: changing leaders, staff, and expectations URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2022/01/01/2022-tailwinds/ Published: 2022-01-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Reports, Startups, Industry Insights --- 2021 was a groundbreaking year for the government technology market (GovTech). This was at a time of massive strain on governments and entrepreneurs themselves. Indeed, the market continued its remarkable growth over the last decade in the face of the pandemic, even at the state and local level where economic crises compound fiscal challenges. ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/2021-spend-growth.png) Why? Based on dozens of interviews in the fall of 2021 with CIOs, CTOs, and other departmental heads, along with a [unprecedented survey of 400+ local government decision makers](https://www.civicpulse.org/it-trends), three trends have been fundamentally changing the buyer landscape in government technology over the last ten years, which are now coming to a head: new leadership, personnel turnover, and SaaS expectations. And indeed the pandemic accelerated those drivers. Together, these demand-side shifts not only promise continued growth for the industry, but also more activity, innovation, and competition in the marketplace. ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-overview.png) ## A New Brand of IT Manager Historically, the IT department was considered a secondary administrative function. In cities, that meant an IT group (a manager and a few analysts/engineers) would report into an Operations Director, then a General Manager, and finally a city manager, or city council. As the role of technology has elevated throughout society, the same has happened structurally within government. After the White House in 2009 by appointing the first Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer, states and cities — that could — followed suit. Various senior technology roles — CIO, CTO, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Digital Officer, etc — now exist in over 40 of the 50 of the largest cities, and in every single state. Along with those roles came the elevation of the IT departments to “cabinet-level” meaning that at the very least technology was more publicly visible as a priority for the government. Also, it promises to enable smarter and broader use of technology as the interdepartmental connections grow deeper — and the operational leaders (e.g. GM of Buildings) better understand technology themselves. These reinforcing trends — new IT roles, elevated departments, and technical operational leadership — should open up the previously entrenched, legacy-dominated government technology market to new players on the outside, just like on the inside. ## Empty Seats, Open Opportunities Strong leaders cultivate strong teams, but government CIOs have had a tough time, especially at the local level. Indeed, hiring technology talent is difficult for even the most financially generous tech companies. The last few decades have seen a "hollowing out" of government technical talent, with budget crises and political conflicts leading to IT departments sometimes with more job openings than current employees. (Furloughs and early retirements enable agencies to reduce spend but maintain opportunity.) Thus, governments struggle to staff against the systems they are required to maintain. (In part because COBOL engineers are just as hard to recruit as data scientists maybe harder.) During 2020 through early 2021, the pandemic exacerbated this challenge. These empty seats strain the whole organization, making innovation more difficult. CIOs must keep the lights on, not change the wiring. Indeed, many entrepreneurs reported that contracts slowed in 2021 because their government contacts had turned over or were furloughed. But based on interviews with 20+ government C-level leaders, governments are looking to turnkey SaaS platforms to enable a reorientation of their IT shops. Having had experience with SaaS tools — more below — many CIOs see the opportunity to hire generalists, both technical or not, in "digital service" teams that focus less on custom code and more on the user experience, leveraging a host of vendors to get the job done. Currently, the White House, some states, and many large U.S. cities have a digital service or innovation team, and more are surely on the way in 2022. As modern, digital professionals fill the empty seats in government IT, they will be looking for modern, digital partners in the private sector. Accordingly as IT departments evolve — effectively turning over — the software systems they had been support will need to change as well, a rare chance for churn in a typically stagnant buyer marketplace. ![GovTech Market Trends Tailwinds](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-market-trends.png) ## New SaaS Expectations: Fast, Simple & Modern The fear coming into the pandemic within local government was profound. Local governments live off their businesses, and are responsible for the majority of public health: the nightmare scenario of no revenue and unprecedented expense. The reality, fortunately, was not so bleak — in fact, most report the budget surpluses through the pandemic. And the federal and state recovery dollars continue to flow (unevenly, however) into local coffers. ![GovTech Market Spend](https://abhinemani.com/img/gt-it-spending-snapshot.png) That said, this budgetary windfall should not be seen as a free lunch for software vendors. Over the three dozen local government leaders engaged, none specified that recovery funds were being allocated for IT “capital projects," which is how IT has historically been procured. Many governments did, however, find money during the first two years of the pandemic for **rapid deployments, which is where SaaS tools found traction**. Across the board, governments were forced to adopt and support new digital tools — primarily productivity tools for remote work — and many even rapidly integrated quick deploy SaaS solutions to enhance the digital experience for engagement with residents. As government technology moves from admin-facing to public-facing, the expectations change, and so CIOs have begun to expect private-sector grade digital experiences from their technology vendors. But because many legacy vendors have not been able to modernize their citizen/customer experiences, governments have begun to look at new solutions, including many SaaS solutions "layering" atop the legacy solutions. On the other hand, some have turned to the private sector: A few even reported more substantial, yet rapid deployments of ZenDesk. The combination of limited funding for capital projects and the heightened expectations for digital should persist and intensify in 2022, opening the door for innovation or disruption. --- *This briefing is based off of interviews and research from over 20 government officials, a handful of universities and research centers, and a number of GovTech entrepreneurs, conducted in Fall 2021.* --- # A New Model of Collaborative Governance for Civic Data > A Case Study on The Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/09/01/wprdc/ Published: 2021-09-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Cities, Data --- Most community-based collaborations for local governments focus on natural resources: land, water, parks. In our digital age, pubic assets need not be digital. Indeed, the most valuable resource might be data, bits of information stored on servers spread far outside any single government’s jurisdiction. Over the last decade, governments of all sizes have launched open data programs to publish government-created or maintained data (that is not personally identifiable) online for anyone to use. More relevantly, over the last five years, there has been an emergence of community-based open data programs that “live” outside city hall: instead of a department of analytics or data managing the data, an independent non-profit (based often in a university) runs a regional open data program. In this essay, I analyze the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) case, the first known case for this approach for cross-sector alignment. WPRDC serves as a unique example as it connects multiple governments (cities and counties), is financed by foundations, universities, and the governments, themselves and has ongoing interaction between governments, academics, businesses, and community leaders. ## 1. History & Purpose ### Focus on Public Policy Over the last 20 years, there has been a switch in how governments approach their data. Historically, data — or information — was requested through FOIA and CFRA rules and others like those across the states. Historically this happened through a “pull” mechanism: citizens, academics, or journalists would make a formal request with the city to share a specific piece of information. The Obama Administration issued the Open Government Executive Order in 2009, which set the precedent that agencies should “push” not “pull” data: they should proactively publish their information for public consumption. [The directive and its guidance](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ogi-progress-report-american-people.pdf) describe open data as “jet fuel” for innovation, and opening federal data became a priority for the White House. The benefits include not only increased transparency and the possibility of greater accountability but also for broader civic innovation: entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists could use the data to advance their communities. One of the first local government Chief Data Officers, Brett Goldstein, former CDO of Chicago, was appointed in 2011, and he serves as an example of [how this tricked down to local](https://beyondtransparency.org). Once the bell was wrong for open data, cities — driven in part by politics — pushed forward on embracing the notion of transparency. They built open data portals to share all the data coming in and out of departments. From 2009 through 2013, local governments took a common approach to manage this asset, data: they purchased or built their own “data portals” where they would host and allow access to the data they problem. Commons providers were Socrata, CKAN, and others. At Code for America, the team helped at least 20 cities launch their own data portals. There are important questions about what happens when the government and a private sector player (its contractor) manage a public asset. An external manager might improve utility and honestly. [In a symposium on open data](https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open\_data-latex.pdf), NYU Professor Clay Shirky explains several challenges with government-run open data programs. First, he argues, “Transparency is often mere translucency.” He explains that governments’ incentives — politics, public response, and even regulations — may drive towards the appearance of transparency without an external agent for accountability. Second, and similarly, Shirky argues that a data program can effectively subsidize a private company (e.g., Socrata) instead of investing in the local community. Third — paraphrasing — the agency may not effectively use the data with its resources for management, visualization, and public engagement. One additional issue regarding open data programs is their limited geographic focus: typically just one city. IT Manager [John Feldman of Asheville](https://beyondtransparency.org/) explains that not only does it undermine the citizen experience because meaningful data for users from multiple regional institutions — cities, counties, school districts, etc. Also, resourcing numerous programs only increases the wasted public time and capital into private coffers that Shirky highlighted. ### Convening Public Agency: City of Pittsburgh & Allegheny County Even with growing criticism of city-led open data programs, in the mid-2010s, many mayors undertook the initiative . Like other cities, Pittsburgh began the procurement process for an open data solution and even hired a data and analytics manager, Laura Meixell, to oversee the program. An urban planner, Meixell had previously attended the University of Pittsburgh and was also an alumnus of the Code for America civic innovation program: [she had first-hand experience with open data strategies](https://www.govtech.com/data/using-data-and-analytics-to-make-pittsburgh-neighborhoods-great.html). Concurrently, Bob Gradeck, a local researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, saw the city’s request for a proposal and reached out to Meixell and her supervisor, Debra Lam, the city’s Chief Innovation and Performance Officer. Together, they decided that instead of funneling money into a for-profit third party for a software platform, they would consider two distinct approaches: first, that the data would “live” outside City Hall — that a non-profit or academic institution should be tasked with managing it; second, the city would reallocate its planned budget for the data system to this third party, making it a meaningful connection; and third, and uniquely, that the data should not be limited to just one jurisdiction. ### Non-State Actors: University of Pittsburgh (WPRDC) The combination of these strategies led to the development of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Portal. The WPRDC partnership of three lead institutions in Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County. The initial funding and commitment came from the city and the university, but since they all three have been involved in operations. Since 2015, it has been managed by staff at the University of Pittsburgh — specifically, Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) — as the WPRDC project led by Bob Gradeck as project manager on the founding team. The data center was launched with 50 datasets furnished by the city and county with the WRPDC’s technical and strategy support teams. These formal partners, WPRDC, regularly engage with the public, [as illustrated at its launch](https://pittnews.com/article/64296/news/open-data-connects-community/), >“In the packed room Thursday night, people pinned papers to the walls, detailing their ideas for data sets ranging from ‘most popular dog names in Pittsburgh," to ‘time spent in jail.’ Groups of three to four people, with and without a background in data analysis and computer programming, sat around each of the seven tables pointing at tables and numbers on their computer screens." As Meixell explains in the announcement, this kind of community engagement is central to the city’s strategy, what she called “community as capital,’ a model where citizens can use this centrally hosted data to build tools and analyses themselves to serve the community. Gradeck adds that he considers WRPDC’s role is not only as an independent steward of transparency but as a “data intermediary…. the project team also organizes and provides events, training sessions, and services to help staff at government and nonprofit organizations, students… use civic information." Even though the city and county participate financially, budget reports obtained reflect this varied function of WRPDC with various stakeholders. The funding comes from foundations — Richard King Mellon and the Heinz Endowments — for operations and project-based contracts or federal grants. Moreover, WRPDC is a member of the National Neighborhood Indicators Project (NNIP), connecting back to a network of community-based groups. NNIP gathers performance and quality of life data, unlike the raw operational data WRPDC. That said, WRPDC’s Draft Sustainability Plan suggests, “Like most of its peers in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, the Regional Data Center will pursue a fee for service model. Projects and contracts will enable the Regional Data Center to fund operations.” ## 2. Structure & Process ### Participants Engage Directly & Forum Aims to Make Decisions A review of the WPRDC’s operating agreement between the founding parties — the Univerity, the city, and the county — illustrates the basic decision-making structure and process for WRPDC, on paper — which is reasonably unilateral — but Gradeck explained a more collaborative relationship. The agreement delimits decision-making and control of what data sets are released and when they are entirely subject to governmental approval. Per the concerns stated by open data advocates above, this suggests WRPDC may suffer from translucency but transparency. However, WRPDC’s materials position them as a data intermediary, and part of the operating agreement states their responsibility for “creating public data request procedures and community feedback loops”. Gradeck adds that this role and positioning provide political backing for their data requests. Indeed, he says that there has not been a data set WRPDC’s staff has requested (via the public or another partner) that the city or county has not published — in its over five years of existence. That said, research had shown that conflict had existed but was then resolved, for instead when community groups wanted racial breakdowns of COVID-19 reports, which they eventually received after advocacy. It may be worth noting that the formation of this collaboration might be uniquely beneficial for this kind of direct decision-making. Since WRPDC did not fit within the model of the data portal software contract the city had been developing, the city developed a custom statement of work. This including a formal role for the University in helping map out the city’s data ecosystem and strategy. There was direct, collaborative participation and partnership from the start. ### Organized and Meets Collectively Indeed, those initial parties remain the “Executive Leadership Team” now: designates from the WPRDC staff, leadership from Allegheny County, the City of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh, which meet “several times a year… to collaborate on the day to day operation of the WPRDC, and provide a place to coordinate WPRDC activities”. An open question for WPRDC is how its other stakeholders are involved in its decision-making. WPRDC lists three constituencies it seeks to engage with its product — the end-users as it were for the collaborative: “beginners,” “data wizards,” and “publishers.” The organization states that their interests should be challenged through the “Advisory Board”: The composition of the Board may change over time, and should reflect the diversity of the community served by the Data Center."" ### Issues of Inclusion That said, Gradeck admits that diversity and inclusion remain challenges. Indeed, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Advisory Board has been on hiatus, even though collaborative has been actively involved in the region’s COVID response. Moreover, Gradeck added that part of the challenge in creating and maintaining an advisory board is avoiding the “usual suspects” to borrow the phrase from modern public participation theory. Further, the community leaders who participate often have a private or political agenda, forcing WRPDC to reconsider a participation and engagement strategy. Indeed, this would need to be a pressing issue given the city’s description of the project, as Lam said, “another testament to Pittsburgh’s inclusive innovation”. Finally, the role of “publishers” is unclear. A publisher could be another government agency — say a smaller suburban city or another university; clearly, WRPDC gives them an on-ramp to share their data with the broader commons. However, what is less clear is their role in the governance of the collaborative. Given the firm operating agreement amongst the three lead institutions, one wonders whether other voices will be heard. And their insights might very well speak to the inclusivity issues WRPDC is aiming to address. These concerns of collaborative groups and participation programs — the “usual suspects” and misaligned interests — generally are not unique and suggest an ongoing question for collaboratives such as these moving forward. ## 3. Outputs & Outcomes ### Outputs WPRDC’s outputs can be considered on various levels. Unlike other collaborative that may be focused on setting, for example, environmental policy, this required only the operating agreement. Its different outputs would be more program-oriented. Going back to the constituencies, we can look at outputs for the data publishers and data consumers (beginners and “wizards”). For data publishers, it seems plain that WPRDC has published significant amounts of public data. From its initial data repository in 2015 with 50 datasets, the data portal now incorporates 329 coming from numerous publishers. For data consumers, without direct user feedback, this paper cannot speak to whether the unified portal enhanced their experience. Beyond these measures, the organization maintains a robust list of over 40 indicators, ranging from datasets downloaded to users trained. Without comparative data, however, it seems a numerical analysis would be unhelpful. ### Projects The final and most visible outcomes from WPRDC have been the projects they have created. Most recently, WRPDC was the region’s official data hub for COVID-19 reports. Before that, WPDRC data was used by the city government — marrying various kinds of data from multiple institutions — to create “PittVIEW,” a real-time dashboard used operationally by the police externally for transparency. However, it is worth noting that that site is no longer live, and no details were found. [As Shirky and others point out](https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open\_data-latex.pdf): app sustainability is a constant problem with open-data-developed applications. (For example, when data from one government falters, it might break down another’s system.) Gradeck reports are “a common and known reality -- that not all the projects will be sustainable.” Overall, this suggests that the regional approach has both its opportunities and challenges for creating meaningful project outputs. That said, the site lists various projects still in existence, and national reports feature applications coming out of the data portal. ### Transparency This was indeed a likely outcome foreseen by critics: that the projects would become more important than the data. Put another way, without concrete measures to test governments against -- without meaningful mechanisms for accountability — “vanity metrics” like several data sets would outweigh other actions like news articles richly analyzing city performance or rapid publication of possibly unfriendly data. It is worth noting that WPRDC does not currently have and post regional COVID-19 vaccines. Assessing whether or not the portal did, in fact, lead to greater transparency seems complicated without national standards and more thoughtful research and analysis (ideally before and after the portal’s emergence). Absent that, however, another point should be made: “journalists” are not listed as a critical constituency on the WRPDC site. Indeed in its governing documents, the role of any media organization is not specified. One could argue that a vital stakeholder, even a group on the executive committee, should be a local journalistic institution. Returning to the ecological model often used in collaborative governance, not including the journalists seems to be overlooking the environmental lobby. ## Analysis Pulling the initial findings together, we can conclude that the WPRDC serves as good example of governmental collaboration: ![(Regional Data Table](https://abhinemani.com/img/wprdc-table.png) The most significant issue would be in its decision-making and participation model. As discussed, there is a risk in this type of collaborative that it can become simply consumptive: WRPDC takes whatever the governments provide. Without a more inclusive process and a more two-way one, this may present more significant risks after the strong personal relations driving the project have moved on. This is only one risk to sustainability: financial sustainability remains a challenge -- say the government fails to repurchase WPRDC’s services or if the paid-for-fee model they are exploring fails? As essential data such as COVID-19 cases live and are heavily relied upon by the public, the region runs the risk of losing an increasingly (however new) piece of civic infrastructure: its data. ## Still Learning Notably, the closest example in the literature of a kind of community-based collaborative is with libraries. Indeed, libraries sometimes take over the open data management role within cities or engage with them for training (Enis, 2020). As detailed in the Library Journal, a new project has emerged called “Civic Switchboard,” funded by various local and national foundations to determine what role libraries can and should play in the open data ecosystem. WRPDC is one of many models — but only with a formal partnership between an independent academic library and multiple local governments to directly manage the data program. Many libraries are publicly owned and funded, making those models less easily relatable to a typical definition of community-based collaborations. But, [the journal article summarizes](http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/trade-journals/civic-data-partnerships/docview/2331476344/se-2?accountid=14749]), “there's no one-size-fits all model for those efforts,” quoting the program founder, Adam Bremmer: “Modelling at the national level must be done by capturing a wide variety of successful local practices." ## Additional Readings - Major, D. (2015). [“Pittsburgh on the road to ‘inclusive innovation](https://gcn.com/articles/2015/12/22/pittsburgh-innovation-roadmap.aspx) - Pettit, K & Gradeck B. [“Black Equity Coalition deploys data to reduce COVID-19.](https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/library/stories/black-equity-coalition-deploys-data-reduce-covid-19%E2%80%99s-impact-black) - Young, M.M. (2020), [Implementation of Digital-Era Governance: The Case of Open Data in U.S. Cities.](https://doi-org.libproxy1.usc.edu/10.1111/puar.13156) --- # Webinar for All Entrepreneurs: Working Smarter With Cities > Whether you sell to government or not, your startup is going to be bound up in the public sector wherever you are and whatever you do. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2021/06/06/smartcityx-webinar/ Published: 2021-06-06 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Cities, Regulation --- This Wednesday, June 9, I'll be hosting a webinar with [SmartCityX by Scrum Ventures](https://en.smartcity-x.com/) on the the undeniable relationship between governments (nations, states, and cities) and *any* startups. It has been a priviledge to be part of the Leadership Circle for this new program and will be sharing my insights for their SmartCityX and **any one else interested in this free webinar.** ## [Working Smarter with Cities](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2750555628) Join us on [June 9th @ 10am PT](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2750555628): [https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2750555628](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2750555628) *(There's no registration, just use that link at the start time.)* Embedded slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAEguqvT_KM/view?embed Whether you sell to government or not, your startup is going to be bound up in the public sector wherever you are and whatever you do. The question you have is to take advantage of it or not. That's what 21st Century "public affairs" or "government relations" or whatever you want to call it: Being Smart About Working with Cities. In the US alone, governments spend over $200B annually on technology, and that only scrapes the surface of the technology industries they affect in their jurisdictions: logistics, mobility, drones, social, communication, etc. You may not know of an angle to engage a public agency, but there is. Knowing how governments work, and what opportunities they hold, are essential for 21st century entrepreneurship. Having worked with hundreds of cities, I will share my insights on how and when to engage local governments: for approval, revenue, or (ideally) both. ## Background materials: - [City Hall 101](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/city-101/) - [New Ways to Build or Buy](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/lean/) - [The GovTech Ecosystem](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/ecosystem/) --- # How to Get into Government Work in 2021 > Ways to affect policy/service delivery outside government for the graduating class of 2021 URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2021/04/26/2021-finding-jobs-in-government/ Published: 2021-04-26 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Academy, Jobs, GovGeek --- Earlier this year, my alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, hosted a panel discussion amongst alumni in the public sector on advice for recent or upcoming graduates looking to serve. **Main takeaways: get creative, focus on practical skills/ways to help, and look at startups, foundation, and universities -- the ecosystem emerging around government innovation.** Embedded PDF: https://abhinemani.com/decks/2021GovGeekJobs.pdf [Open PDF in Browser](https://abhinemani.com/decks/2021GovGeekJobs.pdf) ## More resources: [Find opportunities to learn more, as well as jobs, funding, mentorship, and much, much more.](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/4-resources/) [Join the #GovGeek community for regular updates.](https://govgeek.club) --- # Restoring Trust in Law Enforcement Through Better Data > Using sophisticated sentiment analysis tools and a creative set of approaches, these companies are changing the way many law enforcement agencies work — through better data URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2021/04/14/responsive-public-safety-data-science/ Published: 2021-04-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Academy, Data Science, Law Enforcement --- ## Technology to Restore Trust in Public Safety agencies. Which starts with listening and responding... Over the past 3 yeras, I haveI partnered with [SPIDRTech](https://spidrtech.com), then [POLCO](https://polco.us), which [has partnered](https://blog.polco.us/polco-guardian-alliance-technologies-announce-partnership) with [Guardian Alliance](https://guardianalliancetechnologies.com/), and then [ZenCity](https://zencity.io), which acquired [ELUCD](https://ELUCD.com). All of these companies and initiatives have centered around using social media (and other community engagement channels) to determine and influence policy. ## The confluence of Sentiment Analysis and Public Safety Stepping back, however, we can see how these have come together as distinct but connected approaches to responsiveness — which indeed suggests a broader trend: the evolution of general tools like surveys and social media analysis for deeper engagement and insight for specific, high profile agencies in key areas, such as police departments and law enforcement generallly. More to the point, as govtech startups go deeper into a public sector vertical (e.g., law enforcement) opportunties to use more general horizontal government or private sector approaches will emerge. These opportunties should be product or strategy decisions for exisitng players and a guidestar for new entreprenuers. Explore the infographic: ![Social Media and Sentiment Analysis](https://abhinemani.com/img/responsiveness.png) ## Learn more: [Learn about the relationship between data and operations/policy.](https://abhinemani.com/lessons/03-data-policy.html) [Learn about how SPIDRTech helps police departments engage.](https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2018/08/14/Push-vs-Pull-the-Opportunity-for-Automation-in-GovTech-1509cfb159ce/) [Learn about how ZenCity is putting AI to work for cities.](https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2014-12-21-ZenCity/) --- # What I've learned: Three Different Kinds of Civic Data > Dashboards, Performance Management, and the Trouble with Different Kinds of Data URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/ Published: 2021-02-10 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Los Angeles, Dashboards, Data-Driven Poliymaking, Featured --- _Note: This was written in the Winter 2015, shortly after my time as Chief Data Offier in Los Angeles when I began consulting with other agenices. A version of this essay has been printed in the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) Law Review._ Two days ago I wrote a tweet that I think I still stand by. > The streets of Heroku are paved with the code of unused dashboards. > > — abhi nemani (@abhinemani) [June 29, 2016](https://twitter.com/abhinemani/status/748205198087053312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) As someone who has built a good handful of dashboards for governments, sometimes non-profits, I stand by that and don’t see myself in anytime soon changing my opinion (though I hope someone here might change that opinion). I mentioned that because I just had a conversation with a number of folks interested in building new technology for government and specifically were thinking about dashboards for different issue areas. ### Dashboards Dashboards can be profoundly useful, amazingly helpful, and a radical change from how things have been. How things have been? Opaque, unmeasured, and impossible to track. That said, the question of whether or not dashboard is useful in a given circumstance and how it should be or could be is a deep and profound one. It’s one that I learned firsthand and intimately in my time in the city of Los Angeles. What I want to do now is talk a little bit about how that came to be, what I learned from it and what might be interesting learning their insights for others embarking on similar endeavors. When I first got to the city of Los Angeles, I went around acting like I was the expert on data analysis rather than open data, expecting everyone else would love and endear me for it. I was their data guy, not the transparency guy. Biggest question that I got asked every single meeting I had, which was 50 meetings within the first 15 to 20 days, was this simple: _“What is data?"_ I was floored by that. In fact, one of my staff members in the office that I worked in was looking at the open data portal when she said, “Abhi, I don’t know where the data is or what I should be looking for.” That forced me to step back and think, “All right, this is a different. This isn’t a tech organization with a government focus; this is a government organization with a technology interest. I have to change the way I think and the way I talk about what I’m trying to do. I stepped back. I asked, “What does data mean to the different people in the organization?” ![LAPD Center](https://abhinemani.com/img/lapd-center.png) In some cases it meant this (see above); this is a picture of the amazing systems that I’ve been at ATSAC, the real-time traffic system organization in LA, which has all the 24-style tools and tech that you’d expect: big screens and moving charts, real-time maps. This is how some people in the city look at data, very few, but some because it’s their job to track situational or domain awareness in the city and respond appropriately with public service delivery, emergency services delivery, etc. That’s one categories: of user. Then there’s another whose experience with data was literally plugging in their daily hours into a time card. That’s the most use of data they tend to have on a given basis. ![Stock Timesheet](https://abhinemani.com/img/time-sheet.png) Then there were some that would use data in a slightly different way. They’d be thinking about how to change policy or how to make a different decision from an executive office and want to do some analysis to inform their thinking. They tended to use Excel, make some charts and tables, create reports, and then advocate for their position with their colleagues and bosses . Then finally there are the very senior executives whose role was tracking the success and failures of the departments and the city itself. They tend to get, which is what I saw firsthand, these long reports, 15, 20, 30 pages full of charts, graphs, text, every quarter and use those to help decide what’s the next strategic direction. That was my high level generalization of how data, however you may want to define it, is seen and used by most people within the city. Then about two days before Christmas break, I was asked by the mayor’s chief of staff to build a new dashboard for the mayor. That was exciting: it’s great having anything asked by thechief of staff and this felt like something I might be able to do. In fact, she asked, “Abhi, you know how to do stuff on computers, right? You can build a dashboard for this and an online one, right?” I’m like “Yeah, of course.” Conscientious developer that I am however, I said “Give me about two months. I’ll do a series of prototypes and tests and build something that solves the problem.” This was the previous dashboard I had to build upon: ![LAPD Center](https://abhinemani.com/img/paper-dashboard.png) She had asked for something within roughly five days… interesting. I had to figure out a way to build what you would describe as the most MVP of MVP dashboards for the Mayor of Los Angeles within five days over the holidays. I started, and I built something (see below). As I went through that process, what occurred to me, though, was that those distinctions among persons, the differences that each of those different users had around how they used data weren’t just happenstance outcomes of their own positions, but in fact meaningful distinctions among the kinds and types of data that we track and want to track and visualize and that would require deep, heavy thought around how to integrate and illustrate. *(Side bar, that said, I got something done within the next seven days, which people though was lovely, but in no way ended up being reflective of what we wanted to do.)* After starting to work on the data and think about the kinds of questions the mayor, the senior staff, and the senior leadership wanted to look at, we realized that in fact that what they were looking for was something of a hodgepodge of those different types of data that the city staff were using and working on. It wasn’t just all of the crime reports, wasn’t just all performance metrics around crime, wasn’t just all of the citizens’ satisfaction with public safety — it was all the above. > Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FYnWs0jE0YI > > **Mayor Garcetti Showcases Dashboard at US Conference of Mayors** This presented a profoundly interesting question for myself as the Chief Data Officer, because it occurred to me that we track **very little amounts** of that data in any kind of structured, meaningful way. In fact when you start to think about the holistic picture of a city that you’d want to illustrate, almost none of it is actually tracked by the city itself. We had to start getting creative and thoughtful about what numbers do make sense for a mayor to see. Maybe it’s not just city data, maybe it’s community data, maybe even corporate… Then how do we start pulling that all together in a way that would make sense for him or her to go make decisions and for others around him or her to be able to support those. ## Three different kinds of data Through that process, I came to conclude that there are effectively three kinds of civic or public data that need to be collected, aggregated and summarized for effective decision making. ### Transactional / Raw Data First is transactional or operational data. This is what the city’s doing on a day-to-day basis. Easiest metaphor for that is crime: what crime is happening in the city and where? (*Funny aside, the best data around crime doesn’t even in fact come from the city itself, it comes from the LA Times because city data, since it needs to be validated, has to run up the pole from the local government to the state and back that there’s about a two year backlog on that*.) Or take 311. Are there lots of potholes in this part of town? Or homelessness. Is there an epidemic of homelessness in this other part of town? That kind of situational awareness is what you get from operational data. It’s what’s happening on-the-ground, all the time. That needs to surfaced up, organized, and then presented in a compelling way for a decision maker to say, “We need to do something different about that.” ### Performance Data The next kind of data is performance metrics. This area is popularized by initiatives such as COMPStat or CitiStat where they look at service delivery levels for performance management through what the private sector would describe as KPIs. In contrast to transactional data, this is aggregate. Instead of looking at every single call that came in to 311, say, you would ask, “What’s our average wait time for it to go in call?” Or “What’s our average time to resolution for a pressing call?” This gets more complicated than transactional data, because it’s not usually reported through just one system. Take a 311 request as an example. In LA, the IT department runs the call center, but any actual service delivery — say filling that pothole or cleaning up that street — is handled by another department (DWP or DPW). Thus, systems integration and aggregation are essential, but immensely difficult. Tracking performance metrics is hard. Made further difficult by their normative nature. Whether or not a wait time is good or bad changes on the time of year and historical context. And so not only are performance metrics tricky to track, but even trickier to assess. ### Quality of Life The final piece of this puzzle is probably the most obvious to real citizens: quality of life. How are things going in the city, and more directly, how do people feel about it? (My old boss, Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, described this as “gestalt” data.) Crazy as it might be to hear, local governments barely every track this. A few rare examples exist: Kansas City has a citizen survey, and DC runs a feedback program for its programs. But even still, these initiatives at best track citizen satisfaction with service delivery. They do not track general sentiment of quality of life. Do they feel safe? Do they feel like their children have a good education? Do you have access to the services and programs you need? This has been, what I would describe as the third rail of government data: do you know how your constituents *feel* about their government? Organizations like Pew and others try to collect that data usually at the national level, rarely at the local level, but this is the kind of information we need to know as we govern cities because that’s the *ultimate* barometer of our success. Bringing that back to the running theme then, the question isn’t simply how many of the 311 calls came in, it’s not how quickly were we at responding to their own issues, but it’s how clean do you think your city is? How safe do you think it is to walk? These are difficult questions to ask and in general cities don’t ask them for multiple reasons. They don’t know how to. They don’t know where to. But gathering data data, and then combining it with performance metrics and operational data is critical. All three are interrelated, and the art is in finding the overlap, as I sketched out with Rick (yes, actually on a napkin): ![Data Sweet Spot](https://abhinemani.com/img/data-venn-diagram.jpeg) The sweet spot, the all too rare sweet spot, you see how those three connect together. Maybe it’s 311 issues that come in from 5-9pm ever night that lead to long call wait times and construction and thus delays for families getting to dinner late. That’d make the citizenry unhappy (if you could track it). It’s this sweet spot, the alignment of transactions, performance, and quality of life, that’s the ideal function of data science and dashboarding. ![Data Process](https://abhinemani.com/img/data-flow.jpeg) If you can figure out that sweet spot, that correlation, that causation, that’s profoundly interesting and useful, but that’s really hard to do. It is the work we have to do as civic data advocates and as data-driven public officials. Data isn’t just data. It’s more complicated that. Different kinds and different types. Different types that interact, interrelate, and connect, and it is our responsibility as public stewards to bring them together to help better serve citizens. There’s a notion in *Democratic Theory* called Deliberative Democracy — yes, I’m a philosophy nerd) — where democracy only works well when people are forced to and willing to share their good reasons to defend their point. They can’t just say “I believe this and that’s that.” They have to say “I believe this is going well, and this is why.” That’s where data can, should, and must come in. --- ## More: Lecture on How Governments Use Data > Embedded PDF: https://abhinemani.com/decks/lectures/CAPP6.pdf > > [Open Lecture in Browser](https://abhinemani.com/decks/lectures/CAPP6.pdf) --- # Moving Beyond Open Data Portals > What could be subtitled, biting the hand that feed me URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/01/Let-s-Move-Beyond-Open-Data-Portals/ Published: 2021-02-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, Los Angeles, Featured --- Open data has been my life. For a good number of years, open data has been my life: first at Code for America, where number of datasets opened and data portals launched annually were two of core metrics, and later at the City of Los Angeles, where managing, growing, and evangelizing open data was my stated top priority. Indeed, some of my most visible accomplishments have been [publishing a book on open data](http://beyondtransparency.org), redesigning [Los Angeles’ open data portal](http://data.lacity.org), and taking that city to [#1 on the Open Data Census](http://abhinemani.com/press/techwire/). I say all this in part just to emphasize that open data and open data portals, specifically, have been central to my career for some time. You may then think this will all be about open data portals, what they are, why we need them, and how to make them better. In fact, that’s not at all what I’m about to do. I actually think it’s time we abandon data portals altogether. Why? Because I think there’s a couple of key trends, certain profound shifts happening in the tech industry in general and in government technology in particular that force us to rethink the way we approach data, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today. ### Trend one. We’re moving from data to delivery. Let’s step back to about 2008. Many good government organizations were working on opening up data: lot’s of [FOIA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_%28United_States%29) requests (which now I’ve had to deal with…), data scraping, etc. The premise: more _data_ and more _transparency,_ and so better _accountability_ and better _governance_. That was 2008. Things started to change a little bit. Then we started to move into this idea of civic engagement, using technology for engagement. I’ll be honest: I haven’t seen too many of these platforms — [Change by Us](http://nycchangebyus.tumblr.com/), IdeaScale, or even Google Moderator , etc — succeed; most have failed. That was step two. Now I think we’re finally moving into this area of digital transformation, of using technology to actually change the way we do service delivery. Taking processes that were before offline and information that was before on paper, online and machine readable. [The interesting thing about that is actually that leads to _better data._](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/open-data-civic-engagement-and-delivery-28b990f321ce#.h1446cvnr) Right now it takes 16 months to get official police records from the state — **16 months** — because we have to send _paper forms_ to the state, they transcribe them and then send them back. The backlog is mind-numbing. That’s not the right way to handle data — open or otherwise. Instead, a digital first strategy — eg no paper forms, just iPhones or iPads in the field — would lead to immediately accessible and usable (and hopefully open) data. That’s trend one, is _this movement from_ [_data to services_](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/open-data-civic-engagement-and-delivery-28b990f321ce#.h1446cvnr)_._ ### Trend two is from one app to many apps ![Swarm and Foursquare logos](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_tUf6EBUQR9DByDNnms19ig.png) A rather perceptive venture capitalist named [Mary Meeker](http://allthingsd.com/20130529/mary-meekers-2013-internet-trends-deck-the-full-video/) pens a must-read every year on internet trends. Recently, she noted that “_the web is splintering_.” Instead of just having one app to do everything, you in fact have multiple apps. A good example of this is Foursquare. Beforehand you’d do everything in one app. Now there’s Foursquare and Swarm. Facebook has Messenger as a separate app. Google has like 17 different apps. You’re seeing this shift from just one specific application that does everything to many different applications designed for a particular experience. That’s trend two: Focus on a single, specific, and meaningful user experience, and build a beautiful interface simply for that. ## Trend three is this notion of an architecture participation. What I like about this idea is that when you create web applications and create user experiences, you build the opportunity to get people to do more. You can up-sell them. We all know this. You see it every day when you go to Amazon or in a grocery store. Either when you’re checking out online or offline, you’re asked to pick up some else: a related book or a little bit of candy or a magazine (that you probably don’t need). They’re _up-selling_ you. They’re asking you to do more. There’s no reason we couldn’t apply this same strategy to government engagement and services. [Indeed it’s already happening](https://medium.com/civic-technology/government-is-what-you-make-of-it-d836a6a9353d). What this requires, though, is thinking less about a specific, sole engagement with an user, but instead about a string of related, though distinct interactions, architected to maximize participation. [_It’s about erecting architectures of participation_](https://medium.com/civic-technology/government-is-what-you-make-of-it-d836a6a9353d)_._ ## Bringing it together 1. You’re seeing a movement from _data to delivery_. 2. You’re seeing the _web start to splinter_ towards single-purpose apps. 3. You’re starting to see levels of engagement increasing through _architectures of participation_. Now you’re thinking, “Abhi, weren’t you going to be tell me that we should abandon data portals? Services, splintering apps, architectures…? What gives?” At the core of all three trends is one basic notion: the web is moving away from building for one-size-fits-all towards designing for to-each-his/her-own — towards user-centric design. And we must do so for open data. That’s the core notion here: a shift away from building _portals_ towards designing for _people_, away from _unified_ _platforms_ and more towards _user-centric design_. Then what do we do with data? #### First and foremost I think you have to go where people are. If you’ve every been to LA before — or even not — you may know that traffic is a _little_ bit of a problem there. Just a bit. (That’s why I gave up my car.) The city, as we all know, has information about street closures, public events — all the planned activities that’ll likely gum traffic. **Well, beforehand we kept all the data to ourselves.** Indeed, all this data was available on our GIS Hub, but sadly most of the city staff didn’t even know that — let alone the regular citizen. Fortunately, we eventually found it… **Now we actually give that directly to Waze,** so they can reroute people dynamically. Indeed, this is a good open data story — taking the data to where people are —but there’s something more interesting: it’s a two-way street. Not only does Waze now share pothole and road condition data it collects regularly through its app, they went one step further. They began to proactively collect and share data in the interest public safety. Waze is giving the city data in return. Any time there’s a kidnapping or a hit and run, Waze will tell the users, saying, “This just happened. Do you have any intel/info?” Any time that there’s a kidnapping on Wilshire, Waze will actually ping you and say, “Hey, do you know what’s going on? Have you seen anybody? Do you know what’s happening?” Users can, in-app, report sightings directly, and immediately that data is sent to the LAPD. The news reported it as, “A Gift for Law Enforcement.” ![RT news segment on Waze and police](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_i10295GUgJ_KXf8xxS5lug.png) #### Two, I think we have to start thinking about data as content. Anyone want to guess what the most popular data set for the City of Los Angeles is? **Immigration workshops**. ![Immigration workshop calendar on the LA mayor's website](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_Gaz16rAKEMjaCnoyVzlD_g.png) We collected information on accredited immigration workshops, and published it on the data portal; then we embedded that data _on the mayor’s website —_ a website far, far more popular than data.lacity.org. That’s moving data from the fringes into the center, from a niche site to the homepage. Naturally, there are political and organizational dynamics to work through — the IT or data organization often does not control digital content or strategy. But it’s a fight worth having. If we say as cities that open data matters, then it should matter enough to be featured across the city’s digital presence. _Open data ought to merit a few pixels off the portal._ #### Finally you have to take data offline. An interesting thing that I learned when I was in LA is that there was a lot of interesting groups doing interesting work, but separately, even though they shared a common goal: using technology to serve the city they all loved. And to do so, using open civic data. But these efforts were too often disconnected. (Indeed, I found myself having the same conversation with different community leaders multiple times a week.) What we decided to do there was very deeply commit to actually bringing these groups together, having them all start to talk to each other. We launched a program called #TechLA. We’ve had the biggest hackathon, two years in a row. The idea was that actually just by building a brand, just this identity, #TechLA, it actually helped these different groups come together in a way that they couldn’t have done on their own. That’s one of the core responsibilities and opportunities that we have as government officials, is that we actually can build a tent, we can actually have people come together. > And you can then take the data off of the portal, and put it directly into the hands of developers. Here’s an example from the #TechLA event last year: ![LA Times headline: a team of high-schoolers wins the #techLA competition](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_-PNMAMDfPLjZ-jO9ZcMTtg.png) They built an app that helped people find homeless shelters, and all the kids were in high school. You’re seeing people do really remarkable and special things. I’m sure we can talk on and on about hackathons and app competitions and how to make those great. Those aren’t sustainable. You can have one great event. You can have another great event. Then what happens after that? People go home. They go back to their lives. The hard question is, how do you create staying power? How do you get people to come together on and on? How do you create infrastructure that lets people actually do meaningful work in an ongoing way? ![Compiler.LA: a civic-minded organization using tech and data to build Los Angeles](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_SfvHUxlb8GGGnqmFMbmXDQ.png) We built an organization specifically designed for this purpose in LA. It’s called [Compiler.LA](http://Compiler.LA), a for-profit that actually works on civic issues, but t_hey commit a percentage of all of their revenue back to the community to build the civic tech ecosystem._ They’ll get contracts from foundations, from cities, and then they use part of that money to then go back and help build the civic tech community. That to me is the kind of staying power that we need to have. In closing, there’s a great book called _Small Pieces, Loosely Joined_. It’s about the web, and it’s about how the web is, by David Weinberger, who wrote this phrase, “the web is perfectly broken,” which I think is an interesting phrase, “perfectly broken,” because it’s messy deliberately. It’s not meant to be simple or easy; uniform and centralize. It’s supposed to be hacked together, distributed, customized, and remixed. It’s supposed to be human. Bringing this all back then to data and open data portals: We too often think about building that _one great portal_, _one great experience, for everyone_, but what we learn from the web is that actually we should be listening more than we are building, be understanding user needs and habits more than presuming them, and be going to where they are instead of asking them to come to us. We should do lots of different, small things — not just build one, big thing — and instead think about crafting the ideal experiences for the wonderfully diverse users you have: be it the mayor, city staff, or even your boss; be it the researcher, the entrepreneur, or the regular citizen; be it the person you hadn’t thought of until you meet them randomly at the library. Be it anyone. Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/150116199 *This essay is based on an edited transcript from my keynote address at the 2015 National Association of Government Webmasters 2015 (NAGW); video is below.* --- # ZenCity: Focusing on the User > Helping a a groundbreaking data science company understand 'where to play' and 'how to win' URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2020-12-21-ZenCity/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: startup, citizen sentiment, AI --- [ZenCity](https://zencity.io) uses AI and machine learning to turn civic data into actionable insights. With its rapid integration and data sourcing capabilities, it's supported by a dedicated team of analysts who provide personalized solutions. ### Joining ZenCity Attracted by the potential of using civic data to drive municipal decisions, I joined ZenCity. My experience as the Chief Data Officer of LA allowed me to contribute to this mission uniquely. Our research highlighted that real-time data sources weren't always useful for managers with fixed policies. This led us to shift our focus towards Public Information Officers (PIOs), elected officials, and senior management - individuals keen on understanding daily public sentiment. ### Pivoting for the User We redesigned ZenCity with a user-first strategy, placing PIOs at the heart of our platform. Then, we reshaped the product to focus on issues rather than departments, making it more relevant for decision-makers. ### ZenCity Growth Since 2017, my strategic engagement with ZenCity has evolved into a partnership. My role has guided their U.S. expansion and product/market fit. Today, ZenCity partners with over 100 local governments and has expanded its offerings by acquiring Elucd, a company focused on citizen sentiment in government technology. ### The Future of ZenCity I am pleased to continue engaging with ZenCity's leadership on product innovations surrounding AI and LLMs. The team's ZenCity 360 platform is already incorporating advanced AI functionality, such as ChatGPT, to automatically generate press releases, social media posts, and more. As we look forward, the fusion of AI and LLMs in ZenCity's offerings promises to revolutionize how local governments interact with and understand their citizens. ZenCity's journey underscores the importance of user-focused product development and the power of AI in creating effective "smart city" solutions. --- # Letting governments build their own workflows on CityGrows > Accessible and affordable workflow automation for local governments to replace paper forms and pdfs in minutes URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2020-09-08-CityGrows/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: startup, workflow, SaaS --- >From [dot.LA](https://dot.la/outdoor-restaurants-permit-2646792368.html): It takes about 19 minutes for a business owner to fill-out, receive and print a city of Los Angeles sidewalk permit application. The result of a program launched by CityGrows in late May. As long as the applicant completes the form and agrees to city requirements, a permit is issued immediately. ## CityGro.ws CityGrows is a values-driven company with a mission to transform and improve government. CityGrows was incorporated in 2015 and began providing digital permitting and licensing for governments in 2016. The City of Santa Monica, CA was our first government partner. CityGrows has grown to support counties and municipalities in California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts. CityGrows provide services to governments as large as the City of Los Angeles and as small as Emsworth, PA. ## What They Do CityGrows is workflow automation software for local governments. Governments digitize and automate their workflows from start to finish, and improve operational efficiency, transparency, and compliance. The CityGrows platform allows any government employee – regardless of technical skill – to structure and improve their workflows by collecting information from the public, automating constituent communications, processing online payments, and managing everything through our smart dashboard. CityGrows believes in transparency in software pricing for government and developed our subscription/ payment processing revenue model in collaboration with our government clients and our investors. ‍![LAPD Center](https://abhinemani.com/img/citygrows.gif) ## How I Help As an flagship example of low-code or no-code tools for government, CityGrows seemed like a natural fit for the portfolio, and I knew both co-founders, Catherine and Stephen, from my time in Los Angeles, where they both were active in Hack for LA, and other civic technology initiatives. I was an early angel investor, and continue to support the team as an advisor. --- # Open Data, Civic Engagement, and Delivery > Did We Go the Wrong Way? URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2020/08/28/Open-Data-Civic-Engagement-and-Delivery/ Published: 2020-08-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Featured --- For the past year in particular, and many more before that, I have invested no small part of my life into evangelizing open data. (Indeed we wrote a [book](http://beyondtransparency.org) about it at CfA, gave far too many talks, and I even took an appointment in local government focused on this effort.) Open data is what I do — or at least what I used to do. Looking back now, I have begun to wonder whether we might have been looking at things in the wrong way, or more to the point, whether I have been looking at things, just, wrong. To explain, let’s take a short trip back through the brief history of open data in the public sector. _(N.B. Many others were more close to these projects than myself in the earlier days, so I plead humble ignorance for any oversight or overstatement.)_ #### The Sunlight Era Near the time of this President’s inaugural, a host of organizations were gaining steam around the notion of “open government.” Chief among them had to have been the [Sunlight Foundation](http://sunlightfoundation.com/), a well-run and well-respected transparency / good government non-profit with the appropriate modus operandi that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Their charge was to hold governments — and in particular public officials — accountable to their decisions and those decisions’ impacts through holding them up in the light of day. Such a premise is nothing new in American democracy; the fourth estate has championed this ground for centuries through serious (sometimes dangerous) journalism, [Freedom of Information Act](http://www.foia.gov/) requests, and a stubborn commitment to the real story. Around the end of this century’s first decade, however, three forces conspired to dramatically upend the press-led model for transparency: first, new media platforms decimated publications’ business models, particularly those for smaller, local outlets, leading to limited man hours for deep analysis or research; second, new technologies, ranging from simple modes like internet searching to cleverer ones like internet scraping and data science, opened up the doors to a new breed of “hacks and hackers” — tech-savvy inquisitors able to leverage their desktops instead of a newsroom to find a story; and third, and most relevantly governments started to get into the game themselves. What do I mean by that? The notion of “open government” quickly became synonymous with “open data,” and agencies began to freely publish their own internal documents, reports, and datasets online for public consumption. Enter the data portal. [Data.gov](http://Data.gov) was likely the most notable entry — many others soon followed, bolstered by executive or legislative mandates. Groups like Sunlight and others serves as intermediaries, pushing and pulling: sometimes knocking on the marble halls for more data, and others welcoming new publications with visualizations, apps, and tools to show its value. Tremendous work was done by Sunlight and others to made this data more readable and useful, including their OpenStates project, Influence Explorer and others. Crucially, though, this era was marked technologically by _manual_ open data publication. Yes, that sounds contradictory. But it isn’t. (In fact it’s not too distant from where we are today — more on that later). That is to say, data published tended to come from either difficult exports from _legacy systems_ — where quality and timeliness were questioned — or from transcriptions from what had been _paper based_ systems. (Indeed, this too happens now more often than one cares to admit.) More broadly, the ecosystem of players both inside and outside of government understanding the definition of and value in open data was so limited that much of the focus was on politics — elections, ethics, etc — and not government — buses, bills, and budgets. **So for good reason, our first house of open data infrastructure was build more out of papier-mâché than concrete or steel.** #### The Hackathon Era The upshot? Data did continue to trickle out, and in fact, momentum started to grow at the state and local levels for similar efforts. But this era was also marked by the emergence of “data wranglers” and “manipulators,” those passionate soles willing to drudge through the raw data, clean it up, and re-issue it for “popular” (read: hacker) use. And so the door opened to a new kind of civic engagement: civic hacking. Cities, in particular, caught on to this trend, working hand-in-hand with local, volunteer developers to build new and interesting civic applications. New York City launched its [Big Apps](http://bigapps.nyc/p/) competition; Chicago began its [Hack Nights](http://chihacknight.org/); and even the Feds — under Todd Park’s tremendous leadership — hosted “[datapaloozas](http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/06/07/189565146/datapalooza-a-concept-a-conference-and-a-movement)” to immerse in and then challenge developers and entrepreneurs to show an ROI from the data, to build new apps and businesses. ![Developers working at tables during a hackathon](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__c84O7kyQB9JDfSzwBR9R1g.jpeg) Indeed, I saw first-hand the energy and enthusiasm tech-savvy citizens brought to bear in this effort, not only in the thousands that would apply for the Code for America fellowship, but in the tens of thousands that signed up and participated in local (Brigade) events in their own cities. The fruits of their labors cannot go unnoticed. Just this week, the Washington Post published an article on transportation innovation using open data; previously hackers in Philadelphia not only built a transit app but managed to have their official transportation agency adopt it as their official platform. In Chicago, the community there has been on fire for years: the OpenGov Hack Night brings out 50–60 hackers weekly to build apps, and that they did: apps such as [LargeLots](https://largelots.org/) that helps residents find low-cost residences; [Expunge.io](http://Expunge.io) that clears up a juveniles criminal record (especially if they didn’t know they had one or if there’s anything they could have done about it); and [ClearStreets](http://clearstreets.org/) that helps Chicagoans navigate their city as street sweepers clear the snow in the winter. (As a moment of personal pride, I’ll add that even in Los Angeles in the past year, the [Hack for LA](http://hackforla.org) community has started monthly events and hackathons, each one selling out, with dozens of apps coming through, ranging from immigration reform tools to anti-bullying support.) These innovations show promise for the open data movement moving forward, as they illustrate tangibly (or as tangibly as it can be on your iPhone) what can happen in the real world from open data. If I were, however, to push back, a bit, on this optimism, I’d note that more often than not, the data being used to build these applications _does not come_ from a city-hosted open data portal. No, indeed, often special requests for data are need, sometimes even hacks or scrapers (e.g. Philly); in other cases, the data comes not from the “data portal” as it were but from an agencies website (e.g. the immigration app simply rewrote the content from the federal immigration site in a more palatable, multi-lingual form); and even in a few, no civic open data is needed, such as the case of a drought hacking tool that uses sensors to measure your lawn and then pulls data from retailers such as HomeDepot and others to recommend water conserving plants. _This is a long way of saying that the data we need is often not the data we have_ — at least not what we have on our data portals. Why? I return to the data systems problem scene in the Sunlight era: departments — particularly those in cash strapped agencies — are burdened with legacy systems and overtasked IT professionals, who have to make the difficult decision of keeping the wifi or radio systems working (true story) or writing an ETL script from their years old Oracle database. Add to that the political pressures they come under to meet the demands from electeds or appointed pushing hard for this open data, even in the light of such urgent demands, these dedicated public servants are, simply put, between a rock and a hard place. Thus, I lay no blame on the still mostly manual process for open data publication — that’s simply the administrative and political environment we live in. **Yet this means that as we ask these passionate volunteers in the community to go to war for us and their communities with their rare skills, we are arming them with pencils and poster boards, not APIs or streaming feeds — let alone serious technology, data, and problem sets to make a difference.** #### Digital Services This is a paradigm that must change. We owe it to not only those civic hackers but also to ourselves and the commitments we have made to open government. Some cities have shown a path forward: Chicago, notably, has built a remarkable data management team and ETL framework ([opensourced it even](https://github.com/Chicago/open-data-etl-utility-kit)!) that undoubtably has led to the unprecedented growth and impact of their civic tech community. I can only hope more cities follow this path forward, if they have the technical know-how and systems’ access to do so. That — I must say — is a big if. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a small, rural town of roughly 15,000 people (it’s dropped to 13,000 now). I can’t see Centralia, Illinois, building a data management team and erect an ETL infrastructure in the same skyline of Chicago’s. Nor do I think they should have to. The web, as we are seeing, is moving every day towards more open access and interoperability. Most popular consumer platforms have even more popular APIs. Indeed, the civic tech landscape is becoming spotted with new startups providing open access to their data. Excitingly, these companies, too, are taking aim at many of the legacy systems in place, both on paper and on premise. [Captricity](http://captricity.com) helps take paper forms and transcribe them — though a bit of machine learning and Mechanical Turk — into clean, machine readable data. So that’s a start. (Indeed in our office one metric was number of pieces of paper removed.) Beyond that, though, this new era, I would say, is marked by an insistence on _digital services._ Championed most famously be the [UK Government Digital Services group](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/), led by Mike Bracken, the notion of digital services is rather plain: transform the analog, paper-based, or legacy systems agencies used to interact with residents and make them open, citizen-centric, and simple. Think updating your passport or purchasing a parking pass. It’s as obvious as it is essential. The UK began their “digital transformation” a few years back, and has made steady progress, as seen here. So much progress in fact, that the U.S. Federal Government has launched its own set of sister programs, the [US Digital Service](https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service) and [18F](https://18f.gsa.gov/). These teams of in-house developers and designers dive in to create digital-first interfaces to government. Sometimes that’s as “easy” as a better looking website, or other times as “hard” as ensuring the exchanges on Healthcare.gov began to work after their early hiccups. Indeed, it was Healthcare.gov that arguably gave life to this American breed of the digital services effort; after such a dramatic failure, a commitment was made, “Not again.” Now the digital interface is considered alongside the policy and the business process, meaning that the tech and data is not simply tacked on to the end but baked into the entire process. So what does this mean for data? Much of the most relevant data is _transactional_: internally, that means bills payed, employees hired, etc; externally, that means crimes reported, traffic, and transit usage. Once we remove our governmental transactions from on-paper, through snail-mail, or hidden behind the wrong side of the counter, we enter enter the real opportunities that 21st century technology affords: open-by-default, interoperable APIs, and device and location independence. All this is powered by data being created and managed through modern software, not legacy systems. Put simply, a digital-first strategy means data-first too. To give a bit of color, consider a few of the civic companies currently being used or considered by governments for digital services: with [ScreenDoor](http://www.dobt.co/screendoor/) agencies can take any application process, run it online, and post immediately to common open data portals such as Socrata and CKAN; with [SeeClickFix](http://seeclickfix.com), 311 reports don’t need to be pulled from a legacy CRM, instead their open API enables direct export in real-time; and with [OpenCounter](http://OpenCounter.us), instead of permitting records coming from multiple departments systems (as they do now) the app can offer a direct feed into open data. Looking ahead, as more internet of things systems are rolled out through cities, such as TAP cards for public transit or real-time, location-based parking systems, rich, high-volume, and interesting data feeds should be at the ready. And ready not just for civic hackers usage, but also — and crucially — for agencies themselves to use for smarter, faster analytics and management. **Digital services provide the solid foundation a government’s data program demands.** This is the harmony of _digital_ government and _open_ government. I am increasingly convinced that we will not be able to have one without the other, and indeed, the opportunity for innovation, once we align these sister imperatives, is remarkable. #### We Went the Wrong Way (Maybe) In closing, I’m a bit loathe to admit, that we may have not listened close enough to our friends across the pond. If you track the progress of government innovation in the UK, you see a narrative that effectively flips ours on its head. Whilst we started with open data — primarily pushing from the outside — they made early and significant investments on digital services from the inside. GDS launched nearly 5 years ago and began going first after website after website one at a time, integrating them into a beautiful Gov.UK; then with a sturdy, single digital presence, they turned to digital services. And just recently they appointed the head and founder of GDS as the country’s [first Chief Data Officer](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/uks-first-chief-data-officer-to-focus-on-making-data-a-public-asset/). His task was to weave together the data coming from those digital services — and others like them — into a powerful platform for the government and citizens to use to help make Britain better. (_Note: he has now stepped down after a remarkable career in Whitehall._) Put another way, they did _services first, data later._ Ours might have been a roundabout journey to a similar place. We benefit, however, from the palpable momentum and serious thought that has emerged from these past years. We have experimented, and we have learned. Ours is a big, diverse, complicated country, and our movement is housed in an ever-growing tent. Every day, more and more [sign up for the USDS](https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service#section-people); every day, I come across another thoughtful article about how civic tech needs to think about [diversity](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-oshiro/why-civic-tech-needs-more_b_3679799.html), [community](http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/work/special-initiatives/deep-dive/experimental-modes-of-civic-engagement-in-civic-tech/), and [fairness](https://www.livingcities.org/blog/180-civic-tech-local-government-and-low-income-people-recent-learnings); which is why I think, every day, I see another local or state agency pick up the shared mantle of _open_ and _digital_ government. --- # Ubers as Ambulances? > And other ideas to make consumer apps more civic URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/08/28/Ubers-as-Ambulances/ Published: 2020-08-28 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Some friends of mine on the east coast keep [pushing](http://civic.mit.edu/blog/nickgrossman/beyond-civic-apps-making-all-apps-more-civic) for folks thinking about civic technology to focus less on building new technology and instead work towards making existing technology more civic. The rationale is clear: you could leverage existing user bases, tie in proven business models, and make more mainstream the civic interventions, which otherwise might be left at the periphery. Most common is probably transit (Google Maps [using local government provided route data](http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-2/pioneering-open-data-standards-the-gtfs-story/)), and new examples such as Yelp [displaying](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/01/introducing-lives.html) restaurant inspection scores signal the immense opportunity emerging as more and more data from government is made openly available (and standardized). But ingesting civic data into a consumer platform is really just the start. What’s more exciting to me, at least, is the potential to do more: perform civic functions or transactions, use the physical infrastructure that so many companies are leveraging now and making available, etc. To that end, I kicked around a few ideas that I thought I’d share: * **Turn Ubers into Ambulances — AEDs in Ridesharing Vehicles**: If you can connect a heart attack victim with an [Automated External Defibrillator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillator) (AED) and a trained volunteer faster than an ambulance you dramatically increase their likelihood of staying alive. There was an [app](http://firedepartment.mobi/) that tried to do this before, built by firefighters in San Ramon, but uptake and scale are questionable. First challenge is mapping AEDs; second is getting citizens to download the app. Could we put AEDs in Ubers? Cars are just minutes away throughout the city, and now with AT&T beginning to [pre-install](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458678,00.asp) the application, there’s amazing and growing market penetration. (You could even throw in free rides to citizens willing to get trained and participate.) Tricky, and may be undoable, but speaks to the broader notion of the opportunity presented by all of these cars driving around the city to rethink civic functions. * **Flu Shots On-Demand — Uber / Postmates Flu Shot Delivery**: Uber already does kittens on demand, etc, as promotions, and did recently start doing [Goodwill](http://blog.uber.com/springcleaning) pickup for spring cleaning. There are a critical services that they could be providing: flu shots, etc. * **AirBnB for HSA / Disaster Response, etc**: In various scenarios (homeless family, victims of domestic abuse, etc) Airbnb could offer flux housing for citizens. We could even create a in-kind donation model, where both Airbnb and the homeowner could be able to get tax credit for their gifting of the space in those situations. * [**Kitchit**](http://kitchit.com/) **for the elderly (**or any other chef service): Gives the elderly a warm meal (which they often don’t have, a chance to connect, and someone to checkin on them; modeled off of the [successful](http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2014/may/06/new-technology-transform-elder-care?CMP=twt_gu) [Casserole Club](https://www.casseroleclub.com/) in the UK. * **Ridesharing + Streetbump**: The City of Boston developed an innovative new take on reporting potholes: [StreetBump](http://www.cityofboston.gov/doit/apps/streetbump.asp), an app that uses the phone’s hardware to track road issues automatically while you’re driving, sending them into the city for repair. Challenge again though is adoption; getting people to download and run the app (though they’ve had good [traction](http://www.wired.com/2014/03/potholes-big-data-crowdsourcing-way-better-government/?sf24318027=1) so far). There are already thousands of cars driving around the streets of every major city with smartphones mounted on their dash: rideshares. Have them use Streetbump, and you’ll get more data than ever before, and plus side: they benefit from better streets — they don’t want their cars banged up by potholes. * **TaskRabbit for 311 / Building Inspection**: Many of the “issues” coming out of the city could be easily solved / addressed by the private sector, or even by an individual, as I [wrote a bit about before](https://medium.com/p/e1938f471485). Why not hook up the open data coming from building inspections and 311 into TaskRabbit? You’d help make the city cleaner/safer, and offer jobs. * **Public Health Alerts in Foursquare / Yelp, etc**: The main function of most local public health departments is communications, but their means is antiquated; Apple has built in Emergency warnings into iOS, so you could imagine a similar system for public health issues on major location-based platforms, making citizens aware of a relevant public health issue. There are just a couple of ideas I brainstormed, realizing though that the sustainability and implementation of any of these would be very challenging. It’s a long game, but as these technologies become increasingly mainstream and cities continue to look for creative ways to solve their problems, I think it’s an important conversation we need to be having. How do we use the _technology —_ mobile, real-time, location aware, etc — that makes consumer apps so great to change the way we think about _how_ _cities work_? How do we then get those things into the hands of people who need them? And more broadly, what civic responsibility should consumer platforms in the 21st century have? --- # Data-Driven Policy - San Francisco just showed us how it should work. > A simple, powerful, and human centered approach to data-driven decision-making URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/08/28/Data-Driven-Policy-San-Francisco-just-showed-us-how-it-should-work/ Published: 2020-08-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Vision Zero, Transportation, Data Science --- For any city dweller brave enough to navigate their urban terrain on a bike — I am not — you know that it’s a tricky business. Limited bike paths, wayward pedestrians, and of course: cars. Auto collisions with bikes (and also pedestrians) poses a real threat to the safety and wellbeing of residents. Indeed, I have a friend who was “doored” twice in one month in San Francisco, which for those who don’t know, means that a passenger opened his/her door exactly when his bike was passing by, leaving him in the hospital and with scars for about 6 months. But more than temporary injuries, auto collisions with bikes and pedestrians can kill people. And it does at an alarming rate. According to the city, “Every year in San Francisco, about 30 people lose their lives and over 200 more are seriously injured while traveling on city streets.” As urban life becomes the dominant modality, this is a problem that needs to be addressed, and addressed now. ### Problem -> Data Analysis The city government, in good fashion, made a commitment to do something about. But in better fashion, they decided to do so in a data-driven way. And they tasked the Department of Public Health in collaboration with the Department of Transportation to develop policy. What’s impressive is that instead of some blanket policy or mandate, they opted to study the problem, take a nuanced approach, and put data first. ![San Francisco Vision Zero high injury network map](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__mWOfWpvuLdqRd1ZhJMWSIg.png) The SF team ran a series of data-driven analytics to determine the causes of these collisions. They developed [TransBase](http://www.transbasesf.org/) to continuously map and visualize traffic incidents throughout the city. Using this platform, then, they developed the “[high injury network](http://sfgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=fa37f1274b4446f1bdddd7bdf9e708ff)” — the key places where most problems happen; or as they put it, “to identify where the most investments in engineering, education and enforcement should be focused to have the biggest impact in reducing fatalities and severe injuries.” Turns out that, just 12 percent of intersections result in 70% of major injuries. This is using data to make what might seem like an intractable problem, tractable. > This is using data to make what might seem like an intractable problem, tractable. It’s much easier to commit city resources to a handful of targeted problem areas, instead of dispatching crews to thousands and thousands of intersections. And with the data as a backup, there shouldn’t be concerns of political personal bias: the data speaks for itself. ### Data Analysis -> Policy So now what? Well, this month, Mayor Ed Lee [signed an executive directive to challenge the city to implement these findings under the banner of “Vision Zero”](http://hoodline.com/2016/08/mayor-lee-orders-expedited-traffic-safety-improvements-in-wake-of-cyclists-deaths-in-june): a goal of reducing auto/pedestrian/bike collision deaths to zero by 2024. Now, having worked in and with City Government for sometime, I’m the first to tell you that an ED on its own means little more than the ink on the paper. (And well now, there’s hardly ever ink.) Unless there’s an implementation plan, it becomes like so many other policies, just a quick press hit and then silence. No real action, no real reform. Fortunately, San Francisco took the next step: they put their data to work. ### Policy -> Implementation This week, the city of San Francisco [announced plans to build its first “Protected Intersection”](https://www.sfmta.com/about-sfmta/blog/sf%E2%80%99s-first-%E2%80%98protected-intersection%E2%80%99-break-ground-9th-and-division): > “Protected intersections use a simple design concept to make everyone safer. Under this configuration, features like concrete islands placed at the corners slow turning cars and physically separate people biking and driving. They also position turning drivers at an angle that makes it easier for them to see and yield to people walking and biking crossing their path.” That’s apparently just the start: plans are underway for other intersections, protected bike lanes, and more. Biking and walking in San Francisco is about to become much safer. (Though maybe not easier: the hills — _they’re the worst_.) \*\*\* There is ample talk of “Data-Driven Policy” — indeed, [I’ve written about it myself](https://medium.computting-the-law-in-the-palm-of-your-hand-47f5236da7f1) — but too often we get lost in the abstract or theoretical. This is real. People are getting hurt, and data, leveraged by the city, helped. The broader lesson for me here is the sequencing. Data didn’t come in at the backend of policy to fix it; there wasn’t some data science that ended up sitting on the shelves. No, the city went from **problem** to **analysis** to **policy** to **implementation**. That’s how it should work. > … the city went from problem to analysis to policy to implementation. > That’s how it should work. _My thanks to my friends in the City of Los Angeles government who first taught me about the Vision Zero programs across the country: Seleta Reynolds, Mike Manalo and others. And of course, my applause to the City of San Francisco’s DPH, DOT, and data science teams for making this a reality._ --- # Draft Ideas for “#PublicInnovation Academy” Courses > Here’s a initial “off-the-top of my head” breakdown of potential courses/topics — in no particular order. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2020/08/08/Draft-Ideas/ Published: 2020-08-08 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Academy Ideas, Innovation, Reflections --- In theory each sub-bullet would a class with 5–6, hour-long lectures/modules with quizzes attached to each module. This should lead to about 30+ courses students can mix and match, with faculty approval, for their certification in a bespoke \*program\* — eg data architect, digital services designer, etc — or they can just individual courses credits and are welcome to pick and choose. **Sign up for the latest updates and to be part of the discussion moving forward here:** [**publicinnovation.academy**](https://publicinnovation.academy) Also there _is_ a hope to partner with institutions with content in these areas already to leverage their expertise and work in building a more comprehensive curriculum. If you represent an organization that would like to discuss partnerships, please let me know: abhi.nemani@gmail.com Again all very early thinking but I to **build in the open**. **And I am very open to candid feedback.** **_Sample Course Topics_** #### Data * Visualizations * Charting * Mapping * Standards * Databases * Publishing Open Data * Community building * Data science * Performance management #### Build with, not for users * Lean/Agile * Human Centered Design & Research * Accessibility * Content strategy / good writing * Partnerships with community groups #### The Ecosystem * Existing stack * Field review #### Recruiting & Teamwork * Recruitment strategies * Cross-functional teams — creating and managing * Remote work * Collaboration tools: GDocs etc #### Social Media / Marketing * Social media mastery * Listening/sentiment analysis * How to be a PIO (PR, push notifications) * Boosting app/program engagement * Design tools: 99 Designs, stock photos etc #### Challenges * Procurement * Budget * “Building a tribe” — finding likeminded allies * Ethics of open data, privacy, AI * Inclusivity and anti-racism (unintended or intentional discrimination) #### Digital services * General overview: why, which, and how * Best practices & multi-agency collaboration: interoperability, upsells, engaging form design, and follow ups / surveys * Moving up in a digital services team #### Hardware * Fiber/connectivity * Cloud v on-premise * IoT / Sensors #### App Primers * Excel / Google Sheets * Slack * Esri / CartoDB / Mapbox * PowerPoint * Tableau, SAP, and other reporting tools * Various online tools (IFTTT, AirTable) #### Communications * Negotiation strategies * Translating tech * Perfecting the pitch #### Policy * Technology Roadmaps * Open Data Policy * Economic development for tech * Gig economy partnerships (eg car sharing, micro-mobility) #### Other activities * **Mentorship**: pairing new folks with experienced civic tech leaders for career planning, networking, and on-the-ground insight into how civic Tech works. * **Cohorts/classes**: Individuals from different government but working on the same team (eg digital services) could be paired up to complete joint assignment, effectively setting mew standards by jurisdiction’s collaborating. * **In-person deep dive**: For governments wanting to engage a broader swath of participation, the academy could arrange on-site training, working hands on with front-line operators. * **Speakers Series**: Monthly host a “fireside chat” with a civic tech leader as an open event, which will serve as a feeder for new students in the academy and enable the students to grow their own networks. * **From grade book to front page**: Establish a respected, thought leadership blog. Student will be able to publish their coursework essays, visualizations etc, giving them stage to connect with a nation audience. --- # NJ State Attorney General: Turning Procurement Around to Leverage Existing Tools > Data collection problems can stifle reform efforts that rely on data, such as the New Jersey effort to create an "early warning" system for abuse URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2020-08-01-use-of-force/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: foundation, police, procurement --- The State of New Jersey Attorney General’s (AG) Office works with hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the state, and to effectively coordinate a statewide program of data-driven justice, it needs to have access to reliable, clean, and comprehensive data from those agencies. These agencies, however, have historically been siloed from a technological perspective with each agency using its own systems, often antiquated and never effectively centralized or standardized. This makes statewide reform, innovation, and accountability challenging. In 2019, Arnold Ventures, a internationally recognized philanthropy focused on evidence-based policy, asked me to help. What was needed was not only modern, standardized, preferably automated ways for agencies to share their data, but also tools for officers themselves to report better, cleaner data. The state leadership envisioned a simple, easy-to-use platform​ that our office can use to generate ​forms​, which agencies can have their officers complete, bulk upload​ their data to, or​ integrate their systems​ with, and then our office can ​export​ that data into its ​existing analytics​ system for analysis and reporting. But, crucially, the state leaders and Arnold believed that the government **did not need to reinvent the wheel**. At the core, the solution was just a form for departments to share data, and many, many form solutions exist, even a handful specifically for government. So instead of an Request for Proposal, like governments would typically produce, asking for new, bespoke, and expensive custom software, I helped the state develop a "Request for Solutions," mapping out not the how vendors could and should consider adapting existing solutions, saving time and money. ![Workflow](https://abhinemani.com/img/use-of-force-v2.png) ![Workflow](https://abhinemani.com/img/use-of-force-v1.png) Eventually the key deliverables were a list of civic-oriented data collection and workflow solutions and a reverse RFP — a statement of goals, not features — for SaaS vendors to compete against. --- # The Gap in Public Sector Innovation > The great programs and strategies to develop government tech leadership overlook the people that are already there, or need to be. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/featured/2020/07/11/Skills-Gap/ Published: 2020-07-11 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- There are currently over 20 million government employees in the United States. Although rigorous surveying is lacking, anecdotal evidence suggests most are drastically under-equipped to use, leverage, or oversee technology, even though technology is becoming an essential element of policy making, policy implementation, and general administrative operations. The high profile failures of projects such as Healthcare.gov only signal the broader issue. Estimates suggest 70% of government technology projects fail, and even that number fails to capture the opportunities for technological progress missed because of a lack of understanding — or more specifically, training. Only recently have credentialed programs emerged to train public servants in digital technologies. These laudable initiatives tend to focus on two key constituencies with distinct purposes 1) training existing high-level executive leadership in digital vernacular and best practices; and 2) teaching incoming new employees with pre-existing technical skills how to operate in the public sector. (The latter, it should be noted, cannot guarantee that these potentially highly paid individuals will indeed choose a career in government, given the hiring constraints and payroll limitations.) Historically, however, public policy and public administration educational programs did not include any tech component in the curriculum. This means that the bulk of government employees — the vast middle of the bell curve outside executives and new recruits — lack the technological proficiency and more pressingly, lack credible venues to level up. It seems overly optimistic to presume that these non-technical employees would or should engage in the numerous “coding camps” to become technical experts. They need not become engineers, just sufficiently proficient in technology to get the job done in the digital age. Indeed these individuals play a critical role in government operations, in every branch. If effectively trained, the outcomes would be significant. To name a few: - Better purchasing decisions and management of contractors that would improve project delivery timelines and reduce budgetary impact - Deeper understanding of technological needs for policy that would inform legislation - Awareness of existing tools and solutions that would speed up and improve service delivery - Competency using commonplace digital / data analysis tools that would inform legislative, executive and judicial decision-making With millions of employees spread across thousands of agencies and institutions and various levels of government, tackling the challenge of digital proficiency would be a significant undertaking. Crucially, doing so without relevant and accurate data on the state of the sector would be a fool’s errand. (Indeed many organizations and companies have attempted to build technical training programs — many of which I have personally had a role in, with very limited success.) What’s needed is deeper research into the a) existing skills gap; b) effective mechanisms to address it; and c) tactics to motivate individuals to participate. Put more directly, research ought to center on the following questions: - What skills/knowledge should analysts/advisors/aides/managers inside government have to effectively operate in the digital age? - What skills/knowledge do they currently have? - What types of trainings/programs would they be willing and able to participate in? - How would such programs be financed (eg grant funding, agency allocations,, etc)? - How would you motivate employees to participate (eg credentialing, inducements, etc)? - How would you measure and assess the impact of these trainings (eg cost savings, project completion rates, resident satisfaction, etc)? Fortunately, there are examples and research to pull from: federal teams such as 18F and local governments such as the City and County of Denver (Peak Academy) have run effective and well received trainings; and universities such as Harvard and nonprofits such as the OpenGov Foundation have performed research into these questions. The goal of this project would be to pull together those valuable resources, along with new independent analysis via surveys, interviews, and focus groups into a series of tests to see what works: workshops, online platforms, or offsite retreats — or something else entirely. The scale of this challenge can only be met with rigor and creativity. That said, given the tremendous work happening to train leadership and the next generation of civic leaders, this seems to be the missing piece in institutionalizing a technologically competent and capable government: one that is more efficient, effective, and — critically — responsive to its constituents. ## Appendix 1: Example Outcomes Through various conversations with public sector experts, several (rough) concepts have emerged: - “Quantico for GovTech”: Law enforcement agencies have highly regarded training institutions ranging from local police academies to federal institutions. Participating in these is both an honor and a requirement. By creating centralized hubs of best practices, they ensure that all employees work with a baseline of expertise. A similar model — however different at scale and expectations — could be developed for technical proficiency (ie IT managers, analysts, etc). - “Khan Academy for GovTech”: Online learning management systems (LMS) have opened up access to curriculum ranging from specialized topics to general education, including programs from institutions such as Harvard and Stanford Universities. One could leverage those platforms themselves or their examples to build new courses for the public sector. - Workshops or retreats: In-person short-term workshops can engage individuals who have limited time, and programs such as “RailsBridge” illustrate that a common curriculum can be taught in a decentralized manner nationally by volunteers or ad hoc employees. Provided a curriculum, existing groups (NGOs, colleges, etc) could train public servants at scale. ## Appendix 2: What I’ve seen so far - Code for America: Developed training for fellows going to work inside government, existing government officials, and civic-minded volunteers, reaching overall at least 300 agencies - Cities of Los Angeles and Sacramento: Ran various trainings for city staff and built and deployed new technologies for use by operational staff (eg Mayor’s Dashboard). - Dozens of GovTech startups (through EthosLabs): Tackled firsthand the challenge of ensuring adoption by government employees of new tools. - University of Chicago: Built and taught civic tech courses for the CS & Public Policy schools. --- # Keynote: From Social Innovation to Civic Startups > Notes and Video from Making a Difference (MAD) 2013 Hong Kong URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/talks/2020/07/11/Changing-the-frame-from-social-innovation-to-civic-startups/ Published: 2020-07-11 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- _These are edited notes from my speech at Making a Difference 2013 Hong Kong on civic startups. I had initially prepared a different talk, but upon arriving in Hong Kong, talking with locals and other guests, I realized that while the technology sector there is thriving, it was sorely lacking the civic or social focus that exists in the American ecosystem. Thus, I reoriented my speech to discuss the need for and needs of a civic tech ecosystem. Video is available below._ I want to tell you a story about a city in Massachusetts called Monson. It’s a small town. It’s about eight thousand people so you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s pretty average for a northeastern town in America. If you had heard of it it would have been because of this. In 2011 it was leveled by an F3 tornado. If you know anything about America hearing about a tornado in Massachusetts is like hearing about a hurricane in Germany. It never happens. They weren’t prepared for it. This is what happened to that city. It was demolished. Houses were broken. People lost their jobs. People lost their lives. ![Storm-damaged neighborhood](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_mOTot1u6FhfKMOyUWSYW2A.png) In a crisis like that there’s this one very special women I’ve met, she stepped up, she did what I bet the people in this audience would do. She stepped up and said, “How can I help? How can I solve this problem?” She started corralling all the volunteer that she could, and started getting them together to start solving the problem. People were shipping in resources. Volunteers were stepping up and people were saying, “Give me help.” She was running all of this effort, thousands of people, thousands of resources from her iPhone. It’s funny, if you talk to her about it she says the biggest problem she had was that she had too may resources and not the tools to manage them. In fact, some of the resources were wasted. Some of the help that could’ve been given wasn’t provided. She did, also what I bet a lot of you would do, she built an app for that. She built a little app for the internet that says basically, “Tell me what your needs are, tell me what you have, and tell me what you’re willing to do.” It’s called recovers.org. She built this with her and two of her friends over the course of a couple of months. She thought that even though her city wasn’t prepared, any city should be, and that the problems that she was facing in her town would be common in other towns in a disaster zone. She was right. This is what happened in Forney Texas six months after the app launched. Another F3 tornado leveling a town. Here’s what was different, Forney was able to use that piece of technology to respond to the crisis on the ground. They were able to stand up Forney Recovers and be able to take a list of everything people had, everything that people would be willing to do and match that up with needs. Thousands and thousands of needs were submitted. She’s proud and that company is proud to say that every single one was able to be met because of this piece of technology. ![Person filling out a form on a tablet](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_arYLtxDnSkHppoAUEuYHCg.png) That’s the power of technology in a crisis. That’s the power of technology in a community, that when it’s needed and when people need tools to respond to a situation they have it. This is now their company. It’s Recovers. The story doesn’t end in Forney or Monson. They decided that this shouldn’t just be a one-off situation. This idea, that there should be community powered response, that the citizen who want to help, that the citizens who want to give back should have the tools, in any city that they’re in, should be commonplace. They’ve done the hard work of going city to city in the United States and contracting with the city government to deploy their piece of technology, because you know what? The best time to be ready for an emergency is before it happens. The reason I wanted to tell you this story is because we’re talking about changing the game. I bet to a lot of you the notion of building software and selling it to government sounds insane. What I wanted to do was come before you and tell you that if you want to change the game, if you want to have an impact in your community, this is one way to do, and it’s really important, and it’s really important right now. Before we get there, some background. My name’s Abhi Nemani. I grew up in southern Illinois. It’s a small rural town not unlike Forney or Monson. I was just joking backstage that the tallest building in my town was two stories tall, not exactly like Hong Kong. I was always into politics. I was always into government. I was always the nerd in the room. I was always the guy who would stand up the website when they needed it. Eventually technology became a passion of mine. I made my way to San Francisco eventually and started working for Google. About three years ago I quit my job at Google to go work and help build a new non-profit known as Code for America. My parents were happy about that. What’s Code for America? The notion for Code for America is actually a game changing one. It’s the notion that yo can change the way that government works through technology. You can fundamentally reimagine the way cities work by leveraging technology to make them more open, efficient and connected. When we started it everyone told us we were crazy. I thought we were too. People thought, “Government’s too broken. It’s too disconnected. It’s too removed.” Over the last few years we’ve seen that things are changing and that right now is a tremendous opportunity to make something happen. Specifically what do we do at Code for America? We started off with this basic notion that, let’s bring together the great developers and designers from technology and bring them into cities and see what happens. We launched this program. It’s a fellowship. We call it a Peace Corps for geeks. It’s a public service opportunity for technologists to give back and make cities work better. We focus on cities. Being here in Hong Kong, I would do it here because I love cities. Cities are the place where we get the services that we need, make the connections to the communities that we love. We wanted to work with cities. The core notion of the project is that we’ll get a team of developers and designers, three or four of them, send them to a city like Chicago or Philadelphia and see what can you do if you have free range to just experiment. If you can look at the challenges within city hall and say, “Hey, I’ve got a better way to do that.” That’s what they’ve been able to do for the last couple of years. I don’t really want to talk much about the fellowship, but I wanted to give you an example or two of what we’re doing so you can get a sense of how it’s feasible that we’re able to work with government. This is a story from the city of Boston. It snows a lot there. The first year of our fellowship they had the worst snowfall in their history. They have these fire hydrants throughout the city. When it snows that much they get covered. One thing we ask our fellows to do is to go around the city and ask people, “What are big problems that you have?” They were talking to the fire department and asked them, “Hey, what’s a big challenge in your job.” They said, “This.” They said, “This is the problem, that when it snows, instead of being firemen and putting out fires and saving lives, we have to shovel off these hydrants.” One of our fellows is like, “You know what? We can do something about that. Why do you have to be the one to shovel it out? There’s a person living in the house right in front of that hydrant. There’s an apartment building. There’s tons of people who can help out.” They built an application. It’s called Adopt-a-Hydrant. It’s really simple. This is a very lightweight application. The reason I bring it up is because I think it’s game-changing. This application says that instead of a government being responsible to do everything in the community, we as citizens can do something as well. We can step up. You can adopt a hydrant. It’s great. You put your address in there. You’ll get a list of the hydrants near you. You pick one. They’ll jump up and down. You can give it a name. It becomes your hydrant and it’s your responsibility to take care of it. I bring this up because I think this is a game-changing notion. It’s the notion that citizenship comes with responsibilities and that technology is giving us a way to be more active as citizens, a way for us to do more. It’s not all about the apps. When we’re in the cities the fellows do some other fun stuff too. This is what looks like a utility box in Santa Cruz California. If I’d asked you guys what this was I doubt that many of you would know what this is. I don’t know what it is when I first saw it. Turns out it’s a bike shelter. Santa Cruz is near the water. It rains a lot and there’s waves and they wanted to put bikes inside these shelters so they don’t get ruined. No one knew that. That looks like a utility box. Our fellows were like, “That’s bad. That’s not using the resource.” They went there and drew a bike on the side of all the shelters. They painted that on. The reason I want to bring that up is it shows that cities can have more character. They can be more playful. They can be more accessible to citizens if they’re willing to try something new. ![Volunteers painting bike storage units](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_plWDA5sleX64gcZT2C0TKw.jpg) That’s our fellowship. What say at the fellowship is that it shows what is possible, because you guys, and whoever was thinking this, that it’s going to be hard to work with government. You’re right. It really is sometimes. What we’re learning is that if you can get inside city hall, if you can start working with the government, and this shows something interesting. Show them Adopt a Hydrant. Show them that bike rack. They’re able to see something new. They able and willing to try something new. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. We have a bunch of applications that we’ve built. That was fro the first year. We built twenty-one applications in three cities, the second year, 2012, fifty-two applications, lots of projects. Our strategy, this is what I want to impress on all of you, is that that’s just the beginning. That’s opening the door to innovation. That’s the start. There’s a lot more that needs to be done. There’s this quote I love: > “If you want to build a ship don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Instead of building every single thing a government wants get the government to believe in your vision, believe in this other way of doing things, and then they’re going to long for the endless immensity of the sea. This is our strategy. We’re hoping that governments will see this offer of building with the fellowship and then crave it, demand it. If that’s the case you then have to have a set of startups, new vendors, new technology companies that are going to address those needs. That’s why last year I was proud to build a startup accelerator for Code for America. For those of you who don’t know, an accelerator basically brings together the most exciting, promising startups, gets them resources, training and a network to help those companies to become more successful. We were positioned well in this market because we had a network of cities that we were working with. We wanted to help tee up those cities for new, interesting startups to make it just a little bit easier. Our first year we had a four week application window. Two hundred and thirty-five companies applied for the seven slots. It’s very competitive. I’m proud of the seven companies we picked. ![The government IT market: $172B in federal, state and local spending](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_gcG7H6PaMLR7I-gEFgk2ew.png) I’m going to tell you about one of them. This is Aunt Bertha. Not my Aunt Bertha, but an Aunt Bertha. This is the Aunt of one of the founders of one of our startups. He’s from Texas. I’ve heard that this is an increasing problem here, is that as populations age they require more social services and providing those services is a challenge. A similar challenge is making visible those services to citizens. Aunt Bertha wants a social service. She wants to get her Medicare, or go get healthcare. How does she know where to go? Right now she has this awful, complicated system of twenty different forms, three different websites that are terrible and she’s not able to find the services that are her right, that are made for her. This entrepreneur, Erine Gray made an application called Aunt Bertha. It’s this simple, you put in your zip code and it tells you, “These are the programs available to you.” He made a smart play. He said that, “Instead of going directly to the government first, I’m going go to all those forums, all those websites, get all that data myself and make this application so I don’t have to worry about contracting the government to get started.” He’s got something like fifteen thousand users in the first year in Texas. This is where it gets really interesting. He’s decided to make it profitable by then selling back that information to the government. Talk about changing the game. These are the examples of the kinds of things you can do if you’re willing to get creative and willing to take on hard, messy challenges. These are some of the other companies that we’ve worked with. Captricty is a nice one. They take all of these paper forms that you have to fill out in government and digitizes all of them. I talk to you about Recovers. Measured Voice is a social media tool for government. Revelstone, I’ll mention this one last, Revelstone takes performance management for government, the way they operate, how you say, use this resource or that resource and puts data on top of it so cities can make smarter decisions. The cool thing is because they go city to city to city they cities start to compete for their ratings. The cities want to become better than the other cities, and they’re able to make that challenge, they’re able to gamify that. That’s our accelerator. I wanted to tell you about these companies not just to showcase them, not just to show you wants possible, but as a call to action as well because we’re really just at the beginning. We call these civic startups. This is an emerging market. There’s not very many players in it. Even though we had all those applications, very few of them were viable companies. We need people like you, people like your friends, people who are passionate about making their communities better to step up. To build an industry, it’s not just about having companies. You’ve got to have a community of people willing to support those companies and help them get better. You’ve got to have customers, clients who are willing to work with that technology and buy it. Finally, you’ve got to have capital. You’ve got to have investment firms that are willing to put money into these companies to help them grow. ![Pillars of a market: companies, capital, customers and community](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_qvzZXigB152ojjcWMttiyw.png) On that last point, that’s only going to happen when there’s a lot of companies getting into this market and there’s a lot of brave, brave young people like yourselves willing to say, “You know what? It may be hard to work with the city. It may be hard to work with the government, but I care and I’m going to do something about it.” This is what I ask of you. The reason why is this quote from my friend Tim O’Reilly. He says, > “Technology makes the easy things easy and makes the hard things possible.” I would add one more line to that. I would say that _when something’s possible and it’s important we have the responsibility to take it on_. Let me show you one last example of why. This is a lady named Miss Rita. She’s in the city of New Orleans. She’s retired and now spends all of her day tackling this problem called urban blight. Blight, if you don’t know, it’s vacant houses. I don’t know how much you know about New Orleans. As you may know, they were hit by this Hurricane Katrina a couple of years ago. A lot of people left the city and a lot of houses were damaged which means that now the city that had a population of one point two million is down to six hundred thousand. There’s all these houses that are vacant. That may seem like an opportunity for real estate, but in fact it’s a problem for crime and public safety because thee vacant houses become hotbeds for crime. The mayor, when he came into office, he said, “You know what? I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to take down a hundred thousand vacant houses in my four terms.” This is the mayor. Guess what, no one had the data to tell him which houses were vacant or not. Miss Rita didn’t have it. Do you know what she did? She spent two hours a day going house by house to figure out what the status of those houses were. Her and her friends would do that. She wasn’t the only one. Think about that. Citizens spending hours a day to go map out their city because their government didn’t have the data. The mayor of a major US city didn’t have that data either. He told his CIO, his chief information officer, “When can I have an iPad app that just shows me the status of any house that I’m standing in front of?” Seems simple enough. The CIO said, “It’s going to take me three years and cost about thirty million dollars to do that.” Our fellows went in there and they built it in six weeks. This is BlightStatus. They went into city hall like a SWAT team, went and found all the data sets and build this simple application because they were able to go in there and innovate. They were able to go in there and find all this data. It’s a pretty simple application. The point is it puts the mayor and Miss Rita and other citizens on the same level. I love this quote from the newspaper that covered the launch of this application. It says, > “The app proposes a new kind of more productive communication between the two groups that moves past angry and frustrated citizens on one end and a paralyzed city on the other.” Think about that. It changes the way the community works. It changes the social dynamics in the city. That CIO, after he got the application, the way he described it, he said, “It changed the conversation.” Beforehand citizens were really upset and thinking the city wasn’t doing anything. The government was frustrated because it wasn’t able to respond to their challenges. What happens in that dynamic? Society corrodes. It’s not productive and healthy and collaborative. The technology that came into play, that application BlightStatus was able to change the conversation and change the game. In closing I just wanted to say that when you build civic tools you can build civic trust. That’s what they did with BlightStatus. That’s what they’re doing with Recovers, with Aunt Bertha. That’s what I hope that all of you considered doing. You can sit around and complain about how the city works, you can complain about how your government works, or you can commit to being a change-maker. You can commit to making a difference, and you can get involved. Thank you. Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/150119192 --- # Keynote: Government is What *We* Make of It > Building a civic architecture of participation URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/07/11/Government-is-what-we-make-of-it/ Published: 2020-07-11 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149826020 _These are my (slightly edited) notes from my keynote presentation at the GovDelivery Federal Communications Summit 2014 that aims to trace the evolution of the web and apply its lessons to government — the move from Gov 1.0 to Gov 2.0, from passive democracy to an active one, in the digital age._ *** Today, I’d like to talk to you all about advertising. Actually just [one piece of advertising](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPklt9nYas&ab_channel=THEADFACTORY): Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/zhPklt9nYas I wanted to share that with you because I thought that ad is fascinating. It’s touching and moving and funny too, but I think it’s fascinating in that it’s an ad for Google Chrome, but you don’t hear the word “Chrome” at all in the ad. You don’t hear them pitching about how fast it is, how it’s open source, how it’s secure. _You don’t at any time hear anything about the browser itself._ All you see are things that _you can do_ with the browser. And you see one closing line of text: > “The web is what you make of it.” That resonated. It resonated because this idea of being able to talk about something, being able to present something, to pitch something without actually talking about the thing itself, just what you can do with the thing, I think is really compelling. That’s what I wanted to talk to you today, was try to understand why that is, why could Google run ads like this during the Superbowl. They spent millions of dollars promoting these kinds of ads. How could they do that? Why would they do that? That’s what I want to try to impact together today, is what is it about the web that lets you run an advertisement like this? What is it about the web that lets you pitch a browser by just talking about what you can do with it? To do that I’ve got to tell you a little bit of history about the web. If you’ll pardon me, I’ll give you a brief history about how things have gone. You all have lived this. I have; I grew up on the web. I’m going to walk you through a little bit of history. ### A (brief) history of the web You all probably remember this. Remember this? ![America Online sign-on screen on an old CRT monitor](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_dvRPDkVebxmBnZbZq3esKQ.png) Actually, I’m young enough where, for me, it wasn’t the floppy disks, it was the [CD-ROM drives that you get at Walmart](http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/AHE3H8.jpg). Remember those? They were free. (I used to use them as frisbees.) That was the initial web that we all experienced: the dial tones. Then there was Yahoo, which was like this: ![Yahoo directory homepage from the 1990s](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_1OGcZEVhfUhL1ZEVFSKyeQ.png) If you remember — and this is important — it was just a set of links. It was curated by people at Yahoo. They would find different links throughout the web, put them into directories manually, and let you search them that way, which was a great experience at the time, but now we know a very different one, which we’ll get to in a second. Then this, this is my favorite. This is [Britannica.com](http://britannica.com): ![Britannica.com homepage circa 2000](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_dMv-uzGu4VeLh_D-q1uWBQ.png) Actually, [this hasn’t changed much since 1994](http://www.britannica.com/). If you go to the current site, it’s not too much different. Again, this was the resource for information on the internet. You would search basically a digitized version of the Britannica encyclopedia. That’s all you would have access to is that print document, now online. This is the White House website from 1995: ![Early White House press release search page](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_BC-g25oO_iVI_67MSJ__Yw.png) _(Yeah… not sure exactly to say about that.)_ What’s shocking about that era is that government websites like this were considered state-of-the-art. In fact, in even in 2003 according to Time, 3 of the best websites were government websites. ![Time's 2003 best websites list with government sites highlighted](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_Nwy8hmW5Z7JKZTaz-MH1-Q.png) [Look at it again today](http://time.com/3054279/50-best-websites-2014/), you’re not going to see that. Why? Not just because other sites began to start using prettier typography or CSS; because **things changed.** #### Things changed. Around 2003, 2004, 2005, things changed on the web in a really profound and important way, typified I think by this: !["I can has cheezburger?" cat meme](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_2XrZMdGSpvN0spm3yScHWw.png) You think I’m kidding, but I’m actually not. This, I think, was one of the biggest changes to the web is that Ben Huh and the [ICanHasCheezburger](http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/) team started making their own images like this, but importantly, you could make them yourselves. Think about that shift. Before hand, it was just the publishers themselves pushing you content. Now, you’re in a world where you can create content, they can create content, your friends can create content, and you all can share that together. The explosion of this site, for better or worse, is an example of how the web changed dramatically. It went from a push only experience to a _push_\-_pull_, to a _read_\-_write_ experience. That was just the start. Then, you saw [YouTube](http://youtube.com): ![Early YouTube homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_jLbEHgrC7eO4FJnzKSLXvA.png) The design is much better today, thankfully. Then [Facebook](http://facebook.com), of course. This is the canonical example of the social network, of how people started to connect with each other online. Then, [Wikipedia](http://wikipedia.org). Again, think about the contrast between Wikipedia — totally crowdsourced, totally user generated, accessible for anybody in any language — to Encyclopedia Britannica, driven by one publisher, one group, one institution only. This shows you the profound change I think in the web, that you went from one encyclopedia being the resource, to all of us working together to create public information. Consider this: ![Table comparing top websites by traffic in 2003 and 2013](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_d5_KhSPqBVlKVgET_u5Cpg.png) Look at this comparison. In 2003, the top websites — Yahoo, AOL, MSN — these are all just content publishers, publishers. In 2013, they’re all platforms. Google with Gmail, with Maps, with all the apps that they have, Facebook, social networking, YouTube you can upload things. Yahoo now has more of a user generated aspect. Amazon, with its marketplace that Steve was talking to you about a second ago. Think about that shift. All of the top 10 sites in the US right now have a platform element to them. All of them have an user-generated aspect. In 2003, almost none of them did. This is the change that happened. This is the profound shift that happened in the web. It’s from passive to active. It’s from a passive experience on the web to an active one, and it’s from consumptive, where you’re just consuming information, to participatory, where you’re engaging on the web with it. You’re part of it. _The web is what you make of it._ ![Tim O'Reilly's Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 comparison table](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_EG2Wq3l21p0TKZ7NzVTIZw.png) My friend [Tim O’Reilly](http://twitter.com/@timoreilly) wrote this article called [_What is Web 2.0?_](http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html) I’m sure you guys have seen Tim talk about at some point; he presented it a lot of conferences here in D.C. He observed this phenomenon and dubbed it, **web 2.0**. Exemplified by the shift from Ofoto, which was again, just this publishing platform for pictures, to Flickr, where you could upload your own pictures and find other people’s pictures. It’s this profound shift between this 1.0 view to this 2.0. #### Architecture of Participation He wrote something really interesting about this notion of web 2.0. He said, “The key to the web, the change that’s happened is that we have now an _architecture of participation_.” The web is architected in a way where it’s participatory, where you can engage with it and you can add value. You add value, and you appreciate it, you like uploading your own pictures, uploading your own videos, and you find value in that. Just as importantly, when you do that, you add value to the web itself. Then, the web gets more meaningful for your friends, for your family members, for other people who you don’t even know. That’s the power of the web, that we’ve architected it in a way where you can add value to it, where you can be participatory, and it gets better for everybody. > …for us working in the public sector, this is the question we have to unpack: how do you make an **architecture participation work for government**? I think for us, working in the public sector (…I’m just 6 weeks in so I think I can say that, you tell me if I can’t), for us working in the public sector, this is the question we have to unpack: how do you make an architecture of participation work for government? How do you embed an architecture that is fundamentally participatory inside our public institutions? You’ve may have about this before. You probably heard about this idea of **Gov 2.0**, and **government as a platform**. What I wanted to do today in this conversation was talk about _specifically_ what those terms really mean — based on examples we’ve seen so far, and some ideas of what we want to do next. #### Community as Capacity The first one really puts open data at its core, and it’s this idea that [Chris Vein](https://twitter.com/veinesque), the former deputy CTO for the federal government, coined, called “Community as Capacity.” As you all know, and I am learning very quickly, a big challenge in government is getting the resources and the capacity you need to get stuff done. You have a great idea, you want to build a great visualization like the maps and apps you’ve seen. It’s hard to find the resources to do that sometimes. Chris made a good point, however, which is that sometime you can look outside city hall, or outside federal government to get it done. You can look to the community as capacity. This is something that’s at the heart of open data, its promise to unlock the potential in the community for innovation. A good question is, how do you get value out of open data? You just put this data out there. We’ve [opened up 250 data sets](http://data.lacity.org) in Los Angeles. It’s thousands at the federal level. Ok. So you put this data out there, then what happens? _Does anybody build anything on it?_ More broadly, _how do you realize the potential of open data?_ I **don’t** think, “If you build it, they will just come.” No, they just won’t. Indeed I’ve actually studied a lot of cities about how they’ve done an open data program: Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, etc. The cities that have been successful don’t just publish data, cross their fingers, and hope for impact. They get out their, and actively put data to work. > The cities that have been successful don’t just publish data, cross their fingers, and hope for impact. They get out their, and actively put data to work. By studying them, I’ve distilled these 4 key lessons. 1. **You’ve got to open your doors.** Actually open your doors — that’s not just as a metaphor — you’ve got to let people come inside. 2. **Create a sense of community** where people are actually coming together and knowing each other. 3. **Back good people with real suppor**t, that if people are doing something meaningful with your data, you’ve got to actually give them support and resources to make it better and sustainable. 4. **Then, you’ve got to make it count**, because you’ve got volunteers, you’ve got people who are giving their time, energy, and talent. You’ve got to make that real. You’ve got to make sure that that impact, that technology they build, that insight that they have, has an impact. #### The Chicago Story I’m going to give you probably, I think, the best example of an open data community in the country: **Chicago**. I’m from Illinois, I’m a little bit biased, but in general I think this is probably the best example. This is a picture of the Chicago OpenGov Hack Hight. ![Crowd of developers at a civic hacking meetup](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_-S8hc59CfO62TOnME52-dw.png) This started as just 4 people coming together to say, “Let’s use this open data coming from the city.” Then, the city’s CTO, John Tolva, would show up, and add a word of encouragement — and maybe a bit of beer and pizza. (Note: Pizza in Chicago is _really_ good.) These folks decided that, instead of just doing these random events every now and then, let’s just come together every week at 6:00 at a coffee shop, and just work, and spend 2 hours building technology for our city, to help it work better. They started doing that, then other people heard about it and they wanted to join the popup meetup. Soon, they couldn’t fit in the coffee shop anymore. Then, they moved to a local coworking space, 1871. Now, every week, every Tuesday, at 6:30 P.M., dozens of people show up to code on civic data. Just take a second and think about that. Every week, you have 50, 60, 70, 100 people showing up to use open data to make their city better. **That’s a community**, and it’s a community that gets stuff done. ![Clear Streets and Large Lots civic apps for Chicago](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_CYBk9OUi4SccG9cv4uXKMA.jpg) Here’s an example of an application they built, it’s called [Clear Streets](http://clearstreets.org/) using open data. In Chicago, as you can imagine, it snows a lot, which I know it does here as well. (It doesn’t snow a lot in L.A., so this isn’t a problem for me.) In Chicago, it snows a lot, and they have street plows going through and clearing out the snow, and people are wondering, are they going to clear my street? Are they going to plow out my street? They took open data about the location of all those streets, of those plows, and lets you track in real time where they are and when they’re going to come to your street. Hugely popular in this city, for a good reason. Here’s another example. They built [LargeLots](https://largelots.org/). The city had this program where, for $1, $1, you could buy a city owned property. No one knew about it. If I knew about it, I’d buy lots of properties in Chicago, but no one knew. They took the data on which properties were available, and then built a simple, beautiful application on top of it. Now, the city has liked this application enough, this is their main portal now for running that program. They took something built in the community, totally outside government, and made it now a government resource. Those are some examples of how powerful open data can be if you have the right community around it, if you get people engaged. Now, how do you do that? I think the first thing you got to do is _open your doors, not just your data._ San Francisco has done this really well. They have an [**Entrepreneurship-in- Residence**](http://entrepreneur.sfgov.org/) program where they’ll actually let businesses come into city hall for about a month and a half or 2 months and spend time with people, to Scott’s point, just _listening_. Listening to service line employees and asking, “What are your challenges?” And so learning: do staff really know how to use Excel in the way they _need_ to? Do they _have_ to scan that paper form a dozen times? Do their services really meet the needs of all their constituents? And so forth… What happened? For instance, a team spent time at SFO, and stumbled upon an interesting problem: improving navigation for the blind or hearing impaired. In just a few months, they were able to create a 3D model of the airport. Paired with a bit of navigational software and location aware hardware (read: smartphones), this enables the blind, for instance, to have _turn-by-turn directions inside the building_. Those are the kinds of innovations you don’t get if you’re not in the thick of it, if you’re not in the midst of the problem. Philadelphia has a similar program; they have something called [**FastFWD**](http://fast-fwd.org/) where they’re actually inviting startups that already have built products to pilot their innovations within government. Yes, procurement’s really hard; we all know that. And yes, working with government is (usually) really hard, too; we all know that. But the team behind FastFWD ([New Urban Mechanics](http://newurbanmechanics.org/philadelphia/)) effectively says to entrepreneurs, “Let’s sit down and work on this together. Let us share with you how to navigate this process and let’s work on _making it better together_.” They’re in their second cohort now. They’ve gotten already 6 startups going through it, and — from what I’ve gathered from both the city and the companies — it’s been really valuable. After you get people looking at the real problems you have, what do you do next? I think you have to **create a sense of community**. This is a harder challenge than it seems. Some dense cities can say, “Code for Philly,” all together in one place, or host “OpenGov Hack Night” in Chicago at the same co-working space downtown every week. But how do you do that when you’re the Department of Treasury? How do you do that if you’re a state, or even the entire United States of America? This is something that’s top of mind for me in Los Angeles, because it’s such a big city: it’s **460 square miles,** and **4,700 square miles** if you consider LA County. (That’s bigger than some states.) It’s a _little_ harder because you can’t have everyone in the same place at the same time. ![Hack for LA logo](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_BqXX6vnsp-k7vRHK43r6Ug.png) I think this is where creating a **brand** and an **identity** around your data program is really important. OpenTreasury, for instance. Figure out what that brand is, and do the simple things, like say, create a beautiful logo — which by the way is a great opportunity to engage the community — and slap that on everything. Everything: laptops, desks in City Hall, track jackets. Get people to understand that they are part of something bigger than themselves, a community. So even though they may not see everyone all the time, when they see that common identity, they’ll know they are part of the same tribe. After you create that community, I think you have to **back them with real support.** That means money. > Money comes in maybe for snacks and sodas, not paychecks and personnel. We don’t like to talk about money a lot; we talk about _volunteer_ civic hacking. Money comes in maybe for snacks and sodas, not paychecks and personnel. At the end of the day, if you’re going to take something from a one-off volunteer project, and it’s something sustainable, and it’s something meaningful and scalable, you’ve got to support the people who are building it with resources. These are some examples of institutions that do that. In Chicago, I think one of the keystone pieces of their open data community is [**Smart Chicago Collaborative**](http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/). Funded in part by the Chicago Trust and the MacArthur Foundation, they help transform interesting prototypes into sustainable initiatives through grants, resources, and other kinds of support. In my own backyard, LA, the [**Goldhirsh Foundation**](http://www.goldhirshfoundation.org/) through their [LA2050](http://www.la2050.org/) competition does similar work. And just recently, the [**GovTech Fund**](http://govtechfund.com/) was launched. Serial entrepreneur Ron Bouganim has built a first-of-its-kind **$20+ million** fund to invest in government technology startups. That kind of commitment from private capital stands as not only a substantial resource, but also a firm validator of the potential in this space. Finally, I think you have to **make it count**. You can’t just have people come together, give up their weekend to code atop your data, and then throw it off to the side. These are talented, passionate people who care about their cities. We have to show them respect. ![Two people pair programming at a hackathon](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_TlZcEtZyJtQCFlhYgFGncw.png) In Colorado, [they had a app challenge](http://engagingcities.com/article/new-approach-and-statewide-reach-go-code-colorado-builds-new-way-do-civic-tech) where the winner of it actually was given a chance at a contract with the state. They created a procurement vehicle that the winner of that hackathon would actually get a contract for the city to buy that software and use it. In Philadelphia, they took a different tact, which isn’t as heavy as providing a procurement vehicle; instead, they just had the mayor show up. Mayor Nutter shared a few minutes of his time to award the winners of the hackathon. Talking to attendees afterwards, I heard in unison a sense of appreciation and surprise: “Wow, my mayor cares about this?” That’s huge. If you think about the appointees, the electeds, that we as government officials interact with, we have access to extraordinary (and free) assets to leverage in support of civic innovation in our jurisdictions. And even if you don’t, you can get creative. The national education fundraising nonprofit, [DonorsChoose](http://donorschoose.org) hosted a major hackathon, “[Hacking Education](http://www.donorschoose.org/hacking-education).” Instead of a cash prize, or even a contract, the winner got something much more interesting: they got to go onstage live on “**The Stephen Colbert Show**.” This ended up being one of the most heavily attended hack events actually ever, and for good reason. (That photo will surely be hanging very prominently in the winning team’s coworking space.) ![Developer holding an award next to Stephen Colbert](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_-OA9IbvpDft-Ysft6BQDug.png) As government, we have access to phenomenal resources. If we email someone like Stephen Colbert or a different celebrity and say, “Hey, I’m with the Department of \[X\], we’re doing something really meaningful, can you help us out?” I bet you 9 times out of 10, you’re going to get an email back that’s pretty positive. We should be comfortable with being creative. Be clever, and reach out and see what happens, because these kinds of things are way more meaningful than a $500 prize. That’s the big challenge for open data: how do you make it count? And it’s one worth solving. [GovLab](http://www.thegovlab.org/), which is a research group in New York, has compiled a list of the [**top 500 startups using open data**](http://www.opendata500.com/). I think 500 is just the start. Indeed, McKinsey did a [study](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/open_data_unlocking_innovation_and_performance_with_liquid_information). They said that the economic value of open data is at $3 trillion. That’s trillion with a **T**, not **B**. If we think about the United States being the leader around publishing open data, then we should also strive to be the leader in putting that data to work, to work building businesses, starting nonprofits, improving government, and making a difference in people’s lives. Thus it is incumbent on us as public servants to not only publish data, but also work towards constructing architectures of participation around data. To summarize those four key principles, I would say this: It’s not just how you open data; it’s how you _create friction on top of it_. We often want processes to be frictionless, easy, clean. But given that we’re at such an early, nascent, and emergent stage in the open data movement, I would argue that we need to get in the weeds, into the nitty gritty, and explore what’s possible. The next piece is acting like a platform, thinking about how you, as a government, can be everywhere and anywhere. Here’s a picture comparing the appointments at St. Peters of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and of Pope Francis in 2013: ![Crowds in St. Peter's Square in 2005 and 2013, the latter full of glowing phones](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_Ow5PXr-V75GTPNYlhQfvlg.png) First, 2005, everyone’s just _there, watching_. 2013, look. Look at all those _devices_. That’s just 8 years (and in government time, that’s not a lot). In just 8 years, we have seen a _seismic shift_ in the way people interact. We are on our phones, everywhere, all the time. This shift is so profound that in fact, the obvious thing to do in response to it is to say, “I’m going to build an app, and I want to put it on all of those screens.” But here’s the rub: most people don’t use those apps we build. A story along these lines recently ran in [TechCrunch](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app-businesses-are-not-sustainable/), and it said basically, “The app economy is a winner takes all game.” Most people use a couple of apps a lot, and then don’t use any of the other ones. ![Infographic: the app economy is a winner-take-all game](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_VxPRRN3-wF4RBy_rUEM5hg.png) When we’re thinking about building digital experiences for citizens, we have to keep this front and center. The app economy is a winner takes all game, and I think it’s really hard to compete with Netflix. I think it’s really hard to compete with Facebook. With Google. With Yelp. So let’s not. Let’s instead partner with them and use those amazingly popular, amazingly beautiful interfaces to deliver our data and our services to citizens directly. Indeed, that’s exactly what we did in the past with Yelp and with [Trulia](http://www.codeforamerica.org/our-work/data-formats/housefacts/). The Atlantic ran an article recently talking about how [Yelp might “clean up the restaurant industry.”](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/youll-never-throw-up-in-this-town-again/309383/) Curious, because the restaurant industry is their industry, their customers and revenue base. Then, how could and why would Yelp do that? Through and because of data. Code for America worked with cities across the country to open up restaurant inspection scores and publish them in a common format (a data standard). Thanks to this standard, Yelp could integrate this data into their search results at scale — not just one city, but many. That’s exactly what they did: ![Yelp listing showing a restaurant's health inspection score](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_ghw5HyULZIG0v8DQ6C8ukQ.png) Now, when you’re in San Francisco, you can actually look for a restaurant on Yelp, you could actually see the health score right there. Just think about that transition for a second. Before, this critically important health score — this _data_ that tells you if you’re likely to leave with a stomach ache —is hidden in the back of the restaurant, tucked away near the kitchen where nobody can see. Now, it’s in the palm of your hand. > Before, this critically important health score … is tucked away near the kitchen where nobody can see. Now, it’s in the palm of your hand. This shift is possible when you start to partner with these organizations and start to open up your data, and then integrate it with them. We did something similar with Trulia around code enforcement violations. If your apartment, your building owner isn’t keeping up to code, isn’t doing a good job of making sure your building’s safe, you probably want to know that before you move in. CfA got that data opened up, standardized again, and got it onto [Trulia](http://trulia.com). These examples are really just the start. Although these weren’t easy, they did follow a common model, one where scale is key. We had to get _multiple_ cities, _multiple_ jurisdictions onboard. If it were just one, we wouldn’t be able to make that partnership happen. The federal government, then, has an unparalleled opportunity to broker these partnerships. Consider the reach of the agencies you represent. Then ask yourself, “How can we work together to set standards, and get together as a collective force to go to partners like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and then say, ‘Let’s do something with this’.” I’ll tell you, they’re open to it, more than open to it. They’re excited about doing it because it makes their experience richer for the citizens that they serve. The key here is to consider the citizen experience. You can open up data and put it on your data portal, but does that really go to regular people? Does my mom — that’s the question I ask myself — will my mom be affected by this? Not if it’s just on the data portal. If it’s in Yelp, definitely. The funny story about the Yelp initiative is, my friend at the time, we were going out to dinner, we were picking a place, she was looking at the restaurants in San Francisco to go to, and she said, “Wow, Abhi, have you seen that Yelp has these restaurant inspection scores?” I was like, _“Do you not listen when I tell you what I do all day?”_ #### Civic Upsells A final piece of an architecture of participation is the **upsell**. That is, how do you get more people doing more with the engagements that you have? How do you get them to be more plugged in? You give into this every day. Here’s an example. ![Amazon "customers also bought" recommendations for Democracy in America](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_ntcL_x1epsgjsISksAcupw.jpg) Alexis de Tocqueville is my favorite author. I love Democracy in America. Anybody else here? No? Okay. Thank you. If you go onto [Amazon and try to buy this book](http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061127922), right after you buy it, you’re going to see this. Customers also bought, because Amazon wants to _upsell_ you. They want you to buy something else. They don’t want you just to buy one book, they want you to buy two, or three, or even four. It’s not just Amazon that does that. If you go to a shopping mall or supermarket, you see this: ![Supermarket checkout aisle](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_IyQFkaXLb14706uZQWJiVQ.png) You’ve shopped in the aisles in the back, and when you’re checking out, you see all of this stuff that you can just quickly grab and add to your cart. That’s an upsell. Grocery stores think deeply — there are [books](http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/014311526X) about this — deeply about how to architect those and set those up to make sure the stuff that you’re willing to buy, the stuff that you want to buy, is right there. They think about the upsell. They think about how to get you to do more. > How could we create civic upsells? How could we create those same experiences for citizens using our services from a government? How could we create civic upsells? How could we create those same experiences for citizens using our services from a government? This has happened in the UK. The UK has this great branch called the [Government Digital Service](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/), which is helping think through these things and building great websites for the government. They have a bunch of digital services now, where you can go online and pay your taxes, for instance. They call it a tax disc for some reason (because they’re British). After you do that, they typically just showed you a thank you page, but then they added, if you need an organ transplant, if so, please help others. ![GOV.UK tax disc renewal and thank-you page with an organ donor prompt](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_ysqiq8QD-vdR5wXDsChkYw.jpg) They added an upsell. What was really interesting about it, they actually tested the hell out of it. They did A/B testing on all the different variations of it, so sometimes they had a picture, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they had a logo, sometimes they didn’t. ![Grid of GOV.UK organ donation prompt variants that were A/B tested](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_YEFq0jPkvZOF2-Prk_GI1g.png) Here’s what’s amazing. One link, that little link they added, [added 350,000 more organ donors](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/03/18/organ-donor-register/). Think how powerful that is. They are literally saving lives by just adding a little link. When you think about the digital services you’re creating, and the digital experiences you’re creating, I would strongly recommend to think about the upsell. Consider how you can get people to do more. You’ve got them engaged, you’ve got their attention. _That’s a rare, special thing._ Don’t pass up that opportunity. How can you get them to do just one more thing? And with just one more thing, you may end up getting them hooked. Just in closing, I thought I would mention a [recent study done by NPR and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation](http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/07/07/327322187/stressed-out-americans-tell-us-about-stress-in-their-lives) on the causes of daily stress. What do you think the number one is? Hearing about government and politicians. Honest to God, the number one source of daily stress is hearing about government and politicians: ![Bar chart of the causes of daily stress](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_7g6YNVnu21oxJ6iTMcAtmQ.png) As government communications professionals, that’s kind of tough. That’s hard to hear. What to do about it? I think we have to remember that _the world has changed_. We constructed our communications plans, our strategies in a 2003, 2002 era, where it’s all about _push,_ pushing information out to our constituents. My point here is that it’s about _push and pull, read_ and _write;_ it’s about an _architecture of participation_. ![Nineteenth-century engraving of townspeople gathered around a map](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_UG1g5PgbL_Ubakhks_siHw.png) I’ll end with an old example of an civic architecture of participation, a very old, and very simple one. It comes by way of President Andrew Jackson. In 1835, President Jackson wanted to get people into the White House. He wanted to open up his doors. He was given a big — and I mean big — block of cheese, so he opened up the door and let anybody come into the White House to have a piece. It’s said that 10,000 people showed up to share some cheese with the President. 10,000. Of course we can’t do that anymore. (Apparently, the smell was more than a little problem.) More relevantly, we live in a different world where you couldn’t fit everyone in the White House, where there isn’t just one door that everyone can walk through. Nor should they. That wouldn’t be fully representative, we wouldn’t be fully engaged. We have to think now _digitally_ about how to create that kind of engagement. This is the first thing I ever made for Code for America when I started working there 5 years ago: ![James Madison quote rendered in binary code, from Code for America](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_UVsiG80fz6G9BLQmtPp6bA.png) It’s binary code, and even if you can’t read binary, I bet you can guess what this is: this is the Preamble to the Constitution, changed into ones and zeros. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union...” As I do my own work, I keep returning to this image. I keep coming back to it because it’s a reminder that at the end of the day — no matter what technology, code, app, or platform we are building — what we’re really trying to do is something old, something core to who we are. We the people are forming a more perfect union. We the people are creating a more perfect government. We the people in this room, and “We the People” who aren’t but need to be in the process. Because, at the end of the day, yes, the web is what you make of it, but more importantly, _government is what we make of it_. _(Many thanks to my former colleagues Tim O’Reilly, Jennifer Pahlka, John Lilly, Scott Burns, and others for their thoughts and inspiration leading to this talk.)_ By [abhi nemani](https://medium.com/@abhinemani) on [December 23, 2015](https://medium.com/p/d836a6a9353d). [Canonical link](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/government-is-what-you-make-of-it-d836a6a9353d) Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on April 4, 2021. --- # City Government Technology and Innovation Models > Summary notes for discussion purposes URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/07/06/city-government-technology-and-innovation-models-6ab040973242/ Published: 2020-07-06 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Cities, Policy --- Governments have taken various approaches to reorganization for the digital age. The particular names and focus areas of the leadership teams/positions in each jurisdiction varies; however, these models suggest a common theme: * elevate the position of the IT department — not merging it with others, but instead emphasizing its unique cross-cutting value; * build out the data and analytics capability within the IT organization; * create Mayor’s Office tech capacity & policy expertise to advance mayoral priorities through tech and innovation city-wide. This approach has shown to lead to visible policy advancements, operational efficiencies, and long-term, significant cost-savings. (Note: These descriptions are somewhat reliant on commentary provided by previous holders of these offices, so some exact details may have changed of late. Current and past leaders from many of these cities have been contacted and are available for discussion/collaboration with City of Chicago representatives if that would be helpful.) #### Government Leadership Structure Models * Boston & Philadelphia created Mayor’s Offices of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) to drive technological innovation — specifically public-facing tools and services — in parallel with the IT Department. In both cases, MONUM advanced mayoral priorities through projects that highlighted the opportunity for tech-driven innovation, leading to a more competent and modern IT department: more talent, greater collaboration, and better online service delivery. (See Boston.gov, Philadelphia.gov.) * San Francisco appointed a Chief Innovation Officer in the Mayor’s Office and a Chief Data Officer (CDO) within the IT organization (under the Chief Technology Officer, CTO). The CIO advances city-wide innovations such as procurement reform and digital transformation per the mayor’s agenda relying on grant funding, fellowships, and partnerships. The CDO has developed a data management infrastructure and team within IT that brings together city information for transparency and business intelligence/analytics. * Austin created an Office of Innovation to drive culture and process change across city government. Housed outside of any particular department, the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) has leveraged grant support (eg Bloomberg Philanthropies) to address cross-cutting policy issues such as homelessness through workshops, consulting, and challenges, and created fellowship programs to recruit new tech talent into city hall, eventually leading to a modern and competent digital services team (“Design & Delivery”) within the IT department. * Los Angeles initially created various innovation (Director of Innovation), technology (Chief Innovative Technology Officer) and data (Chief Data Officer) roles within the Mayor’s Office; however, given the budgetary and hiring restraints within the Mayor’s Office, the CDO and CITO were effectively transitioned into the IT department (under the CTO). Remaining in the Mayor’s Office, the CIO drew upon grant funding to advance strategic city-wide initiatives, including equitable economic development and hiring, by building a cross-functional team in technology, policy, and operations. * St. Louis, upon election of its new mayor two years ago, elevated its IT Director to Chief Information Officer with a city-wide operational mandate of greater centralization and collaboration, providing increased visibility and awareness of the role IT plays. Additionally, the Mayor’s Office appointed a CTO with a specific policy (not administrative) agenda — economic development — serving as a liaison between the elected administration and the various relevant agencies, including IT. * In Albuquerque, Kansas City, and Sacramento, the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) took on specific Mayoral priorities such as urban mobility, housing, or economic development relying on partnerships, philanthropy, or new budget approvals to advance the administration’s agenda city-wide, through the lens of technology and innovation. _(Also of note is the state of California: California created a Chief Data Officer (CDO) position within the IT organization, reporting into the state Chief Technology Officer (CTO), who works closely with administrative departments, The past year, the new governor augmented these roles with a “Chief Economic and Business Advisor” — effectively a Chief Innovation Officer — housed within the Governor’s Office to push forward administrative priorities such as homelessness and digital transformation.)_ #### Additional Notes/Findings * Mayor’s Tech and Innovation Councils: many cities — including Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Kansas City — have created advisory councils to inform administrative decision-making on the structure, focus, and management of their technology operations. These councils bring private and public sector expertise, offering a sounding board for Mayoral staff, and — with their own networks — can be useful recruiting new talent to fill whatever new positions are created as well as evangelizing the city’s efforts in technology and innovation. (For example, in both Sacramento and Los Angeles, the Mayor’s Tech Council voiced their support for relevant organization and policy reforms to City Council, helping pass the Mayors’ proposed budgets.) * Chief Data Officers have transitioned out of Mayor’s Offices increasingly because of limited hiring and purchasing ability. As an operational function, the data team requires unique software and skill sets, both of which demand resourcing. The legal and budgetary constraints of the Mayor’s Office make this difficult. The more effective CDOs in recent years — San Francisco, San Diego, Kansas City, and indeed Chicago, to name a few — have been positioned within the IT organization, reporting to either the CIO or CTO, with a strong relationship to the Mayor’s Office, particularly for analytics and performance management insights. * To reduce budgetary impact, most innovation/design/digital teams begin with grant funding to illustrate value and find cost-savings that can eventually pay for budgeted, full-time city positions. This process of “incubation” through design labs/fellowships (eg Austin) or partnerships/philanthropy (eg Los Angeles, Boston) has led to persistent structural reforms that better position the city for ongoing benefits from modern technology. A summary of the outcomes for these modern approaches to technology from cities across the country — along with general descriptions of the various roles — is available here: https://bit.ly/21stCities --- # CovidReady.biz? > Idea for enabling better choices as we reopen businesses in a COVID world URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2020/06/23/CovidReady-biz/ Published: 2020-06-23 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, COVID --- I’ve been asking this question about once a week on Twitter to no avail: > Ringing this bell again as I haven’t gotten an answer: how are cities posting business’ [#COVID](https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) reopening guidelines compliance? And is it being presented in a useful way to residents? [#AreTheyWearingMasks](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AreTheyWearingMasks?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)[#opendata](https://twitter.com/hashtag/opendata?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#healthscores](https://twitter.com/hashtag/healthscores?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) > > — abhi nemani (@abhinemani) [June 23, 2020](https://twitter.com/abhinemani/status/1275221468566163456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) So I figured I must not be being clear enough… and will explain it here. Here’s the idea: cities and counties already rigorously inspect local businesses on a whole host of things, ranging from fire prevention to plumbing. Crucially, counties perform inspections on local restaurants through their departments of public health (DPH). Yes you’ve probably seen that acronym “DPH” a lot over the last 3+ months; they are the _tireless_ public servants on the ground coordinating COVID response: treatment and quarantine, testing sites, contact tracing, etc. These local public health agencies set the rules for what a restaurant _should_ do to be healthy and safe and then they periodically _run inspections_ and _generate scores_ publicly available to you and me, the consumer. (Those are the letter grades you see in the window of your favorite takeout place — see above.) In a COVID world, we must adapt. **The traditional indicators of health, cleanliness, and safety need to be augmented with the COVID safety rules**: for example wearing masks, keeping tables 6 feet apart, etc. Indeed these COVID specific inspections and scores need to extend _beyond_ restaurants to other commercial areas such as stores, malls, and even offices ought to be in compliance with the public health rules. And arguably more importantly: _if they are not in compliance we — as consumers and residents — ought to know that._ In our pandemic plagued cities, public health inspections are essential, and health inspection scores must include COVID safety compliance. > In our pandemic plagued cities, public health inspections are essential, and health inspection scores must include COVID safety compliance. I am acutely passionate and optimistic around this topic because of the innovative work public health agencies, in partnership with local businesses and major internet sites, have already done with regular health inspections. ![Yelp page showing a cafe's health inspection score](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_QWDQm_9J8H6C53rVG5X_1Q@2x.jpg) Years ago, [the three came together to develop a “data standard”](https://www.yelp-support.com/article/What-are-Health-Score-Alerts?l=en_US) on how to openly publish inspection scores for restaurants so residents didn’t have to go searching within the restaurant (after they sat down!) for its grade. [The score is visible on Yelp and in other apps, so you can make an informed choice on where you go.](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/youll-never-throw-up-in-this-town-again/309383/) **This is open data at work**, following the mantra, “[Make all apps more civic](https://link.medium.com/83D3bVeBx7),” taking data previously hidden and placing it into the palm of your (disinfected) hand. **This is open data at work, following the mantra, “Make all apps more civic,” taking data previously hidden and placing it into the palm of your (disinfected) hand.** This kind of innovation is more urgent in the midst of this crisis. You do not want to go to a restaurant and only after eating spot the kitchen staff walking around without masks. You should know that before you walk through the door; in fact, you should know that before you make plans. Because with that, and the attendant shift in consumer demand, we can subtlety encourage greater compliance with COVID regulations, and so support healthier communities. Here’s what we need: - Translation of state or county COVID guidelines into an actionable checklist of sorts - Development of a methodology to assess checklist and generate scores or grades - Proactive inspections of places or businesses to assess their COVID compliance — this by the way should also include assessing the business’ enforcement of COVID rules on patrons (eg wearing masks) - Proactive publication of those scores by public health agencies in standardized formats. (Let’s keep this simple; see below.) - Integration of these scores into popular consumer platforms such as Yelp, Google Places, Apple Maps, Foursquare, Facebook etc This pandemic if nothing else has taught us that the decisions each of us make deeply affects those around us. We need to be able to talk about what’s going on openly and candidly, and that requires data and the communication of that data. It’s time we as residents, business owners, and local leaders, step up and hold each other accountable for our actions. **N.B. To illustrate how the COVID compliance grade would augment existing health inspection scores, consider the ideal schema of the rolled up dataset on restaurants: _“Business ID”, “Business Name”, “Open/Closed”, “Healthscore”, “Covid Compliance Score”.** --- # Five trends to watch in #civictech in 2020 > There’s never been a more important time to be good at what we do URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/06/02/Five-trends-to-watch-in-civictech-in-2020/ Published: 2020-06-02 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Insights --- !["2020: a look back and ahead" title slide](https://abhinemani.com/img/1____TI__8yaflBfo2bwXpmz2og__2x.jpeg) I recently was asked to give a talk to [Code for Milwaukee](https://codeformilwaukee.org/) on their first anniversary. This happened to also by [my 10th anniversary](https://stlresponse.org/) in civic and government tech. In honor of both, I put together my 5 top learnings from the last decade in the areas of technology, open data, community engagement, and service delivery. A brief summary is below, and [the full deck is available on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abhinemani_5-trends-for-civictech-govtech-in-the-activity-6673753214921293824-S8j8). #### Low Code ![Slide: what are other low-code ideas? Airtable, Office 365](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__6c7ZEKoi__RD232ZN3__VF4A__2x.jpeg) Focus on building tools that enable non-technologists (aka “poor man’s hackers) to get the job done. This means building not just an app — to say — map a set of open data, but a simple framework where anyone with enough enthusiasm could use your code to spin up their own. Tools like [Jessica Lord’s SheetSee.js](http://jlord.us/sheetsee.js/) and [Derek Eder’s Map Template](https://derekeder.com/searchable_map_template/) have — in my anecdotal review — proven to have far greater utility, far wider adoption, and much deeper impact than most open source civic apps. > Be better makers for the next generation of hackers. ![Sheetsee.js diagram: a spreadsheet feeding website tables and maps](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__igbzq77GSQPufSSPRy0BNQ__2x.jpeg) ![Derek Eder's searchable map template](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__Zc51tqa7Wc7uKfF36d9euw__2x.jpeg) #### Open Data Beyond City Hall ![Slide: "If you build it they will come," crossed out](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__wCDfySfo5NBJ7kn8vdfFzg__2x.jpeg) Find and highlight data coming from NGOs, businesses, and universities, leveraging the government’s role as a platform to rethink open data portals for a wider open data ecosystem. The local government’s Open Data Portal has an oftener underutilized non-technical function: it can confer trust and reliability of community-sourced data. And looking forward, there’s a new breed on open data technologies that serve less as “spreadsheets on the internet” and more as a platform, or middleware, bringing together all the data players in a “smart city.” ([Stae.co](https://stae.co/) is a good example of this new vision.) ![NBC LA article: lawyer warns of immigration scams after the DACA announcement](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__WY__K2XHGq3HuLIazYrs70Q__2x.jpeg) ![Map of immigration workshops in Los Angeles on Socrata](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__vaPgqIRJRqcvJ4MuDwhnyA__2x.jpeg) ![Immigration workshops dataset on the LA open data portal](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__McZCXnqnYAhYlT1D2qk__xw__2x.jpeg) > Q: Where does the data people need live? NGOs? Universities? Business?… Everywhere. #### Open Data Beyond City Limits ![Slide: (Better) open data, part 2: think regionally](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__zXc5RWHAbVvXPUYFEh__r7A__2x.jpeg) Look towards enhanced regionalism for open data — as interagency coordination becomes even more regent in a COVID World — remembering that residents think of their lives and problems, not the city open data portal vs the county vs the state… Not only do these regional data programs — such as those in [Western Pennsylvania](http://www.wprdc.org/) and [St. Louis](https://stldata.org/) — save the jurisdictions money, time, and staff time, they enable more broadly useful application development. (See the [STL COVID portal](https://stlresponse.org/) built by the STL Alliance.) ![Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__Aq__rYlWZOL7Gi__lm__U2dqg__2x.jpeg) ![St. Louis Regional Data Alliance "Our Story" page](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__n1jAQCqsEdGeBDwMgP9Bkg__2x.jpeg) Pulling these two threads together — community data and regional programs — we can see a new model for open data that puts the **citizen experience** first, first for developers and designers, first for government officials and local business, and first for the communities they all serve. #### Hacks & Hackers (Redux) ![Slide: Hacks and Hackers, rethink the fourth estate](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__QhQIyQ5THxQDokvC87dERA__2x.jpeg) Collaborate with local journalists — or follow their lead — as the data rich projects both civic hacking groups and local news outlets as both share goals and limited capacity; make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. These collaborations can take the form of news outlets building their own civic apps (eg the [COVID resource finder by Chicago’s City Bureau](https://covid.citybureau.org/)), civic data scientists creating visualizations for data driven reporting, or civic-minded blogs and other publications shining a spotlight on the civic tech community. > Hacks and hackers are fundamentally in the storytelling business. ![Chicago COVID resource finder](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__0KtCkOwKGZobWHncYtq9KQ__2x.jpeg) ![New York Times Learning Network: exploring the math of the coronavirus](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__1s8qiP__vKSbAg__qIGudSJA__2x.jpeg) ![Civic storytelling logos: Technical.ly, Civic Hall, StartupSac and Civicist](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__UBljWTClAYNO__rvksdWSow__2x.jpeg) #### Digital Services as Default ![Bell curve: most governments sit between COBOL shops and digital service teams](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__Ni85MmU0tND99rCMEWlklw__2x.jpeg) Few cities can afford a digital services team and very few actually have the hyperbolic antiquated systems outsiders decry: most fall somewhere in the middle. Recognize that in-person service delivery is harder now more than ever, and use that as an opportunity to prioritize digital service delivery. Governments can leverage the host of off-the-shelf tools (such as [CityGro.ws](https://citygro.ws)) and the internet’s wonderful ability to [loosely join, small pieces](https://medium.comsmall-city-pieces-loosely-joined-5202fb5a93e3) for a big impact. ![Slide listing digital services: 311, pet registration, parking permits and more](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__BB__KBtgJ__8mTvq__9k3__QAQ__2x.jpeg) And in doing so, it’s vital to remember that governments do not have the luxury of catering to just one demographic or user type: it has to work for all of us. #### It’s up to us. ![James Madison quote rendered in binary code, from Code for America](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__zBMRkZ03ZAumGEuoYqnw0Q__2x.jpeg) There are a myriad of projects, insights, and learnings already from how civic technologists are playing a vital role already this decade; the Coronavirus demanded it. I will defer to those on-the-ground for their more informed points of view. Instead I’ll close with a line from The West Wing I can’t get out of my head these days: > There’s never been a more important time to be good at what \[we\] do. --- # Enabling Data-Driven Decisions in LA > How building a showpiece unveiled the real challenges of PerformanceStat URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2019-12-21-LA-Dashboard/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: government, data, COMPStat --- In 2015, I built the LA Mayoral Dashboard, which is used regularly by the Mayor and Senior Staff to increase performance and accountability; the dashboard has saved the city over $180K, and has been freely reused by other cities. Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FYnWs0jE0YI >[Learn more about the learnings in the story, **"What I've learned: Three Different Kinds of Civic Data.**"](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2021/02/10/Dashboards/) --- # Building a GovTech Industry Family — The First Midwest GT Meetup URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2018/12/10/Building-a-GovTech-Industry-Family-The-First-Midwest-GT-Meetup/ Published: 2018-12-10 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Events --- Back in 2012, while at Code for America and we were thinking about how to build out the government technology industry, we had this crazy idea: let’s get all the best GovTech startups together, and try to help them out. Let’s try to help them scale, and in doing so, let’s show the investors, and the press, and everyone else who questioned that there could be a disruptive force happening in this legacy, old industry, a new source of momentum. So we started a first-of-its-kind government startup program, the CfA Accelerator. On the first class’s first day, we asked each of the CEOs why they were there. One said, > “I thought I was living alone. I thought I was doing this without anyone else, without any support, without anything else to talk to, or anyone else who would understand why I’m doing, or how I should do this. And today, now… sitting next to all of you, I feel like I’m part of a family.” I believe industries are born not out of market dynamics, or industrial changes, even though I was an economics major, but maybe a bad one. I think they are born out of people, people wanting to change things, and make things different, but those people need to be able to have support connections, and as our friend said, a family. That was the genesis of this [**Midwest GovTech Meetup.**](https://meetup.com/Midwest-GovTech-Meetup/) A chance for entrepreneurs, who are working in the government or civic technology space, to come together and talk. ![Midwest GovTech Meetup logo](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__zsAs0TQcu9HE__gUWgNY90A.png) What’s working? What’s not? What can we do? What should we do next? These are questions that most people, and I know this myself, personally, we ask ourselves every day, but it’s much better if we can ask them amongst friends. That’s what the GovTech meetup was all about. A few months ago, my new friends at [**Marketplace.city**](http://Marketplace.city), Chris Foreman and Andrew Watkins, and I (through my company, [EthosLabs.us](http://EthosLabs.us)), decided, “Let’s give this a go.” A monthly, or bimonthly meetup, where people would come together and just talk. People would share what they’re working on and then talk to each other.([Marketplace.city](http://Marketplace.city) was not only a fun but a natural partner, as their important work is to catalog government innovations and connect governments with them.) ![Speaker addressing the audience at the first Midwest GovTech Meetup](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__046kgtrNBUWuGtWfqCIKQw.jpeg) The first one happened a couple of months ago, back in October. Over 140 people registered, in Chicago, Illinois, and dozens showed up. The format was decidedly not that of a traditional lecture or conference; and also was not designed like a hackathon around building apps — it was instead about building a community. And specifically a community of _startups_, distinguishing it from big trade conferences or local government gatherings. Thus, we opted to invite 1–2 select speakers for brief presentations on the state of the field, and the 2–3 companies to demo their applications, with a decided focus on lessons learned. Here’s a snapshot of the inaugural event. (And thanks go to **Darshan Sumant**, a graduate student in the University of Chicago’s Computational Analysis and Public Policy — [CAPP](https://capp.uchicago.edu/) — program for compiling these notes!) #### Summary of October’s Presentations / Demos * **Danielle DuMerer**, the CIO & Commissioner at City of Chicago, joined us along with one of her team’s data scientists, **Nick Lucius.** They presented the city’s perspective on encouraging a vibrant GovTech ecosystem in the region, and shared various initiatives designed to support it, ranging from policy to culture. * **Leah Siskind**, Director of Smart City Initiatives at [**Uptake**](http://uptake.org)**—** which graciously hosted us— presented the data science leader’s efforts to leverage its technology and reach to support smart cities, chiefly the [Data Fellows program](https://www.uptake.org/data-fellows.html): a 6-month fellowship to connect data professionals from non-profits, foundations, social enterprises and build a strong community around civic projects. * [**Vamonde**](https://www.vamonde.com/) enables Cities to actively engage with travelers and visitors, and tell stories from an explorer’s perspective. **Nick Petit**, their Chief Revenue Officer, offered insights on their experience with the procurement process — specifically for long-term engagements — and how startups can navigate the process to secure multi-year recurring revenue. * [**HAAS Alert**](https://www.haasalert.com/) is building a “Safety Cloud” to drive safer, faster, smoother Emergency & Rapid Response. **Jeremy Agulnek**, their Vice President, gave a live demo, tracking a fire truck as it responded to an emergency call, and he went on to explain their product development process and history as well as lessons learned from working with cities on implementation in the emergency services space. We’re just getting started, but the momentum is there. If not seen by the turnout or the presentations, but by the living conversations that went on long past. For those who were there, they said it felt like an increasingly connected community. And that’s precisely the goal. Join us at the [**next Meetup on December 12th**](https://www.meetup.com/Midwest-GovTech-Meetup/events/256345650/) for more demos and presentations, and another chance to join the [Midwest GovTech family](https://meetup.com/Midwest-GovTech-Meetup/). --- # Push vs. Pull & the Opportunity for Automation in GovTech > Over the last ten years, I have seen firsthand the leaps and strides governments have taken to catch up to the private sector’s pace of… URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2018/08/14/Push-vs-Pull-the-Opportunity-for-Automation-in-GovTech/ Published: 2018-08-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Startups, Law Enforcement --- Over the last ten years, I have [seen firsthand](https://medium.comopen-data-civic-engagement-and-delivery-28b990f321ce?source=user_profile---------42----------------) the leaps and strides governments have taken to catch up to the private sector’s pace of innovation. It started with digital engagement: websites and social media. Then we moved forward to providing greater digital access through open data and digital services. (I would be remiss not to applaud the tremendous work that has been done on the latter in the past few years, in particular.) Even with these advancements, however, these technologies often put the burden on the _user_. **They pull.** You have to sign up to follow an agency, dig through the government’s website for the relevant data or form; or even download and install a custom city app. This makes it hard to imagine these tools finding serious traction — particularly at the local level. (Indeed I’ve seen this myself with [open data portals](https://medium.com/civic-technology/rethinking-data-portals-30b66f00585d).) [Tom Steinberg](http://twitter.com/steiny), an early and longtime leader in government transformation, once said, “People don’t wake up wanting to be civic.” No, they wake up wanting to see if they have any new texts or emails; needing to get to work and check the weather; and hoping that little further complicates, their already complicated lives. This is why I suspect a [study](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app-businesses-are-not-sustainable/) from a few years back continues to linger. It described the mobile app market is a “winner takes all economy.” An updated [study](http://info.localytics.com/blog/mobile-apps-whats-a-good-retention-rate) gives more context; specifically, the vast majority of apps — over 80% — are no longer opened after the first 90 days. Then they are left to sit buried away in some folder or fourth or fifth home screen, likely never to be used again. Fortunately, you’re seeing things start to change. Instead of new apps, you are seeing chatbots; and more than new phones, you hear about personal assistants. Every major technology company is making massive [investments](https://www.investors.com/research/industry-snapshot/artificial-intelligence-investing-it-doesnt-take-a-rocket-scientist/) in artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable this kind of personal communication delivered directly to those select few platforms you actually listen to. Be it online via text message or social media, or in your home through your Echo or Google Home… **They push.** Fortunately, enough, this has been one evolution government technology has not been as slow to pick up. Cities ranging from [small](https://sunlightfoundation.com/2017/07/13/word-gets-around-chattanooga-adopts-facebook-chatbot-for-open-data/) to [big](https://medium.comalexa-lets-talk-about-open-data-standards-138e86262d28?source=user_profile---------4----------------) are developing their own personalized communication systems to answer basic questions or access open data. But this is I’m sure just the start. Indeed, that’s part of what we’re working on at [SPIDR Tech](http://spidrtech.com). At SPIDR, this notion of push communications is central to what we do. “No more apps” is a working mantra. That’s because we work with law enforcement agencies that need to provide crucial information to victims of crimes or 911 callers, who do not have time to download another app. And nor do the agencies have the bandwidth for more calls. Instead automated, personalized, and relevant communication makes lives easier for officials and residents. ![Phone showing a plain-language police report follow-up email from SPIDR Tech](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__6m7xZ1GMjf0G3aRJdYNOvg.jpeg) These aren’t like the more traditional push messages you may be used to from law enforcement (emergency notifications), instead there are _personalized for the resident for the specific problem they have_. And just as importantly from a governmental perspective, there’s no need for new systems or process change. In fact, using the _existing_ processes / systems, SPIDR is able to provide a **1/1 communication** that’d be impossible at scale for an agency. Indeed, if it is true that, “people don’t wake up wanting to be civic,” and that “the app economy is winner-takes-all,” then our best hope for engaging citizens with the critical information they need is to go to where they are, when they need us. We do this physically already — it’s the foundation of public service delivery — and now, I believe, we must make it the basis of _digital_ public service delivery. _Abhi Nemani is an advisor at_ [_SPIDR Tech_](http://spidrtech.com)_, a law enforcement software company delivering police departments the technology they need to give their citizens the service they deserve. Founded by former law enforcement officers, SPIDR Tech was established to help law enforcement agencies leverage their own data so they can improve their public perception, increase their efficiency and save money. Learn more here:_ [_spidrtech.com_](http://spidrtech.com) _or_ [_request a demo_](http://spidrtech.com/demo)_._ --- # 21st Century Cities: A Primer > A “101” Overview of Technology and Innovation at the Local Level URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2018/06/27/21st-century-cities-a-primer-8d88b0c481e0/ Published: 2018-06-27 Author: Abhi Nemani --- !["What's Working Where" title card](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__9xdptnb4YnxLme2CxeqOqA__2x.jpeg) What does a 21st century city look like? That’s a question I’m asked fairly often. Indeed, I’m often tasked with giving an introduction on local government innovation — to new mayors, potential investors, etc — and after a couple dozen hacked together presentations, I decided to put some effort into it, and put together this document. [**21st Century Cities, Technology & Innovation - An Overview** _technological optimist and political philosophy nerd. writer, speaker, maker. Published on A "101" primer from…_www2.slideshare.net](https://www2.slideshare.net/anemani10/21st-century-cities-technology-innovation-an-overview-103000495 "https://www2.slideshare.net/anemani10/21st-century-cities-technology-innovation-an-overview-103000495")[](https://www2.slideshare.net/anemani10/21st-century-cities-technology-innovation-an-overview-103000495) Since the definition of a “21st Century City” seems elusive, or controversial, I did what I do: tell some stories. It’s a kind of “greatest hits” with simple examples and takeaways from three key areas of impact from the last few years: digital services, data science/analytics, and civic entrepreneurship. It closes with a high-level set of recommendations including policy and staffing. This way it works as a presentation or a leave behind. I’ve found it helpful in various setting — conferences, pitches, and just casual conversations — so in the interest of transparency, I figured I’d share it publicly. Share, comment, and critique freely. [_EthosLabs_](http://ethoslabs.us) _is a government innovation consultancy designed to help cities and startups work together to embrace this opportunity. If your city or company is interested in working together, get in touch: hello@ethoslabs.us_ --- # 311 Inquiry, Machine Learning, and Automated Citizen Support URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2018/06/15/Project-idea-311-Inquiry-Machine-Learning-and-Automated-Citizen-Support-754033246a/ Published: 2018-06-15 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Instead of building new platforms for expression, could we listen more closely to those upon which citizens are already standing? I believe that 311 call centers hold immense promise to develop a richer understanding of citizens’ needs, concerns, and ideas. Historically, innovators have focused on the issue-reporting functionality of 311, building apps to streamline reporting of potholes, graffiti, etc. Data suggests, however, that these make up just a small fraction of 311. Instead, most is taken up by questions about city operations, ranging from office hours to council meetings. Even this, however is \***conjecture**\*: we have lacked the ability to rigorously catalog and parse the tonnage of calls coming in. With modern cloud computing, AI, and natural language processing, now that has changed. **Put simply: could we transcribe al the 311 inquiry calls, apply machine learning to generate standardized responses, and then could we use that to power smarter 311 systems, better digital interfaces, and more? And moreover, could the learnings from existing 311 systems — typically reserved for large cities — open up the opportunity for cheaper, automated citizen support systems for smaller cities?** The opportunities with this are endless: improved service design through data-driven optimization, reduced call center burden through automated responses, and real-time alerts for policy/decision-makers on citizen sentiment. Practical outcomes could include a chatbot (or Alexa skill) for 311, a best practices guide for designing citizen centric digital content, or a prioritized list of publishable data to reduce FOIA requests. As the project unfolds, more ideas will surely emerge. What do you think? --- # Putting Sacramento On the Map > Case study on building an economic development strategy to level-up a city's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2017-12-21-Sacramento/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: government, economic development, innovation --- In 2016, nearing the end of his term as Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson sought to elevate the city's position within California as a top choice for entrepreneurs and innovators. More broadly, the City of Sacramento sought to become a hub of innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship to create new private-sector jobs that will bring new wealth to the community and drive growth in other industries — and position the city as a national leader in municipal innovation. ![Pipeline for Startups](https://abhinemani.com/img/sac-chart.png) Based on Abhi Nemani's experience leading local innovation, Mayor Johnson tapped EthosLabs to develop a program to put Sacramento on the map. Over a year, Ethos built a framework for building Sacramento's attractiveness, created the nation's leading Innovation Fund, and launched and funded innovative programs -- all while garnering national press and additional capital to galvanize ongoing momentum. ## Hightlights: Impact * Created largest innovation fund for mid-sized city in the country ($10M) * Set up Innovation & Entrepreneurship Office with sustainable revenues and partnerships * Built, launched, and completed entrepreneurship grant program (RAILS) in under 4 months * Developed broad-based community and stakeholder engagement program through events, tech council, etc ## Highlight: Press * **BizJournal**: [Mayor’s framework for Innovation & Entrepreneurship has come together](http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2016/06/10/how-city-council-would-spend-8-2-million-fund.html) * **KCRA** [VIDEO]: [Mayor: Tech Startups next generation for Sacramento](http://www.kcra.com/news/mayor-tech-startups-next-generation-for-sacramento/40175930) * **TechWire**: [Sacramento’s Innovation Fund will invest in local startup community](http://www.techwire.net/innovation/sacramentos-innovation-growth-fund-will-invest-in-local-companies-mayor-says.html) * **SacBee**: [Sacramento approves $10M for local tech companies](https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article85198202.html) * **SacBee**: [More than 140 Apply for RAIL](https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article85198202.html) * **COMSTOCK**: [Can Sacramento Become a Capital of Entrepreneurship?](http://www.comstocksmag.com/web-only/can-sacramento-become-capital-entrepreneurship) # Developing Capacity for Innovation ## Nation-Leading $10M Innovation Fund ![Leveraged Approach](https://abhinemani.com/img/sac-leverage.png) As part of the Mayor's Economic Development 3.0 strategy, the Mayor's Office recommended to the City Council a repurposing of the existing Innovation and Growth Fund towards diversifying and growing the economy through new technologies and new industries. Three areas of focus were identified: 1. Supporting a Pipeline of talent and startups in Sacramento (RAILS program) 2. Attracting Capital through Limited Partnership (LP) with 500 Startups 3. Connecting and highlighting the region's successful innovations (MOFIE) These three IGF strategic programs were designed to be sustainable over time, falling under the expected $2M annual revenue from the special fund supporting the IGF. Additionally, with a reserve balance of $5-8M, the city retains its ability to make larger-scale strategic investments as opportunities arise, such as the 500 Startups investment described below. [This $10M plan — which makes it the most prominent innovation fund of its kind — was presented to the Council in May 2016, and it was approved unanimously (9-0).](http://sacramento.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=21&event_id=2826&meta_id=471926) Following this vote, the Economic Development Department, the Information Technology Department, and the Mayor's Office collaborated to identify concrete recommendations for appropriations for Council to fulfill the IGF's goals and objectives by creating an Office of Entrepreneurship & Innovation. ## First City Entrepreneurship & Innovation Office ![Research](https://abhinemani.com/img/sac-research.png) For sustainablity, there is the need for a permanent institution within City Hall that can cut across departments and drive structural change and serve as a bully pulpit to celebrate Sacramento's innovative culture to attract and/or retain new entrepreneurs and businesses. Practically, this meant the creation of a Mayor's Office for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, led by a Chief Innovation Officer and supporting staff. Key organizational activities included: * Created organization design & structure for new Mayor's office unit * Crafted job description for permanent Chief Innovation Officer, key staff * Hired a full-time Chief Innovation Officer & Product Manager * Developed working group amongst relevant departments for efficiency & collaboration # Creating a Pipeline for Startups ![Pipeline for Startups](https://abhinemani.com/img/pipeline.png) After a thorough review of other cities' innovation programs, Sacramento decided to focus not simply on an individual company or organization but instead the pipeline for entrepreneurship: from training new leaders to incubating new projects, and finally scaling up successful ideas. ## RAILS: Rapid Acceleration, Innovation & Leadership in Sacramento ![](https://abhinemani.com/img/sac-rails-logo.png)The [RAILS](http://cityofsacramento.org/RAILS) program (Rapid Acceleration, Innovation, and Leadership in Sacramento) was designed to have the city act as a platform to support each piece of that pipeline; for example a STEAM education program for area youth, or a hackathon focused on civic issues. Leveraging funds from the Innovation and Growth Fund, the city allocated up to $1M in grants for these "startup enablers" to openly compete for funding. After receiving 100+ applications in a short span of just 4 weeks, and going through an extensive review process with internal and external leaders, City management selected 15 grantees for Council to consider for funding. ( [>See the full list here](http://www.cityofsacramento.org/RAILS/2016/index.html#/) .) These 15 organizations represent the following values, which reflect the City's value and unique strengths): * Diverse, Inclusive, and Creative * Broad-based innovation in fabrication, energy, avionics & more * Civic & Socially Oriented Since then, multiple cities have developed similiar programs, using Sacramento as a model (e.g. Philadelphia, Kansas City, etc).. # Attracting Capital ## Partnership with 500 Startups Training and facilitating entrepreneurs locally may not encourage them to stay. Upon review with Sacramento technology leaders, the issue of the lack of startup capital -- angel, VC, etc -- was a major concern with emerging founders looking for a more permanent home. Indeed, this finding aligned with the "brain drain" issue experienced in Los Angeles. The city's financial commitment was significant ($10M) but relatively insignificant when considering the funding needs of growing companies. Accordingly, the Innovation Office opted to leverage its funding with a high-profile, proven, and successful VC/accelerator, 500 Startups. In additional to regular LP terms, 500 Startups agreed to make a Sacramento office to support local entrepreneurs and attract others. Aside from the potential financial upside, this "marketability" of the partnership showed outsized value. # Connecting the Community ![Mayors Tech Council](https://abhinemani.com/img/sac-img1.jpeg) ## Mayor's Tech Council Modeled off of Kansas City's "Challenge Cabinet" and Los Angeles' "Tech Advisory Council," MOFIE established a "Mayor's Tech Council" to provide external expertise, guidance, and input on the city's strategy. This group brings to bear tremendous insight in the innovation arena and helps evangelism Sacramento's commitment to entrepreneurship; in so doing, they help attract and retain talent within the region. Further, the Tech Council serves as a "sounding board" for critical strategic decisions (e.g., organizations to fund) outside the traditional City Hall mindset. It's important to note that while similar models in other cities exist, critiques also follow; particularly, members of other councils often feel unengaged or not influential — more of a "rubber stamp" than an insightful lens. And with rosters exceeding 30+ participants, any one individual had a little direct impact. Learning from this, Sacramento's Tech Council was deliberately created to be decidedly small (currently 7 members) and tasked with specific, actionable requests (e.g., reviewing the RAILS applicants). To date, every member of the Tech Council has been actively engaged in some fashion, and continues to ask for more ways to help the city and the Mayor's office accomplish its innovation and entrepreneurship goals. ## Events & Outreach * **Innovate Your State: Civic & GovTech Showcase**: The City partnered with an internationally recognized Venture Capitalist, Tim Draper, to host a demo day of 15 companies in front of an audience of 200+ regional leaders. Sacramento is the only city outside Silicon Valley where Draper has held such an event. * **National Day of Civic Hacking**: As part of a national effort coordinated by the White House, Sacramento hosted a hackathon over the summer with over 100 attendees, where a handful of apps were built with a focus on economic development and access. * **TEDxSacramento**: The Mayor's Office was asked to present Sacramento's TEDx event, celebrating the city's innovation leadership, and the video was featured on TED.com for national and international attention. --- # What I have learned from my many teachers > I was recently asked to speak at my alma mater (Claremont McKenna College) about my career and how CMC helped shape and empower it... URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2017/05/20/What-I-have-learned-from-my-many-teachers/ Published: 2017-05-20 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Reflections --- Being just about 6 years out of college, I didn’t really feel well suited to provide any of my own insight — I’m still really just getting started. Instead, I opted to share some key thoughts or pieces of advice I have received over my (brief) career and how they’ve shaped my thinking (even more than my career). ### "Someone broke you" I somewhat foolishly decided to start with a math major in college. I was always the “math” kid in the family; my sister taught my basic functions (addition, multiplication, etc) years before they came up in school. And I suppose as the only son in an Indian family, math and science were “destined” to be my arena. College math, or proper math as I like to call it, is a bit different than memorizing multiplication tables. Abstract algebra, number theory, analysis… becoming a human calculator wasn’t terribly useful when my homework looked more like essays than excel sheets. But I stuck with it. And I stuck with it because of one very special professor I had the privilege of learning from. She started me off in multi-variable, and then helped me through Analysis I and II. But it wasn’t any theorem or proof she taught that motivated me onwards (meanwhile my GPA kept trickling lower). It was something she said. Once someone was complaining that their friends say, “they aren’t math people,” and she quickly retorted: > “That’s because someone, some teacher, when they were younger broke them. They said they couldn’t do math, and that stuck. But, here’s the thing: everyone can do math. And everyone should. It’s just thinking deliberately.” Someone broke them. That’s what stuck with me. The idea that in our formative years if you’re told you can’t do something, or if something can’t work, that sticks. You’re broken. Or it’s broken. And it can’t be fixed. But her optimism in saying that you _can_ and you _should_ resonated. I think that’s what’s motivated me to work in a sector where most people think it’s broken and can’t be fixed: the government. To me, it’s something that can, should, and must work. And we must merely forget whatever ghost in our past told us otherwise. We must learn that all of us can, should, and must make government work, and work for all of us. ### "What do you mean by that?" I entered college like most “entitled, arrogant millennial” I suppose. I thought I knew everything — or at least I could talk and act like I could. Then I took my first _serious_ Philosophy class. It was Aesthetics of Literature, which is basically an examination of the philosophy around what makes great books. My high school was a “great books” high school, so of course, entitled, arrogant me thought this wouldn’t be a problem; it’d be a cake walk. So 16-year-old, freshman me walked into the classroom, and found it ch0ck-full of seniors and who had spent years in philosophy classes, and a professor (who is now a good friend) then wasn’t one to suffer fools. But this isn’t a story about hubris, instead one of clarity. A few courses in I mustered up the courage to chime in. I can’t recall the book, or the discussion (you’ll learn why in a moment). I do recall saying something along the lines of, “The _construct_ the author is creating doesn’t add up. The _construct_ seems flawed, and the _construct_ seems plain wrong.” There was lots of hand motions — justiculations really — every time I said construct, almost like intimating that there was some physical thing everyone should see. The professsor asked, “So what do you mean by ‘construct’?” My world went blank. I’m pretty sure I started sweating, eyes jetting around the room, hoping dearly someone else would bail me out. Because I didn’t know what I meant by that. It was my conceit to say that I thought something was wrong but really didn’t know what it was or how to say it. I used a baseless generality to conceal the hollowness of my own thinking. So the question came again, “What do you mean by ‘construct’”? I had no answer, and after what seemed like a lifetime, I admitted that. I said, I didn’t really know what I meant by it, and I needed time to think it through more clearly and deliberately. That was the day I learned the profound importance of rhetoric. The words we use. And the thinking behind them. I had been able to skate by I think in the past with smooth sounding words and vibrant hand motions. But in truth, there were so many times I wasn’t really clear on what I was thinking; I just was talking. That distinction between talking and thinking has stuck with me ever since. **I now write the way I talk; I talk the way I think; I see no lines between them: it’s just me.** It’s why I usually pause before answering any question. It’s why I respond in structured ways — usually a list of 3 things ;) — and why I value so much clear, reasoned, and direct language. Because it’s probably the best reflection of how we think. Which I believe should be clear, reasoned, and direct. ### "Tell me a story" While I hammered on through my maths, I also advanced a different (or seemingly different) major: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. (And let me tell you, that when I told people I was a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and Math major, the response usually was impress, but confusion — for good reason.) The PPE major as it’s known isn’t three different programs, but one special one: an integrated curriculum, modeled off of its Oxford great godparents, to broadly touch on these three elements of public life, and show the crucial connections. It was joking described as the “cocktail napkin” major: you learn enough to speak about anything intelligently at a cocktail party with a pen an a nearby napkin (preferably with a hand drawn graph). But this would seem like a big undertaking, bigger still when you learned that the course worked with a fairly strict regime: read one book a week, and write a 5–10 page paper — and then be prepared to do a graded “defense” against one of your peers in front of your professor. So how to handle that, along with all your other classes and extracurriculars (academic and recreational)? **My philosophy professor’s answer was simple: Stories.** He explained it like this: you aren’t really trying to understand every argument, data point, or example from the books you’re reading. You’re trying to understand their story. This felt odd, given that we were reading nonfiction such as Rawls’ Theory of Justice or Sen’s Development as Freedom. These weren’t fairy tales; they were Noble Prize winning scholarly works. But he pushed further. He said that at the end of the day all these writers are basically trying to tell you a story, a narrative you could follow (and love), and your job was to — at best — find a competing narrative, a story that was more compelling. So this bore itself out with fascinating conversations with my professor, where when I had a “good” idea, he’d ask for the story behind it. What I heard in nearly every tutorial, in nearly every thesis defense, nearly every day, was this: > “Tell me a story…” And that’s how I learned Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and I think that’s also how I learned to think. That same style worked for me years later in foundation grant pitches, in sales meetings, in strategy sessions. My other “teacher” at work once said that “stories are maps of the world.” And that’s why they are so powerful in business and in life: they give people clarity, grounding, and a place from which to look ahead. #### Push v. Pull There are too many mentors, advisors, and “teachers” I’ve had since college for me to count. And too many lessons learned to share. What clicked as I rounded out this trip down memory lane was one meeting in particular with a Code for America Board Member, when I was then interim Co-Executive Director, having the privilege of working closely with a world-class board. It was happy days, mostly, as we had solid streams of funding coming in, increasingly clarity on our strategy and impact, and the wonderful problem of having to hire, not fire people. (A rare boon at a nonprofit.) My partner-in-crime, co-director and I met with board member who had experience scaling companies that dwarfed our little challenge. But he cared about the organization and offered up some advice. He told us a story about how when he was recruiting and with his senior staff — and in particular when doing so in front of others, say at a all-hands — he would make a point to call out his senior team, asking hard questions, and demanding answers and ideas. One might think this was a show of force: a boss looking to remind others that he/she is the boss. But he, of course, has a more subtle, thoughtful reason for doing this. Paraphrasing: > “I needed people to understand that leaders in the organization have to push, not pull.” Push, not pull. I later learned that this meant something fairly simple but powerful. It wasn’t the CEO’s job to answer every question for the team, to be “pulled” into solving their problems. Instead the CEO should be “pushed” — challenged and driven ahead by the team. Put simply, you must surround yourself with people who aren’t looking for answers but demanding progress, and making it happen. They don’t pull from you. They push you. This led to hiring decisions, of course, but to me, it led to a reflection on relationships in general, and in particular our relationship collectively with each other. That is to say, with government. (You just knew I’d get back here, right?) It’s easy I think to slip into a pull mentality with our public institutions. What is government doing for me today? Why hasn’t it filled that pothole? Why isn’t my kid’s school better? Or why do I have to wait on the phone for 2 hours to get my business permit? And I’m going to keep pulling until I get answers and get what I want. Indeed for many the relationship with government must be pull: those disenfranchised, those needing help and support. It’s government’s role in so many cases to help. And we should do that with pride. But, not always. In a democracy, it’s our role of citizens to push as well. And that might mean complaining. But like my friend said about leaders, it’s about helping solve those problems yourself as well; it’s about giving back; it’s about taking it upon yourself to make things better. It’s about running for office, taking a job in government, doing something, anything to be a citizen that takes the lead. So I suppose to pull together these rambling thoughts: **Governing is about realizing that even if something seems broken, you can, should, and must push hard as hell until you fix it.** --- # SPIDRTech: How GTM Research Shaped Product Strategy > Starting with a simple text reminders, SPIDR Tech's platform now enables realtime communication and feedback between the community and government URL: https://abhinemani.com/portfolio/2017-04-07-SPIDR/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Law Enforcement, Communications, Go-to-Market --- Founded by former law enforcement officers, [SPIDRTech](https://spidrtech.com) was established to help law enforcement agencies leverage their own data to improve their public perception, increase their efficiency, and save money. The founders of SPIDRTech believed that [new communications technologies could boost trust with communities](https://abhinemani.com/blog/2021/04/14/responsive-public-safety-data-science/), and they buil a (platform to push messages out to residents regarding law enforcement activity. Unlike mass communicatoins, SPIDR's messages are personalized for the resident for the specific problem they have. ![Communications and Trust](https://abhinemani.com/img/responsiveness.png) In 2017, [I joined SPIDRTech as an advisor](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2018/08/14/Push-vs-Pull-the-Opportunity-for-Automation-in-GovTech), helping the team in small ways when I could. My role grew significantly when I was brought on board to drive the go-to-market strategy for existing projects, effectively serving as a temporary Chief Product Officer. I leveraged my extensive network of city leaders, including CIOs, City Managers, and Mayors, to gain valuable insights into how to position SPIDRTech's product in the market. Through this market research, we identified a problem: positioning the SPIDRTech technology as a one-size-fits-all "platform" was not resonating with cities that already had different pieces of the law enforcement citizen engagement stack. Recognizing this challenge, we decided to rethink our product strategy. We unbundled the platform into three distinct products, better catering to the varying needs of different cities. This change involved minimal technical adjustments, but it demanded a significant shift in our marketing, messaging, and sales approach. **Go-to-market strategy development unveiled product strategy -- seen below -- which materialized, quickly, on the website, marketing materials, etc. The transformation of the company from one platform to multiple solutions was done within 3 months.** ![SPIDRTech Product Breakdown](https://abhinemani.com/img/spidr-product.png) This new strategy and product vision led to phenomenal growth for SPIDRTech. The company saw increased adoption of its products and ultimately experienced a [successful exit to Versaterm](https://www.govtech.com/biz/versaterm-buys-spidr-in-latest-emergency-response-tech-deal). I'm proud to have played a part in this transformation and to have contributed to the growth and success of a company dedicated to improving communication and trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. --- # Alexa — let’s talk about open data standards URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2017/02/10/Alexa-let-s-talk-about-open-data-standards-138e86262d28/ Published: 2017-02-10 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Most people probably do not realize they rely on publicly available government everyday. Be it checking the weather before you head out in the morning or deciding on which bus or train route to take: you are using data — or information if you’d prefer — generated by the government and made freely available for public use. You likely did not realize this information even came from the government; you did not pull up your local transit authority’s website nor is the [National Weather Service’s website](http://www.weather.gov/) bookmarked in your browser… No, you access this critical information through the consumer apps and platforms that don’t feel at all like government systems: the weather app on your smartphone, [DarkSky](https://darksky.net/app/), Google/Apple Maps, [Waze](https://www.waze.com/), etc. These are apps that go with the grain of your regular life, more as a consumer, less as a citizen (or #GovTech nerd). Indeed, these consumer apps, powered by civic data, typically showcase the greatest utility of open data, _because the data comes to you_. Those two examples came easy to me, because they are now so integrated, they are commonplace, expected. _That information is where we need it when we need it._ But this is hardly the rule when it comes to government data — calling it even the exception seems generous. Out of the hundreds of thousands of datasets released by tens of thousands of government agencies every year, only a handful make their way into a consumer experience in any meaningful way. Why? Because data is messy business. And government data even more so. Because while “the government” as a singular monolith is more a caricature than a reality. Data is siloed across agencies within just one jurisdiction let alone across a region, state, or country. (I once heard an apocryphal claim that for every policeman in Canada, the United States has a police department.) Syncing up data across the multitude of jurisdictions within the country is an uphill battle to say the least, but one worth fighting. Why? Because if we can’t, it becomes next to impossible for government data to make its way into consumer experiences. Scale and success are synonymous for consumer apps and city-by-city customization an antonym. (That’s more a B2B play.) So how square this round peg? Data standards. Or common data schemas and metadata. While this sounds wonky, it simply means getting all relevant agencies to publish their information — say bus routes or restaurant inspection scores — in spreadsheets with consistent headers. Or put even more simply: using an Excel template. Easy enough in theory, this is remarkably hard. Consider public transportation information — routes, stops, and schedules for buses, subways, and light rail — just that, that simple information would have to rely on at least nine data streams, all hopefully synced up, and all then standardized from region to region. This hardly happens. This is a windmill I’ve tilted at for some time. I can safely point to two examples for local governments where this has effectively happened: transit data and restaurant inspection scores. (The scarcity of examples is why those are a common refrain in this discussion.) The best summary of the transit data example — probably the most widely adopted and oldest — comes from one its chief architects, [Bibiana McHugh](http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-2/pioneering-open-data-standards-the-gtfs-story/) in [_Beyond Transparency_](http://beyondtransparency.org) (an open data anthology published by CfA). Read it, you should, if you’re interested in this area. The Cliff Notes version is straightforward. It’s called the “killer app” stratagem for data standards. Basically a big, popular third party (i.e. Google) builds a technology apt for consumption of public data (i.e. public transit schedules), and because if it’s potential scale and impact, that company is able to partner with an agency (or a few) to develop a schema and make it into the de facto standard by sheer force of _appeal_. More and more people were using Google Maps for directions, and so sooner enough, more and more agencies got onboard with the (then) Google Transit Feed Specification, GTFS — now [_General_ Transit Specification Feed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Specification). (Naturally as the standard spread, it dropped its platform specific name for, well, a more _general_ one.) Similar gambits have been attempted with traction — though limited when compared to GTFS — for [restaurant inspection scores with Yelp](https://www.yelpblog.com/2013/01/introducing-lives) and for [building inspection data with Trulia](https://sites.google.com/site/housefactsdatastandard/home/specification). These are limited less in their specific usage with the “killer app” but in their slow uptake by other developers for other apps, which would indicate a healthy ecosystem around the standard. (GTFS for instance is used by [NextBus](https://www.nextbus.com/), a widely popular, open source transit platform.) All in all, we see then a handful or so examples of data standards taking off, even though arguably there are dozens if not hundreds or thousands of examples where readily accessible government data would be useful for citizens in their everyday life: ranging from notifications of road closures, garbage pickups, or special events to alerts on crime, fires, and other emergencies. And everything in between. One might push back and argue that since equivalent data standards haven’t emerged for these datasets maybe they lack salience. But I would argue that a few key phenomenon in today’s technological environment have stayed this invisible hand: 1. Consumer apps increasingly play in a “winner takes all” marketplace, which limits the number of potential “killer apps” out there. 2. Given the length of time it took a standard like GTFS at take hold (5+ years) there is limited appetite for such a long game by established and emergent players alike. 3. Social media streams such as Twitter or Facebook have become a kind of consumer platform integration for data (although this makes any kind of structured usage of the “data” next to impossible). Long story short, there’s a lack of incentive on either side — government or company — to invest in data standardization. Until now, I hope. What affords me this optimism? It’s not a what, but a who: Alexa. Or maybe Siri. Or Cortana. Or Google Assistant. (Ok, that last one doesn’t really work rhetorically…) These devices do more than simply articulate answers to web searches; they talk to you. They understand (when they can) what you are looking for and instead of serving up a list of links, they deliver the music, answer, or information you’re looking for. When they can. I consider the advancement similar to that from WebTV to Apple TV. If you recall, the former merely projected your typical web experience — well atypical, it _was_ way worse than a traditional monitor — onto your television; Apple TV created a custom, controlled experience designed for the television: optimized for video (which is what you likely wanted), guarded by design standards, and done in partnership with the content providers to ensure a great experience. Similarly the voice assistants of today do indeed have limited functionality, but limited with a purpose: to optimize the experience of the user. You can only get certain answers from services that have stepped up to program them with human friendly, conversational language. That’s why I was excited to see a city government develop its own offering for Amazon’s Alexa — as hopefully the start of more to come. ![Amazon Echo superimposed over the Los Angeles skyline](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__eW__kU65y3bkfPNVoO9gTeQ.gif) Recently the [City of Los Angeles launched an Alexa skill](http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/16/why-los-angeles-made-an-alexa-skill-and-what-the-city-wants-to-do-with-it/) that can answer questions about “City Council, Council Committee, and featured events occurring within the City.” This may seem trivial. But I contend that this opens the door to significantly more interesting, new ways to engage with you local government. It’s not that this information isn’t available online; it is. It’s that now we are beginning to integrate that information into more casual, friendly and direct experiences. That little black cylinder sits in your living room or office. Increasingly then we will become more accustomed to engaging with typical consumer services through it — for instance getting the news or the weather — and slowly but surely more transactional services will emerge — already you can order a pizza or an Uber. You no longer need to know URLs or even really care where the information is coming from; it’s just there. Now returning to the public sector, the challenge of getting users to go to or download a government specific app is largely the rationale for pursuing third party data integrations. It’s just hard to compete with Facebook, Google, Yelp, etc when it comes to public interest. What these in-home devices, synced up with public data or even services, do is subtlety insert government resources into your daily routine in a way that doesn’t feel like government at all: * Reflect the kinds of “human” interaction we engage government staff with * Are inherently localized and designed to answer with relevant, local answers * Can become increasingly personalized, meaning that you don’t have to enter your name or address over and over again That’s a leap frog opportunity for governments that are still struggling to even build website or web services on par with the private sector. For this to work, however, at scale, standards must come into play. If every city has to build its own “skill” and encourage people to download their specific rev, then adoption will be just as slow as user numbers on government apps (for reference 311 apps, which are rather common, have alarmingly low usage statistics because again we live in a “winner takes all” environment). Instead, the smart play is the standards play. If we can work on identifying the core pieces of information citizens want, and the essential services they need, and develop lightweight systems for sharing that standard information — GTFS for instance just requires a government to upload a zip file of excel sheets — then we can inch toward a world where governments can better do their jobs in a digital age: by being where you need them, when you need them, in a friendly, human way. _N.B.: Congratulations to the City of Los Angeles’ terrific Information Technology agency, specifically Ted Ross and Joyce Edison, for making the Alexa skill a reality — and in so doing inspiring my thinking on this topic._ --- # GovTech Sales Lessons Learned, 1/n — Pricing URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2017/01/30/GovTech-Sales-Lessons-Learned-1-n-Pricing/ Published: 2017-01-30 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Over the past decade, I have worked with local governments in various capacities, ranging from a researcher at a think tank, to a business development lead at a tech nonprofit, to working within government itself and interacting with folks in those other roles. I’ve been on both sides of the table when it comes to public sector partnerships. Now as I build out [EthosLabs](http://ethoslabs.us/) as a resource for the growing GovTech industry, a resource to reduce friction, accelerate innovation, and quite simply make everyone’s life a little easier, I’ve taken to jotting down lessons learned from my experiences. In particular, I am trying to sketch out the pain points and workarounds for purchasing and partnerships for governments — as sticky issues such as procurement almost always come up as the barrier for innovation. A friend of mine was said that was vastly overstated and if you simply knew what you were doing procurement and its cousins — budgeting, bidding, and contracting — were very much solvable problems. Of course we will be putting that to the test. But first we have to know what works and what doesn’t. Let’s start there, what doesn’t work. I’m penning this series of posts with strategies and tactics I’ve noticed that handicap or even kneecap a GovTech salesperson when pitching to government decision-makers. (It’s “1/n” as I don’t know how many we will end up with, which as also means that I’m eager for your thoughts/experiences as well. * **Different prices for different cities**: Cities talk to each other. Well, city staffers that is. Particularly in highly specialized roles, such as technology leadership (CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, etc), cross-jurisdictional collaboration is essential since many of these posts are new. There’s no playbook — and if there is one, it’s being written by the very people currently in those roles. As someone who has been there, I can attest, you are building the plane while you’re flying it. So again, either for a sounding board or even for a support group, city tech leadership talk. And particularly when it comes to vendor relations, RFPs, contracts, and critically, pricing. And finding out who someone knows is as easy as running a Linkedin search. Do your homework, and be sure you aren’t quoting a price wildly divergent than those you (or your colleagues) gave to your potential client’s peer. They will find out, and feel like they are being played. --- # Transparency: You cannot unring the bell. > A strange thing happened today. For a while, I have drawn a fairly bright line between my social networks: facebook was for college… URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2017/01/26/transparency-you-cannot-unring-the-bell-29ea26131bb2/ Published: 2017-01-26 Author: Abhi Nemani --- A strange thing happened today. For a while, I have drawn a fairly bright line between my social networks: facebook was for college friends; twitter business friends. On twitter, I’d end up seeing all the news I needed — and then some — about open government, civic technology, and the like, but on facebook very little of the same. That changed today. ![We the People petition site banner](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__KdxL4UxSsio7NdpQwEtq0w.png) Today I saw on facebook multiple posts regarding the [“We The People” petitions platform](http://petitions.whitehouse.gov) that the Obama White House deployed to encourage citizen engagement in the policy making process. The idea was simple enough: anyone could post a petition and if it gained enough support (i.e. 100K+ endorsements) the administration would be required to issue a formal response. Effectively it democratized the press pool, enabling anyone with a popular enough question to get an answer. For open government, open data, and govtech nerds like myself this was a bold and important move for meaningful transparency and citizen engagement. Instead of outside groups clawing for information from their public institutions, the administration was willingly opening itself up. The platform did gain some traction, particularly initially, requiring the White House to issue formal statements on issues ranging from the [legalization of marijuana](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/marijuana-legalization_n_2440352.html) to the alleged creation of a [government-run “Death Star”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/01/12/white-house-rejects-death-star-petittion/). Nerd paradise. So thus, I was surprised to see the We The People site get a healthy dose of visibility this week on my facebook newsfeed. In response to President Trump’s call to defund the cultural programs, specifically (the widely beloved) NPR, many took to action, [creating a petition for the new administration to change its stance](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/preserve-national-endowment-arts-and-national-endowment-humanities) — or at least explain it. Unfortunately, for some reason up-votes for that petition failed to register. The [_Independent_](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/president-donald-trump-arts-funding-nea-neh-cpb-prs-npr-petition-white-house-a7541631.html) even picked up the story. (It was initially stuck at 27, now at 54, and at least a dozen or so of my friends have already commented stating that it’s been stuck there even with their votes.) A similar phenomenon happened earlier this week with a petition for [President Trump to release his tax records](https://www.wired.com/2017/01/petition-didnt-make-trump-give-tax-returns-made-listen/); that was seemingly automatically resolved after some time (which likely points to a caching or CDN issue). Since the code is [ostensibly open source](https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petitions), and there hasn’t been any code changes, it stands to reason that this was not a deliberate attempt by the Trump White House to silence participation, even though they have said they won’t follow President Obama’s commitment to respond to all petitions at 100K signatures. Unfortunate timing all the same for a software glitch… But instead of belaboring the technical or even policy issues at play with this system going defunct, I find it more interesting to think about the fact that this platform and its functionality made its way onto my facebook feed, a place where I would strain to find posts (other than my own) related to transparency, open government, or citizen engagement. While the opengov community has grown in recent years, it’s a stretch to say it’s anything like a national past time. So why so much interest? And why is there more engagement now around the platform than before when it was first launched, and for the most part, functional? I would venture to say this phenomenon is teaching us something interesting about transparency initiatives and their timeline for impact. In fairness, I’ve been skeptical about the power of open data to drive better governance, as has been typically the argument of good government reformers. Not that there isn’t a case for it, just that real, causal outcomes have been hard to identify. Instead, open data — for the past few years — has proven more utility in powering better citizen experiences, fueling new businesses, and enabling collaboration between governments. Today, however, I think I might be changing my mind. Not because transparency has led to real change in our government, but that the _lack of transparency_ has provoked serious dialogue and attention from both the mass media and social media. > Transparency is then a bell that you cannot unring. At least not without someone hearing. And possibly even more people than when it first emerged. That I think is what we are seeing now. Transparency is then a bell that you cannot unring. At least not without someone hearing. And possibly even more people than when it first emerged. That I think is what we are seeing now. And what we may need to learn from this is that there’s a kind of benchmarking effect for transparency initiatives. And that may be its broader impact and long-term legacy. As an administration moves the ball forward — even if things don’t seriously change — that becomes the new standard, and attempts to walk it back are met with more interest (probably negative) than when they first were enacted (probably positive). > But any interest in government is better than disinterest. Torpor is democracy’s death knell. This says something somewhat disturbing about the nature of public opinion towards government: we focus on missteps more than progress. But any interest in government is better than disinterest. Torpor is democracy’s death knell. And politics _is_ the “slow boring of hard boards.” So I take solace in knowing that even if transparency’s time comes later than anticipated, it does come and sometimes thanks to unanticipated advocates. --- # In one picture — Why governments need CMOs… URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2017/01/26/In-one-picture-why-governments-need-CMOs/ Published: 2017-01-26 Author: Abhi Nemani --- _Backstory_: I recently ordered some K-Cups from Amazon (because who really wants to walk those two blocks for the convenience store?). Yes, K-Cups: coffee, a grocery item, something you’d find at a Trader Joe’s, Target or even Walmart — but not the kind of thing you’d expect a book or electronics store to carry. However odd that might be — and however long I thought about it — when my little brown box of coffee came in, my mind immediately jumped to _electronics_, not _java_. That’s because someone (or some team) at Amazon was clever enough to realize that they have massively valuable advertising real estate that costs them next to nothing. **The tape.** Yes, the tape that they already had to buy and use, but instead of just considering it a logistical hassle, they used it as a strategic opportunity. They were able to get a piece of advertising in my home, right in front of me, that I couldn’t even try to avoid if I wanted to get my beloved K-Cups. And guess what? Right after, I went and looked up what the Echo Dot is. That’s plain clever. Not just because of its ingenuity, but because of its simplicity. But crucially, this happened because someone or some team _thought_ of it and agreed on it. That person or team wasn’t just tasked with selling more k-cups but building out the broader business, which at this time happened to revolve around the new Echo. Next month, maybe it’s turkey baste, the next, free gift wrap. It’s marketing 101: cross promotion. For anyone familiar with the Echo they know that it’s a virtual assistant. A way to figure out how long your commute will be, what today’s weather’s like; or what recent scores were. And of course, you can play music, record some notes, and if you get particularly creative, deploy your own automated holiday decorations (or “wicked cool tree” as it’s known in most circles). But at its the Echoes are designed as _shopping_ assistants more than _personal_ assistants. As you’ve probably seen through the ads from Alec Baldwin and the like, the Echo powered by Alexa makes it simple to order new products or replace orders for ones that you need to have often. In this way the Echo is really your _gateway_ into the Amazon purchasing ecosystem. Of course the device itself comes at a cost ranging from $50 now for the lightest Echo Dot to about $180 or so for the full scale Echo. At those rates however, direct sales alone could not justify their prioritization, particularly during the holidays. So why focus so much on them? My guess, they look at the Echo hardware as the gateway drug to the far more profitable products and services you can use it to enjoy. Just like a cheap or free smartphone app with _in-app_ purchases, the Echo gets to work (for Amazon’s ledgers that is) _after_ you’ve set it up in your house. No longer do I need to get out my laptop or phone to order new hair gel or K-Cups — it’s just too easy not to, and too much fun. I would argue that this is only possible because Amazon has developed a smart, clever, and highly strategic plan for welcoming customers into their ecosystem. To do this requires a very clear and accepted vision and strategy. If different departments were jockeying everyday for space on those cardboard boxes, this wouldn’t be possible. Instead senior leadership, probably C-Level agreed that Echo was their big play and they wanted to make it as big as possible. Bringing us back to city government, I would say this is the missing piece when it comes to government service delivery. There’s no standardized, commonly accepted, and more importantly properly used system for an on ramp into your city public institutions. Some may point to 311 or increasingly centralized government homepages, but usage numbers still do not suggest these are the main avenues for citizen interaction with government. Nor is there compelling evidence that they are structured in a way to encourage further participation (ie the civic upsell). But even if those systems were in place, there is not someone in the typical org chart whose specific task it is to make sure that a common, consistent strategy is implemented on an operational level. No one is making sure that we’ve figured out what goes on that piece of tape and that that piece of tape gets slapped on every single box. This is where I think a CMO is essential. Marketing can often be taken as an ugly word, same as PR. It’s sometimes hard to think that it’s justifiable to spend government public dollars like something like marketing, which is typically related to profit generation or even consumer exploitation. Neither, understandably, are comfortable terms in the public sector. Maybe there’s a rhetorical shift necessary — or just a reexamination of our preconceptions and biases. But to not invest in marketing is to not only disregard how important and essential certain services are to so many people, but also to underutilize all the other tax dollars we’re pouring in day after day into those very public institutions for those very services. Further, strong C-Level leadership from someone who has the responsibility of going out there and selling might encourage more actionable, direct, and accessible strategies and vision. In my experience, the best marketing comes hand-in-hand with great product or service, and I don’t think one leads to the other. Both need to be present for the best outcome. If we can find a way to apply this thinking to the public sector, we can do a lot better than ordering K-Cups: we could effectively deliver government services to exactly where people need them, which is to say, exactly where they are. --- # Public Sentiments Toward Public Service? URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2017/01/17/Public-Sentiments-Toward-Public-Service/ Published: 2017-01-17 Author: Abhi Nemani --- In the media, we so often here of public opinion towards our electeds, ranging from job performance to likability, and even for the government itself, research institutions and universities, such as Pew or Harvard, dig into trust in the government itself through polls, surveys, and focus groups. I find myself wanting however for data on not the government itself or our politicians but on public service — that is, on the people who actually do the work of public administration, why they went into it, and what’s working, and what’s not. Given the immense size of the public sector as a employer and its special role in our daily lives, I find this curious. Which makes me think that I might just be missing something. And so I’m wondering if anyone knows of such insight or would be interested in finding out more. In particular, I would like to explore the following — from both current public servants and those on the outside who might (or might not) consider a government gig. * Why did you join the public sector? / Would you join the public sector? * What do you think public’s impression of public servants is? / What is your impression of public servants? * What’s the favorite part of your job? * What your least favorite part of your job? * What support — ranging from tools and resources to additional personnel — would you want to make your job more enjoyable/meaningful? * What would you change immediately in your role if you could? * Would you recommend a public sector job to a friend? * How long do you plan on staying or would you plan on staying in the public sector? Hopefully much of this already exists, but if not I would argue this kind of insight is essential. As the economy grows more automated, technology more disruptive, and so the safety net more critical, it is essential we understand and propagate public institutions and roles for public servants within them that work. --- # TEDx: The Hack of the Century: Cities > A few months ago I was asked to speak at TedXSacramentoSalon in September. Below is the video and text from the talk from September URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2017/01/14/The-Hack-of-the-Century-Cities/ Published: 2017-01-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, Code for America, TED, Speeches --- _N.B. A few months ago I was asked to speak at TedXSacramentoSalon in September. Below is the video and text from the talk from September — month before this year’s elections. Since then, I thought it’s worth clarifying that I have since then voted and participate actively in my personal capacity. I implore the reader to see the intro more as a hyperbolic hook, and less as an argument against voting._ **_I firmly believe voting is an essential right and a particular, wonderful, and universal privilege: indeed, we all must vote._** Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/2qcmoD0qLSQ I’m going to tell you guys a secret. Can you guys keep a secret? I’ve lived my life in public service. I helped run a company called Code for America, then was the chief data officer for LA and then now I’m the chief innovation officer here in Sacramento. Public service is my life. That isn’t a secret. In fact, I will tell you this, that I actually keep a copy of the constitution in my pocket. Here’s a secret though. I’ve never voted in a federal election. This isn’t apathy or malice. There’s some reasonable thinking, I hope, behind this practice, if as nothing more than a conversation starter. Because I think this a conversation we need to have. Why? Because think about what the federal government has done in the last 8 years… it’s limited. The last major piece of legislation that the federal government has passed was the ObamaCare Act. That was 6 years ago. Everything else since then… Immigration reform held up in the courts, new justices on Bench held up… ![Slide: 73% trust in local government](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_eIHU-5cIX6Fw7ZnPc1Kgyw.jpg) And naturally, this government inaction leads to citizen distrust. A Pew recently researched the level of trust in federal government. 23 percent of people trusted federal government, 23 percent. That’s just under one in four. On the flip side, local government had 73 percent. Put another way, when you look around this room, you’re going to find a lot more people trusting their public servants here in Sacramento than those in D.C. So why is that? What’s going on in our cities that make us trust them so? Let me give you an example. I used to run this company Code for America and we focused on helping cities solve problems with technology. The problem NOLA tapped our too to address was blight — vacant housing. It’s easy to think that because of Katrina, blight is just a New Orleans problem; it’s not. It’s a problem everywhere. I’m from St. Louis, and I will tell you, when I talk with the mayor, he says this is one of the biggest problems they have and I’m sure it’s a big problem here in Sacramento too. Why? Because vacant housing are hotbeds for drugs and crime, affecting the entire neighborhood’s quality of life and value. Cities **_have_** to figure out how to deal with it. ![Two people reviewing a large printed map](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_0sZDLpFtoX6dRK9QMs3wxg.jpg) What was fascinating when we were in New Orleans is there’s this woman. She’s wonderful. Her name is Miss Rita. She cared about her community. She’s older, retired, didn’t have anything else to do with her time so she wanted to focus on figuring out what’s going on with the community. She would literally with paper maps track what’s going on with vacant housing in her community. If you walk into her house you would see these big pieces of paper, which apparently are called Tom’s guides that I’m too young to know what those really mean, all around her house that she’s tracking manually what’s going on. ![New Orleans Mayor Landrieu reviewing plans with residents](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_LhlIM2Gf3hDej5eHOK6TJw.jpg) Here’s what’s fascinating. The mayor had the same problem. The mayor was asked by citizens all the time, “Hey, Mr. Mayor, what’s going on with vacant housing in this place? What’s happening in that specific area?” He didn’t have an answer because he didn’t have the information or the data to answer that question. He asked his chief information officer, “Can you build an application to solve that problem? Can you build an application on my iPad that you can tell me what’s going on?” He said, “Yeah, sure. It’s going to cost me **$3 million and take 3 years**,” because that’s usually how government does business. We took a different approach in New Orleans. What we did instead was we opened up all the data and the information around what’s going on with vacant properties and blighted properties in New Orleans and said, “Hey, hackers, people in the community, can you build something on this?” We deployed, when I was in my old organization, Code for America, we deployed Code for America fellows to build something on top of that data and we built a very simple application called BlightStatus. You can look up an address and see exactly what’s going on. You can see that’s where it is and the status of either demolishing it, reselling it, etc, and you can also see at a macro level what’s going on in a general community. That itself is interesting, but the story doesn’t end with just a dashboard. Guess who was the main user of the app? It was Habitat for Humanity. This community based organization needed basically a realtime CRM on blighted houses, and the city just handed them one for free. ![Volunteers raising a wall frame at a Habitat for Humanity build](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_NCw0bCQ1pHzjYOwSoDwEww.jpg) That I think is what’s most exciting about building new technology for cities, is that you can empower people who aren’t technological to do things that help their city better, which is why I think the future of cities is technology. I think the way we make cities work effectively in the 21st century is using technology to solve every day, real-work problems. ![Slide: the future of cities is technology](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_c38m3mHZpvYVLTDov1ETQQ.jpg) That’s for good reason because cities do thing — things that are _vital_ but totally _mundane_ like picking up trash, things that are _vital_ but totally _dangerous_ like putting out fires. Then things that are just _simply vital_ like getting people to school. That’s what cities do. We do things. This is why I think people trust cities way more than they trust the federal government because they know that we’re the ones in delivering the services that they need. ![City of Boston "City Hall To Go" truck](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_7LaZg7GM9k4u4_f2DlV0dg.jpg) Plus, sometimes they do some cool stuff too. This is a picture of the “wicked cool tree” in Boston. This is a tree they set up in City Hall where you could tweet at this hashtag and it would change the color of the tree based on your tweet. They also did a thing in Boston where they took a food truck and re-purposed it as a “City Hall-to-go” food truck. You didn’t have to come to city hall to renew that permit; City Hall will come to you. (Though likely without tacos.) It’s hard not to trust a city when they’re that cool. But I think most importantly, this is a quote from the Mayor in Minneapolis: ![Minneapolis mayor quote: there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_vMr7xEBxczXafmUTSD5gTA.jpg) That’s an important perspective on local government, is that it’s not about traditional partisan politics. It’s about getting — sorry for my language — getting shit done. That’s what we care about and that’s what we do. . ![Uber app on a phone setting a pickup location](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_QnoTrQx7OxSVGGwjjkih2g.jpg) That’s government. Government is moving in this area that they focus on technology more. But technology is also really focusing on urban. Imagine, how many of you guys took Uber to get here? Or Lyft? Or used a Zipcar? Or some other app/service I’ve never heard of? It’s impossible to deny that getting around a city has radically changed in the past few years. Because cities are dense, tightly woven, and there are people there… people with smartphone that tell you where they are and can request a car that’s only 2 minutes away. But this kind of immensely convenient (arguably disruptive) technology only works in cities, in an _urban environment_. You couldn’t have Uber if people didn’t live in urban environments. There wouldn’t be enough people around. You couldn’t have Airbnb without urban environments; there wouldn’t be enough apartment units or Uber to get you from the suburb back to downtown. Ways and Google Maps and everything else that we use on a daily basis only work because we all live in cities — they continue to get terabytes and terabytes of traffic data and behavior because we continue to use them day after day to get around. All of this urban innovation couldn’t come at a better time. Right now 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, 50%. In the next 10 years it’s going to be two-thirds, 67%. So just to retain relevance, technology has to be urban, and I’d go further, I’d bet that the next “unicorn” though I’m loathe to use that phrase will be fundamentally urban. The last thing I want to say and I’m going to pull off stage here in a minute is that what’s most exciting to me is bringing those 2 things together, 1) the fact that we live in cities and we care about our cities and 2) cities need technology, and that technology is fundamentally urban. How do we bring those two things together? ![Slide: the future of technology is urban](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_PXCIB9NYNL756YN-IzM2sg.jpg) Let me give you an example of that, which is really the most compelling illustrations about what the next phase of “good” technology will look like. In a city if you have a heart attack it takes about 11 minutes for a ambulance to get to you. However, most cities are overwhelmed with 911 calls, so it’s hard for them to respond to you right away. Well, what if — and this is a big if — you could bring that number down just a little; say, 8 minutes? That would increase the likelihood of survival by more than 2/3 (67%). This means that if we could creatively speed up the delivery process for assistance, we could be saving lives. **Saving lives.** Turn’s out, there’s an app for that. A company called PulsePoint launched a couple years back. What they didn’t to do was to crowdsource the problem. As firefighters themselves, they knew that AED kits — the small defibrillators you see hanging on the walls of almost any public place — were everywhere, well, everywhere where people were. And some — not all of course — but some may have gotten AED trainings either voluntarily, for sports, for work, etc. So they decided to cut out the middle man. Effectively, the app asks **_you_**, standing right there next to someone in cardiac arrest to step up and use your training to help, reducing that patient’s response time, and increase their chance of survival. Literally, if you keep the application open in the background, it may someday send you a simple notification: “Hey, someone’s dying near you. Can you help them out?” ![PulsePoint CPR-needed alert on a phone](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_JaUdyM1Jm8HixqChNA8DcQ.jpg) **That’s what’s possible with technology. That’s what’s possible with cities.** I guess in closing what I’ll say is this, and you can’t give a talk about cities without quoting Jane Jacobs, so I have to do this: ![Jane Jacobs quote on cities being created by everybody](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_aiOhnApZbdfyDvn7TUDa9g.jpg) BlightStatus wouldn’t work if people weren’t stepping up to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. The PulsePoint app wouldn’t work if people weren’t stepping up to stop heart attacks with PulsePoint. And this is truly just the beginning. Once we start to see the fundamental realignment between our prevailing technology (networked and mobile) and our prevailing organizational unit (cities), every day is a chance to reinvent your city, to not just hack together another app, but to mold the way you, your family and friends get to strengthen, celebrate, and enjoy beautiful cities, just like this one here in Sacramento. --- # Why We Do the Work. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2017/01/08/Why-We-Do-the-Work/ Published: 2017-01-08 Author: Abhi Nemani --- With the cacophony, animosity, and distrust surrounding our politics at the moment, it is easy for those of us who [work within government](https://medium.comyou-wouldnt-understand-because-you-re-not-actually-a-public-servant-61701729c6ad) to lose morale, let alone hope. [Much has been written](https://medium.com/@pahlkadot/would-you-work-for-trump-edf32662107c) about the internal tensions many in the federal government, working tirelessly to modernize its operating system, feel around the new administration and its attendant personalities. Yet, most, if not all, who I have spoken with working at every level of government maintain their resolve. They will continue to do the work, because that’s just what they do. _Because the work matters_. This weekend, the New York Times published a short anthology of [reflections on President Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office](http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/reflections-on-obama.html?_r=0). One letter, in particular, hit home. It reminded my why we do the work. Why we work day in and day out to [help government catch up to the 21st century](https://medium.comopen-data-civic-engagement-and-delivery-28b990f321ce), to boost [empathy](https://medium.com/@lippytak/people-not-data-47434acb50a8#.1mhjsc9uq) and [understanding](https://medium.comtwo-kinds-of-emp-25706bf36df4) in its interfaces, and — paraphrase the letter— make our government feel more _human_: > President Obama would be the one to make our government feel human to me. He warmed up the cold bureaucracy of Washington, he made me feel like my government was on my side, and he personally was working tirelessly just for me… > ELLA PETERSON, Moorestown, N.J. That’s what gets me out of bed every morning. And I suspect it does so for so many others working in the public’s interest. Now more than ever we must recommit ourselves to humanizing our government, to making it feel more accessible and useful, because at the end of the day, [government is what we do together.](https://medium.com/civic-technology/government-is-what-you-make-of-it-d836a6a9353d#.uibixggrk) --- # Reconciling the Old and the New — America at the crossroads URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2016/11/23/Reconciling-the-Old-and-the-New-America-s-at-the-crossroads/ Published: 2016-11-23 Author: Abhi Nemani --- I read today in the _Atlantic_ that this week marks the 53rd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. To mark his passing, the [Atlantic posted JFK’s lovely, powerful, and I think relevant speech](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-purpose-of-poetry/309470/?utm_source=atlfb) he delivered to honor the death of another great American mind, Robert Frost’s. > “I look forward to a great future for America — a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.” — President John F. Kennedy Here he juxtaposes conflicting notions, seeming contradictions. He places side by side our might and our virtue, our treasures and our truth, our past and our present. Kennedy’s speech optimistically assumes these competing forces will resolve, that reconciling these competing forces is inevitable for America, that it’s what’s next. For me, however, over a half century later, I _do_ know that those words resonate, but I _do not_ know whether that vision has been realized. What I have seen of late is a fundamental [division between the past and present](http://www.businessinsider.com/zuora-ceo-tien-tzuo-on-globalization-populism-trump-brexit-fourth-industrial-revolution-2016-11). We see people rightly arguing that there place in the new economy will not work for them, and feeling belittled by those already there. We also see other people driving forward the engines of our economy, and not understanding how some may not grasp its promise. This gulf grows deeper and deeper every day, it seems. Indeed, our time is marked by divisiveness I haven’t experienced (in my lifetime); by distrust; by resentment. And resentment often trumps reconciliation. And yet, I was reminded of another insight penned by from another great American mind: > “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald I suppose this is an ability we all need right now. Because we are all left, I believe — or maybe hope — _asking_ how can all this continue to function: Can we love our country while we hate what some have done in its name? Can we cherish our rights while others use them to denigrate us? Can we stay while it seems like so many want us to leave? Can we honor our great national past while imagining “handsome and balanced cities for our future”? Or to summarize simply: > Can we balance the **_power_** of our unity with the _purpose_ of our diversity? Right now, right here, and for us, this is the test. --- # Making Presentations from Spreadsheets > Really it is better. Collaborate on the content in a structured, open way. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2016/11/08/Presentations-from-Spreadsheets/ Published: 2016-11-08 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Technology, Tips --- A remember a few years back — well, now, maybe more than a few — while i was working at Code for America, we had the thoughtful idea of… ![Code for Sacramento and I/O Labs Foundation slides](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_2BWF57jB0a08HX0a2Uu0lw.png) A remember a few years back — well, now, maybe more than a few — while i was working at Code for America, we had the thoughtful idea of including every since one of that year’s fellowship apps in the intro presentation at the annual Summit. Seems easy, no? Over a handful of teams working for just 11 months, that should be just a handful of slides, right? No. **More like 30.** So there we sat, our meager communications team, hammering away at Powerpoint to put together 30 slides, all with different content, but all with the same basic layout. With PPT’s auto-formatting — which hurt more than it helped, font sizes were askew, screenshots had different resolutions, and so on and so on. And then, of course, came edits from those teams, staff, and anyone else with an opinion. At one point, I felt like giving my laptop, the [Office Space treatment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8). So this year, when I was tasked with pulling together slides to pitch the City Council the 15 recommendations for the [RAILS grant program](https://sacmoie.github.io/RAILS/), I said: **Not again.** This year, I started with a clear bias: online instead of off, and collaborative instead of not. Easily, anyone savvy with HTML5 would jump to the number of great open-source projects that provide frameworks for lovely online presentations; and as many are hosted on github, collaboration is built in. Problem: Not everyone I work now with knows what either HTML5 or github is — let alone both. So I stepped back and thought about the ideal experience for me to do the “heavy-lifting” of design and formatting and my colleagues to edit and tweak. Effectively, I realized I wanted a very simple content management system (CMS) for slide, or put another way, a “data-driven” presentation. ![Spreadsheet of organizations with descriptions and image filenames](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_xFZIDukI3pjLKqZzlqenSQ.png) Then I remembered how we approached a similar problem with [dashboard-ing in Los Angeles](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/government-dashboards-what-ought-we-do-b0dcc58f299d#.j7i2hkcyy): **Google Spreadsheets**, and a nice little bit of JS called [Tabletop](https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop). Wiring up those two enabled me then, and now, enabled clean, consistent, and elegant design and also general non-technical access and editing. So here’s what we did: * Forked [Reveal.js](https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/) (what seems to be the standard-bearer for HTML5 presentations) * Added in some CSS for common look an feel on the “project” slides — the ones, which you’ll want to include common information, such as project name, descriptions, screenshots, etc. (Of course, you’ll still want others with introductory and conclusion slides.) * Set a doc in Google Spreadsheet with those same fields as headers, published it to the web, logged the spreadsheet unique ID, and entered in some placeholder content * Added the [TableTop.js](https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop) script to the repo — with the spreadsheet ID — and set up some javascript to pull the appropriate cells, buttressed with the appropriate CSS tags * Inserted a dummy div in my main html file and pointed the tabletop script at it * Turned on gh-pages, and _voila_: I had a “data-driven presentation, fully mobile responsive, printable, and shareable [See for yourself](https://abhinemani.com/RAILS/2016/#/): [https://abhinemani.com/RAILS/2016/#/](https://abhinemani.com/RAILS/2016/#//) Of course, the real benefit came from being able to share that Google Spreadsheet with all 15 organizations recommended for the grants, and the city staff I was collaborating with. Instead of having dozens and dozens of emails filling my inbox with “can you swap this pic for that?” or “our style guide doesn’t recommend use of the ampersand,” I simply shared everyone on the Google docs and let them have at it. I crowdsourced slide “creation” in an open, version-controlled way. To boot, we now also had a shiny public-facing website for launch, already built, and generally agreed upon copy in an API-accessible format. (Read: this “presentation” basically teed up mostly of everything we might need for ongoing marketing and outreach.) You can have a look at the code here: [https://github.com/abhinemani/RAILS/tree/gh-pages/2016](https://github.com/abhinemani/RAILS/tree/gh-pages/2016) Sharing this story isn’t a vanity exercise — this really isn’t terribly clever or good code. No, I’m doing this for that next poor-man’s hacker asked to generate 30 consistent slides with 50 editors. Have faith, you don’t need to take that baseball bat to your laptop. At least not until the conference is over :) --- # You Wouldn’t Understand Because You’re Not Actually a Public Servant! > Why we need to expand the definition of public servant URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2016/09/13/You-Wouldn-t-Understand-Because-You-re-Not-Actually-a-Public-Servant/ Published: 2016-09-13 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Reflections --- That was the response I got on a call a few weeks ago whilst having a lively conversation with a member of a government’s civil service. > “You wouldn’t understand because you’re not actually a public servant.” At first this was tough for me to handle. I was taken aback. I’ve lived my life for governments; opting at every turn to do something for the civic and social good over my own private interests. In this person’s defense, indeed I am no longer a full-time staff member in a government — I work with [multiple in an advisory or consultancy role](http://ethoslabs.us). I think that’s public service. I also now work with a handful of government-focused startup companies — all of which dedicate their lives and livelihoods to helping people. I think that’s public service. And I also now serve on the board of a handful of nonprofits working hand-in-hand with governments and elected officials — not to just help _them_ in the polls or elections, but in getting _them_ better, deeper, and more insightful engagement with their constituencies. I think that’s public service as well. So I suppose I was taken aback not so much at the critique of me — indeed I’m happy to admit there are many things I don’t know — but more of the broader implication. Aren’t those advisors, consultants, and volunteers working with government, public servants; those startups optimizing governments’ technology, public servants; and those nonprofits dedicated to improving civic life, public servants? I sincerely hope so. _Because it’d be a sad world to live in_ where folks, ranging from the volunteers I’ve been inspired by like [Joel Riphagen](https://twitter.com/joelrip), and [Maya Wallace](https://twitter.com/mayagirl) in [Sacramento](https://codeforsacramento.org/), to the entrepreneurs I’ve learned from like [Nick Bowden](https://twitter.com/njbowden) and [Scott Burns](https://twitter.com/smburns?lang=en), in [Kansas City](http://app.mysidewalk.com/) and [St. Paul](http://govdelivery.com), to the nonprofit leaders I know like [Seamus Kraft](https://twitter.com/seamuskraft) ([OpenGov Foundation](https://twitter.com/seamuskraft)) and [Tiffani Ashley Bell](https://twitter.com/tiffani) (HumanUtility), weren’t considered public servants. They live their lives to serve the public. That’s all that they do. When they could do much else. As do so many others. We need to expand our definition of public service to not just include the amazing people who sit within City Hall to those who sit on the outside, helping prop it up. Because public service shouldn’t just be a job description, but a job; it’s something you do, wherever, and however you can. --- # Thoughts on what’s next for government innovation URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2016/07/26/Thoughts-on-what-s-next-for-government-innovation/ Published: 2016-07-26 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Insights, Reflections --- I was recently asked to draft some thoughts on what’s needed for government and civic technology to continue to flourish. My thoughts — however useful — are below. ### Data Science-as-a-Service Cities are proving that they can dramatically improve service delivery and responsiveness through operational optimization determined through data science and analytics. This is why you’re seeing cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago invest heavily in their data science capability. But very few cities have or could have the resources to fully staff a data science team. (Some of the smaller ones are beginning to develop “Performance Management” teams, which are effectively lightweight versions of a data science unit.) Startups are emerging to provide data science expertise as a service for cities, providing insights at low cost, without additional staff, and at scale across the country. (For example, [Enimga.io](http://enigma.io), [mySidewalk](http://mysidewalk.com), [Datascience.com](http://Datascience.com).) Not only will this be a profitable growing enterprise, but by working with multiple jurisdictions at the same time, they will be able to have collective learning that can benefit not just some cities but all. ### Civil Service 2.0 City IT departments have been decimated by encouraged retirements and budget cuts. (In Los Angeles, for example, the IT department has shrunk from 800 to about 150.) This means that the remaining IT staff is tasked with not only performing multiple jobs at the same time, but also innovating. Even with renewed interest in public service, though, it is difficult to fill the available jobs, as HR/Personnel departments have been equally undermined. (In Los Angeles, it takes roughly 500 days to fill open positions, rendering them untenable for top-notch talent.) What’s demanded then is both reform of the civil service policies and procedures to make it easier to quickly hire good people and training for existing city staff on how to better leverage their roles: the use of SaaS software, partnerships, new contracting mechanisms, and “small jobs” (e.g. Mechanical Turk, etc). ### Open Data+ The previous thinking around open data could be summarized as follows: “If you build it, they will come.” That isn’t the case. Even in the nation’s second largest city, the open data portal had few more than 10,000 visitors a month (.25% of the population), and most of those were city employees. Data from open data portals across the country tell a similar story: the mentality of putting “spreadsheets on the internet” doesn’t truly foster citizen engagement or promote accountability. This needs to and has started to change. Instead you are seeing two trends emerge: 1) integration of open data into existing consumer experiences/apps; 2) the development of custom, issue specific, and action oriented visualizations of the data. #### All Apps More Civic: Data suggests that the vast majority of apps (over 90%) are opened only once; that means, the app economy is a “winner takes all” ecosystem. Thus, governments should focus less on building new interfaces/apps that try to compete with popular consumer apps (e.g. Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc), and instead leverage them. Already we have seen fruitful partnerships between cities and consumer platforms such as Yelp, Trulia, and Waze. This should be the norm not the exception. #### Bespoke Open Data Viz Specific action-oriented data visualization tools have proven to much for useful for government decision-makers and civically-minded residents. These work best when there’s tight alignment with existing decision-making processes. Most notable is the COMPStat processes run by many city police departments. For instance, LAPD worked with Palantir to develop a crime dashboard — infused with other relevant information such as traffic, public events, etc — and then host weekly senior management meeting relying primarily on this data visualization buttressed with contextual information from on-the-ground officers. Concrete decisions about force deployment are made; and these meetings are also open to the public, thus increasing transparency and so trust in the policing process. This -Stat model has been replicated with success in other areas, including Fire, EMS, Blight, and even Parks and Libraries. We need simple data visualization platforms (or trainings) and a theory of best practice around the citizen engagement needed to make the public meetings work. ### Digital Services Championed most famously by the [UK Government Digital Services group](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/), led by Mike Bracken, the notion of digital services is rather plain: transform the analog, paper-based, or legacy systems agencies used to interact with residents and make them open, citizen-centric, and simple. Think updating your passport or purchasing a parking pass. It’s as obvious as it is essential. The UK began their “digital transformation” a few years back, and has made steady progress, as seen here. So much progress in fact, that the U.S. Federal Government has launched its own set of sister programs, the [US Digital Service](https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service) and [18F](https://18f.gsa.gov/). These teams of in-house developers and designers dive in to create digital-first interfaces to government. Sometimes that’s as “easy” as a better looking website, or other times as “hard” as ensuring the exchanges on Healthcare.gov began to work after their early hiccups. Indeed, it was Healthcare.gov that arguably gave life to this American breed of the digital services effort; after such a dramatic failure, a commitment was made, “Not again.” Now the digital interface is considered alongside the policy and the business process, meaning that the tech and data is not simply tacked on to the end but baked into the entire process. Put simply, a digital-first strategy means data-first too. Yet it will be very difficult for most jurisdictions to build a digital services unit akin to GDS or USDS due to a lack of budget and access to talent. We can, however, support the emerging marketplace of government technology (govtech) startups, with a bias towards improving service delivery and a requirement for an “open data by default” strategy, leading to better data for community engagement. ### Brigade 2.0 For years, the civic technology has been pushed further — in more ways and into more places — through the vital contributions of volunteers. Hackers, designers, entrepreneurs willing to commit as little as a few hours once a year to other leaders donating dozens of hours every month. Chiefly, these were supported through a lightweight network based out of Code for America, called the Brigade. Yet, increasingly, it questions of sustainability arose. Success, in fact, for a Brigade was a double edged sword. As the groups grew and projects became substantial, the burdens on the volunteers increased — particularly for the group leaders (Brigade Captains). Read the following from [_Eddie Tejada, fmr head of OpenOakland, the CfA Brigade_](https://medium.com/@eddietejeda/so-long-farewell-openoakland-5f4be133f2a1#.jdc9o1isl), on his decision to transition out of his leadership role: > _“Every once in while I wondered how sustainable this was. I feared that one day no one would show up. But I am I still amazed that, every Tuesday at 6:30pm in Hearing Room 3, there will be one or two dozen OpenOaklanders asking questions and proposing new projects. But keeping this pace has challenging for me. Personally, I found it difficult managing existing projects and relationships while engaging in new ones. For example, I started a company and wanted to make sure I still had time for friends and family, and suddenly I was not keeping up the way I wanted to.”_ Without dedicated funding for operations — ranging from snacks to office space — or for staffing, the Brigades were often hamstrung or forced to focus on non-technical administration such as fundraising or sponsorship. And without a easy, formal way to raise funds (most aren’t 501c3s) even that proved difficult. Different models are emerging: hybrids of public private partnerships or consulting — community organizing organizations. In Chicago, the Smart Chicago Collaborative — a nonprofit partnership between the city government, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Chicago Trust — provides support infrastructure for the local Brigade: hosting for apps, fellowships for app contest / hackathon winners, and office space. Modeled slightly off of Smart Chicago, Compiler.LA was recently launched in Southern California: Compiler is a new civic-focused, for-profit consulting building technology for area foundations, local governments, and non-profits; in return, they commit a specific portion of their revenues to running the local Brigade. Essentially the Brigade becomes a kind of marketing and recruitment effort for their business, creating a business case for it, and also a revenue stream. Finally, these kinds of consultancies themselves are needed as digital government and civic engagement become more commonplace, as local institutions (cities, nonprofits, or foundations) will need local consultants to contract out new projects. ### Civic Startup Shared Rolodex State and local governments in the US spend nearly $100B on technology every year; all the while, 99% of government technology projects fail, wasting taxpayer dollars and undermining crucial service delivery. This has to change. And it’s starting to. A marketplace of new govtech startups is emerging, eager to change the way government works, using principles of the modern web: open, collaborative, and an ethos of constant improvement. What’s needed is the infrastructure to connect the dots between governments looking to do things differently, and startups ready to serve. Too often innovation does not scale because the innovators are too focused or only connected locally, so their pace of growth stalls. Simple connections between the key players in different cities — and some local insight into funding or contracting — can make a massive difference in the lifespan of a particular tool or innovation. Naturally, this can and should be followed on by more intensive hands-on support: mentorship, financing, outreach, etc. _What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments. We all need to be talking more about this._ --- # How a City Can Build a Startup Pipeline URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2016/07/13/How-a-City-Can-Build-a-Startup-Pipeline/ Published: 2016-07-13 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Case Studies, Cities, Entrepreneurship, Economic Development --- > “**A more diverse, more entrepreneurial economy means a stronger Sacramento**: more jobs, more innovation, and mostly a better quality of life for all of us. That’s why we’re launching [RAILS](http://cityofsacramento.org/RAILS).” — Mayor Kevin Johnson How can a city build out its startup scene? An easy answer would be to pick a few of the winners, support them — invest in them even — and let those stories do the work. Well, when the **City of Sacramento** and **Mayor Kevin Johnson** began thinking about their approach to startups and entrepreneurship in the city, we decided that we would do what’s _hard_: we chose to focus on getting everyone in the game. We wanted to create more of a platform, the infrastructure really, for many different startups to be successful and thrive. That’s why we’ve built this program called [**RAILS**](http://www.cityofsacramento.org/rails/)**:** [**Rapid Acceleration Innovation and Leadership in Sacramento**](http://www.cityofsacramento.org/rails/), a first-of-its-kind city grant program of up to $1.5M designed to support the broad startup _pipeline_ within the city. ![RAILS: Rapid Acceleration, Innovation and Leadership in Sacramento](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__WzGpuffDp1NCiD8Y2MGGLQ.jpeg) That is to say it’s designed to make Sacramento the ideal place to come if you want to get your startup off the ground running and thriving to be in. What does that mean and how does it work? Through RAILS we plan to make grants to “_startup enablers_” — the kinds of initiatives and programs that help entrepreneurs take their startup from idea to company. Specifically, we’re investing in **leadership** programs, **innovation** programs, and **acceleration** programs throughout the city doing different things in different ways to build the broad ecosystem that we think is necessary to support startups in a holistic way. ### The Pipeline Model This comes down to a pipeline model. ![Startup pipeline funnel: leadership, innovation, acceleration](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__kYAQeG6DNzhv7m5ENer9Yg.png) The pipeline being, “How do you help, say, a potential entrepreneur named Sally, go from just having an idea for a great company to actually knowing how to start one to actually starting one to actually having it thrive?” Let’s talk about that. #### The Next Generation of Tech Leadership Having just graduated from undergrad — say Sac State or UC Davis — Sally has an interesting idea around food tech innovation. But Sally didn’t major in business or computer science: she majored in agriculture. Naturally. ![Audience at a Sacramento startup event](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__jJ08yPIJHduUyB__p2lpqLA.jpeg) How do we help her out? The first is a series of **leadership training programs**. They can range from business training to technical education. Fantastic programs exist and have proven to be successful at this first stage of entrepreneurship: Girls Who Code, Railsbridge, etc. Our goal is to bring more of those programs here to Sacramento, and just as importantly help people like Sally know about them and excited about participating. #### Creating Spaces for Innovation Now that she’s got trained up, Sally has this really fun food tech company and wants to start getting it off the ground. What’s she going to need? ![Coworking space in Sacramento](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__XOuiwXS0M5UTXzaxtF3Ojg.jpeg) She’s going to need a **team;** that’s the second prong of the RAILS program comes in: **innovation**. She’s going to need to find ways to connect with and work with other potential co-founders or staff members to help take the idea into a real product. That’s where we plan to invest in things like co-working spaces, hackathons, app contests, different ways in which people can come together and take to their ideas to the next level. #### Accelerating What Works Then finally once Sally’s gotten the idea off the ground, got a team, got things working on, what’s next? Getting users, financing, and help. ![Old Sacramento street at night](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__AASjgqoC__B8l5Ndxab7O__A.jpeg) Fortunately, the tech ecosystem has born out a compelling model for exactly this stage: startup **accelerators**. We want to support existing local accelerators and incubators or attract other national ones to Sacramento help startups thrive. Throughout my conversations with Sacramento entrepreneurs around barriers to scale locally, a common theme emerged: money, or more specifically early stage venture financing. And that’s a big part of what accelerators can help with through their networks of investors, demo days, and connections to other exit avenues. (By the way there’s more planned on the VC front — stay tuned.) Beyond financing support, these programs should help people like Sally gain a network of like-minded people with common goals, a support system to help when things get tough. (I remember when we first launched the Code for America Accelerator in 2012 one of the entrepreneurs, when asked why he was happy to be there, he said, “It feels good to know that I’m not alone.”) You need to be able to find your tribe. #### A couple of particulars (basically FAQs) * **Both for-profits and non-profits can apply,** but the city funding will come as a grant, but an investment or purchase * **Non-Sacramento organizations are welcome to apply** but need to speak to operations they will do in or for Sacramento residents * This program isn’t designed for a direct investment in \*your\* startup: you need to speak to how your organization will help others in the areas of acceleration, innovation, or leadership * **We aren’t just focused on traditional consumer spaces.** Biotech, agtech, and of course civic tech — all fair game. If you have, say, an accelerator in one of these areas (or any other) do apply * Finally, we have a big focus on **diversity** — of all stripes — so that’s something you’re going to have to speak to in the application: how are you promoting diversity and inclusion in technology? And we expect real answers and real metrics. ### So What’s the “R” for? **RAPID**. We’re trying to do this fast, really fast. We launched this program about three weeks ago, and the deadline for it is in two weeks: **July 22**. We’re moving running fast — probably faster than you’ve ever seen a government run — because we want to get stuff done. Not just because we want to see outcomes, but because we see _momentum_ in Sacramento that’s unprecedented: the development of downtown and the Golden One Center, the growth of companies like I/O Labs and Velocity Ventures, the events hosted by the local universities and Code for Sacramento, and by all the investments the Kings and Moneta Ventures are making. That’s only to name a few. Sparks are flying in the Sacramento innovation ecosystem, and we to add in some gasoline. That momentum was the core motivation for the RAILS program, and the broader redeployment of the [$10M Innovation and Growth Fund towards startups.](http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2016/06/10/how-city-council-would-spend-8-2-million-fund.html) There’s more we’re going to do. We’re planning to invest in venture capital funds. We’re going to host events, demo days, and meet-ups. We even plan to build an entire office for entrepreneurship and innovation within city hall. We aim to make Sacramento the leading capital for innovation in the state and hopefully in the country. In closing, I will return to the first point. It would be easy, I think, for the city to get some press and some attention by hand picking a couple of startups and maybe supporting one program or two programs in the city. Instead, we’re taking a platform role, which is we’re trying to build an entire new ecosystem of startups in Sacramento and position the city in a a way where it can unlock and catalyze profound, systemic change. This isn’t going to be easy, this is going to be hard. But we have the resources, the backing and most importantly the momentum in the community to get this done. We hope you’ll join us in this effort. Apply for a [RAILS grant](http://www.cityofsacramento.org/rails/), show your feedback on our strategy, tell us how you should think about using the rest of the innovation fund. All of this work is yours. Government is of, for, and by the people. As a city that has so many passionate, dedicated people, if we can find way to leverage that, to focus that, to direct that, to put Sacramento on the startup map, we can be proud of doing work that matters with people that matter. I can’t imagine anything that would be more important. > As a city that has so many passionate, dedicated people, if we can find way to leverage that, to focus that, to direct that, to put Sacramento on the startup map, we can be proud of doing work that matters with people that matter. I can’t imagine anything that would be more important. [_Let us know how you want to be involved_](mailto:mofie@cityofsacramento.org)_. Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions. We hope you’ll join us for putting Sacramento on RAILS and making Sacramento the innovation capitol of the state. And of course,_ [**_apply now!_**](http://cityofsacramento.org/RAILS) _Abhi Nemani is the interim Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Sacramento; formerly he was the Chief Data Officer for Los Angeles, and helped build, launch, and run the nationally recognized non-profit, Code for America._ --- # Engines of Civic Entrepreneurship > Clever ways cities are turning civic enthusiasm into meaningful civic action and entrepreneurship URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2016/02/04/Engines-of-Civic-Entrepreneurship/ Published: 2016-02-04 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Policy, Cities, Economic Development --- It was the French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, that noted that in our American democracy our imagined lines between private and public lives were too crude, too strict, for reality. What he saw when he documented the early days of our young republic was a society, structured around small towns and bristling with associations of all kinds: political, civic, social, etc. Where there had been fires, a volunteer brigade was congealed to respond to future disasters; where bridges needed to be built, teams of people came together to get to work. Associative — or community — life in America was everywhere, and it was not one defined by ego or fancy; instead, by common need and collective resolve. America was, in its own way, entrepreneurial. While much has changed since then — fire departments are no longer volunteer run, and Public Works maintains our roads and bridges — the core idea remains. In a democracy, when people come together, they can do great things, inside government and out. In the past, citizens stepped up where government had not. Now, thanks to new tools and technologies, we are seeing a deeper level of collaboration. We are seeing citizens and their public representatives work together to find the best way to meet the needs of their community, to strengthen them, and to define a new kind of entrepreneurship for the 21st century: one that is decidedly civic, and biased towards innovation. ### 7 Tactics for Fostering 21st Century Civic Life Taking a look across the country, you can see a wide range of tactics and approaches to tapping into this new opportunity for innovation. A few, though, common themes have emerged. Below is a **_working list_** of some tactics (I repeat: _some_ — this is very much something I hope to continue to add to) clever cities and the communities within them have proven to be effective: #### Create a Space for Collaboration > “This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.” — [Steven B. Johnson](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/12645873-where-good-ideas-come-from) The civic technology space stands apart from other sectors in a meaningful way: more often than not, it’s not zero sum. Cities are not competitive with each other, and usually, civic organizations, entrepreneurs, or startups in a city are not either. Collaboration, thus, is not only acceptable, but encouraged. For that collaboration to happen, density, and the random connections it enables, is crucial. Good people need good places to come together. 1. **Co-working / Maker Spaces**: [1871](http://www.1871.com/) (Chicago), [Civic Hall](http://civichall.org) (NYC), [Ctrl Collective](http://www.ctrlcollective.com/) (LA) 2. **Meetups**: [1 Million Cups](http://www.1millioncups.com/) (Kansas City) 3. **Hackathons / Weekly Hack Nights**: Chicago, LA, SF, etc #### Ensure Institutional Support & Capital @ your back > “Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure — the law firms, the real estate, all that — that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.” — Elon Musk But increasingly, it’s not just Silicon Valley that has that support structure. Cities across the country are leveraging their unique assets, be it their local industry, historic philanthropic base, or even young angel investors, to amass capital resources for new entrepreneurs. And even going beyond writing checks by supporting homegrown startups with advice, mentorship, and connections. 1. **VC / Institutional Funding**: [Arch Angels](http://www.stlouisarchangels.com/) (STL); [Goldhirsh Foundation](http://www.goldhirshfoundation.org/) (LA); [Awesome Foundation](http://www.awesomefoundation.org/), GovTech Fund (various cities) 2. **Private sponsorship**: [Socrata](https://www.socrata.com/newsroom-article/open-data-platform-provider-socrata-sponsors-national-day-civic-hacking-donating-data-hosting-platform-technical-support/) (Seattle), [Azavea](http://www.summerofmaps.com/) (Philadelphia) 3. **Local Accelerators / Incubators**: [Impact Hub](http://www.impacthub.net/) (various cities), [1776](http://www.1776.vc/) (DC), [Smart Chicago Collaborative](http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/), [TechStars](http://www.techstars.com/) (various cities) 4. **New (crowdsourced) models of local financing**: [Neighborly](https://neighborly.com/go) #### Open Doors & Seed Deep Roots > “The major fault line in the 21st century is not between right or left, but between **open** or closed.” — Alec J. Ross \[my emphasis\] A different kind of “revolving door” is emerging in cities across the country: instead of city officials leaving City Hall permanently for private sector employment, they are stepping out for a few hours to attend a local meet-up, or inviting civic innovators inside to get a real look at civic challenges. 1. **Connections to city hall**: [Active Chief Innovation/Technology Officers](https://medium.comon-boston-politics-and-the-arc-of-civic-innovation-be37621f947f#.twaivv5xi), [FastFWD](http://fast-fwd.org) (Philadelphia), Entrepreneur-in-Residence ([SF](http://entrepreneur.sfgov.org), [Boston](http://newurbanmechanics.org/boston/join-our-team/) & LA) 2. **Civic Internships / Fellowships**: [Mayor’s Innovation Fellowship](http://innovatesf.com/) ([SF](https://manhattan.edu/content/san-francisco-mayors-innovation-fellowship)), [Code for America Fellowship](http://codeforamerica.org) (various cities) #### Build a Pipeline for innovators / talent / energy > “…what I see cities and metropolitan areas doing now is beginning to focus on the **fundamentals**…**do you have the skilled workers and collaboration between universities and companies and entrepreneurs and labor unions so that you can really compete and prosper…?”** — Bruce Katz “If you build it, they will come,” the saying goes. Not exactly. Hackerspaces and fellowship programs are only as good as the people you get inside them. That’s why cities are investing deeply in their local intellectual “capital” — fostering talented entrepreneurs and then encouraging them to stay and use _their_ talents in _their_ city. 1. **Local universities, community colleges, or schools:** Cornell Tech (NYC), CUSP (NYC), Harris School of Public Policy (Chicago) 2. **Tech trainings / skill shares**: Girls Who Code, RailsBridge, Library digital literacy programs (all in multiple cities) #### Shine a spotlight Speculating on motivations can be a dicey game, particularly when you start to intermingle civic and commercial interests. It’s easy to think that entrepreneurs getting into the civic space are motivated by cash, and cash alone. But as so many cities have shown, there are ways to engage, encourage, and mobilize entreprenuers without putting dollars up. Let them know that the city is behind them, that the city supports them, and that they are helping _their_ city. Leverage the city’s _voice_ as _capital_, its bully pulpit. 1. **Media**: Technical.ly (Philadelphia, DC, etc) 2. **Contests:** [NYC Big Apps](http://bigapps.nyc/p/), [LA2050](https://www.la2050.org/), OpenDataRace (Philadelphia) 3. **Mayoral / Celebrity recognition:** [Hack for LA & I.am.Angel Foundation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12r-3PechX4), Mayor’s participation in hackathons (multiple cities) #### Erect New Civic (Digital) Infrastructure > You see, greatness for a state doesn’t require some huge monument for all to see. It is not a journey to a particular destination — but a commitment to follow a course of constant and never-ending improvement.” — Sonny Perdue Before there were town halls and public parks where citizens would congregate; those still exist, to be sure, but the conversation has moved. Online. (In large part.) What’s needed then is investment in new kinds of civic infrastructure to facilitate participation — both big and small — in our digital age. 1. **Civic Apps with Community Engagement**: [City Answers & Write-a-thons](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2012/08/13/honolulu-answers/); [LocalWiki](http://localwiki.org); [Textizen](https://www.textizen.com/); [Remix](http://getremix.com/); [Madison by OpenGov Foundation](http://www.routefifty.com/2016/01/dc-open-data-madison/125129/) 2. [**Open data**](https://medium.comrethinking-data-portals-30b66f00585d) #### Go to where people are > “…government of the people, by the people, and for the people..” — Lincoln As new tools and interfaces emerge in the civic space, there’s always the tendency towards the new and shiny. This not only undermines the value of established groups and institutions, but misses the point entirely of the purpose of civic life — to be of and by the people. That’s why we’re seeing really _smart_ cities build for inclusion, be it through relying on billboards or bus stops to get the word out, or knocking on doors to get user feedback, or connecting to existing networks of citizens and empowering them with new means for their central goals. These clever cities are connecting the digital and the analog to get the job done. 1. **On-the-ground, continuous feedback**: [Civic User Testing Group](http://www.cutgroup.org/) (Chicago) 2. **Ongoing outreach / user engagement**: [NYC311](https://www.behance.net/gallery/4277419/NYC-311) (physical ads), [City Hall to Go](http://www.cityofboston.gov/cityhalltogo/) (Boston) 3. **Existing community organizations**: [LISC](http://www.lisc-chicago.org/index.html) (Chicago), [Neighborhood Councils](https://www.lacity.org/city-government/subscribe-meeting-agendas-and-more/neighborhood-councils) (LA), [CfA Brigades](http://brigade.codeforamerica.org) _As stated, this is a working list of themes and tactics (which is arguably a bit dated, given the pace of change in the field, and certainly biased towards the cities I’ve worked with). Please share your ideas, comments, or edits. — AN_ --- # 7 Tactics for 21st Century Cities > Seven ways for modern city halls to innovate. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/principles/2016/02/04/7-Tactics-for-21st-Century-Cities/ Published: 2016-02-04 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Be it the burden placed on them by shrinking federal support, or the opportunity presented by modern technology, 21st-century cities are finding new ways to do things. For years, [Code for America](http://www.govtech.com/data/Code-for-America-Innovation-Ecosystem.html) has worked with dozens of cities, each finding creative ways to solve neighborhood problems, build local capacity and steward a national network. These aren’t one-offs. Cities are championing fundamental, institutional reforms to commit to an ongoing innovation agenda. Here are a few of the ways how: ### 1\. CREATE A SPACE TO EXPERIMENT. Cities should commit to innovation by creating offices or departments dedicated to trying things differently and making it safe for others to do so. Such risk aggregators are the first step toward reinvigorating a culture of experimentation within city hall. > **Action item:** Create an office of New Urban Mechanics or appoint a Chief Innovation Officer. ### 2\. USE GOOD DATA FOR BETTER DECISIONS. Governments — especially cities — steward much data, and government officials can use it to make better decisions on resource allocation, performance improvement and even policies. But remember that not all data is created equally, and data gains meaning with context. > **Action item:** Appoint a Chief Data Officer or create an Office of Performance management/Enhancement. ### 3\. DESIGN FOR/WITH CITIZENS. In many ways, governments are like any other business: They need tools for customers (citizens) to interact with them. But governments can’t slice their customers into demographic groups, targeting some and excluding others: Government serves us all. Through user-driven design, ongoing feedback, and rigorous testing and iterations, government websites can continually connect with more citizens, more effectively. > **Action item:** Adopt the Gov.UK Design Principles, and require plain, human language on every interface. ### 4\. DON’T BE AN ISLAND. Our 21st-century public institutions were created with an 18th-century notion of technology. With no national communication infrastructure, we built cities as silos, each operating within a geographical proximity of its own as an autonomous, distinct unit, though they were tasked with essentially the same mandate. Things have changed. Cities can now work together to pool resources and share best practices. > **Action item:** Share open source technology with a sister city or change procurement rules to make it easier to redeploy civic tech. ### 5\. TAP INTO THE COMMUNITY’S CAPACITY. Technologists are helping write websites and build new tools in their free time; teenagers are texting in their input to city plans as they walk down the street; volunteers are coordinating emergency response with smartphones; and neighbors are hosting Meetups for community watch groups and cleanups. > **Action item:** Work with the local civic tech community and engage citizens for their feedback on city policy through events, tech and existing forums. ### 6\. BIAS TOWARD OPEN. Closed systems tend toward control, while open ones tend toward innovation. Open systems begin with the belief that the best idea won’t always come from the people in the room, or in this case, city hall. Instead, as the Internet has evidenced time and time again, opening up access to data and opportunities leads to wildly emergent, amazing and valuable outcomes. > **Action item:** Create an open data policy and adopt open data specifications. ### 7\. TAKE TECH SERIOUSLY. Technology no longer lives in the IT department. Each element of a government — trucks, buildings, pipes, services — has a technology component, and more often, Web-based and citizen-facing apps. That demands rethinking of how each of those very services could be delivered via technology. Thus, new skills and perspective must seep into city hall via fellowships, volunteers, trainings or hiring. > **Action item:** Attract tech talent into city leadership, and create training opportunities citywide to level up the tech literacy for city staff. **_This post originally appeared in_** [**_Government Technology Magazine_**](http://www.govtech.com/data/7-Tactics-for-21st-Century-Cities.html)**_._** --- # The Trumpet Summons Us Again > On JFK’s Inaugural Address URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2016/01/08/The-Trumpet-Summons-Us-Again/ Published: 2016-01-08 Author: Abhi Nemani --- A skeptical public, a looming enemy, and a D.C. winter; On January 20, 1961, Kennedy faced a daunting task. He had won the Presidency of the United States by a fraction — a mere 12,000 votes. He was a Catholic, rich kid, and now he had to fill the shoes of Dwight Eisenhower, the man who won the Second World War. The presidency itself is an unfathomable challenge, and it begins with a tremendous responsibility: the inaugural. History’s cold eye judges these speeches, and they often serve as a focal point in an administration. Thus, Kennedy’s task was great, and so was his speech. His oratory refocused the American system on its founding principles, while expanding them to confront the current crises. With a keen awareness of his audience and breathtaking use of prose, he crafted a concise, but effective speech. More than anything, he set the tone for his administration, not as lofty idealism, but as purposeful realism. ### Context of the Inaugural Aristotle defined the art of rhetoric as the ability to see what is possibly persuasive. This demands an understanding of the context and the audience of a speech. Our rhetorical analysis will thus begin with a discussion of the circumstances, broad and immediate, surrounding Kennedy’s inaugural address. In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy declared his intentions to seek the presidency. Aside from southern opposition from Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy enjoyed general success in the primary season, though his Catholicism and youth forced a vigorous campaign. After the convention, he tapped Johnson for the bottom of the ticket, adding age and southern support to his campaign. In the general election, they faced the sitting Vice-President, Republican Richard Nixon. The Democrats exploited Nixon’s association with President Eisenhower and tagged him with negligence in curbing the U.S.S.R.’s growth economically and militarily. The U.S.S.R. had grown dramatically and was poised to eclipse the United States on the international stage, while growing increasingly hostile. Republicans fought back with questions of Kennedy’s Catholicism. Eventually, he had to make a public statement, distancing himself from the Church of Rome: “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.” This nonsectarian Christianity, as long as his youth, shaped his character greatly in the public eye. Political posturing helped, but his religious affiliation still plagued Kennedy in the election, keeping the polls close. Inevitably, national security trumped religious discrimination. By chastising the growing “missile gap” — the difference in numbers between the U.S.S.R. and America in ballistic missiles — Kennedy garnered enough support to ensure a — albeit small — victory. On November 8, 1960, he won the general election by one tenth of one percent. This victory was small; it was far short of any governable mandate. Thus, Kennedy had considerable work to do to capture public trust and support to implement his New Frontier agenda, a set of domestic policies emphasizing government assistance and growth. These policies had not received tremendous approval, initially and during the campaign. In Theodore Sorensen’s analysis of the 1960 victory, he does not mention domestic policy as one of the seven top decisive factors. Going into his presidency and his inaugural, Kennedy would have to be careful in his handling of domestic policy. One of the top reasons for victory Sorenson does list is Kennedy’s television personality. The 1960 elections provided the first televised presidential debates. In these debates, Kennedy confounded expectations and demonstrated more poise and confidence than the sweaty Nixon. Sorenson cites this advantage as crucial to a win. Kennedy had an acute awareness the television and media played on public opinion. These factors all weighed in on Kennedy’s inaugural. Kennedy had to deal with questionable domestic support, a daunting international system, and new media. If the art of rhetoric if finding a way to handle the circumstances and still persuade your audience, to be effective, Kennedy’s inaugural would have to be a masterpiece. #### The Creation & Goals of the Speech To adequately understand the art of Kennedy’s inaugural, one must appreciate its origins. The staff, officially, began work on the speech in the beginning of 1961. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s top aid and speechwriter, had started laying the ground work considerably earlier. As we will see later, much of the inaugural’s diction and phrasing originated from 1960 campaign. This may seen impure, but it is fairly commonsensical. The President-elect has just spent that last year laying out his ideology and beliefs, and inevitably effective formulations would linger and even sneak into the inaugural. In his memoirs, Sorensen cites the Acceptance Speech in Los Angeles and televised campaign addresses as the source for many notable phrases. ![Table comparing JFK campaign speech lines with the inaugural address](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__Mb94ZPg4gRakGE4xY5FZkw.png) Thus, the speech, itself, was a kind of amalgamation of lines from previous speeches, a near highlight reel of the top pieces of tested rhetoric. This quality made each line a possible “sound-bite” in the new age of television. The choice to have each line very precise and self-contained demonstrates Sorensen’s and Kennedy’s keen awareness of the media and the broader audience. Though campaign rhetoric played a key role in the creation, the New Frontier and domestic policy were slighted. In his memoirs, Sorensen recounts the difficulty crafting nonpartisan domestic policy sections of the speech. Eventually, Kennedy eased the speechwriter’s burden: He told Sorensen, “Let’s drop the domestic stuff altogether. It’s too long anyway. It’s more effective that way \[without domestic policy\] and I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.” This decision to exclude domestic policy allowed the speech to focus on foreign policy, a more uniting topic where the President-elect had already scored political points. According to Sorensen, Kennedy “wanted it focused on foreign policy. He did not want it to sound partisan, pessimistic or critical of his predecessor. He wanted neither the customary cold war rhetoric about the Communist menace nor any weasel words that Khrushchev might misinterpret. And he wanted it to set a tone for the era about to begin.” Thus the inaugural’s goals were harmony among friends and a novel, yet civil handling of enemies. Now let’s us begin to examine not the art of the text, but its execution of those goals. ### JANUARY 20, 1960 There is no greater stage. Overshadowing the assemblage of statesman, foreign dignitaries, and Presidents, Kennedy commanded the east balcony of a newly painted Capitol with thousands of eager fans, battling the cold to see their new leader. His address, though, was to an even greater audience. Kennedy used this opportunity to speak to all members of the international community, allies, enemies and all Americans. He had a special message, a pledge or request, for each, and he structured his speech in that manner. #### INTRODUCTION Kennedy began his inaugural with a traditional introduction, acknowledging the great leaders in the audience and then the great legacy before him. He grounds himself in the American tradition, reminding everyone, “I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbearers prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.” Also, this attempts to counterbalance Kennedy’s youth — he was only 43 when elected. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of the American Founding and its principles for Kennedy. This theme continues throughout the speech, while Kennedy ties America’s course in the international situation to its guiding principles. Immediately, he makes it explicit: “…the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” Thus, Kennedy set the ideological framework for his foreign policy, expanding the American view of freedom to the world. Scholar Robert Bellah takes this interpretation one step further by focusing on the reference to “Almighty God.” He argues that Kennedy’s mention of divinity while reference to his constitutional oath elevates his responsibility from just serving the American people to more universal goods. This theme will return later in the speech. Though Kennedy emphasizes the ideas in the Founding, he is quick to distinguish his people from past Americans: “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” In this section, Kennedy is most apparently employing his character for rhetorical purposes. He turns his youth around to symbolize a new generation, contrasting the older, quieter Eisenhower. Moreover, Kennedy had served in WWII and witnessed the calcification of the Cold War. This section identifies the new President as one who has a new perspective and a basis for his views. Paragraph 4 closes with the mobilization of the Declaration of Independence, summarizing Kennedy’s general policy to “assure the survival and the success of liberty.” #### FRIENDS, ALLIES, AND SISTERS Structurally, the speech continues to address the different members of the international community. Kennedy begins with the allies. The content of this section is largely traditional (“we pledge… loyalty”), but Kennedy’s style is still noticed. The lines, “United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do,” begin to demonstrate the speeches technical beauty. This is an example of anastrophe — deviating from the normal order of words — a rhetorical device probably unknown to the audience, yet still powerful in delivery. Next, Kennedy addresses new members of the free world. In his section, he tempers his idealism with a refreshing touch of realism. He does not expect the free, skeptical world to follow America without question. Moreover, Kennedy places responsibility for their success not in his hands, but in theirs: “we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom.” This continues later in his address to the people still shackled by “mass misery,” when he promises to “help them help themselves.” Pragmatically, he makes it clear that America cannot be the world’s keeper, singlehandedly, nor should it be. Kennedy’s view of government (later immortalized with “ask not”) demands joint responsibility and service to society — as seen in his creation of the Peace Corp. In his inaugural, Kennedy expanded that sense of responsibility to freedom loving people across the globe.He continues to with a call for international cooperation. First, to the “sisters” to the south, Central and South America, he pledges a “new alliance of progress” to cast off the “chains of poverty.” Pragmatism immediately follows and contrasts this idealism. “…this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.” Though lofty, this policy emphasizes national security, keeping the U.S.S.R. off our borders, again demonstrating his practical idealism. The “friends” section closes with a vigilant promise to aid the U.N. from becoming “merely a forum for incentive.” #### “TO THOSE NATIONS WHO WOULD MAKE THEMSELVES OUR ADVERSARY” Throughout the speech, Kennedy makes somewhat vague references to the U.S.S.R. (“iron tyranny,” “back of the tiger,” “hostile powers,” etc). It should be noted that he never directly names our Cold War adversary or any specific country for that matter. Yet the intention rings true. When he addresses “those nations who would make themselves our adversary” everyone knows who he is talking about. In these sections, Kennedy truly demonstrates the excellence in his character. Embodying a true statesman, he unabashedly confronts the perils of the present, while striving for a better peace. Moreover, he reminds both sides the incentive to peaceful recourse, safety from “the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science.” He begins with the basis for his “request” and then continues to outlines a rough set of goals for the cold relationship. The first goal is on based on western side of the Atlantic: “We dare not tempt them with weakness.” This sentiment reverberates with Kennedy’s campaign, where he played the “missile gap” effectively. Some saw his next line as unnecessarily alarmist: “For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” Nonetheless, only minutes earlier Kennedy had reminded the war that this generation was “tempered by war, and disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” He had fought in a war, and he was not willing to get in another, let alone lose one. Moreover, he had intimated this sentiment before, demonstrating his honest belief that the U.S.S.R. only responded to strength. After that note of national self-interest, he again opens the doors to more peaceful and friendly cooperation. He admits the flaws with over-militarization (“the spread of the deadly atom”) and then begins his litany of requests from both sides. They requests themselves are nothing extraordinary; they are basic calls for the use of the positive ends of human nature and science, civility and exploration (the closest reference to the New Frontier). Technically, however, these lines are breathtaking. First, each begins with the phrase “let us.” This is a classic example of anaphora, a tool Kennedy used often and even earlier in the speech. This repetition tied together the requests, while adding structure to each individual one. The first call, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” employs chiasmus, a device where phrases are reversed in order in successive sentences. This links not negotiating and desperately negotiating, emphasizing their common ineffectiveness. The other key rhetorical device in these sections and in the inaugural overall is antithesis, a juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas. More specifically, Kennedy often used the “not\_\__, but_\_\_” construction, as seen in the lines, “let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law…” This device is throughout the speech, adding rhetorical beauty, but in this section, it serves a symbolic purpose as well. Antithesis pairs together contrasting ideas, shunning one and accepting the other. This construction — joined, parallel phrases with a preference of one — symbolizes Kennedy’s view of the Cold War. Though he asked for peaceful cooperation, he still maintain a strong ideological preference for the American system, and this sentiment is seen and furthered throughout the inaugural. #### MY FELLOW CITIZENS Kennedy transitions from his address to the U.S.S.R. to one the American people with a note of realism: “All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days.” Here he manages to shirk off the expectations set by FDR or any timeline. Then he finishes the repeated “let” phrases with “let us begin.” This use of the first person plural along with the mention of 100 days stages and transitions to his discussion of national issues and priorities. In these sections, Kennedy again makes the surprising transfer of responsibility. Just as he called on sovereign nations to “help themselves,” he tells the American people, “In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.” This sentiment may seem odd coming from a man who has just sworn to “protect, serve, and defend” the Constitution. It would seem that when a President-elect places his hand on the bible and the other in the air, those hands are really picking up responsibility for success or failure. Kennedy circumvents this logic with the help of history. “Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.” This responsibility has been and is the people’s duty. Thus, he places responsibility in the citizens’ hands; the hands that buried the fallen in the previous wars, the hands would carry the weapons in the future ones. Again Kennedy promptly follows the mention of past generations with mentions of the uniqueness of the moment. “Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” The trumpet reference harkens a biblical sentiment, emphasizing the higher purpose of the current undertaking. It is this higher and broader purpose against the common enemies of man that makes it a “historic effort.” These broad and idealistic phrases and calls may seem impractical, but they serve a real purpose for the speech. They give the speech a more optimistic feel, playing to the public’s pride: “I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation.” By making this movement unique, more would be willing to join or support it. At this point, Kennedy has captured the immediate audience’s trust (The crowd did yell “Yes” to Kennedy’s query, “Will you join in that historic effort?”). He had devoted the speech to persuading free people — abroad and at home — to accept the responsibility of their freedom. This culminated with the immortal line, “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” If the “success of liberty” defined Kennedy’s philosophy of government, then “ask not…” summarized his view of citizenship. The use of antithesis here is powerful, as it highlighted the drastic reversals of commonly accepted views. Kennedy closes his inaugural address with a practical understanding that this undertaking has no tangible positives (“good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds”), but he justifies its undertaking by touching on higher purposes. The last section cites many of the key motivating forces in American life, “good conscience,” patriotism (“land we love”), and the divine (“His blessing and His help”). The successive placement of these strong drives adds energy to the closing summation, “here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” Bellah cites that line, coupled with the other religious allusions, as the simplest formulation of Kennedy’s philosophy and — arguably — the overall American purpose. ### Conclusion Broadly, Kennedy’s speech served as an expansion of the American Founding. It takes the fundamental principles of our democracy and mobilizes them against tyranny abroad and apathy at home. Kennedy’s rhetoric employs classical themes (duty) and techniques (antithesis), emphasizing the seriousness of purpose. Moreover, the technical beauty and apparent thoughtfulness worked to combat the general tendency to write off Kennedy as a naïve idealist. These techniques complemented his realist evaluation of the unstable international order. Thus, he gave his foreign policy practicality, necessity, and righteousness. Though simply put, this task would be too much for one man or one office. To ensure the success of liberty, he had to ensure all those who wanted it worked for it, from countries to people. Overall, President Kennedy, confronted by distrust and disharmony, began his short-lived presidency by summoning the better angels of our nature, civility and responsibility. ### Resources * Aristotle. Rhetoric. n.d. * Bellah, Robert. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus (Cambridge) (2005): 40–55. * Burton, Gideon O. Silva Rhetoricae. 26 February 2007. Bringham Young University. 30 April 2007 * Clarke, Thurston. Ask Not. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. * Kennedy, John Fitzgerald. “JFK Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.” 12 September 1960. American Rhetoric. 30 April 2007 * Sorensen, Theodore C. Kennedy. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. * Tofel, Richard J. Sounding the Trumpet. Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2005. --- # Things I’d like this GovGeek to talk about differently in 2016 URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2016/01/01/Things-I-d-like-this-govgeek-to-talk-about-differently-in-2016/ Published: 2016-01-01 Author: Abhi Nemani --- !["2016 > 2015 #govgeek" banner](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__YUZyk5Q46lOd5OS97imW9g.png) Moving into the new year, I wanted to take a (short) minute to write down a few of the things I learned in 2015. And I wanted to write these down as personal reminders about how I talk / write about these things moving forward. It’s easy to slip back into what’s comfortable or what’s vogue — and to forget the [on-the-ground truths](https://medium.coma-year-in-la-8f4aa3a63ba7#.r1x64a9yj) you witnessed firsthand. _I’m told I’m a fast-forgetter._ In that spirit, here are a few topics I hope to speak to with a bit more sophistication, appreciation, and nuance in 2016. And you better believe this will be a running list… #### **Procurement** No, it’s not the 1,000 pound gorilla in the room we all make it out to be. Worse, the more we talk it up as the fundamental (or “insurmountable”) barrier to new SaaS startups, the less inclined they are to get into the game: it’s a self-fulfilling, dire prophesy. Truly it’s more of an antiquated system ripe for [small](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2015/12/23/recapping-the-california-child-welfare-technology-vendor-forums-part-1/) hacks and [simpler](https://18f.gsa.gov/rfpez/) interfaces. And those we are already starting to see. Instead the harder structural problem comes by way of a painful, rigid budgeting process and the need for [discretionary, innovation-friendly, on-demand reserves](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/06/los-angeles-rolls-out-a-million-dollar-vc-fund-just-for-city-employees/) to just. get. things. done. * _Reframe_: Let’s stop trying to fix procurement since it was a system built for “[buying pencils](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bK9B8_0FDQ)” and instead build _new interfaces and processes that are modern and startup-friendly from the start_. #### **Open data** No, it won’t magically turn your city into Silicon Valley, nor will it overnight rid your city of lobbying, undue influence, or political corruption. There’s only so much accountability or economic firepower laden in the few hundred datasets voluntarily published online by an institution not usually known for _single-handedly_ doing either. * _Reframe_: Data is just data, and what matters isn’t how much is published, but how much is used. And to what end. The conversation needs to shift away from inventories and publication calendars to [user needs](http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/work/ecosystem/chicago-school-of-data/) and [integration](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-partnership-waze-20150421-story.html) [partnerships](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2013/01/17/foodies-and-open-data-enthusiasts-rejoice/): _give users the data they want where they want it._ #### Legacy Systems No, old, antiquated, disconnected systems aren’t insurmountable. Yes, they often give entrepreneurs (and some civil servants) nightmares. Many — if not most — are so barren or so underutilized or so abandoned that a wholesale replacement isn’t untenable; and more to the point: if you get to the core need, focus there, and chip away at the legacy system, I suspect you’ll find out that a top-to-bottom replacement or full-scale integration would not be necessary — particularly if you’re building front-end consumer interaction apps or managerial dashboards/reports. * _Reframe_: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. To borrow a phrase from a old colleague, you can get a lot done by just drilling little holes into the decaying IT edifice. Think more about [small pieces loosely joined](https://medium.comsmall-city-pieces-loosely-joined-5202fb5a93e3), not big integrations atop shoddy foundations. #### Digital Services Units No, not every city in the county can build out a GDS, USDS, 18F, or even the smaller efforts being launched by SF, Philly, LA and others: that model just doesn’t scale. _(I should admit here in some of those cases, I’m personally at fault for kickstarting those.)_ Smaller townships lack the funding to resource such teams and the local talent (sometimes) to staff them. Plus, it’s just not a terribly leveraged approach to a coast-to- coast digital services transformation. * _Reframe_: This one is hard, because I don’t see a fully realized model ([though there’s the start of one](https://medium.comsmall-city-pieces-loosely-joined-5202fb5a93e3)) we can point to. In terms of vernacular however I would argue that we must focus the conversation on the _services_ themselves, not necessarily the teams or structures other, bigger governments deployed to build them. And then continue to have vibrant, humble conversations with smaller jurisdictions and new startups/organizations on how to solve this “last mile” problem. (And in truth, it’s much, much more than just the last mile; it’s more like the _second mile problem_.) #### Volunteer civic hacking No, it really can’t be all volunteer. Time for organizing is needed; money for pizza and beer; space for getting together; listservs for community building; technical resources for hosting; materials for marketing. And to top all that off, you need storytellers working with media outlets to make sure what happens in a hack night doesn’t just stay there; each story _must_ spread to have outsized impact. That means that even if the majority of folks can — probably happily — volunteer their time in the moment of a hack night, hackathon, or app contest, none of that will really matter in any kind of sustainable, influential way of someone(s) or something(s) are compensated for (and thus responsible for) their time to create the conditions for volunteerism to matter. * _Reframe_: local nonprofits, B-Corps, or even [civic minded for-profits](http://compiler.la) need to take an active role is housing and shepherding the civic tech community. People (at least some) need to be paid. And that’s not just to support viability of the local movement, but also to ensure staying power, to open up the doors a broader range audiences as leaders, and to — plainly — keep the to-date volunteer leaders from losing their minds. _If_ [_community is really going to be capacity_](https://medium.combuilding-blocks-of-an-open-data-civic-tech-community-96652bf34c10#.r84loxrzw) _for local innovation, then we must invest in it._ More to come… please share your thoughts, responses, and ideas! --- # Putting Open Data to Work > Best practices from the field and a path forward for data visualization, innovation, and community-building URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2015/12/28/Putting-Open-Data-Work/ Published: 2015-12-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Keynote --- Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149984557 Last evening, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Remi, the conference organizer, where we started talking about the conference, about data, and about the goals for this conversation. “What are the goals for this conference?,” I asked. He repeatedly mentioned one question: how do we drive value from data. We’re all opening up lots of data, you heard about New York opening 2,000+ data sets, so you’re seeing lots of data get out there, and you’re seeing measures like [$3 trillion dollars of value apparently coming out of it.](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/open_data_unlocking_innovation_and_performance_with_liquid_information) All of us _have_ to be asking the question: How do we actually take this data that is being opened up and turn it into meaning, turn it into value, turn it into social outcomes that make our cities work better? Today, I’m going to give a little bit of a different presentation than was initially built, based on that conversation — written hurriedly at the hotel last night — so again, apologies that this is a little off the cuff. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about how to build a civic technology ecosystem. How do you get the various different actors within a city using data to derive meaning? You’re going to hear a lot of conversations today, you’ve heard them already, about data science and data analytics, about how you can take data and do really deep and meaningful analysis. We’re doing that in LA, we’re doing some modeling around how to reduce some pedestrian auto collisions, how to reduce worker’s compensation, but what I’m focused on a lot is how we actually build this community. I wanted to share that with you all, if you’re all right with me going a little bit off the cuff. The question you have to ask is how do we put data to work within the community. Before we do that though, I want to see a show of hands. How many people work for the government? Not that many. How many people work for the private sector? Great. How many people work for NGOs and Academics? What you’re seeing here is a really broad spectrum of attendees. Typically, I go speak at government conferences, where it’s all kinds of bureaucrats like me and we all just talk about how annoying procurement is, but instead here we’ve got this cross-spectrum of people, and so the question is how do each of you, in your various different roles, work together to use open data effectively? I’ve got four key principles, the first is focusing on the user. ### Focus on the User This is a picture of our first data portal from the city of Los Angeles. ![DataLA open data portal homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_XagIg9Nsbjy3rC04R3K-Gw.png) This was launched in June 2014, about seven months ago. I started a few months after the launch — in September — and I figured it was a good opportunity to get some feedback and do some user testing. I went around and started doing some basic user feedback. I just knocked on doors and asked people, “Does this site work for you? Are you able to get the data you need from this interface?” It was interesting, very interesting, in fact, the feedback that I got the most kind of blew my mind. It was, “Abhi, yeah… kind of, but I don’t know what data is.” “What is data?” was the question that I got asked the most. Even someone in my office asked me that question. > “What is data?” was the question that I got asked the most. What I decided then is we should think about interaction around open data that visualizes it compellingly, to let people really know what data is and how it affects them. Simply enough, we redesigned the portal a month ago, this is the new look of [data.lacity.org](http://data.lacity.org) and just at the front it’s pretty basic. ![Los Angeles open data map of February building permits](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_P1-8oirxs26tsm-wTFoqDQ.png) We just put a map, we put points on a map that’s kind of beautiful, it’s Easter themed, because we’re coming up to Easter. It shows building permits that you can actually zoom in and find them near you. Scroll down, there’s search functionality, there’s discovery functionality like you see in most data portals, but the key feature was I wanted to say right there front and center, here’s the data that can matter to you. We keep it relevant too; if there’s a particular event one week, like this last weekend in Los Angeles we had a big bike festival called CicLAvia, where they shut down parts of the street to let people just bike all along the street, so we put a map of the route front-and center. We made it relevant and visual, and here’s what happened when we did that. ![Chart: data.lacity.org bounce rate fell from 50% to 5% after the redesign](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_iLBUZy5JvXlk-XixLNrt9g.png) The bounce rate, for anybody who knows technology, this is like if you go to a website and you don’t find what you need and you leave immediately, that’s called bouncing off the site. Our bounce rate before hand was 50%, half the people that came to data.lacity.gov went right away, not great for me. **It dropped to 5%**. Just by talking to people, figuring out what they wanted, what their problems were with the interface, had this kind of a dramatic shift in less than a month. > Just by talking to people, figuring out what they wanted, what their problems were with the interface, had this kind of a dramatic shift in less than a month. I bring this up as we think about building open data experiences, if you think about building open data programs, keep in mind the user. Here’s just a preview by the way, of what the new data view site will be... right now it’s just spreadsheets on the internet, which it is. If you just go, it looks like a spreadsheet on the internet. This is what it’s going to look like soon, where every data set is going to be visualized and made interactive for people to explore and understand in a more meaningful way: ![Data portal dashboard with charts of permits by type and council district](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_bvaocQwVkyQ2MgANVknOgw.png) That’s the first principle, focus on the user. The next thing I think is, changing the citizen’s experience. ### Change the Citizen Experience We tend to think of open data as something that’s on a portal or maybe on an app that someone’s built, or maybe you download to your computer and do some research on. I think that’s just the start, because the open data that we’re providing can be really meaningful to private businesses, and the interactions you all are creating every day for citizens. There’s no reason you can’t put this data to work for your company. Here’s an example of that. The Atlantic wrote this article, How Yelp might help clean up the restaurant inspection industry. In the states, we have these things, these are restaurant inspection scores, do you have these in France? Yeah. Are they usually hidden in the back of the restaurant, where you can’t see them? Yeah. This is a problem, right, because you want to get this information before you choose to go to the restaurant, let alone when you go into the restroom after you’ve ordered the main course. What we thought of, this is when I was back at Code for America was, can we take this data that typically is hidden, and put it into the palm of your hand? Trulia is a very popular apartment search website, having recently moved to Los Angeles, I can tell you it’s very valuable, even though rents are really high. What they did is they took building inspection data; is your landlord a good landlord? Do they keep the building up to code? Are there termites, are there rats? The city is actually doing a lot of work to inspect that, they send inspectors to apartment buildings to see what’s happening, but again, that data, that information typically lives in some code enforcement, frankly piece of paper. If you’re lucky, excel page, if you’re really lucky, web page, but no one is lucky enough to actually have a citizen go to that web page and check it out before they pick an apartment. ![Trulia listing with a House Facts panel showing past code violations](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_W8oGyMmncIiI3y7QGQpP9g.png) I’m sure none of you have ever done that before picking a place to live. Now, any time you’re looking for a place in a place that has this open data, you get that right in front of you. For the private sector folks in the room, I would encourage you to think about this: Think about the work that you’re doing, and how you might be able to integrate open data into it, to improve your business operations, but also to improve the experience of the customers that you have. The broader point here is, instead of thinking about building more civic applications, which is what we tend to think about, [how do we make all apps a bit more civic](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/ubers-as-ambulances-4e3a2db3880b)? The third piece here is enabling community. ### Enabling a Community Brett talked a little bit about what keeps him up at night, this is what wakes me up in the morning. The idea of building a really thriving, engaged, civic technology community within my city, within Los Angeles. What I did when I came to LA is I took some time to study what worked in other cities. In my past role at Code for America, we spent a lot of time working with other cities to set up their open government, open data organizations. We worked with cities like Chicago, like New York, and like Boston, to actually develop their open data communities. I took some time, I sat down and said, “All right, what do we do, what worked, what didn’t work, and what might be a model for us to apply here in Los Angeles?” The first thing you have to do is you have to create a place where people can work on good problems — _where good people can work on good problems_. This sounds simple, just like having a place where people can come together, but it’s very powerful, because what right now, what typically happens with open data is somebody will go into their basement with their computer, go to a web site and pull it down and work on it themselves. Maybe they’ll go to a coffee shop and meet with a couple of their friends and work on it together, but never do those communities get stitched together, unless you find a way for them to come together. Second is building an identity. People like being part of a group, people like having their tribe. You need to create that sense of identity, and it’s code for Boston, there’s Beta NYC, it’s frankly as easy as creating a brand, but once you do that, you can start putting stickers in the back of laptops, as you might see for some people over here, you can start having common message boards and threads, you can just create a sense of all of these people are part of a common group, and that creates group cohesion. It’s not just random people meeting up randomly, you’re a part of this group. ### Make a Challenge Then, you’ve got a challenge of them to get something done, and here I’m talking to mostly the folks who work inside government. It’s us who see the really hard problems from the other side of the counter. It’s us who see the challenges that need fixing, that too often don’t get fixed, so we need to create mechanisms where we can give those ideas, give those opportunities to citizens who are interested in using our data, and say, “Love that you’re interested in our data, love that you’re interested in making our city better, here’s something you can do, here’s a hill that you can take.” In Los Angeles last year, we did something like this, we had a #techLA competition. It was a 24 hour hackathon, and they built an app that made it easier to find homeless shelters, which I know this is something you’re passionate about, and the great thing is the winners of one more thing were all in high school. ![LA Times headline: a team of high-schoolers wins the #techLA competition](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_SXewMDRODNUpCvS90CXZhQ.png) It’s really people of all ages who are able to use this data to solve problems. This year, instead of just doing the one hackathon, as I was mentioning, because we want to make it a more of a community building effort, we’re doing a broader year long what we’re calling _X Prize for LA_, where we’re actually challenging people around key issue areas, for instance water conservation, which is a central challenge for us in Los Angeles, also immigration reform. Taking these big issues that we have and saying, “Hey citizens, you’re interested in working with us? Here are the things that we want you to do, and if you do it, we’re going to help you out. We’re going to give you resources, we might give you a city contract, we might get you a Hollywood star to do an ad for you, because we’re in Los Angeles and we can do that.” We’re thinking creatively about the way that we can motivate people to take on these challenges. Finally, I want to talk about the fourth piece, which is institutions. ### Work with, not against Institutions One thing we talked about last night was this question of sustainability. You might build something interesting while you have it, chief data officer in office, but what happens if that guy leaves, or that woman leaves? What happens if that major turns over? This is where I think institution building is really important. You’ve got to build a culture within City Hall, and then you also have to build capacity outside of City Hall. Here’s one way we’re trying to build culture within City Hall. We’ve been working in this program in performance management, and the mayor one day said, “Hey Abhi, can we build a dashboard that I can track all of this stuff on?” He actually asked me that on a January 2nd, and wanted it done by a January 6th. Sometimes things move fast in government. ![Los Angeles mayor's dashboard with job growth and building permit charts](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_2Q9hX6S3Kss7bhANLtKUvA.png) We built this dashboard for the city. The reason I bring this up is for two reasons. One, the way we built it was on Google docs. A lot of times, people within the government don’t have as much technical familiarity, they can’t go in and edit code on GitHub for instance, but they can at a Google doc or spreadsheet. ![Spreadsheet that feeds the mayor's dashboard metrics](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_U6w0_RXmZ9jrIEE9NhMTPg.png) The second reason I bring it up is, after we built this for the major and we sent it around the city, I can’t tell you the number of departments that reached out to me and said, “Hey, we want a dashboard just like that.” That’s called momentum, and that momentum can lead to culture change. That’s what we’re trying to do within the city, so even if major’s office staff turns over in 4 years, hopefully 8, there’ll still be that capacity within the organizations themselves, within the departments themselves, around technology. That’s only part of it, and I keep talking about Chicago, which I kind of hate, because Brett’s loving this. Chicago has this great organization called Smart Chicago Collaborative. It’s a collaboration between the city, between the Chicago trust and the MacArthur Foundation. It’s a non-profit specifically focused on using technology for good. What I love about what they do is they’re committed to taking the innovations out of hackathons or out of hack nights and turning them from one off projects into sustainable solutions. They do things like make grants to teams that build interesting things, they take fellows from these groups and say, “Hey, come spend a year working with us on this problem,” and they provide things like free hosting, that make it easier, that lower the barrier to entry for sustainable solutions. I love this model, and when I went to LA, I told myself, we need to recreate this in Los Angeles. I’m pleased to tell you that we actually have, we built an organization called [Compiler.LA](http://Compiler.LA), which is our version of Smart Chicago. What they’re doing is building civic technology, so they’re working with non-profits, with the governments, and helping them solve solutions directly. More importantly, they’ve committed 10% of all revenue generated from any contracts they have to community building. This means we’re going to have an actual source of ongoing revenue to fund innovation throughout the city that doesn’t come from the city government. Back to that point about sustainability, this creates a capacity within the community that’s there long term. ![CityGrows.LA map of proposed projects](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_Q4h1pMogs9P-gWvVRZEU3g.jpg) This is an example of something that they built, it’s called CityGrows.LA, and what they do is they track all permits within the city, they scrape it from our website and let people comment on whether they like it or not. It’s own kind of crowd source planning effort. The last thing I’ll just say about the community side is it’s great to have individual organizations like Smart Chicago, like Compiler.LA doing this work, but to really grow and sustain the broader civic technology movement, we need serious capital, and I think someone back there said the word venture capital, so we should talk after this. What we need are real investments to take an organization that’s built a prototype and help them become a startup. That’s what venture capital helps do. The one I just want to call, there’s a couple of great foundations that do this work. There’s one in LA called Goldhirsh, but I want to call out the GovTech fund, because this came out of our work at Code for America. At Code for America, we built this accelerator to help take what we call Civic Startups, which are government focused for-profit technology companies, and help them scale. It worked remarkably well. The companies that we worked with, one of them went from 100 clients to 650 over the last 2 years. Based on the success of that, my friend Ron Bouganim, who helped launch the accelerator, has actually built a [venture capital fund](http://govtechfund.com) focused on civic startups or GovTech startups, that’s a $20 million dollar fund. It’s plain: governments, foundations, and institutional capital are stepping up to help prop up the civic tech ecosystem. Just in closing, I want to make two points, we think of technology as something where we’re trying to get rid of friction. You want your application to be very smooth. You want it to be quick, you can go from getting a user to making a transaction. I think with open data we have to take the exact opposite approach. I think we have to create friction. We have to have those meetups where people come in person and talk to each other. We have to have those challenges where people get together and figure out what they want to do, because it’s with that friction that you figure out what’s possible, you have the conversation and get creative. A topic that’s come up today, to open up data we need to know the value of it before we do. **I so strongly disagree with that**. I think open data has an _emergent_ quality. We don’t know the value that it’s going to provide yet, that’s the beauty of it. We’re creating raw materials that people are going to build great new things off of. We shouldn’t, ourselves as people wearing suits and in government, say that we know best. So often with technology we see that it’s the random person who we never thought of, who can take that data, take that idea and make it amazing. **So often with technology we see that it’s the random person who we never thought of, who can take that data, take that idea and make it amazing.** Last thing I’ll say is, I couldn’t come to France and not make an Alexis de Tocqueville quote, because he’s my favorite author and I just have to do that. This is from _Democracy in America_: > “As soon as I found one another out, they combine. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.” This is Tocqueville saying the power of community. This is Tocqueville saying how valuable it is in America, but I think also here in France, for when people come together, what’s possible. Just us here today coming together today is powerful, this is now a community. My challenge to you is to think about how we can create a broader community within Paris, within France, and around the world around open data, to really make is a light seen from afar. Thank you. --- # Keynote: Disruption as a Public Service > Talking Civic Startups at BigKansasCity (BigKC) URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2015/12/28/Disruption-as-a-Public-Service/ Published: 2015-12-28 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, Los Angeles --- _These are notes and video from my keynote address at BigKansasCity in 2013 on civic startups. _ Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/150112504 ![W.H. Auden quote: "We are left alone with our day... and time is short"](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_mluGm1gfve3pzIOnbf6g1g.png) It’s exciting to be here. I’m actually from the Midwest, so this is like a homecoming for me. This is fun, never given a talk in an airplane hangar before, so a little bit different. I want to tell you a little bit about what we do. This is a person named Miss Rita. I want you to meet her, because she’s great. She lives in New Orleans. Do you know what she does for two hours every day? She tracks down blighted housing in the city. She and a lot of other people in her community care about vacant housing, because if you’re in New Orleans, this is a big issue. After Hurricane Katrina and actually even before that, this has been a systemic problem inside the community. The community really cares about this, because crime happens in vacant housing. These are real issues for local communities. Miss Rita and her friends spend two hours every day walking around the city to map out where the vacant housing is in the city. The crazy thing about the story though is the mayor has that same question. That’s the mayor of New Orleans. He wants to know where vacant housing is in his city, because he wants to deal with it. He actually made a commitment that during his term, he was going to deal with 100,000 vacant houses in New Orleans. He turned to his CIO, a guy named Allen Square, great guy, a very smart guy. He asked Allen, he said, “When can I have an app where I can go to any house in the city and see the status of it?” The CIO said, “I want that too, but it’s going to take me three years, and it’s going to cost me 30 million dollars.” The organization I work for, Code for America, we send fellows in the cities, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about it. They were able to build an application in six weeks, just six: BlightStatus. You put in a location of a house, and it gives you back exactly what the status of it is. What the city knows about it, is it vacant or is it not, is it blighted or is it not, is the city doing something about it. You can do nice things like see a map view or whatever. The point though isn’t that the application is cool or interesting, the point is this. This is what FastCompany said. They said, > “The app proposes a new, kinder, more productive communication between the two groups that moves past angry and frustrated citizens on one end and the paralyzed city on the other.” Allen Square spoke at our conference last year that we had, and he came on stage and he said, “The application BlightStatus changed the conversation.” That’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about today. Which is how can technology change the conversation between citizens and their cities. How can you fundamentally change the way the citizen, Miss Rita, and the mayor interact through technology. That’s what you’re able to do now because of the way technology works. Let me back up now and tell you a little bit about specifically what we do. ![Hand-painted "Code for America (under construction)" sign signed by fellows](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_BefVkjWVpwXgUeaOzq7Rmw.png) Code for America, we’re a startup. This is that we had in our office. The first sign for our offices was hand-drawn with some water color pens, by yours truly. We were scrappy. We began in 2009 with this basic notion which is how can you bring citizens and technology to bear on reinventing the way cities work. We started this thing. It’s a peace corp for geeks. We actually have some fellows here in Kansas City this year. The idea is that people will give a year of service. Technologists, designers, developers, entrepreneurs will spend a year working with cities to help them innovate. They build different technology, engage the citizens, work with the community, see what you can do fundamentally differently. The first year we had three cities, last year was eight, this year nine, and Kansas City’s one of them. We’re doing some really fun stuff, which I’ll tell you about it in minute. The core notion is kind of technology is at this turning point where it’s becoming more physical, becoming more real. It’s changing the way businesses work. I’m sure each of you as entrepreneurs know this. You can use technology to change the way your company works. How can you change the way government works using technology? That’s what we’re trying to do. What I wanted to do is tell you a little bit of the history of what we’ve learned, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, share some perspectives on what’s possible, and what we’re going to do at Kansas City if that’s okay. We started in 2011, our first year. We kind of knew what we were doing but not really. We’re still learning what’s possible. We hired folks like this: ![Max Ogden beside a how-to-tie-a-tie diagram](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_VEu9GThETHVcSeWTyPM04g.png) This is a guy named Max Ogden who is one of our fellows working in the city of Boston. Max is a great open source developer. He’s terrific, really smart. Problem with Max is Max doesn’t know how to tie a tie. We set up in the city of Boston to go work in the mayor’s office. They all wear suits, and our fellows don’t wear a suit. One thing we’ve learned is we have to understand the context within which we’re working, and figure out how to be effective in that situation. We sent Max there. We sent five other fellows there to work with the city. They were actually going to work on a tool to help open up data for the city’s school system. It turns out that was really hard, because there’s a lot of privacy challenges and issues around getting access to student data. They started working on that. They spent a lot of time working on it, and honestly, they couldn’t get anywhere, because it was just too hard from a legal perspective. Instead, during the middle of the year, the mayor actually got into a lot of trouble with the press in the city. _Boston Globe_ ran an editorial saying, “The process by which parents have to choose their schools for their kids was way too complicated.” If you see here, this is the PDF, or actually a brochure they send to parents every year. It’s 38 pages. No one can parse it. I can’t even read it from here. Parents got really frustrated, because the rules around which schools their kids can go to or complicated but important. It’s your kids’ schools. ![City of Boston school enrollment guide spread](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_wzBgpcVWzU22cJsiZEYSKg.png) The parents got really frustrated about this, and they asked us then to say, “Hey, what can you do to change this system?” so we built this. It’s DiscoverBPS. It’s like a Yelp for schools … not complicated, nothing crazy, but this is what parents needed. They needed an easy streamlined way to see how their school districts work. The reason I tell that story is for two reasons. One is this. This is why our fellows do what they do. They believe that interfacing together can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use. That’s what that is. It’s a simple Yelp-like tool, but it’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to use. It’s the way you want to interact with your city. **“If you had to build this tool like DiscoverBPS, how much would it cost you, and how long would it take?” They said it would take two years and cost two million dollars.** The other reason I tell this story because this one blows my mind. We asked our government partners, “If you had to build this tool like DiscoverBPS, how much would it cost you, and how long would it take?” They said it would take two years and cost two million dollars. We were able to do it in two months with a team of about one and a half people. What we’re trying to do is show what’s possible for governments. Help them understand what’s out there, what’s feasible now given the landscape we’re in with technology, and how they can leverage it to be more open and engage with citizens. On this notion of simple, be beautiful, and easy to use, this is not. This is Honolulu.gov. This is the city website for Honolulu which was one of our partners last year which I nicely got to travel to which was great. This is the city website. ![Old Honolulu.gov homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_PYmnpGxPsh5qgPwA3R_WIQ.jpg) Again and again, citizens say, “This city website is broken. It’s not useful for me.” In fact, the city when we came in, said, “Can you guys fix that?” We’re like rebuilding an entire city website, so it’s a year-long program. Rebuilding a whole website in one year is going to be really tough. We didn’t know if we can do that. Then we thought about it, and we looked at actually … You should check out Gov.UK which is the website that the UK government’s building. They began with the simple premise which is that governments like this are organized by departments. You can see up there it says, “Agencies and Departments, Online Services, Businesses, Residents,” but why Online Services isn’t the whole home page I don’t know. It’s organized based on verticals, but citizens don’t think like that. We don’t think like that. ![Honolulu Answers homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_8He90-IUqJMeykyWek2Ivw.png) When you think about your government website, what are you thinking? “I have this question I need answered.” “I have this problem I need solved.” So what we decided is, what if _we centered on the search_? What if we centered on the citizen’s question? We built this thing called Honolulu Answers. It’s really simple. You just put in a question, “How do I get my driver’s license renewed?” It just gives you the answer. It’s like here are the two different questions, and then here’s the specific steps. We spent a lot of time working on this simple design. It’s like here are the five steps that you need to know about. What this is doing, is it’s building new experiences for citizens and really changing the way citizens interact with their government. The coolest thing about the story is we sent teams of about three or five fellows to cities. You can imagine, people have a lot of questions about their cities, hundreds. Fellows can’t write all of that content. They just don’t have enough time. They have to build the technology, deploy, get users, etc. They asked themselves, “How can we get a lot of content? How can we get more information in this system?” They turned to the community. ![Honolulu Answers search results and answer page](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_ZvBrds6eL7x8V_Naqsjljg.png) They actually held this thing called a Write-a-thon. You guys have probably heard about a Hack-a-thon, but we decided that actually people could write for their city and not just code for it. They had these weekend events where basically hundreds of people would come out, and they would write content for their city, working collaboratively with the city staff. Think about that. A citizen-written website for their government. This is what’s possible when you’re able to use technology and then engage citizens to try things differently. That actually was a story from last year. Now we speak specifically about 2012 and the thing about last year is I ran around the office the whole time saying, > “Civic startups, civic startups, civic startups,” and this is what happened… ![Code for America Accelerator laptop sticker](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_yq7j9jzolXcNCnAmskhiwQ.png) Have you guys ever been to a town hall meeting for a city or planning? Yeah, Steven from MindMixer back there’s been to these, but they’re typically held at 7:00 in city hall so ten people show up. The thing is, these are really important decisions being made about your city. Do I want a park here? Do I want a mall there? In the city of Philadelphia last year, they wanted us to take on this question. How can you reinvent, reimagine the way the city planning works? They built an app called Textizen. These are the posters they put up in the city. ![Textizen survey posters at Philadelphia bus stops](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_CJgIqzOlgQadwylInnboow.png) The great thing about this is that _you engage your consumers where they are —_ that’s not unique to the public sector, that’s Marketing 101 for any business. You don’t want to make your customers go somewhere new; you go to them. But cities typically don’t do that. They don’t engage people where they are. We decided, “Let’s change that.” Throughout the city of Philadelphia they put these posters. “Would you like to see our rapid transit line?” They put them on buses, they put them inside bus stops, because that’s where people are, and that’s where people are engaging with their city. That’s where you should ask them the questions. It’s a simple SMS tool. It’s actually not complicated. I could write this code, and I’m not a programmer. It’s just basically give feedback on how your city’s working. The point is, is that it changes the dynamic. It’s saying, “I don’t want the same 50 people over and over and over again coming to my city meeting. I want new people. I want to ask them new questions, different questions, engage them in new ways.” That’s what this tool allows. Here’s the funny thing about this story. We put up a simple web form when the thing went live in Philadelphia saying, “Hey, would you like Textizen in your city?” Within the first month, **200 different cities said they wanted** it in their area. That’s the thing that people don’t understand about city government: that there’s _actually_ an interest and a need to change things. Folks inside cities understand that. They just need the tools and resources to do something differently. That’s what something like Textizen do. These guys in private say have made a civic startup, have a paying client. You guys know how hard it is to make that first sale. They’re making this into a business. That’s what’s really great to see. It’s the evolution of this ecosystem to make it more sustainable. Here’s the thing about government. People say it’s broke, that it doesn’t have any money. > Do you know how much money government spends on technology every year? **140 billion dollars, federal, state, and local, 140 billion dollars.** To put that in perspective, the video games market, like HALO, Xbox, PlayStations… 10 billion dollars. The iPhone app market which everyone’s clamoring about an IOS app, two billion dollars. The government technology market is massive, and there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt that market with interesting technology, and that’s what we’re trying to do now. ![The government IT market: $172B in federal, state and local spending](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1__Zn9zi7mTTn1bRC3iiih3w.png) Actually from the last year fellowship class, so we have eight projects a year, three of them have become startups. Textizen’s an example, Blightstatus, which I mentioned earlier, is actually now making a startup, and another one too, called LocalData from Detroit. You’re seeing the emergence of a civic startup ecosystem which is really championed by folks like Steven back there who works for MindMixer. Last year we also added to our program offerings. When you work in non-profits, you talk about programs not products, and so we run programs. We made an accelerator. This is like YCombinator or TechStars if you’re familiar with it. We’re trying to bring civic startups from the outside, bring them into the network, help them, give them funding and support, and really get them more client’s attraction in the industry. Last year, we opened up a call. We decided to do this in the middle of last year but decided that we wanted to get it done by the end. We had four weeks to recruit companies, so I lost my mind a little bit. We had 235 companies apply. Think about that. **The first year of an accelerator program that’s focused on government technology had 235 applicants**. These are the seven we picked. MindMixer, if you don’t know about these guys, you should. They’re the best in class software for civic engagement. They’ll work with cities to help them get best ideas from their citizens and help crowdsource the plans that the city should have. Measured Voice helps cities use social media, because they need to bubble-up the best ideas of what to share. Then strategically think about when to do it. ![Civic startup logos: Captricity, Measured Voice, MindMixer, Recovers, Revelstone and Aunt Bertha](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_m3uzjyWrmWf6jqP05racLQ.png) I also personally really like Aunt Bertha. This is a guy — his name is Erin Gray — and Erin’s aunt was on social services, but she didn’t know which services she was eligible for. He wanted to build a tool to make it easier for people to find out those services. The coolest thing about Aunt Bertha is they’re actually building like an Open Table now for social services. I’m from San Francisco. When you’re there, you basically see people waiting around the corner to try and get food stamps, to try to get access to a homeless shelter which is heartbreaking to see. The problem is when that happens, you don’t get a chance to actually go get job training or interview for a job, because you’re busy waiting in line to get access to this homeless shelter. He’s trying to make it easier for those shelters themselves to allocate and identify resources, so that way you don’t have to wait in line. You actually will know if there’s a resource here or where else to go. This is like important, life-changing work. That’s what the great thing about these civic startups are. They’re not just building an Airbnb for Dropbox. They’re building real companies that are helping people’s lives work better. That was 2012. Now we’re moving into 2013. Now it’s getting interesting, because we’ve gone from this general notion of engagement, of open data, of openness to come into some more messy stuff like the Department of Corrections in the cities of Louisville and New York City. They’ve asked us to tackle the question of pre-trial incarceration rates. I don’t know if you guys understand what I’m talking about there, but basically if you get arrested, you got to go to a bench trial to see if you’re going to thrown in jail or let free before your even actual trial. This is just to decide if you’re going to be held in prison for while. This is the kind of technology that they’re working with right now. There’s been studies that show that apparently the most likely indicator of whether or not you get thrown in jail or let free, is whether or not the judge had lunch that morning or not. That’s how this stuff is determined. There’s this great organization called the Arnold Foundation that’s done a lot of research into this. ![Tweet showing a handwritten civilian rider program request form](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1__z5Ot8cCXdQag-IfZ11wLw.png) They’ve looked at it and found out that there’s some real algorithms you can use. What someone’s job history was like, whether or not they showed up at school every day. You can use that kind of data to decide whether or not someone should actually be thrown in jail or not. They want us to help work with the city of New Orleans and with the city of Louisville to actually build technology that gives them insight into that. Here’s the funny thing. It’s like we talk about algorithms and helping judges make better decisions. There’s simple stuff that they’re building. We had our fellows actually take a ride with the cops, and drive around the city to get a sense of how it worked. You learn this crazy stuff. When you get a bench warrant which is like a reason that you have to show up, you get a little card that’s like this big that says your time and your date of your trial. If you lose that, there’s no record inside the city at all where you can find out what your time is for the trial. You don’t have any access to that information, and if you miss that trial, you get arrested, and you have to go to jail for X amount of days. It’s like so simple little things like that are the problems that you have to take on when you’re working with city government. The fellows are going to build a notification app, but basically an SMS tool that gets a text message whenever your trial’s going to be. It’s simple things, but small pieces that really matter. I wanted to speak a minute about what we’re doing specifically with Kansas City and how folks here might be able to get involved. We’re creating for our accelerator. If you guys have a civic startup like MindMixer or like Neighborly, you should apply. Think about doing that, because that’s a really great opportunity to get access to a lot in government clients. We have a fellowship program which is open calls. You don’t have to be a coder. If you’re not, you can also be a community manager, project manager, or an entrepreneur coming to join that. It’s a year-long program. You get mentorship training, support, access to a lot of great people, and the chance to do something that really matters. You going to spend your time helping cities work differently which is not a bad way to spend some time. Then we also have a brigade here locally. Jace is your local **Kansas City Brigade Captain**. We have this volunteer program basically where people who don’t want to give a whole year of service, but want to be able to hack in their free time or hack on the weekend. The Write-a-thons are run by the brigade in Honolulu. They basically come together, re-deploy existing civic technology, work with the city to build new things, write for the city website, and that’s a really great opportunity to get involved locally here in Kansas City. Finally, think about how you can be more civically engaged. How can you use MindMixer to help your city work differently? There’s a WikiKC if you’ve heard about that which is a local community website that’s all about how to document and curate your local city. How can you use those platforms to really make your city a better place? There’s this quote I read last year that’s really stuck with me. This is Auden writing about the Spanish Revolution. He was talking about how the city is theirs and if you want to make it better, you really have to make it your own. Then he had this line, > “We are left alone with our day…. And time is short.” The first time I read that, I first thought, “Oh, wow. That’s really sad and pessimistic,” like _we’re screwed_, _we’re on our own_. Then I read it again, and I read the second line, “And time is short.” The point is that we have control of our day. This is our making. Our cities are our own. My friend, Tim O’Reilly, uses a phrase, > “Government is what we do together.” You can complain about government, or you can realize that we live in a democracy, and this is ours. This is ours to do, and these are our cities, and we are left alone with our day, and then time is short. What I would say is think about how you can _code for America_ in the ways that you live your day-to-day lives with your companies, with your organizations, with your colleagues. Think about what you can do to make Kansas City even better or whatever city you’re from, because coding for America isn’t something you just do in San Francisco, it’s what you do everywhere, and it’s what you do with your cities. --- # Bowling Alone and Living with Others > The Problems of a Civil Society Moving into the 21st Century URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2015/12/23/Bowling-Alone-and-Living-with-Others/ Published: 2015-12-23 Author: Abhi Nemani --- At the turn of the century, bowling league membership was down, way down, and this, to Harvard professor Robert Putnam was quite a problem. See, with the loss of bowling leagues go the friendly conversations over beer, pizza, and pretzels and the weekly commitments that solo bowlers do without. Now, we bowl alone. Putnam provides this meme as an entry point into his body of research on social capital, a democratic concept tracing back to the 1800s, most simply defined as the social fabric that eases collective action; it’s what helps societies come together. For Putnam, the decline of bowling leagues—along with a host of similar stories—tells of a waning of social capital and an atomization of American society. But following his research—and many unfriendly rejoinders to his conclusions—the literature has gone on to ask what makes up a group, not only what it does. How does diversity affect the formation of social capital? ### **Putnam Bowls Alone** The bowling league case is one of Putnam’s more whimsical examples, an accessible illustration of the trend in his controversial essay and book, [B_owling Alone_](http://bowlingalone.com/)_._ As political scientist focused on the background institutions that support and inform governance, he focused on the role of civil society in politics in this review of American society, because, as he writes, “The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government. That, at least, was the central conclusion of my own 20-year, quasi-experimental study of subnational governments in different regions of Italy.” His conclusion from the Italian summary was that a vibrant civil society—“networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity”—were a precondition for successful modern nations. Focused more on the statistical analysis, Putnam loosely tells the story of this relationship, standing on the data as proof. For Putnam, networks of civic engagement house the memories of cooperative success, which serve as a kind of template for future action. You learn how to get things done—together. Plus, the networks of interaction “broaden the participants’ sense of self,” developing the “‘I’ into the ‘we’.” Civic life is in this way a factor of production for society, and social capital then its metric. > Civic life is in this way a factor of production for society, and social capital then its metric. Putnam defines social capital as the “features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” Those features and their direct effects, though, are difficult to identify—let alone quantity—but with a wealth of information on public attitudes and activities, Putnam maps certain traits to trends in social capital in contemporary America. It is an input-output study—with many variables. The inputs are the causes of social capital—associational activity, familial ties, and the like; the outputs are its effects—civic participation and societal trust. In his analysis, social capital inputs have dropped. Since the 1960s, Churchgoing slipped from roughly 15 percent. Since the mid-1950s, when union membership peaked, the nonagricultural union rosters have cut by more than half. The Boy Scouts are off by 26 percent since 1970, and the Red Cross off by 61. In sum, after expanding steadily throughout most of this century, many major civic organizations have experienced a sudden, substantial, and nearly simultaneous decline in membership over the last decade or two. According to Putnam, we aren’t just bowling alone, we’re living alone. If a decline in civic activities is the input then a drop social trust is the output in Putnam’s social capital calculus. “The proportion of Americans saying that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did.” Couple that with the “loosening bonds of the family” and closed-off neighbors and according to Putnam, we see a society that is dishearteningly disconnected. Conversely, controlling for most socioeconomic factors—race, income, education, etc—he found that with more social capital in a state, the more educated and well-off are its children, the lower the homicide rate, the greater the degree of public health, and the smaller the likelihood of tax evasion. So what explains the overall drop? Putnam points to four possible causes of the social capital drop: 1. Movement of women into the labor force 2. Mobility 3. Demographic changes such as more divorces and fewer children 4. Television as the new form of leisure All these sum to a sense that American culture has changed for the worse—more demanding and less social; more atomized and less connected—and as he concludes, “there is reason to suspect that \[our\] democratic disarray may be linked to a broad and continuing erosion of civic engagement that began a quarter-century ago.” Putnam has contributed to this social capital research with the recent publication of an essay, [_“E Pluribus Unum_: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.”](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract) In a way, this is a sequel to _Bowling Alone._ If Bowling Alone called our attention to a _problem_ in society, this essay explores a possible _solution_. It asks essentially, can diversity develop social capital? His answer comes as a surprise not only to himself but also to those who assume that diversity strengthens communities. He took upon a similar statistical endeavor as before, controlling for socioeconomic factors—age, education, and poverty—across areas to find the relationship between diversity and social well being. And in the short run, that relationship was negative. As he explains, “The more ethnically diverse the people we live around the less we trust them.” In terms of real impact, he found greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. > Instead of action in either direction — positive or negative — individuals faced with diversity do less. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. This finding flies in the face of traditional theories of diversity that predicted either growth or conflict after immigration. The “contact theory” holds that increased contacts between different groups—just face-to-face contacts—will spark recognition of commonality and lead to smooth, shared relations. The “conflict theory” on the other hand takes a less rosy view of human nature, expected the groups to square off, actively. Essentially, they are two ends of the spectrum: cooperation or corrosion. Putnam’s findings fall right at the center, and lay flat. Instead of action in either direction—positive or negative—individuals faced with diversity do less. They turn inwards, less trusting of the “other” and, curiously, of their own as well. Trust across the system decreases. Putnam explains the phenomenon as a hunkering down: “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.” This hunkering down seems to be a serious challenge for social capitalists, and Putnam, himself, recognizes this. An individual willingness to engage in society is critical for any amount of social capital to take root. A people hunkered down are just persons, not a people at all. So then how do diverse societies function? How does the United States and Europe not only survive, but also from time to time thrive? Putnam makes way for the long-term vitality of diverse states. Citing World War II, religious immigration, and other movements, Putnam finds that over time “successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities.” So in the short-run, society suffers, but in the long run it reconstructs and essentially grows. In explaining this phenomenon, Putnam relies on a fundamental assumption about human identity — that we are socially defined: > _“‘When social distance is small, there is a feeling of common identity, closeness, and shared experiences. But when social distance is great, people perceive and treat the other as belonging to a different categories:.’ Social distance depends in turn on social identity: our sense of who we are._ **_Identity itself is socially constructed and can be socially de-constructed and re-constructed._** _Indeed, this sort of social change happens all the time in any dynamic and evolving society. For example, religious evangelism, social mobilization and political campaigning all involve the intentional transformation of identities.”(emphasis mine)_ As the community is rewoven, then, so is our identity. What was before foreign or the other becomes common and the same. As seen before, man gives “prominence to sympathy”—to use Dewey’s terms—and the fundamental commonalities overshadow the traditional differences over time. As Putnam describes, “…adapting over time, dynamically, to immigration and diversity requires the reconstruction of social identities, not merely of the immigrants themselves (though assimilation is important), but also of the newly more diverse society as a whole (including the native born).” Thus, the very mechanics of Dewey’s social capital rehabilitate Putnam’s diverse society—in a sense, eliminating “diversity” for the sake of social trust. Putnam, though, maintains that “diversity” should not be eliminated so much as reconstructed. With regards to ethnic identities, societies should reduce “their social salience without eliminating their personal importance,” and “encourage permeable, syncretic, ‘hyphenated’ identities; identities that enable previously separate ethnic groups to see themselves, in part, as members of a shared group with a shared identity.” Thus, ethnicity is not scrubbed away but contextualized within a broader framework of identity—presumably including religion, nationality, and even humanity. > Thus, ethnicity is not scrubbed away but contextualized within a broader framework of identity — presumably including religion, nationality, and even humanity. James Q. Wilson, the famed social scientist, on the other hand, takes issue with Putnam’s belief in this allegedly natural process of social development. [In his response to “E Pluribus Unum,”](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bowling-with-others/) Wilson first praises Putnam’s scholarly conscientiousness and integrity in publishing the unsettling short-term findings but then goes to challenge the long-term prognosis. Putnam relies on tools (the military, churches, and the like) too rare for broad scale socialization of immigrants. As he explains, “Unfortunately… the pertinence of the military, religious, or athletic model to life in neighborhoods is very slight. In those three institutions, authority and discipline can break down native hostilities or force them underground… But what authority or discipline can anyone bring to neighborhoods?” To summarize his answer briefly, none. The neighborhood itself lacks the functional modes to “pull the turtle from its shell.” People are able to self-segregate within even the smallest of geographies, and, to use Wilson’s example, white multi-million dollar movie stars can live blocks away from black “Shoreline Crips and the V-13 gang.” But whenever the former sees the latter, no matter how longs it’s been, she hunkers down. “Ethnic differences are often seen as threats,” he surmises, citing that, “Even where everyone is equally poor or equally threatened by crime, people exhibit less trust if their neighborhood is ethnically diverse than if it is homogeneous.” Wilson thus argues for societal bonds built upon superficial characteristics. Homogeneity, for him, seems to be defined by brut luck characteristics—race, ethnicity, position, and class. He vacillates between a simply physical lens and a socio-economic one, shifting from definitions of “like us” from same colors (with his citation of Thomas Schelling’s color-based self-segregation study) to same stories (“like-minded persons: first the family, then friends and colleagues…”). Yet he leaves no room for any _discernible_ diversity to allow for the formation of social capital. The hunkering down impulse, for Wilson, does not pass until the visible lines of difference fade. Men who think they are different (let alone look different) cannot work together. But then what of _E Pluribus Unum_? How can many make one? The modern consensus suggests that the process at best, to use Max Weber’s phrase, “a slow boring of hard boards.” It just takes time. --- # The world deserves a better presentation software: my pitch URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2015/11/22/The-world-deserves-a-better-presentation-software-my-pitch-1ec9e2a8a57/ Published: 2015-11-22 Author: Abhi Nemani --- _I often — like you I bet — have to make slide decks fast, very fast, and need them not to look like what I made back in the 8th grade. I’ve taken classes on slide design, made a few 1,000 myself, and I’d admit that never have I been able to quickly, easily, and reliably been able to make a professional, yet human deck in under 30 minutes. That ought to change, I think. The modern web is just too good for this to be so hard._ So here’s my pitch: ### General Principles * Slides should be fast and easy to create and not ever strain the eyes of your audience * You should be able to create slides through just your browser and they should work everywhere and anywhere (and yes, that means you fonts) * Never should there be faked 3D animation — or animation of any kind — projected by an adult. ### A simple theory of slides There are basically four types of slides that you should ever really want to have: * Photos * Quotes * Charts * Screenshots #### _Photos_ Photo slides should be simple, beautiful, powerful — and most of all easy to include and optimize: * Smart search from flickr, instagram, Facebook and other social image platforms for super simple starts * Instagram-style and -ease filtering and cropping to add charm * And automated permalinking, attribution, and short link to be a good person #### _Quotes_ Quote slides should let the words do the talking: * Smart search from quote websites and copy/paste functionality from websites/blogs for quick starts * Big, bold, and mostly universally accessible fonts to make sure the words are heard * Option for photo-slides as backgrounds to spruce them up (optional, not required) #### _Charts_ A charts slide should convey one point, and one point only as simply as possible; that means using chart and graph styles that people actually know and understand: * Sync up with Google Sheets and then restyle with D3 and a clean CSS for beautiful, simple bar, line, and pie charts (that’s it) * Smart copy/paste functionality to take Excel data into a non-Excel looking chart * Only a few “process” charts (read: a vegan diet of SmartCharts): linear, hierarchy, and cycle #### _Screenshots_ Screenshot slides should be just like a screenshot: fast, easy, and reliable: * Just type in a url and automatically pull in a recent (but then archived) shot of a URL to get things going * Super simple cropping and filtering functionality just like photos * Stored archives of your past screenshots for posterities sake since, well, sometimes websites fail Let’s go make this happen. A world of current and future procrastinating presenters will be forever at your mercy. --- # Angels in America - The American Tragedy > It seemed like a fairy tale ending URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/papers/2015/11/12/Angels-in-America-The-American-Tragedy/ Published: 2015-11-12 Author: Abhi Nemani --- It seemed like a fairy tale ending. In Tony Kushner’s stirring play, _Angels in America_, the difficult, yet engrossing narrative seems to close in picturesque fashion. The villain — vile and unlikable — Roy Cohn dies, and the hero — plagued yet optimistic — Prior Walter renews his lease on life. We end high, not low. In truth, this greeting card assessment is paper thin. Indeed, Kushner’s ending masks the deeper, tragic allegory, one speaking to the true subject of the play: America itself. And that story is no fairy tale; it is a decidedly American tragedy. If happiness is the most positive human emotion, then schadenfreude must run a close second. Schadenfreude is the psychological phenomenon, emotional response, triggered by witnessing another’s downfall — specifically the plight of an evil, terrible figure. Scholar John Portmann defines the concept as “a rational emotional affirmation of a justly constituted world where certain modes of suffering elicit appropriate responses.” \[1\] Basically, we enjoy watching bad man pay. Enter Kushner’s Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn, no matter his power or clout, cannot escape his fate. His tale has a subtle sense of irony. Roy tries to confound every stereotype associated with his existence. He is a Jew-bashing, homophobic, gay Jew. John Quinn aptly describes the sleazy lawyer, “In short, Cohn is a diseased version of the norm.” Slowly, his life unravels. The Bar Association comes after his license for accepting a loan from a client. His prodigy, Joe Pitt, turns down his D.C. job offer, which would actually save him from the Bar’s wolves. And his secret homosexuality catches up with him, when he diagnosed with AIDS. Kushner candidly expounds every bitter degradation of the character. The disease slowly eats away his body and mind, while the Bar takes away his only real self-identifier, his law license. On the deathbed, he scoffs at the chance of pity. Ethel Rosenberg compassionately responds to his painful plea for a song. After it seems he has redeemed himself slightly in Ethel’s and the audience’s eyes, he snaps back into life with his cynicism: “I fooled you Ethel… I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I win!” It was all a game for Roy. Yet, he lost the larger one, and shortly after, he dies. Just bliss. With the audience’s need for schadenfreude sufficiently placated, Kushner turns to their hearts. His epic tale of life, death, and homosexuality closes with joy and happiness all around. “The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Ceausescus are out. He’s building democratic socialism. The New Internationalism. Gorbachev is the greatest political thinker since Lenin.” After two books full of anguish, disease, and sadness, Louis begins the epilogue with a proclamation of good will. The international chaos of past has resolved, and the Cold War is over. Moreover, the miracle AZT has pumped life into the disease-riddled Prior. Five years ago, he was in the hospital, near death, and alone. Now, his life is full and full of hope. Louis, Belize, and Hannah stand beside him, visiting the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park: “When the millennium comes… \[t\]he fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told \[Prior\] I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean,” says Hannah. She promises him purification on the day of redemption, whenever that may be. That sentiment — along with the pleasing scenery — makes Bethesda Prior’s “favorite place in the…whole universe.” He loves the hope. Scholar Peter Cohen summarizes the emotion, commenting, “a symbol of the healing and reconciliation that becomes central to the play’s final vision.” Kushner himself described Perestroika as a comedy, citing its optimistic sentiment. It ends with the wrecking of the fourth wall and Prior’s stirring call to arms against the AIDS epidemic. The audience, assuredly, leaves the theater feeling positive and — dare I say — hopeful. Some criticize the playwright for this ending: “Angels in America’s epilogue has come under attack from a number of critics who have viewed the play’s feel-good ending and Prior’s blessing of the audience as a sop intended to placate a mainstream Broadway audience.” Cohen rebuffs this contention, reconciling the clichéd finale with the overall theme of activism: “Having offered audiences both a denunciation of Reaganism and a vision of community and collective action, Kushner instructs them that the process of social change he envisions is not an imaginative process, but rather one that can only “begin” once the play itself has ended.” Both of these stands, however, fail to properly examine the context and reality of the feel-good ending. ### What’s Really Good Let’s begin by reevaluating the setting. Prior’s favorite place is actually a cold, barren park. He describes its beauty in yesteryear, but only in contrast to its current shortcomings. “In autumn, those trees across the lake are yellow, and the sun strikes those most brilliantly. Against the blue of the sky, that sad fall blue, those trees are more light than vegetation. They are Yankee trees, New England transplants. They’re barren now.” Thus, the present pales in consideration to the past. Quite literary, the present is empty, frozen. “The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes.” The hope that he searches for, yearns for, is based off the past or the future. Yet, even that is misplaced. Louis cited Gorbachev’s brilliance and the promise of the new Russia, but that idea failed. When Kushner was writing Angels in America, Gorbachev was selling pizzas in Pizza Hut advertisements. Moreover, Kushner’s stage notes sap from the optimistic sentiment. “It’s a bright day, but cold… Prior is heavily bundled, and he had think glasses on, and he supports himself with a cane.” This calls into question how well Prior has been living with his AIDS. Even with the Angel’s blessing, the miracle ATZ pills, and his friends’ care, his state has degenerated, and he needs the cane to “support himself.” Clearly, things are not as good as they seem, and the critics’ chastisement of the “sop” lacks complete justification. Cohen’s reconciliation draws on more than pure sentiment for evidence. “Angels in America would have been a tragedy of sorts if it had ended with Prior’s refusal to allow Louis to return, drama’s ability to represent the group allows Kushner to transform his play into a comedy that is grounded in a vision of communal purpose and action.” His analysis points to the neo-family structure in the Epilogue for some optimistic solace. Even though the classical relationships of man-woman or even man-man fail, he argues, societal unity prevails in the ends, reinforcing the belief in the community and collectivism. Yet, one must ask, how real is this family? ### A Family is Appearance Only A WASP, a black man, and a Jew — all gay and single — paired with a single, Mormon mother figure: What kind of family is that? True, these individuals have come together and co-exist, but are these associations forced or welcomed? Louis arguably commits the worst kind of sin. His friend, roommate, and lover battles AIDS, and instead of providing comfort and solace, he leaves… and sleeps with a Mormon. Yet, he eventually comes back to Prior, and when he does, he is not reaccepted. Prior says, “I love you… But you can’t come back. Not ever. I’m sorry. But you can’t.” That said, the epilogue shows them together. Their demeanor hints at subtle annoyance, with Prior’s quip, “I’ve been living with AIDS for five years now. That’s six whole months longer than I lived with Louis.” Furthermore, Louis’s relationship with Belize maintains the habitual animosity. Kushner tells us in the stage notes, “Louis and Belize are arguing.” Their discussion of the Middle East provides an adequate metaphor for the relationship. Just as Israel and Palestine fruitlessly strive for some kind of coexistence, these brothers bitterly push on, existing simultaneously but not truly together. The most obvious idiosyncrasy must be Hannah. This Mormon, spouseless woman seemingly leaves her own son to “adopt” three gay kids. Her religion despises and rejects homosexuality, yet she stomachs the ideological issues these orphaned men. Compassionate yes, but was her decision truly deliberate or merely immediate? Her character seems slightly irrational. Upon a quirky phone call from Joe, she sells her house and comes to New York from Salt Lake. When asked, she says, “I don’t know why I came here.” She is uncomfortably decisive, and she falls into unnatural situations. Similarly, after a few moments of conversation with Prior, she helps him to the hospital, cares for him, and eventually becomes a central figure in his life. Catherine Stevenson describes her as a “surrogate mother,” to Prior and Harper. Nonetheless, her transition from Salt Lake Mormon to New York neo-mother seems forced. In the Epilogue stage notes, Hannah is “noticeably different — she looks like a New Yorker, and she is reading the New York Times.” She is playing the character of the New Yorker — much like the New England transplant trees — too well. Stevenson summarizes this staged metamorphosis as “a journey that is the antithesis of the Mormon pilgrimage in a number of ways.” She rejects her earlier lifestyle and accepts this one; her only justification comes when she responds to Prior’s plea for company in the hospital: “I’m not needed elsewhere.” This family, Prior, Belize, Louis, and Hannah, seems collectively bound and oddly natural. Nonetheless, pain, bitterness, and idiosyncrasies riddle that group. They have little in common, constantly bicker, and lack love in any conventional sense. Then what overcomes the obvious tension? Cohen’s answer is that the “characters are shown to have found sustenance not through the isolating institutions of conjugal marriage or the bourgeois family, but through the benefits of group friendship (emphasis added).” This collective bands together for “sustenance” to survive. While Cohen maintains that this phenomenon demonstrates Kushner’s beliefs in collective action, they are not making action — they are surviving. They need each other to cope with the knowledge the past events has burdened them with. Prior stomachs Louis’s treachery, Belize placates Louis, and Hannah finds somewhere that she is “needed.” This story is not one of optimism or progress, but one of tragedy. The sheer depth and horror of that tragedy forces these characters to come together, just to live with it. ### The Tragedy Kushner himself rebuffed the notion of Perestroika’s tragedy, but Aristotle would beg to differ. In his Poetics, Aristotle laid out the classical definition of tragedy, as seen in great works such as Oedipus Rex. The crux of Aristotelian tragedy lies within the main character himself. The basic motion of a tragedy is downhill with one lifeboat at the end of the cliff. To jump on, the character must make the right decision, not right based on morals or ethics, but on intellect. The “victim” has a final chance of salvation, which is quickly taken away. Aristotle puts it as, “misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” From that point onward, his fate is sealed, and his pain and downfall staged. What is worse, these heroes tend to pursue their decision, fervently, to a bitter end. Thus, inherent frailty dictates his demise. That is the tragedy. The “tragic flaw” in Angels in America is hard to find for two reasons. First, the ending seems happy and positive — much unlike Greek tragedies such as Oedipus. Second and more cumbersome, we do not want to find the tragedy in the play. The work seems to convey a tremendous amount of hope and strength in the human character, and sapping from that is hard. Regrettably, Kushner’s work demonstrates the greatest of tragic flaws, the human flaw. Prior, the prophet of stasis, rejects his prescribed destiny. From the outset, he rejects the “Great Work.” Yet over time, he deliberates the issue, pontificating and reiterating the story to others. When describing the angel’s visit to Belize, his language and tone almost convey acceptance of the prophesy. “It’s all gone too far, too much loss is what they think, we should stop somehow, go back.” Belize responds, “But that’s not how the world works, Prior. It only spins forward.” Prior’s telling quip is “Yeah, but forward into what?” The inflection on that question reminds the audience that he has seen the end of progress. When he picks up the spectacles, the peep-stones, he sees a terrible image — undoubtedly, the image of chaos destined for humanity. The angel herself expands on the bitter end: “Surely you see towards what we are Progressing, the fabric of the sky unravels… Before the boiling of blood and the searing of the skin comes the Secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.” Initially overwhelmed, Prior eventually sees the harshness of progress in his own life: “It’s 1986 and there’s a plague, half my friends are dead and I’m only thirty-one.” Then comes the realization. “Maybe I am a prophet. Not just me, all of us who are dying now. Maybe we’ve caught the virus of prophecy. Be still. Toil no more.” AIDS is the disease of progress, and the world is infected. That tragedy is sad, but too real; Aristotelian tragedy demands a character’s imprudence and downfall. Later, Prior plays this role as well. ### The Tragic Flaw Prior bounces back and forth between rationalizations: He is insane, and the angel was just a hallucination; or, he is sane, and all he can do is run away from the prophesy. Neither is sufficient, yet he continually characterizes the angel’s visit as insane. Understandable, this makes its rejection rational. If he accepts the “Great Work” as real, then he must — rationally — pursue it. In his debate with Belize, he comes to that conclusion. “Maybe the world has driven God from heaven, incurred the angels’ wrath. I believe I’ve seen the end of things.” Thus, he tries to run, obfuscating and circumventing the inevitable, hoping to bypass his destiny. Finally, however, destiny catches up: “She’s coming…” With his condition worsening, Prior loses control: “I’m scared. I can’t do it again… Oh God, I want to be done.” And then she comes, the great angel — she listens to his call. He is ready to accept fate, and she comes to facilitate it. Human emotion, however, gets in the way. Hannah preaches solidarity, saying, “An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new.” This platitude resonates with the ailing prophet. Whereas he was content with death, he now — immediately and suddenly — insists on life, no thought, no deliberation. Hannah’s optimism overwhelms him, and faced with the angel’s presence, he plays out his tragic flaw — he wrestles the angel. Much like the tragic heroes of yore, he pursues his decision with great vigor. His compels his immune-suppressed body into action against a supernatural force. Highlighting the irrationality, he somehow wins. His unbelievable fervor and energy overwhelm the angel, and she grants his passage to heaven to return the text of the prophesy. In heaven, Prior only compounds his error. Given a tour of heaven, a free pass into paradise, he still decides to go back. He witnesses heaven’s peaceful serenity, the quiet stagnancy, but he stays committed to life on earth. The council of angels tries to reason with him. Europa says, “This is the Tomb of Immobility… drink it and never thirst again.” Prior responds, “I can’t… Even sick. I want to be alive.” Finally, the Angel pleads with him, “You only think you do. Life is a habit with you….” Reluctant and obstinate, Prior rebuffs, “Bless me anyway… I can’t help myself. I do… I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive…. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but… Bless me anyway. I want more life.” In that, he admits his own irrationality. He equates living to addiction, a mindless repetition or habit. Even that is not enough, but somehow he still desires earth with AIDS, alone, and hopeless. He asks for a blessing, but he leaves not knowing if he received it. He returns to earth to play out his tragic existence, damned to the pains and anguish of disease and mortality ### The Big Picture Our emotional core levels with Prior. He made the conscious decision to persevere. It is the human choice. The choice Hamlet makes, the choice the depressed but lucky teenage girls makes, the choice we all make to live. Prior character only exemplifies it since he saw heaven, experienced it, but still said no. Hamlet chose “to be” out of indecision and ignorance, but Prior actively and knowingly pursued a life of terrors. In that sense, he became the America tragic hero. The ills of progress are as obvious as they are terrible, as pervasive as poisonous. America’s core is built on its progress. Manifest Destiny, the New Frontier, science, industry, commerce… American identity is built off restlessness and desire. Authors since Alexis de Tocqueville have known this, and Kushner tactfully chose to place the angels in America. Regrettably, the tragedy is inevitable. We rationalize everyday travesties with seemingly happy endings: the pleasant paycheck, the filled dinner table, and the promise of another day. These emotions only help us stomach the human tragedy, of a life destined for — to quote Harper — ”a kind of painful progress.” ### The Catharsis Yet no tragedy ends without a final catharsis. Catharsis has two conflicting definitions in the literary sense. Some argue the catharsis is the final emotional purging and purification, when the play “through pity and fear effect\[s\] the proper purgation of these emotions.” Leon Golden, an Aristotelian scholar, makes way for another interpretation. “The Greek word katharsis can mean ‘clarification,” I argue that the internal argument of Poetics demands that we interpret catharsis as an ‘intellectual clarification.’” Thus, tragedy — or any art — should strive for the clarification or exposition of the emotional tensions in the work, and in tragedy that should be pity or fear. The final scene of Angels in America does not purge pity, fear, or even indignation — the comedic sentiment — it sends a mixed signal of frozen progress and forced relations, of hope and despair, of a people and a nation knowingly and pleasantly killing themselves. It does, however, teach us something about the human condition; that — if nothing else — when we know our failings and our inevitable destinies, we find a way to survive. We may not make the best of it, but we make something. --- # Connecting the dots - data & delivery > How digital services, data, and citizen engagement relate URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2015/11/10/digital-services-data-engagement/ Published: 2015-11-10 Author: Abhi Nemani --- It’s impossible now to disregard three emerging trends in civic innovation — some new, some not, but all now very much in vogue: * **Open Data**: the free publication of civic information for community research, app development, and public accountability * **Data Analytics**: the application of modern data science techniques for policy analysis and service delivery optimization * **Digital Services**: the transformation of previously analog service delivery to citizen-centric online transactions What’s exciting to me is how these three lines of work are deeply related and complimentary. [As I wrote before](https://medium.comopen-data-civic-engagement-and-delivery-28b990f321ce), in many ways we can see arcs connecting the evolution of civic innovation in this country in others as the movement from any one to the next and then the next. What I think I failed to communicate is the power of the connection between these three efforts; it’s not that any one is more important than the other. Indeed, they are deeply connected, and in fact, when we prioritize any one, we miss out on the broader opportunity: a model for using data for delivery that gets better over time. > Or to use [Eric Reis’ popular phrase](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/opening_up_open_data_an_interview_with_tim_o_reilly), when we align digital services, analytics, and open data, we can create a “machine for learning” for civic technology. The interplay is probably most easily seen in the 311 space. Cities have oft built applications (i.e. **digital services**) for digital submissions of 311 requests — [NYC’s system](http://www.wired.com/2010/11/ff_311_new_york/) has famously massive usage. This generates data, both about the issues themselves and also about the service delivery (e.g. time to completion) and the citizen experience (e.g. app usage: frequency, completion, etc), and this data powers both citizen engagement through **open data** (e.g. beautiful [visualizations](http://chriswhong.github.io/311plus/) and analyses) and service optimization through **analytics** (e.g. smart routing, predictive modeling, etc). In turn, the open data and analytics lead to better digital services for the citizens and city alike by creating more of them ([competition here is a good thing](https://medium.comlooking-at-things-in-many-different-ways-ef2b3987ff81?source=latest---)) and informing experience enhancements on existing ones. Put simply: we can put data to work to make delivery smarter and better by weaving together digital services, open data, and analytics. On it’s face, this surely should not strike anyone as profoundly novel. This kind of thinking is what makes great consumer products so successful: a commitment to continuous enhancement based on user feedback, a willingness to share data and act more like a platform, and a constant urge to build more, better experiences. The challenge, though, comes less in the thinking behind the model, and more its operations. This is one of my more often used quotes: > The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. — Aristotle Often that’s the case, but making it so is more difficult than it seems. Organizations are too easily organized in silos; teams even lean towards being competitive; and each of us tend to think about that task right in front of us. Same is true in our public institutions, notoriously designed in silos, and frequently under-resourced. Even in the increasingly energized civic innovation space, it’s difficult to think of starting not just one program (say open data) but three concurrently. (I’ll admit, in my own experience, this challenge and its attendant pressure was real.) But maybe with this picture in mind we can take small steps towards this bigger goal. In Los Angeles, we wanted to work on reducing pedestrian and auto collisions, but lacked either a true digital services team or an analytics shop; instead, we turned to partners. We opened up data on traffic, crime, etc, and turned to grad students to run simple analytics, which in turn we shared with transit apps to incorporate collision “hot spots” into their digital interfaces to reroute around dangerous intersections — that is, to help save lives. The question is how to move this from one example to the norm, how to operationalize or institutionalize this tricky collaboration between policy, data, digital, and analytics. I’m the first to admit, I don’t have the answer. But it strikes me as an urgent and fascinating question I hope we consider and discuss as we continue to reinvent our public institutions in the digital age. --- # Building a Local Open Data Community URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2015/10/30/Building-a-Local-Open-Data-Community/ Published: 2015-10-30 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Before taking my post in Los Angeles, I took some time to study the ingredients of successful open data communities around the country; cities as small as Portland to as large as New York, and everything in between. Many models, tactics, and strategies emerged. Hack nights, app competitions, open data, challenges, investment, etc… The challenge was to distill such creativity into some guidance for a city getting off the ground with open data. Below is my working draft of the “key elements of a successful open data community” — this isn’t meant to be exhaustive or rigorous, just a high-level identification of what seemed to work, where. _(You’ll note that this isn’t rather novel, but I found that breaking it out plainly helped organize efforts as we rebooted Hack for LA in the city and encouraged new partners — within the city and outside — to join in.)_ #### **1\. Work on things that matter.** * Identify **high priority, high impact** areas to focus community efforts — Integrated with Policy Agenda, Local Issues, community feedback, etc — Drives city Open Data Strategic Roadmap _Model:_ [_San Francisco Roadmap_](http://sfmayor.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentID=425) #### **2\. People should know each other.** * Create group **identify/brand** and dedicated **owner —** In partnership with _existing_ communities, events through networked approach — Needs to have dedicated staff for community/list management, etc _Model:_ [_SmartChicagoCollaborative_](http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/)_;_ [_Hack for LA_](http://hackforla.org) _&_ [_Compiler.LA_](http://compiler.la) * Create online and offline _homes_ for collaboration space through fixed events, mailing lists — Host weekly Hack Nights _Model:_ [_Chicago OpenGov Hack Night_](http://opengovhacknight.org/) _—_ Create (or build upon) online community as a way to capture interest and grow internal connectivity _Options: Meetup, NationBuilder, Google Groups_ #### **3\. Support good people with good backing.** * Identify funding, training, and mentorship opportunities for entrepreneurs _Models: 1 Million Cups, Awesome Foundation, LA2050_ * Creates avenues to make innovations more sustainable and scalable _Model: BlueRidge Foundation; SmartChicago; Knight Foundation News Challenge;_ [_SF Entrepreneurship in Residence program_](http://entrepreneur.sfgov.org/)_;_ [_Tumml_](http://www.tumml.org/)_;_ [_CfA Accelerator_](http://codeforamerica.org/startups) #### **4\. Showcase the community’s success.** * Draw attention to successful events and projects through city hall’s unique relationship to media _Options: Invite Mayor as judge; Bring winners into City Hall for demo day; Recruit media partners to feature events and outcomes_ * Develop creative prizes / incentives for app contest winners/participants _Model:_ [_Hack Education_](http://www.donorschoose.org/hacking-education) _(prize was picture with Colbert)_ --- # My Christmas wish for the open data community > Open data publication for the rest of us URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2015/10/29/My-Christmas-wish-for-the-open-data-community/ Published: 2015-10-29 Author: Abhi Nemani --- It’s simple. It’s not that complicated, and for any of you who know me, you’ve probably heard me describe it at least a dozen times. (Sorry.) Basically, I want just a little bit of plumbing, something like a little Lego brick to connect two other pieces together. > All I want for Christmas is to be able to feed an API into a data portal without having to write a line of code. Yes, I’m a man of simple tastes. Seems simple enough, but I can assure you, in my time it’s taken way too much effort, and I’ve heard way too many excuses why this isn’t possible. But truthfully it’s the same kind of plumbing If This Then That (ifttt.com) offers for a myriad of different services, services as as simple as email to as complicated as my new best friend from Amazon, Alexa. I have a strong belief that such a tool could dramatically lower the barrier to publishing good, clean, and useful open data. Before we get there, let me give you a little bit of an example of how simple something like this should be based on an entirely different, but apt use case with Google docs, the Twitter API, and a simple mapping widget. A few years ago on Code for America, we were running a small marketing campaign — bring CfA to your city — and I wanted to add a viral, visual element: a live map of people advocating on our behalf. We made a simple hashtag, #CfA2012 I think it was that year, and said, “Tweet that, and we’ll put your city on the map.” Quite literally (I hoped). Being the poor man’s hacker that I was I couldn’t rely on tradition JavaScript-based mapping scripts at that time, and candidly I had little experience working with APIs then. I repeat, poor man’s hacker. So I needed a hack, and I thought, “There’s got to be an easier way to do this, where I don’t have to write any real code.” ​Fortunately enough there was. I found and easy way to pull in an API feed from Twitter right into Google docs. It’s a simple getData call where all I had to do was copy and paste the feed URL, and Google Sheets did the rest. It grabbed and cached the tweets in a recurring basis in a simple worksheet. (I think it worked about every few minutes — fast enough for our meager efforts.) The platform was easy enough that I could share it with anyone in the office for screening and clever enough to dynamically geocode the tweets onto an interactive map. ![Code for America "Citizen Action Center" flyer with a map of participating cities](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__t1hDrpAtWIjrmF8tIoZigg.jpeg) In about thirty minutes I was able to go from a twitter feed to an interactive map which I could embed on a Wordpress page. > All this was powered of course by the Twitter API and Google Sheets, but for me the user, all I had to worry about was getting the key info I needed (location and content) stored in a canonical place and visualized simply and cleanly. What I didn’t have to worry about was writing ETLs, hosting them myself and keeping them updated. That I think is what most open data managers, particularly in smaller cities, want to worry — and not worry about — about as well. ​So I return to my Christmas wish: let’s do the same thing for open data. Made plain, this would be a simple web-app where you could input your API URL, login to your data portal, select a refresh rate and the relevant fields, and the press play. Why? > At the end of the day, that’s the goal of an open data portal, a canonical archive of the data coming from a civic interaction, a piece of technology that people can use in the future to see what happened in the past. And as more and more civic tools emerge, ideally SaaS, defaulted to open and hosted in the cloud, it should be trivial to store the data from those systems in the data portals we hold up as our open data central hubs. The elegance of this model, I think, is beyond just making life easier for data portal managers like my (past) self. It’s really that it sets up a dynamic that’s better for both the open data portal visitors, and what I would describe as the open data power users: hackers. The hackers and developers should want to build tools on top of original application, not the archived store. Why? Say I wanted to properly code that Twitter mashup I mentioned before, I wouldn’t want to go and use the data from my spreadsheet, learn the Google API in addition to the Twitter one, and limit my access to whatever caching the “third party” (eg Google Sheets) had set up. I would want to go to the source. (In this case, recall, I am not a poor man’s hacker.) I would want more complete documentation, up-to-the-minute downtime information, and access to developer evangelists and support staff that deeply understood the product. On the other hand, the open data portal visitors, who in my experience tend to be more academics, researches, and journalists, would have access to the historical data, the longitudinal data that they could look at for analysis on shifts, spikes, or trends over time. And maybe even some simple visualization tools to easily make that map without a line of code. This is the natural duality of open data usage, which I argue we should mirror in open data publication. And we should bias towards simplicity and scale. Many more cities and so many more open data managers will fall into the non-technical camp, and hopefully many more tools and APIs will emerge within the ecosystem. Let’s make it easy for them to work together. As easy as setting up an IFTTT recipe. As easy as connecting some Lego blocks. Because as we all know the hard work is using them to build something beautiful. (That’s what I’ll ask for next year.) --- # Talking through Cocktail Party Napkins URL: https://abhinemani.com/talks/reflections/2015/10/29/Talking-through-Cocktail-Party-Napkins/ Published: 2015-10-29 Author: Abhi Nemani --- A few years back, I was honored to speak at the installment of my former professor Brock Blomberg as the next president of Urnisus College. My professor taught the Economics portion of the college’s distinctive Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program — a tutorial-based curriculum where you get a taste and a sense of the interconnections between these three key arenas of public life. Professor Blomberg was well aware that covering such deep and vast topics would be impossible in just four short years, indeed this was no triple major. Instead he recommended what he called, “Cocktail party economics”: a daft, yet light understanding of the topic sufficient enough to impress your guests at a cocktail party with a few simple charts and graphs on a handy napkin. Enough to get by, but not too much to bore your neighbors. Sound advice. Accordingly, at his recent inaugural I used this tactic to discuss the chosen topic, “Innovation.” As these illustrations took far more time than anything I’ve made in Keynote and Powerpoint, I figured I’d share them with a few tips on napkin writing for other kindred spirits. ### Dummy Supply and Demand graph ![Napkin sketch of two crossing lines on unlabeled axes](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__Q5CbYPvxe67S__o__eIwB6Ng.jpeg) _You can basically use to describe anything in economics with enough words and no axis._ _Pro-tip: use the side of a notebook to draw straight lines; it’s next to impossible to do it by freehand on a flimsy napkin._ ### Pie chart to explain what data for a city is and means. ![Napkin Venn diagram: quality of life, performance data, raw data and insight](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__nou5__pwzihM1wjNWEmyAEA.jpeg) _Pro-tip: use the bottom of a cup to draw the circles, and in general, never try to write words — they are illegible. Sharpies were not designed for napkin penmanship._ ### Exaggerated pie chart to explain that most mobile users open only a handful of apps only once. ![Napkin pie chart: most apps are never opened again, a sliver for Facebook](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__lbO5dH0oQJsLH3oo__M0Afg.jpeg) _Lesson learned: Apparently using facebook as the go-to app for the college set doesn’t work that well any more. Expected a few more laughs…_ ### Bar charts to illustrate Eric Reis’ observation that 99 percent of startups fail. ![Napkin bar chart of failure versus success](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__CdUx8zu88fI2zapnY__DOXg.jpeg) _Lesson learned: It’s nearly impossible to draw a 1 percent bar chart with a Sharpie._ ### Workflow map of a hub-and-spoke model of organization ![Napkin hub-and-spoke sketch](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__CCi8uc4lYoAgN6vzUghlMw.jpeg) _Lesson learned: Hubs and spokes make a lot more sense with a circle drawn around them…_ ### Workflow map of a networked organizational model ![Napkin network sketch](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__lLAK8pUxM5Z6Kx9DB1U8dA.jpeg) _Pro-tip: Next time you think of drawing a network on a napkin, don’t._ ### (Failed) Inspirational closing about being able to start fresh ![Napkin reading "Get another napkin"](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__1Wj9FF__q9QCwNbrL900Vkg.jpeg) _Lesson learned: When you talk about napkins and especially when you say you should throw them away, don’t accidentally leave one on the stage floor for the next speaker. Makes the next guy’s pictures kind of awkward…_ --- # Anchoring Open Data in the Community URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2015/10/14/Anchoring-Open-Data-in-the-Community/ Published: 2015-10-14 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Where should open data live? This wasn’t a question I had asked myself before. To me, it had seemed obvious. When it comes to government, it’s the government that has the data, it’s the government published the open data, and it’s the government that hosts the open data portal. Simple, right? Well, recently I had a conversation that challenged that simplistic conclusion and got me thinking. I was talking to a open data supporter, who was working with a government on launching its open data program. He was thinking smartly about the lifecycle of open data — looking beyond the mere publication of raw data sets to its usage, the creation of a community around the data, and the engagement of citizens with the tools and apps developed. Those latter components need a strategy, he reminded me, and a home; a plan to put the data to work, and an owner with the resources to do so. For that, it’s a good question of whether the government is well positioned to execute. This question was further underscored by a civic hacker I met in Chicago. He noted that in a resource scarce environment, you are forced to make tough decisions: what’s the most you can do with the least. His position was that governments should consider what they are **uniquely** able to do, and that’s publish data. Paraphrasing his point, “In most cases, it’s only the government that has the data. If they can only do one thing, they should just get the data out there — and do that one thing really well.” Counterpoints, however, exist. New York City, for example, has hosted an annual Big Apps competition that’s sparked an active community around open data; cities such as Chattanooga are hiring open data program managers in their IT departments or even in their libraries to build community; and Chicago itself has a history of its city staff actively engaging the local developer community. It seems then that there isn’t a clear answer to the question, but two facts do emerge: first, that government’s leveraged role is _publishing_ open data, and second, that community involvement requires a _strategy_ and _resources_ to deliver. I wonder if then we may want to more creatively explore what housing open data outside government might look like. Even if the government is the one publishing the data, are there ways to deeply entrench it within the community to ensure it finds meaning and impact. Put another way, how might we anchor open data in the community? The example in Philadelphia may point the way. The Philadelphia open data story begins, as many have, with transit data: how to get around the city. SEPTA is the regional transit authority, which had a website with route information, times, and even real time updates. But it was difficult to use, not mobile friendly, and web-based, not native. Civic hackers in the community wanted more. So these civic hackers did what civic hackers do: they hacked together their own app. By scraping the data, they built an API, free and open to anyone to develop anything (mobile apps, visualizations, etc). Soon, an ecosystem of app began to emerge, and users followed. Indeed soon enough, the SEPTA took notice, first skeptically, thinking of compelling the hackers to shut it down, but later more openly, using those tools themselves on their own website and powering an official API with even more data. That was just the start. The community, now in partnership with the city and a local technology firm, decided to go all-in on open data, building an open data portal, open data philly — an opensource, fully community-built and operated platform — that features both Philly official data and community sets as well. While most government host their own data portal — either by contracting with say Socrata or hosting their own CKAN or DKAN instance — Philadelphia’s is one of the few hosted by the community, and indeed the only one of the 10 ten largest U.S. cities. (Note: recently the city has decided to complement the community portal with their own Socrata instance.) Nonetheless, this confidence in and reliance upon the community sends a strong signal to the community from the city: this is your data, and we trust you to steward it. That was in 2011. Now on the community side, Philadelphia has one of the strongest civic hacking community, and a number of promising civic startups, as well as Chief Data Officer, a Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, and a Open Innovation Hub on the city side. Philadelphia is the story of the seeds of open data being planted by the community, and made to flourish by official sanction, support, and partnership. It’s notable that such strong community partnership was made possible by strong institutions already at work within the _community._ Temple University built an [Urban Maps & Apps Studio](http://appsnmaps.temple.edu/) with open data as a focal point; [OpenAccessPhilly](http://openaccessphilly.com/), a kind of modern civic league of leaders from inside and outside City Hall, already served as bridge; and the [Knight Foundation’s local program office](http://www.knightfoundation.org/communities/philadelphia/) had been investing substantial resources into community engagement far before open data came onto the scene. These institutions became the foundation upon which an community-anchored open data program could sit. For cities thinking about recreating the Philadelphia story, the allure is real — it’s a showcase example for the nation, truly — but so are questions. Could you just wait-and-see if civic hackers set up, start scraping data, and then eventually engage them and formalize a community and partnership? How long would that take? And could you be sure it’d have the same outcomes? And be sustainable and thrive over time? What happens when that group of volunteers moves or stops participating? As open data becomes a key pillar in community information systems — for journalists, hackers, and the government itself — it needs to be sturdy. The question then is two fold: how to artfully tease out the civic hackers in a city and thread them into a community; and how to ensure the necessary architecture they, and the city need, are robust, solid, and accessible? Returning then to the question that prompted this consideration, I think there’s a deeper, less logistical, and more philosophical point. It’s not just a question of whether the government has the resources to fully manage the open data program, but whether it _ought_ to. Should the stewardship of open data be in part a community responsibility? Opinions here will likely vary. I believe that open data infrastructure is sturdier when more parties are involved, when more institutions are in place to prop it up. If open data is a bridge between government and the community, then it stands to reason that both sides should meet halfway. --- # My Year in LA > Some reflections on my time in public service in Los Angeles URL: https://abhinemani.com/2015/10/01/My-Year-in-LA/ Published: 2015-10-01 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Some reflections on my time in public service For the past year, I’ve had the privilege to serve as the Chief Data Officer for the City of Los Angeles. It has been a privilege, an honor. To say the least. After a wonderfully educational and illuminating year, I’ve decided this ride is over. There’s much more I’ll likely write about my experience and my learnings, but a few essential thoughts come to mind as I wrap up my brief stint in the public sector: * **Ask _some_ questions**: What I found myself doing in meeting after meeting as just asking questions. “What about this,” “How about this option,” or “Could we try this?” Mostly this was for my education — my way to learn why things were the way they were. But sometimes this turned out to be fruitful. One time I was in a meeting where a department wanted to build a new mobile app (and spend countless dollars) and it turned out all they needed to do was just mobile-optimize their website. These are small, but meaningful wins. Indeed, the best compliment I ever received in this job was a few months in, “You’re already changing the way people in the city think about problems.” * **Show _some_ love**: To say that public service is a thankless job is an understatement. The way most interact with a government official is to complain. But here’s the thing: our governments do wonderful work. Based on my experience at Code for America, I walked into City Hall last year with a list of things I wanted to do. Guess what? Most — if not all — were already in place. In fact, the what’s often decried as the plague of innovation in the public sector, the procurement office, already had dashboard, price matching, and performance management. But too often those “innovations” — or more actually, doing a good job — go overlooked. What I realized was that the most useful thing I could do as a newcomer was to show appreciation and respect. Because they deserved it. * **Find _some_ allies**: The city of Los Angeles has over 40,000 employees. That alone is a sizable force. But the city proper has 100X that. I found that so many of those 4M were more than interested, they were committed, to helping the city work better. Groups like Hack for LA and the Civic Innovation Lab emerged over the time I was in Los Angeles, and they put hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours into using technology for the public good. As a city official, all I had to do was show up and be there; they did the rest. (And maybe cheerlead a little bit.) _That’s a force multiplier._ I’m forever grateful to those passionate citizens who made the LA civic tech community what it is now. All that said, no one should ever think public service is an easy task. It’s hard. But meaningful. My greatest thanks go out to the people who made this possible for me, the people who continue on this important task, and the people I hope will follow into it in the future. --- # My friend Jake URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/2015/09/22/My-friend-Jake/ Published: 2015-09-22 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Many others have written wonderful, thoughtful, and moving pieces on the passing of Jake Brewer. People who knew him better than me, people who can write more effectively. I pen this now less as an effective memorial, but more as a distillation of the thoughts that have been rambling around my unhappy mind for the past few days. Jake was a friend. I met Jake about 5 years ago working on a project with Code for America with the former CTO Aneesh Chopra. Anyone who knows Aneesh knows that he’s a big, crazy thinker whose ideas most would think impossible. But not Jake. We were planning a big, hard project, one which Jake was leading. It’d make most people say, “hell no”. But not Jake. And Aneesh, in the way that he does, would throw out one crazy idea after another. Whereas most would say, “No,” “Not possible,” and “What the hell are you thinking,” Jake would say, “Sounds good,” “Let’s do it,” and “Who do we talk to?” After that first project, we had many, many more. In our conversations, there was usually a pause, and then one of us would say, “What if…” And usually we took a stab at making it happen. Jake had a unflappable belief in the possible that was contagious. A belief solidified by sheer competence and an ethos of leadership. And of course that’s borne out in his resume and accomplishments — so much done in so terribly little time. But I suppose what I’m left thinking about most about Jake is less his CV and more his style, his persona. It’s said that some people can light up a room; that others can own it. Jake, I know, could do both, but to me, he did something different and better. Jake would _warm the room_. He made everyone around him feel more welcome, feel better. I know he did that for me. No matter how tense or complicated a situation, he’d walk into the room with a smile and with energy that would ease and uncomplicate. I always admired that. I always admired him. And I will miss him. --- # Data in the City of Angels > On joining Mayor Garcetti’s Team as the city’s first Chief Data Officer URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/announcements/reflections/2014/08/20/Data-in-the-City-of-Angels/ Published: 2014-08-20 Author: Abhi Nemani --- On moving from working _with_ government to working _within_ one: LA I’ve always been enamored by public servants. These are skilled and passionate individuals, who commit their lives (or some portion of it) to serving the public, and to do so _within_ our public institutions, which are understandably constrained by policies, regulation, and scrutiny. Such service merits nothing short of our deepest appreciation. As someone driven by the promise and purpose our public institutions hold, I think that’s why I have spent my career watching, supporting, and celebrating public servants. First it was at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, where we worked with municipalities in Southern California on their fiscal challenges and changing demographics. I still remember late nights with unbundled copies of a city’s budget spread across the conference table and 5-foot GIS maps hanging on the walls; our belief was that you had to go line-by-line and inch-by-inch to understand what was really going on. Later, it was with Code for America, where we would unearth local government supporters for our mission across the country. Sometimes it was the Mayor or the CTO; others the Parks Department or the Criminal Justice Coordinator. No matter the city, no matter the role, these public servants had something in common: a belief that government can “[work for the people, by the people in the 21st century](http://codeforamerica.org/about).” Each engagement I noticed something new about working with government: the [tactics successful officials used to get things done](https://medium.comon-boston-politics-and-the-arc-of-civic-innovation-be37621f947f), [the ways citizen interest can be turned into citizen action](http://www.govexec.com/state-local/2014/08/ahbi-nemani-civic-interest-action/90695/a), and [how every city has unique assets it leverages to get the job done](https://medium.comlooking-at-things-in-many-different-ways-ef2b3987ff81). I watched, and I learned. And yet, in every city, certain themes emerged, chiefly that a new relationship is emerging between the community and the government — one of collaboration and co-creation—and in that new relationship, open data serves [as part](https://medium.comopen-data-as-a-means-with-many-ends-9bcc16e20f81) of their common vocabulary. Now, I’m honored to get a chance to go from working _with_ governments to working _within_ one. I’ll be joining Mayor Garcetti’s team, as the City of Los Angeles’ first Chief Data Officer, leading the administration’s efforts to drive data-driven policy and performance and make the city a platform for citizen engagement and entrepreneurship. Data can sometimes seem like an abstract, intangible thing, but’s not — it’s everywhere, and we use it everyday. We use data to find the best route to get to work, to manage our financials, or even to plan for the weather. Data is everywhere, and we use it all the time. What’s exciting _now_ is that with the advent of new tools and systems, governments can use public information to be more efficient, open, and engaged. Governments can and are. Some are using data to [optimize performance and service delivery](http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-4/beyond-transparency-louisvilles-strategic-use-of-data-to-drive-continuous-improvement/), like [improving ambulances response times](http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/06/predictive-data-analytics-big-data-nyc.html); others are encouraging citizens to build apps atop open data that make their own lives better, like [social service locators](http://www.smc-connect.org/) or [transit planners](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/10/code-for-america-detroit-fellows-launch-a-better-way-to-ride-the-bus.html). It’s these examples, and the public servants who made them real, that I hope to lean upon as I navigate these new waters. Indeed, I also aim to work with the growing community of civic data champions to go further: promote collaboration across jurisdictional lines, integrate more deeply public data into citizen’s lives, and simplify the ability for anyone in the public sector to use data and make data-driven decisions. > That’s the beauty of modern cities: rich diversity within high density — places where unexpected collisions lead to creativity and innovation. It’s impossible to mention Los Angeles without thinking about its scale and diversity: nearly 4 million people, and growing. When you explore the city, it feels almost like a city of cities. So many neighborhoods, each with its own culture, its own ecosystem, its own feel. Yet, still connected to the common identity as Angelenos. On my latest trip, I was told an interesting fact about the city: something akin to, “You can arrive into LAX from any country in the world and very quickly find a neighborhood where you feel right at home; or you explore a new part of town and feel in like your in another country altogether.” That’s the beauty of modern cities: rich diversity within high density — places where unexpected collisions lead to creativity and innovation. I suspect that’s part of what motivates the public servants that I know, and the many more I’ll meet soon. It’s surely part of why I’m getting onto a plane shortly to LAX. I have a hypothesis that data can play a big role in making the city even more efficient and open, as well as one in enabling those neighborhoods to make their communities even better. That, like so much else, is part of what I’ll be testing and learning in the City of Angels. --- # What the US Digital Service should learn from Apple for Government as a Platform > Lessons for the new USDS from real consumer platforms URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2014/08/13/What-the-USDS/ Published: 2014-08-13 Author: Abhi Nemani --- It’s been about 10 years. Apple went from creating one of the most interesting and successful media playing devices, the iPod, to generating the flagship mobile experience for consumers. Of course, I’m talking about the iPhone. The iPhone is simple, elegant, user friendly, and it just works, but the trick in the iPhone and the broader Apple marketplace is that they’ve been able to crack the code on how to create a platform. The iPhone is a platform. What I mean by that? That means that this device, as a piece of hardware, not only comes preloaded with a dozen beautiful applications. It has enabled hundreds of thousands if not millions of applications built outside of Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. Thousands of developers have built and continue to build many diverse and amazing tools. That’s what we mean about a software company working as a platform. As Tim O’Reilly likes to put it, it’s the art of creating, of architecting technology where users can add even more value than what they take. The App Store may be the best current living example of this notion that is growing and thriving. Then, since then this notion has been further extended towards areas that aren’t necessarily technological. Most relevant to this conversation is a term popularized by civic-minded Web 2.0 advocates, a notion called _government as a platform_. Now, this phrase, government as a platform can take on a lot of different meanings. Sometimes that can mean enabling citizens to do the work of government with government. Say, picking up the trash themselves and helping out their local recycling firm, or more famously adopting hydrant, so they can dig them out when it snows, or something just as simple as providing input. It’s not just the city making decisions on its own. These however are more about the metaphor of government as a platform, less the technology of a platform itself. Even when technology was used, it was an enabler, not the focus point. The iPhone, however, is different. At the base level though, it was really hard and software. The App Store, no matter how you extend its metaphor, no matter how you apply its meaning to other areas, it really is a technology platform for creating new software. It’s been remarkably successful at doing that. What if we were to take this metaphor, this idea of an Apple App Store and apply it to government? What would that mean, not just from a _metaphorical_ perspective, but from a _technological_ one? > What if we were to take this metaphor, this idea of an Apple App Store and apply it to government? What would that mean, not just from a _metaphorical_ perspective, but from a _technological_ one. This question couldn’t be more relevant than it is right now. That’s because just this week, the United States Federal Government announced the launch of the [United States Digital Service](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm). This is a technology group centralized within the vast bureaucracy of the federal government, focused on supporting the creation of world class digitals interfaces for citizens. It shares its motivation and much of its strategy to its predecessor in the United Kingdom, the Government Digital Service (or GDS by short). What GDS aimed to do was to create a world-class group of technologists within the government that could build government interfaces that were simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Most famously they scrapped the maze of created by hundreds of outdated government websites, replacing them with a one-stop portal, [Gov.uk](http://gov.uk). Beyond direct software development, however, GDS served as a kind of innovation consultancy within government — somewhat by accident, the story goes. A possibly apocryphal story I heard was that a consultant came in for a big technology project projected at millions of dollars. GDS was invited by the lead agency to help provide a point of view. Now, instead of a typical vendor conversation, instead of just sitting down at the table, looking at their proposal, possibly past works, and maybe even the roadmap, the GDS staff _walked into the room with a prototype_. They came into the meeting with a functioning prototype of the software the agency was trying to use. They could say, “These guys are asking for tens and millions of dollars and look my team built this basically functioning equivalent in a fraction of the cost and time.” That changes things: the conversation, the process, and the power between the vendor and the government. > That changes things: the conversation, the process, and the power between the vendor and the government. This is the background upon which USDS is being launched. GDS has already been credited with saving their government millions upon millions of dollars. Interestingly enough, it sprung out of its own healthcare debacle. They tried to roll out a healthcare system for their National Health Institute was calamitous outcomes. There is a phrasing that, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and our friends across the pond did not. Now, it seems that our officials in DC are not either. Now, pointing Mikey Dickerson, former Google engineer and leader of the healthcare.gov redesign, the administration is launching an American Government Digital Service, known as the US Digital Service (or USDS). While their mandate is large, I suspect at its core, there’s this basic goal: “We will not let another healthcare.gov happen again.” Yet, although GDS and USDS have similar motivations, similar histories in their own ways, they don’t share fully the same approach. USDS will serve as more a management consultancy for tech projects, while 18F, a technology team about 6 months older, will be more on the implementation side. Both, however, will share responsibilities and resources, it seems, with the technology groups _within the agencies already_. Now, the UK did that, but they did it with a broad mandate, and the staff (500+ now) to really overhaul the system. Because responsibility is shared between USDS and the other agencies, I think the question around a functioning Apple store is salient. Apple, much like USDS had to share—or even give up —responsibility. They couldn’t build every application in the App Store, nor did they want to. Their strategy was the ecosystem. With limited resources, complicated management structures, and share responsibilities, USDS may need to follow suit. Instead of centralizing technology expertise and a big bench, they want consider the platform play: commit to pushing innovation, tech-savvy, and modern software techniques down into the organization. This way the agencies themselves don’t have to rely on USDS or 18F for _every_ _single_ _thing_ _they_ _do_. That’s just not sustainable. A close study of the Apple model, though, may point the way. For their platform, Apple focused on standard (both technical and design), distribution, and developer engagement & incentives. ### Design Anybody who has used an Apple device of any kind, iPhone, Android, iPhone, iPad, or Mac even, can’t help but notice the elegance and simplicity of the software. It just works and works beautifully. They did that by having, of course, amazing designers on staff at Apple who could create a calendar application prettier than one that you’ve seen before; who could create an operating system that felt human; and who could continually push the envelope rising the tides of the broader design community. These became their de facto **_design standards:_** reference prototypes, which anyone seeking to sit their app next to Apple’s on the home screen would do well to match. Side note: something similar I’ve been personally noticing is with the web publishing platform, Medium, which you’re reading this article on. Flickr shared a similar origin story. The quality of the content you see on other pages by other authors, their insight, rhetoric, and meaningfulness forces you to think long and hard about what you write and how because you want to stack up. Talent attracts talent. Just the same way, developers adding apps to the App Store wanted to stack up. > The quality of the content you see on other pages by other authors, their insight, rhetoric, and meaningfulness forces you to think long and hard about what you write and how because you want to stack up. Talent attracts talent. Of course, Apple’s strict submission and review process ensured that those apps would; not just anybody could throw an app into the App Store. No, instead you’d have to meet key standards and be approved by Apple personnel. Of course, I’ve heard this as a headache for some, but for users, they can likely see that there is a common _interface_ _language_ as it were to iOS applications. The gesturing is common, as are, say, the location of common buttons just settings and sharing. The user interfaces are always clean and simple. And every day, the expectations grow higher and higher for designers to create delightful experiences for their users. This is a, ‘less is more’ approach. Instead of doing more — say building \*every\* application with such rigorous standards, they did less, building a number of flagship applications along with design standards to cultivate high quality external contribution. That’s part of how the App Store went from just a dozen or two apps on the fresh loaded system to hundreds of thousands in the App Store. What does this tell us for government? First and foremost, a base-level set of principles would be needed, and the [US’s port](http://playbook.cio.gov/) of the [UK’s equivalent](https://www.gov.uk/design-principles) is a great start: pithy, practical, and user-centric. Supplementing these with more day-to-day design standards (e.g. a style guide, etc) may be helpful overtime. Beyond that, since USDS is meant to serve as a management consultant role, they could either invest directly or help agencies in the usability standards and interoperability systems that ensure the applications built by any agency meet industry standards for what’s great. Beyond that, they could invest in the integration services that make going from app to app to app seamless. Those services can include identity. If you’ll notice there are many apps, for instance—those in the game center, the number of facebook apps now, etc — all those present next to seamless experiences. Switching the app to app, doesn’t require you to login again and again. Data is synced across devices too, in the same way you’d hope agencies coordinated and shared data. Finally, you’re less concerned about viruses or similar malfeasance because of Apple’s strict review and approval process; something you’d certainly want from say the IRS or HHS. In the government setting, it’s often commented that half of your time is spent filling out paperwork, and nearly all of _that_ is filling out paperwork with the same information over and over again. As if every form wants you to fill them out its name, your name, your address, etc. each time. So a shared federal identity service could means that citizens wouldn’t have to go through that laborious and frustrating process. That instead, they could create one account that spans multiple apps. That means that you go from many small pieces or large, not joined at all save a link from app to app, to one where those pieces are joined, arguably loosely, but loose enough that the citizen doesn’t have to each time log in or register and acclimate to that new environment. (Note: I know this has been tried before in the US was mixed results; the UK, however, relies on bank/credit card identity information, and it seems to show promise.) The same goes, I would argue, for the design and user experience components of the App Store as we think of the government as a platform. Could we create design prototypes that are valuable from agency to agency? Probably the best example of this is Twitter’s Bootstrap design framework built by the Twitter team for them to make it easier to build Twitter and then any supporting pages for that company. Cleverly, that team open sourced it and it quickly became the most popular open source project on GitHub. Pull up almost any page on the internet from a startup, you’ll likely see a common set of buttons or toolbars, particularly at startups, early-stage companies without the time or resources to invest in design. If you look closely, you’d notice that it’s probably Bootstrap or another common CSS framework that’s making it happen. What about government Bootstrap? Could we create design frameworks and standards working hand in hand with USDS and the agencies that not only create common experiences app to app, but also dramatically lower the barrier for agencies to create new tools? Particularly when those agencies have a limited bandwidth and limited technical resources. These design resources make the time to go from idea to delivery from say, 4 months or 6 months to 4 days or 6 hours. I can speak from personal experience. I can take a simple Ruby general app, throw in a Bootstrap design, customize it a bit, and take it live within a day. Given USDS’s role as more management consultant than operational arm, it may be hard for the group to directly build either of these pieces of infrastructure. Yet, building them in a vacuum isn’t good either. Instead, maybe USDS could work with 18F and a sponsoring agency to build these services while developing new technology. For instance, develop a scalable identity system while developing a service that needs one; or generalize out a design patter after launching a beautiful app. In this way, these services — or others like them— would not only have a test case, but USDS would not need to creep beyond their mandate. These two ideas coming together, an identity layer that makes it easier for users to switch from app to app and a design framework that provides common user experiences offer a powerful combination for a central digital strategy unit. This could dramatically change the way agencies approach technology. First and foremost, it means they no longer have to look at 18F or GDS or USDS every time they want to build a tool. Instead, those tools are now at their ready. Second, it recognizes the fact that American federal government agencies are vast, and will often require more than one application. HHS is going to need its own handful of apps; Energy another set, and so forth. That’s the unavoidable reality of decentralized bureaucracy, with specialized services for its specialized constituencies. That’s not a problem, that’s a reality and possibly even a good thing. These integration layers or infrastructure pieces, however, let even a thousand apps bloom, all the while keeping them in a walled garden where citizens can find what they are looking for and know that it’s likely beautiful. > These two ideas coming together, an identity layer that makes it easier for users to switch from app to app and a design framework that provides common user experiences offer a powerful combination for a central digital strategy unit. ### Distribution. The App Store model’s been something tried by other companies, both private or public. In the civic technology space, you’re seeing a number of companies invest in a platform strategy. Most, however, focus on easier access to government clients. For instance, if your civic startup has anything to do with business permitting, you might partner with Accela, and then when a city is working with Accela, and they can more readily deploy your tool on top. For a startup, as anybody who’s worked in one can know, anything that brings down the acquisition cost is a boon. Now, I would argue that the harder question for civic technology companies doesn’t come in the form of procurement or access to government. No, now I think that there’s energy and cities in particular across the country for new tools and a new way of doing things. There’s an itch they want to scratch. The startups and new service providers are the solution. Instead, I think the bigger problem is actually user adoption. Getting these tools that are built, that nearly all, some are, but nearly if not most are citizen facing, and would be better with massive user numbers. Not just 100 or 50 users here or there, but thousands or tens of thousands, particularly if it’s a broad-purposed app. It’s fair to note that some of the apps are more niche and don’t require that kind of visibility or user acquisition, and that’s fair. For the ones that do, and those in particular are the ones that are generating more significant revenue, raising funding, and have applicability or jurisdiction. These platforms need a way to get to users, and that’s hard. As has been written in the past, people don’t wake up in the morning wanting to be civic. While you or I may wake up and pull up our email or Facebook because that’s how we been trained, that our professional and personal lives are front and center, and that’s what we want to see right away. Do we wake up in the morning and want to report a pothole? Do take a quick break from work to share an idea to improve the city? Maybe some of us do. (I’m sufficiently nerdy that that’s something that’s top of mine, but I suspect I’m in the minority there.) We want people to be civic, but we can’t assume they already are. > We want people to be civic, but we can’t assume they already are. That means that in the civic space it’s particularly hard to gain users. That said, it was the traditional consumer space—where user acquisition is still a challenge —that the App Store model paved the way for a new breed of popular apps, because soon after launch, the iPhone was more the exception than the rule in the smartphone market. As these devices, these little remarkable handhelds, become ever present, you were promised entry into a massive user base, all eager for new toys to trick out their pocket-sized supercomputer. The specter of your app becoming one of those shiny button user’s home screen is compelling because of developers’ feverish drive to build things that people use. Put another way, the App Store paves out a pathway for use or distribution for a company that typically would have to invest dramatic resources into marketing, ranging from print to online ads, outreach and PR, and ongoing community management, user engagement. Applying that lesson to the government space, however, is more difficult. Unlike Apple, Google, or other consumer platforms, the government doesn’t have a flagship piece of hardware. There isn’t a device everyone crave, which we drive app downloads and usage. (The closest thing would be a driver’s license I suppose, which isn’t exactly magical, not could it run anything ranging from Angry Birds to Wikipedia.) Thus, how do we re-create that kind of, every man, every place, every usage platform that we can put in the palms of citizens hands? I’m not quite sure. You may be able to re-create the efficacy of the App Store sans the hardware. Could you make the value of building an app that gets approved for the App Store something that governments can do? The _value_ and _incentive_, not necessarily the process and payout. Could you add other benefits, such as a business model or connections to other applications that would incentivize developers to build with those common pieces of infrastructure, design, identity, etc? You could imagine a high-profile government App Store focused specifically on citizens, curated very, very well, and then complemented with nontraditional delivery mechanisms. The government sends us mail, the government controls street signs, the government controls so much of what we interact with on a day-to-day basis. We might be able to leverage those physical assets and existing processes to create the same kind of transparent marketplace that Apple was able to do. Add to that then, the prestige of, say a centralized government body housed within the offices of the executive branch. Then, you might be able to even take advantage of the clout of, say, the Oval Office. Maybe high-value applications could be part of a weekly communication from the White House? Maybe you could you push users from one interface to another, what’s been called the _civic upsell_, only for applications up to par? The government has a megaphone to leverage, one that grows louder as more tools emerge and gain traction. There are probably many ways to push this kind of thinking. This piece of a government as a platform hasn’t been fully addressed yet. The central strategy would be to consider where the government had leverage — in the same way Apple did with devices and the app store — and then to put it to work on incentivizing users and encouraging developers. The broader point, however, is simple: when you build something, _people do not necessarily_ just come. Instead, you have to architect scaffolding for the tool makers, ways their apps can get into the hands of a sizable user base eager to engage. This strikes me as a massive opportunity for centralized technology groups such as USDS. ### Business model. Finally, the App Store was able to draw in so many developers in a serious fashion because there was money on the table. Developers could charge for their applications, ranging from $0.99 to $10 to even more than that. That meant that there were real financial incentives for developers to build apps for this government as a platform. Of course, Apple took a chunk of that deal, and until recently, things like in-app purchases were difficult to do, so the revenue potential for many applications was a bit limited, but still there was potential. You could make money off apps in the App Store. Now, some [interesting studies](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/10/the-app-store-six-years-later/) have come out now that most don’t make money, that in fact, most put the developers in a lot of jeopardy around sustainability of their lifestyle and career if building iOS apps is all they do. That said, at least at the start, and there’s much commentary about this in the news, the prospect of a revenue share model did two important things. First, it told developers and the world that their contributions in this ecosystem matter. That they are worth paying for, that you should have skin in the game just as they do because these tools matter. Second, it was a signal to developers and the community writ large that this notion of a platform wasn’t just a ‘nice to have’, but it was a ‘need to have’. Apple invested serious resources to build that up. From a technology perspective, and from a business operations perspective, they equally staffed up a the tools and resources developers would need to go to work and a team to go through the approval process for new applications. These two together become a fairly articulate and compelling case for developers or others thinking about building on that platform, that this just isn’t a passing fancy. The iPhone as a platform was for real. Such a revenue share opportunity holds less relevance for the USDS and 18F examples; in those cases, the expectation is that some of the work will be done in-house, and even contracted work likely wouldn’t function on the kind of $.99 app store model. You could, however, open up the doors to the design standards and the distribution channels to outside developers, in the same way Apple did. Further, you could augment the now commonplace app contests and hackathons with prizes in the form of contracts with the agencies or USDS that offer that same kind of business incentive for developers. Sustainability, profitability, and just keeping the lights on are increasingly common and hard questions for civic technology; if any of these tactics borrowed from Apple move the needle, it should pay dividends for the ecosystem. These three different tactics, design, and distribution, and business model, are some, but not all of the tactics that Apple used to create its platform. To make this work, we need to move beyond government as a platform as just a metaphor or idea, but into a real technological reality. Begging, borrowing or stealing innovation, whenever possible, from what worked at Apple, Google, and others, and remembering that it’s not just about the technology, but it’s also not just about the metaphor. It’s both. It’s about the means studying closely the mechanisms through which those consumer platforms were really able to become platforms. Their businesses shifted from one exclusively about internal creativity to external participation and co-creation. That is, they swapped from a top-down model to a networked one. For the US Digital Service, it seems already slated to play this kind of network role. They can’t mandate that each agency builds everything, nor can they build everything themselves. Instead, it’s my belief that they should learn from the successes, from the consumer industry. Learn from the iPhone, learn from the Android ecosystem, and see how those platforms, in a very real and technical sense, became effective ecosystems for innovation. See if those lessons can be applied in the public sector. Could USDS actually make government a platform a reality? A technological reality that makes every government agency more tech-savvy and excited about building great software. A reality where citizens can have world-class digital interfaces, no matter the creator, no matter the agency. That should be our goal for government in the 21st century. One that works sure, but also one that gets smarter, more creative, and more open overtime. That’s exactly what we’ve seen from successful platforms across the board. I suspect that too is what we’ll see as we venture ahead in re-architecting our governments as a platform. --- # On Empathy — Building for Both Sides of the Government Counter > Two kinds of empathy and the gap in public sector innovation URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/featured/2014/08/13/Two-Kinds-of-Empathy-the-Gap-in-Public-Sector-Innovation/ Published: 2014-08-13 Author: Abhi Nemani --- About a year ago I was doing introductions in this segment at the Code for America Summit around some of the harder problems for government technology. I was introducing a number of speakers, most of them were civic startup founders. I found myself commenting that the first speaker was working in government… and then the next speaker actually had been a police officer. Then finally the third one too was a retired cop. I joked, “So to build a successful civic startup do you have to have either had a badge or a gun?” Now, about a year later, I’m thinking: maybe. Maybe there was a kernel of truth in that quick quip. > I joked, “So to build a successful civic startup do you have to have either had a badge or a gun?” I’ve been fortunate to be pretty close to a number of civic startups throughout the years. When I say a civic startup I mean a startup that focusing on selling to the government, on providing it tools to help them do their jobs better. In fact, I helped build and run the [Code for America Accelerator](http://codeforamerica.org/accelerator), which jumpstarts civic startups. Over the course of 3 years, I’ve read over nearly a thousand applications from across the country and some from even around the world. Some were very much on point—e.g. some of the winners, [MindMixer](http://MindMixer.com), [SmartProcure](http://smartprocure.us), etc — and some not so much: one had more to do with peanut butter than any civic technology company ever should. Each year, we selected each year a handful or so of some of the best startups that we could find. That’s not just in terms of their market traction, business potential, but also for the meatiness of the challenges they wanted to take on. (Why so small? We had a few punches to pick. We wanted them to be good ones. We wanted them to hit their mark.) Since then I have studied the civic startup space closely, striving to understand whether this was a flash in the pan or something bigger. Now, more than ever, I’m convinced it’s the latter. Not only are there countless startups actively scaling, but there are dozens of new programs, ranging from [eRepublic Labs](http://labs.erepublic.com/) or [FastFWD](http://fast-fwd.org/), designed with intents similar to CfA: how can we fuel this emergent ecosystem. These sum to say —if I can borrow a phrase from Dan O’Neil — that we’re seeing the beginnings of a _real_ _industry_. Diving in a bit deeper, though, I’ve noticed a curious but consistent thread running through many successful companies: many civic startups have a cofounder or senior leader who worked _inside_ government. Out of the 12 civic startups in CfA the first two years, **75 percent** had a public sector co-founder. These co-founders were _public entrepreneurs_ even before they became _private ones_. Their businesses are as much a reflection of their insights and understanding of the government process as it is general startup and business acumen. > These co-founder were _public entrepreneurs_ even before they became _private ones._ Thinking about that I was reminded of a conversation I had years ago with one of the partners at [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com), YC, as it goes by, is one of the world’s most famous, most successful accelerators. Their wins include Dropbox and Airbnb and many others like it. One YC-backed co-founder once told me that the most valuable resource he got out of the program was the founder @ YC listserv, where he could post the questions that kept him up at night, and promptly receive helpful input from other founders, new and old. That is to say, that one of YC’s outcomes may have truly been the creation of a community, a collaborative community. In the Summer of 2012, we were in the midst of building the inaugural CfA Accelerator, and naturally we wanted to learn from the best, so we headed down to Mountain View to meet with a YC partner. What I learned was what that YC had no specific operating thesis (unlike say Union Square that invests in networks, or Collaborative Fund and the sharing economy companies), aside from high growth potential. YC is general. They look for an interesting idea, a promising market, and most importantly, a powerful team. A powerful team, to them, had both technical and business chops, but just as important, they had _empathy_ (my word, not his). That is to say, what they look for in a company is a team that’s solving a problem they’ve confronted in their own lives. Famously you can look at Airbnb, where the founders needing to find a cheaper, quicker, easier, faster way to book a place to stay when they’re on the road. Or Warby Parker (although not YC): The lore goes that the founders lost a pair of glasses on a flight and then was shocked by the cost of new glasses. They decided this was a problem they wanted to solve and they built a massive and growing business (of, I’ll add, beautiful glasses) around that idea. > It’s hard to build software for somebody else. It’s hard to solve a problem if it’s not a problem that you’ve seen yourself. Entrepreneurs solve problems they see in their own lives. That was the takeaway. In a certain way that speaks to a notion that’s very popular in the technology development space called _empathy_. It’s hard to build software for somebody else. It’s hard to solve a problem if it’s not a problem that you’ve seen yourself. Even if it’s not a problem that you’re facing in your day to day lives you need to _empathize_ with your customers so that way you can build software that they would find valuable. You are to put yourself in their shoes and design _for_ and _with_ them. Of course through that conversation this YC partner made a good point about their typical participant: recent top-notch engineers (say Stanford grads) whose biggest problems are things like booking a place to stay or finding cool hipster sunglasses. Government isn’t something they really deal with — particularly not out in the supportive, lush surroundings off of the 210. If anything it’s paying a parking ticket in Palo Alto or some incorporation or financing paperwork to go, but even that they can tend to rely on a vast network of legal and policy partners to handled. Government and in particular government problems just weren’t top of mind. The question he posed back to us in that conversation is, “How do you go about building empathy for entrepreneurs for _your_ problems?” That meant, leading them to the well of challenges ranging from access to food stamps or prison overcrowding. These aren’t exactly situations that the typical ramen eating entrepreneur takes on. (Well, maybe the food stamps.) And if visibility is the first step towards empathy, then the typical YC thoroughbred may well as be blind to these blights, he added. But for us that was something more of a solvable problem. Code for America made its name around an intensive in-city experience. CfA sends its fellows within the city hall to see what’s working, what’s not, to understand real problems, and then build software that solve their problems. The fellows are challenged to empathize in entirely new environments. Last year one of the teams in San Mateo was trying to build tools to increase food stamp enrollment. In what is typically known as one of the wealthiest counties in the country, there are a disproportionately high number of individuals eligible for food stamps, yet notable low adoption rates. Why and how do we change that, were the questions poised to the fellows. To answer it, the decided to walk in the shoes of the people they were hoping to build for and with: they took the “food stamp challenge,” living a week only off of what they could purchase on food stampts — nothing more. (A dramatic break particularly for folks like the fellows coming from very successful backgrounds ranging from Apple, Microsoft and Google.) Another working on criminal justice reform did a night in a jail and then a ride along with a police officer. This year one of the teams in code enforcement did a code enforcement follow along with an officer and had ended up with some fairly colorful experiences including what looks like one of the meanest dogs I’ve seen out there. Empathy was front and center to the fellowship process. The validation of this approach came later in 2012, then three of the eight fellowship teams decided to turn their year-long projects into full-blown startups. They had simply seen too much interest in their tools from across the country to not take the leap. Each of these tools took (and many others like them), say, open data, or a citizen engagement process and built a new interface into city hall. BlightStatus (now [CivicInsight](http://civicinsight.com/)) for instance took data from the vacant housing restoration / demolition process and built a simple and beautiful web app so citizens were no longer in the dark around what’s happening to that abandoned building next door. Turns out, though, that city officials and social advocates — ranging from the mayor to the local habitat for humanity—found this tool compelling. (Habitat is now their power user.) The unexpected upshot was that this consumer tool because an enterprise asset. Since then I’ve been thinking about that a lot. How do we think not just about citizens, but also those public servants (inside cities or not) decidated to serving them? We desperately need empathy for citizens, particularly those hit hardest by the short-comings of our social safety net and the justice system. But there’s another, less discussed empathy, but no less salient. It’s the _empathy behind the counter,_ a constant reminder that government is not just _for the people_, but also _of_ and _by_ the people. Put another way, the users of government software are not just end citizens, but also government officials themselves. And all deserve beautiful technology that works. > It’s the _empathy behind the counter,_ a constant reminder that government is not just _for the people_, but also _of_ and _by_ the people. For us as citizens we live on the _front side_ of the counter. When we’re at the DMV we see the slow processes and long ways. We sit there frustrated, all the while marveling at the speed with which we can email a colleague, play Angry Birds, and check facebook — all at the same time. That’s the front side of the counter. That’s the citizen experience. I think the kind of empathy that we need to think more about is empathy on the _other side of the counter._ The kind of empathy for the government official, who’s there working with hundreds if not thousands of people coming with a “request” ranging from new driver’s license to a clearly impossible permit for parking even through street cleaning. These passionate civil servants must go through each and everyone with equal care, because that’s what governments do: they help everyone — no matter their needs. > **But we don’t see onto the other side of the counter… > We simply don’t go back there. > We don’t see the piles of papers stacked up on their desks. We don’t see the software probably built decades ago that they’re forced to work with.** ![Screenshot of a legacy government case-management software interface](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__J0M5j8m8T16MDczfN86L6A.png) But we don’t see what these people do. We don’t see how service line government works, how they handle this deluge of inbound. We simply don’t go back there. We don’t see the piles of papers stacked up on their desks. We don’t see the software probably built decades ago that they’re forced to work with. Worse still, we do not give them the benefit of the doubt that it’s the system, not the people within it, that’s cause those frustrating delays and headaches (Certainly, we owe them that.) The combination of those things—not seeing the situation, and not feeling for the people within it—that’s the opposite of empathy. That’s indifference at best, disregard at worst. That’s what needs to change. We need to start building empathy when we’re thinking about civic tools. That’s not just for and with users, _citizens_, but for and with _public servants_. > We need to start building empathy when we’re thinking about civic tools. That’s not just for and with user, citizens, but for and with public servants. Hence the correlation between a successful civic startup and its having a former government official on its founding team. They’ve seen it. They’ve been there. These are entrepreneurs who as citizens lived on the front side of the counter but as public service lived on the back. They’ve seen both sides of how technology can dramatically change our private lives and how misuse or outdated technology can frustrate the public process. I would argue that the schism between our private technologies and our public systems is caused by this _empathy gap_. We need to marry the best thinking and modern approaches from the web with the specialized insight and expertise from public service. Its this mixture that breeds vibrant, organic civic enterprises. > I would argue that the schism between our private technologies and our public systems is caused by this _empathy gap._ Here’s the good thing. Things are changing, and things are changing for the better in part because some of these entrepreneurs are bringing to bear their bureaucratic experience. Bureaucracy here should actually be a good word, not a bad one. It’s the knowledge of how the machine you’re striving to change, actually works. More and more programs are emerging to pair public entrepreneurs with private ones: [Entrepreneurs-in-Residence in SF](http://entrepreneur.sfgov.org/), [FuseCorps](http://fusecorps.org/), and of course CfA — just to name of few. These programs are yielding startups we as citizens can be proud up. For instance, take [OpenCounter.](http://opencounter.us) This is a fellowship application of the Santa Cruz in 2012 designed to help small business permitting that turned into a Knight Foundation-backed civic startup. OpenCounter makes it easy to go through the bulk of the business permitting process online for new entrepreneurs. Take as an example of a classic approach where a consumer oriented or consumer centric tool might overlook the nuances and complexities of city hall. You could think, “Let’s build a turbo tax for business licensing. Find all of the paperwork the citizens have to go through. Build a streamline desktop or mobile app and then just ship that off to the city department and hope that they’ll use that data well.” That strategy, however, misses the point entirely. All that strategy does is add another sheet of paper to the stack that the government official all ready has to deal with. All that strategy does is reaffirms this notion that change can happen entirely on the outside. All that strategy does is make an all ready complex and difficult system more complex and more difficult. Unless we start to understand and optimize the backend system, the back of the office systems that drive our governments that all we’re doing is making the problem worse. We ought to do better than that. That’s where I think Open Counter is such a great example. One of the founders is a past CfA fellow and the other actually ran economic development for a city. These are 2 individuals who closely and deeply understood how the business permitting process works. It worked in ways like you’d expect any disaggregated system would. (They once showed me stacks and stacks of papers entrepreneurs typically have to wade through to get their business off of the ground.) Some forms go to one department, others go to another; the rules are A, in one place and B in another. Of course, none of the departments of them are open past 5pm. As an entrepreneur going through this process you’re stuck bouncing around city hall during your work day hoping to string together an sensible, successful application, all the while frustration is bubbling up along with a few second regrets around taking this old leap into entrepreneurship. Indeed it _is_ out responsibility to minimize that complexity and guard against doubts around new businesses, particularly when cities of all sizes are looking to grow their economic base. But _starting there_ would be a fool’s errand. What the OpenCounter team did was say, “Let’s start by just understanding the process no matter its complications and then let’s do what technology does well. Let’s use technology to abstract away those complications for the citizens.” Reengineering systems takes time, requires politics, and deep localized understanding. The OpenCounter team presciently took to heart that bureaucracy was built for a reason, often good reasons, and any (or all) complications come from years and years of policies and regulations piling on and on to where there were so many layers of bureaucracy that for government officials, answering simple questions like zoning and fees are far less easy than they seem. (I spent three years trying to compile a national database of economic development programs; I speak from experience, it’s a nightmare.) OpenCounter’s process mapped the submissions and applications coming in from new business owners routing them effectively to the correct agency. They worked as a kind of router for a citizen into the various departments that they would need to work with. Not requiring that the citizens themselves interact with those departments over and over again, but realizing that the information and applications that they were pulling together would need to get to those existing organizations in time and in a way that they could use. Instead of adding a piece of paper to that growing pile on their desks they used email, meaning that they might even be able to take a piece of paper off. > Instead of adding a piece of paper to that growing pile on their desks they used email, meaning that they might even be able to take a piece of paper off. Thus, OpenCounter effectively said to government agency, “While I realize this process isn’t ideal, I’m not asking you to change it overnight; instead, let’s simplify the front end for your users, and let’s work together to make sure their submissions don’t undermine or disrupt your existing processes.” That is indeed empathy. What happens through this kind of process, you deploy a interface citizens really want to use — without hampering the government agencies—and in so doing develop a backdoor view into the bottlenecks in the existing process. Where did users drop off in the process? Which agencies struggled to respond? Which still required an onsite visit? These are the questions that an app built atop an existing governmental process offer insight into. Software can enable data-driven reform, and empathy can make it palatable. While this a long game, a slow game, and probably a hard one, it is one that empathizes deeply both ahead and behind the counter, both with citizens and the governments dedicated to serving them. > Software can enable data-driven reform, and empathy can make it palatable. Empathy has emerged profoundly in the technology literature over the past few years. There’s probably many reasons for that, the growth of UX and UI practices, the number of technologies themselves and the value of design just to name a few. I would argue the central reason for empathy becoming so critical in software is that as more and more of the obvious tools are built —the tools to book hotels or collaborate with colleagues what have you— there’s a need to move away from the obvious consumer problems towards the societal or systemic problems that many have never seen before. The same goes for any other industry, health care, education, etc: these are foreign territories for many entrepreneurs. These are new lands to chart. A commitment to empathy and all that it entails is unavoidable and indeed preferable: talking to users, working with them, building for them and then iterating over time. With a commitment to empathy, we can start to take on challenges that may not be problems of our own but are certainly problems that other people have. Now more than ever, those with the skills to build great software need empathy for those with the important problems that technology _can begin_ to address. That’s what will make the technology they create more meaningful. In the government context in particular, such a commitment would reframe the role of technology _from the help desk to the digital service center_, one positioned as an empathetic partner in the business of government. The goals of technology would be less bug fixes or even shiny new websites; instead, they would be the customer experience, citizen engagement, and optimal service delivery. Those are goals we have for great civic software. Indeed, those are goals we have for great company. Indeed I think too those are goals that we have for our public institutions. --- # The power of a simple, little light URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2014/07/26/The-power-of-a-simple-little-light/ Published: 2014-07-26 Author: Abhi Nemani --- It’s a fairly common joke for those in the technology industry that you’re parents don’t really know what you do. Worse still, if you happen to work in a niche market or on a currently unknown app. For me over the last few years, my parents would introduce me to their friends as a “non-profit organizer,” which all things considered wasn’t really that far off. Getting much beyond that though — in the particulars around what kind of non-profit, what technology we were building, and why that mattered — well, that was an entirely different matter. Just recently, in the sprawling indoor parking structure of an outlet mall outside of Chicago, that changed. It finally clicked. ![Cars in a dimly lit parking garage](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__7IH4FxTZsc3mk15I18tpzA.jpeg) > “Oh, so that’s what you do.” ![Green indicator light on a parking-garage space sensor](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__OB9AGB3TWK1AW5E__cnNpvA.jpeg) Hanging above each parking space was a small light that simply emitted one of two colors: green if it was open, red if not. Either via sensors on the ground or in the bulb’s housing, this technology determined whether the space was available and, well, let you know. To boot, they had lights ahead of each lane indicating whether there were openings, saving you the time of driving up and down scanning for a space — and avoiding the heartbreak of thinking you’ve spotted one, only to find it occupied by a Vespa or a Mini you couldn’t see around the SUV next to it. No mobile app, no SMS, nothing really: just a sensor and a little light. There’s something laudable in that simplicity. ![Parking garage with overhead space-sensor lights](https://abhinemani.com/img/1____amcFiB2mmqhjMiJ7SFkLA.jpeg) This was an incarnation of the “smart” or “sensing” cities that is so often discussed in the civic innovation sphere. You sometimes see it through mobile payment systems or even real-time pricing; more often, though, you don’t. The “smart”-ness of the system is hidden, instead silently piped into a city data center for analysis, caricaturized famously by the [Rio de Janeiro massive, Star Wars-esque command center](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/ibm-takes-smarter-cities-concept-to-rio-de-janeiro.html?pagewanted=all). Smart, but invisible, and anything but simple and human. Conversely, this little civic innovation is **_right there_**, shining above your head, and humbly doing little more than saving you a bit of headache and frustration for your time at the mall. (And that, I would content, is no small feat.) Trivial? Maybe. But my family was impressed. For _maybe_ the first time, they saw what I was talking about when I would say that technology can change the way you interact with your city — in a physical, visible way. I wonder if there’s a lesson in here somewhere for us as we move forward in this space, and one not just for our parents: maybe it’s time we think less about “smart” cities and more about simple ones, ones where some of the most interesting technology could be little more than a well-placed lightbulb. --- # How John Dewey Played a Big Role in the 2008 Election > Technology, social capital, and the campaign URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2014/06/18/How-John-Dewey-Played-a-Big-Role-in-the-2008-Election/ Published: 2014-06-18 Author: Abhi Nemani --- About three months before the election, my boss informed me Barack Obama was going to lose. And this wasn’t some casual assertion: my boss knew what he was talking about. He was the political director of a national political organization, and, even before the conventions, he had recognized the harbinger of Democratic defeat. “Authenticity,” he told me, “Authenticity is what the American people want, and they don’t think Obama has it: he’s too flexible, too fake.” Regretfully, I could guess the rationale. That month, Obama had reneged on two primary promises, swallowing FISA and bucking public financing. The two moves I had read as pragmatic positioning, teeing up a well-financed and centrist general, my superior considered suicidal flip-flopping, unleashing the Rovian wolves upon John Kerry 2.0. So I applauded the pragmatism; he feared the inconsistency. He was wrong. 365 electoral votes say so. My boss was right, though, to recognize the tension between principle and pragmatism. A caricaturized pragmatist would seem erratic, uncontrolled, but somehow justified in any decision with the cure-all, “it’s for the best.” Well, no, it often isn’t. This is why voters appreciate some principle or ideology undergirding their politicians’ views, a sense of what they’ll do and why. Thus, pragmatism often earns a costly, though unfair, connotation: hollow. But that caricature overdramatizes the tension. Pragmatism _can be_ infused with principle, or at least substantiated by it. This (albeit uncommon) possibility came to life in the Obama campaign. They took the Chicago-style pragmatism across the country and online, building a social movement dedicated to change but able to disagree about what it meant. By creating social capital among his supporters, he could preserve his political capital, then cashing in both for a historic win. This story starts at home. #### Chicago On My Mind Obama moved to Chicago in 1985, a little more than a year after he graduated from Columbia University in NYC. He was 24 years old and hired to lead the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a progressive coalition aiming to mobilize black churches in the area. This is when he planted his roots in Chicago’s south side, and when organizing became rooted within him. He admits as much himself, speaking to the DCP a few years ago: “I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area. It’s as a consequence of working with this organization and this community that I found my calling. There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public service.” He found not only his calling, but also his core principles. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” an education that he said was “[seared into my brain.](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/us/politics/07community.html)” He shares his lessons from community organizing in his chapter in a 1990 book, [_After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois_](http://www.edwoj.com/Alinsky/AlinskyObamaChapter1990.htm): > _Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions._ The power of community organizing, Obama recognized, was its associative potential, the ability to construct organic, diffuse, yet powerful machines primed to change the status quo. Politically, its strength comes from numbers: “Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs.” Obama goes further in his praise, though, noting, “Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.” By empowering a community, an organizer weaves together a thick social fabric, warming individuals’ confidence in the collective and in themselves. People learn that they each are stronger together. > By empowering a community, an organizer weaves together a thick social fabric, warming individuals’ confidence in the collective and in themselves. Within Obama’s description is a sense of political agnosticism. He presents the potential for a community to connect and tackle a problem—any problem—without obvious preference. This too comes with the territory. The organizer’s task is not persuasion, per se—he is not collecting votes or securing praise—it is problem solving. To solve problems in Chicago, Obama evidenced his methodological pragmatism, the ability both to put community views ahead of his own and to fight for solutions. “We knew what was wrong in the community but we didn’t know how to get something done about it,” [recalls](http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070826/3obama.htm) Yvonne Lloyd, 78, who worked with Obama. Lloyd explains that Obama insisted on “staying in the background while he empowered us,” and he encouraged residents to come up with their own priorities with the nudge: “It’s your community.” With his orders, he would do what was necessary, according to Michelle Obama: “Barack is not one of those people who fight for the sake of fighting. \[He’s\] willing to do it when it’s necessary,” but he knows “you have to keep the door open” to deal with the other side. This pragmatism followed him through to 2008. [He explained to Steve Kroft on _60 Minutes_](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97205628) his method in tackling the financial crisis: “What I don’t want to do is get bottled up in a lot of ideology and is this conservative of liberal. My interest is finding something that works, and whether’s coming from FDR or it’s coming from Ronald Reagan, if the idea is right for the times then we’re going to apply it. And things that don’t work, we’re going to get rid of.” — President Obama Early in his career and in just a few short years, Obama had appropriated a kind of pragmatic _ethos_ and, possibly unknowingly, a local tradition. Chicago’s South Side is a reformist hotbed, home to the University of Chicago. Its own John Dewey had championed pragmatism a century earlier, opening his very own Laboratory School just to put his ideas into action, and it’s to Dewey—not Lincoln, Rawls, or FDR—that Obama owes his ideological debt. #### A Legacy of Pragmatism Dewey connects pragmatism to principle. He adds philosophical weight to the simplified slogan, “it’s for the best.” He does this by recasting the meanings of ideas and the individuals. As always the products of inquiry, ideas are bound up in the problematic situation that produced them. Simply put, ideas are a way of scratching an itch. And they only have value, then, if we actually use them. When faced with a problem, rational inquiry upon termination presents ideas, and Dewey claims, to make inquiry meaningful we much use those ideas to alleviate the problem. Thus, grand theories are not timeless or static; they are pliable instruments for achieving a purpose and after, should be discarded as expired. Philosophy, for Dewey, has a practical and progressive bend. What progress, one asks? The melioration of individuality, socially, not liberally, understood. Liberals are narrow-minded, Dewey held, as they consider the individual “fixed, given ready-made.” When instead, [they should know](http://www.springerlink.com/content/jx435566m8jj9201/), “It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical…” Social problems—poverty, healthcare, or strife—inhibit an individual’s capacity to fully engage in society and in turn stunt the development of his individuality. By recognizing man’s social nature, you can tap into the strongest force to realize his individuality and to enact change: social capital. > By recognizing man’s social nature, you can tap into the strongest force to realize his individuality and to enact change: social capital. Dewey pioneered the term “social capital,” but the concept dates back further, most notably to Alexis de Tocqueville. The famed democratic observer detected a humanitarian impulse in American democracy. This impulse presses for liberty through associational life. Man comes together in low-level democracy—the grassroots—recognizes the commonality between himself and another, and learns to trust him, if for no other reason than he must. Or else, democracy would stall, and problems persist. This recognition underpins self-interest rightly understood, and its prevalence in 1830s America fueled a rich and productive civic life. It was social capital at work. Dewey elaborates this concept and connects it back to pragmatism. In “[Social Capital: A Conceptual History,](http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148167)” James Farr presents Dewey’s three key connections. First, “we leverage one part of reality against the other.” Since ideas are instrumental and men social, we should use cooperative action to solve the problems that brought the ideas into existence. Second, pragmatism gives “prominence to sympathy.” Following Tocqueville’s impulse, Dewey’s sympathy is the product of deliberation and is “cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” It makes possible social life. Third, social capital can be conceived as a commodity. It can be employed or squandered just like funds or property. But it is the community’s good, so there is political justification in its investment and development. To be fair, Dewey’s pragmatism is coarse. No grand ideas, no first principles, no five point plans, just two basic concepts. Ideas have limits, and society has power. With the recognition of both—and their underlying epistemology—comes the acceptance of a philosophical and political burden: progress. The pragmatist, free of ideological fetters, can and must leverage social capital to surmount challenges great and small. Consciously or subconsciously, Obama inherited this philosophical tradition, and his campaign’s success testifies to its veracity. #### The Social Capital Campaign Can it get much harder to win the presidency? You’re black, your middle name is Hussein, you have little experience, and you’re up against the two most powerful political organizations in modern history: the Clintons and the Republicans. This is not an ideal candidacy; nor is it an easy one. To grapple with seemingly insurmountable odds, Obama returned to his organizer roots. He flipped the top-down style Clintonian campaign on its head and generated enthusiasm from the bottom up. From the outset, he recognized that social capital would have to pay for his electoral victory. In his announcement speech, [he said](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/10/barackobama): > This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice — to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change. His overtures, though noble, would not be enough alone. Remember, for Dewey, society could develop more capital through education and capitalize upon it with social movements. But Professor Obama couldn’t teach a national civics course, and a campaign for the presidency isn’t exactly a social movement. Using social capital for purely political ends seems difficult. This, in fact, is a classic problem for political parties imitating social movements. In his study of political reform clubs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1950s and early 1960s, James Q. Wilson recounted what one Los Angeles leader told him: The club movement is not basically a social movement…My social friends are not in the clubs. I don’t go to the homes of the people I know in the clubs and they don’t come to mine. Club meetings, [Wilson argued](http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/uslaner/partiessocialcapital.pdf), were “long and often dull in the extreme, with a seemingly endless agenda and interminable speakers.” Thus, a candidate has two problems in building a social movement. First, people don’t care that much. Second, politics isn’t very social. This former is essentially a question of size: how can the candidate enlarge his campaign into something bigger than himself? The latter is one of methods: how can you bring people together in meaningful ways? The Obama campaign had answers to both. #### Change.org(anization) In equal parts opportunism and pragmatism, Obama enshrined “change” as this campaign theme. He promised to “bring change to Washington” and to “change the way Washington worked,” and these promises betrayed and rationalized his relative inexperience. He may be young, but he’s new and different. With Congressional and Presidential approval rating beneath 40 percent or lower, those characteristics would attract disappointed voters. Furthermore, his more polished slogan, “Change we can believe in,” surfaced in late 2007, with the less-than-subtle implication that the promises of change coming from establishment choice, Clinton, can’t be trusted. In the campaign, change could work for him. > Essentially, he crafted his campaign’s message as an agnostic creed for the American spirit. In another way, “change we can believe in” encapsulates a kind of pragmatic philosophy. It is defined by the circumstance and promises solutions to pressing problems. Without policy elaboration, the slogan would attract interest from anyone disappointed or underserved by the status quo. This broadened his appeal, an appeal deepened by his patriotic infusion: “The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we’ve changed this country before.” Change was possible, he claimed, and everyone’s American duty to realize it. Essentially, he crafted his campaign’s message as an agnostic creed for the American spirit. Coupled with soaring rhetoric from a diverse and likeable candidate, the message caught on. Obama himself [recalled](http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/09/obama_draws_throng_in_jersey_c.html) months into the race, “We started this campaign talking about change. We talked about it while we were down, and we talked about it while we were up. Now almost everybody is talking about change.” Commentators would [agree](http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/11/the-change-election/%3E) that the 2008 presidential was a “Change election.” Billing himself as the best “agent of change,” Obama was able to enlarge his campaign into a broader movement. His posters read “Change” not “Obama,” his podium had “Change” plastered in front, he owned “Change.org,” and even his events were Change-themed (consider the low-dollar fundraiser, “Small Change for Big Change”). Whenever possible, Obama’s campaign _would not_ be about him. But a campaign is won by its moving parts, not by its design. Even with broader and deeper appeal, the movement would still need to be social. The engine of social movements is social capital, a commodity enriched and employed by meaningful cooperation. Put another way, he still needed to organize his community and put it to work. #### My.BarackObama .com As a community organizer, Obama himself would arrange and host meetings in his Chicago neighborhood. Even with a small and set demographic, mobilization and participation was difficult. Locals asked, _Who is this guy_? And distrust often led to inaction. Now multiply this problem a million times over and stretch it across a continent. This was the challenge facing the Obama campaign in 2007. The candidate was relatively unknown (or, even worse, misunderstood), and they needed victories in primaries and caucuses across the country. Darkening this organizational nightmare was the problem of financing. Commissioning former DNC chair Terry McCauffe, Clinton commanded the party coffers. Obama would have to reach out to and rely upon new donors to finance his insurgency. Traditional organizing, then, was not an option, too difficult and too costly. Instead, the campaign upgraded the concept. They “crowdsourced” campaigning. Meet MyBO. My.BarackObama.com (or My.BO) was the campaign’s digital headquarters, open to everyone, 24/7. Upon registering, you were tasked with community building responsibilities. Your page included a scale of your involvement (1 to 10), and each “action” bumped you up. You were your own campaign manager. For finances, you could plan and host fundraisers, set personal and group targets, and watch your contribution thermometer rise. For fieldwork, you could make an online group, plan local activist events, and even download voter contact information, volunteering your cell phone as a mini-phone bank. In a way, the Obama campaign stole its methodology from Napster. Online file-sharing platforms first popularized the notion of peer-to-peer (P2P) interaction. Instead of millions of users accessing data from one central database, the data is distributed among the users, and they connect with each other. It’s a network, not a silo. In file sharing, the advantage is speed; in politics, it’s power. The power comes from diversity and flexibility. Each node has its own character and its own leadership, and each is able to respond to the needs in its locations. The distributed structure requires low-level activism, which in turn, creates low-level activists. As the campaign advances and gains experience, those activists become skilled, and accordingly, the campaign grows. The nature of the growth is more important: it’s personal. The campaign can infiltrate a social group with just one contact and then leverage that contact for access to the entire group. It’s viral campaigning. By getting to just one of your friends, they’ll inevitably get to you via email, phone, or invitation to your friend’s _Party for Change._ Since each group could be a hotbed of interactivity and participation, trust and enthusiasm developed. Thus, each person had the capacity to develop the campaign’s social capital. For the campaign, this meant more volunteers, more dedication, and more money. In turn, there was more confidence among the membership. The crowdsourced campaign was thus organic, dynamic, and expansive. > The crowdsourced campaign was thus organic, dynamic, and expansive. The Obama campaign championed this P2P approach, employing new-media tools to craft a user-generated campaign. “One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.” This was a lesson Democrats learned from the short-lived Dean campaign. The 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, but the country just wasn’t ready yet, according to Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor specializing on Internet policy advice, in_Technology Review._ Times have changed though, he continues, “The world has now caught up with the technology.” The Obama campaign recognized this early, he says: “The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning.” And what smarter way than facebook’s? The social network connects tens of millions of people across the world, and on college campuses, serves as the community portal. The campaign decided not only to follow suit, but also to snatch the ace. Obama hired Chris Hughes, co-founder of facebook, to run online operations, and he explained his strategy, [paraphrased by the _New York Times_](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html): > _Hughes brought a growth strategy, borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles: keep it real, and keep it local. Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives. The Internet served as the connective tissue._ The My.BO network strung together diverse and distant groups into a cohesive social network. The network, then, could capitalize upon turbocharged activist resources for meaningful impact. That network, though, sometimes strained. “Change” housed a large coalition, and Obama had trouble serving all his masters. My.BO helped smooth tensions. When dissent did spring up, it was compartmentalized online—within one group or on one page—so the campaign could sustain its momentum while allowing disagreement. Moreover, this sense of openness and deliberation could enrich the sense of membership. Blog posts were open to comments, and the campaign sometimes responded to users’ questions. Obama himself posted a long explanation of his FISA vote to temper his angry “netroots.” No community is without its disagreements, and as Tocqueville pointed out, the virtue of associations is that they teach us to compromise for the greater good. In this way, My.BO was a digital free association. In the end, groups would retire their complaints for the larger cause. Thus, Obama was free to make pragmatic political moves, such as that FISA vote, without sacrificing his campaign’s core. Social capital thus produced political capital. #### Cashing in the Capital The two-year campaign really came down to 12 hours: 7am to 7pm, November 4th. Get Out The Vote (GOTV) strategies are how elections are won (ask Karl Rove), since no amount of voter participation is as crucial as casting a ballot. This is where the social capital was cashed in. The campaign had been prepping activists across the country for months in basic GOTV strategies—phone banking, door-to-door, and text messaging—and this was the opportunity to let them loose. Armed with pinpointed data from My.BO, theses self-made foot soldiers could score big in previously unattended communities. It’s difficult to know the direct impact of the ground game. Nonetheless, historic turnout (over 65 percent) and Obama victories in perennial Republican strongholds (Colorado, Omaha, and Florida to name a few) suggest the troops mattered—in a big way. #### Social Capital 2.0 The Obama campaign thus enshrined pragmatism as its message and its methodology. In a way, it solved its own problems. To create a social movement, they latched onto an attractive and timely theme, and to power it, they strapped it onto an explosive online network. Its success illustrates the sustainability and power of social capital in the modern age. The Internet, at times atomizing, can knit together diffuse networks of meaningful interaction. While not a substitute, these networks can complement or even produce real-world communities, and together, they can facilitate deliberation, generate trust, and motivate action. Put another way, they can _yield social capital._ Then, leveraging it is the work of pragmatic organizers. Moving forward, the lesson of the Obama campaign is at once old and new: to make one out of many, each of the many must feel like one. --- # open data as a means with many ends > open is not simple URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2014/06/17/open-data-as-a-means-with-many-ends/ Published: 2014-06-17 Author: Abhi Nemani --- A friend sent me a note the other day, in response to a previous post, pushing back on the topic of open data, and asking some good questions about its impact and usage; in particular one bit stood out: > The trend line certainly seems towards having [open, machine readable data as the default](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/09/executive-order-making-open-and-machine-readable-new-default-government-) in the next few years. The focus is often put on creating some sort of mega-dashboard (or suite of slick app dashboards) to make meaning out of that un-analyzed data. Yet if I wanted to tackle those sorts of general management questions I would look to Moody’s / Fitch / S&P rating reports. So how do you ensure that this data gets effectively analyzed to drive better government decisions? Just some food for thought This strikes at the center of the tension around open data; phrased as a question, _who and what is it for_? Is it for government managers, using data, visualizations, and “mega-dashboard” style views to improve performance within city hall? Or is it for civic hacker and journalists looking for an API with great documentation to use and remix into compelling interfaces to improve citizens’ quality of life or expose governmental impropriety? Or is it for the average citizen, interested only in a quick snapshot of city performance and maybe a few pieces of key data that’s relevant to her that day? Each of these is a distinct persona, which may likely come with very real, very distinct design requirements. > We need to move away from a perspective where open data is just a box we check (or an attachment we forward), and instead open data is a core element of each agency’s business strategy… We have as a community looked at “open data” as a singular institution within governments. One portal, one strategy. The open data ecosystem is far more complex. What we have are many needs, different users, and unexpected outcomes. We need to move away from a perspective where open data is just a box we check (or an attachment we forward), and instead open data is a core element of each agency’s business strategy; the performance management group should be creating open data powered reports, charts, and graphs; community engagement teams should be writing open API docs and attending hackathons to improve them; and the communications shop should be telling compelling stories with data through the blog, social media, website, etc. Indeed, this is what’s happening. Consider New York City, under the Bloomberg administration: they typified this multi-pronged approach to data. Mike Flowers, the Chief Open Analytics Officer in NYC, had a business imperative to use data to optimize service delivery, so he put the data to work. Separately, Andrew Nicklin, the open data evangelist, championed the data portal and created resources for developers. And Rachael Hoat, the Chief Digital Officer, built a best-in-class city website relying extensively on open data to make the site relevant and uniquely NYC. That’s the picture of an institution using data across the board, not just in one silo. Open data is a tool, and is only as useful as the person holding it. Best to put it in as many hands as possible. It’s time we move beyond considering open data as its own institution, towards considering it as an asset for every organization within the institution we call government. --- # Reframing the conversation around open data > Building a culture of transparency URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2014/06/14/Reframing-the-conversation-around-open-data/ Published: 2014-06-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Open Data --- In a political environment, that’s decidedly risk averse, accustomed to politicization, and constantly mindful of public scrutiny, how would you go about encouraging a culture of openness and transparency? Waldo Jacquith, the head of the Open Data Institute for the US, just [posted an interesting case](http://usodi.org/2014/06/06/reframe-rhetoric) that the way the pitch has been made may need to evolve: > The arguments that persuade the public to support open data can be actively harmful when used to persuade government employees to support open data. We need to reframe how we describe the benefits of open data within government by understanding and accommodating the needs of the people who comprise our governments. Given that stakeholders within the governments control access to that information — and that typically providing it comes with potentially some risk and surely some work — the messaging that resonates has been one emphasizes internal buy-in and direct value add, in his opinion. And it’s one that he’s been shopping around as an informal text. For example, talk more about how open information — like contact information for other departments or officials—would help that agency do its job better. From past experience, like in the [case of Boston](https://medium.comon-boston-politics-and-the-arc-of-civic-innovation-be37621f947f), I can attest that taking open data out of the realm of altruism imperative and into one of business case clarity works. > tl;dr: for open data, focus on the return on investment (ROI), not ideology. This reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a colleague who ran partnerships for an API company that works hand-in-hand with large institutions around their openness and engagement strategy. (Their platform made it easier for a business to open up an API.) Naturally, a challenge for them, like open data advocates, is to build buy-in within the institution. He explained that looking at the data and the history of successful API rollouts, a pattern emerged: #### The Evolution of an API 1. 1st party — Connecting developers within a company 2. Partners (Shorttail) — Known firms that’ll be doing development work (contracted vendors) 3. Platform (Longtail) — 50-50K. Community advocates, hackday participants. Indeed, he mentioned that many partners never make it step 3 (longtail distribution), instead focusing solely on the internal utility or small group of external partners — where they were able to derive tons of value, value that became ongoing momentum for openness. In the government open data space, you could argue that we’re basically optimized around **step two**: a small group of passionate local advocates or hackers find the data, build on top of it, etc, often even working directly with city hall. Yet, this is why I think Waldo’s point is salient in the context of this API arc: the process matters. If we were to begin by generating internal buy-in and showing some ROI, and then turning to the external community, might we end up generating more support? Could that fuel further open data? And would that widen the group of stakeholders within government willing to work with the community to do amazing things with their increasingly open government. Waldo seems to have been doing a bit of testing around this, and he claims to see signs that this approach may work — at least in terms of messaging. It’d be great to take this to the next level see if we can start to measure, learn, and understand how open data is being used within government, and then turning that into momentum moving forward. --- # Putting the law in the palm of your hand > Joining the OpenGov Foundation Board of Directors URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/announcements/2014/06/13/Putting-the-law-in-the-palm-of-your-hand/ Published: 2014-06-13 Author: Abhi Nemani --- If you were walking around the sunny coastal town of Santa Cruz, California, in the middle of 2012, you might have seen a rather strange sight. Crouched over what appeared to be an massive green electrical box, a young woman, wearing a white lab coat and work goggles, wielding a can of paint. What was she doing? Trying to help you understand the city a little bit better. ![Volunteers painting bike storage units on a city street](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__KgScNrv__8UKegbKb7ceKTQ.jpeg) Those green boxes were in fact bike storage units — lovingly put in place by the city government — but presented as more eyesore and than useful city service. The woman was a Code for America fellow named Tamara, who joined with some local friends to change that, hand painting clear and bold bike symbols on the storage units. I love so much in this story, from Santa Cruz city government building modern transportation infrastructure, to Tamara opting for paint and goggles over keyboard and Photoshop. Proof that a little (sanctioned) graffiti can go a long way. But at a deeper level, this story reminds me of a central challenge — and in fact opportunity — for governance: how do you actually get citizens engaged and informed? And in a democracy where government is supposed to work for the people, how do you make the most essential stuff of government — America’s legislation and laws, rules and regulations, and the countless decisions behind them — accessible, understandable, and useful to We the People? Questions like these led me to [Code for America](http://codeforamerica.org/) four years ago. And how CfA’s fellows, brigades, governments, and startups have begun to answer them amazes me. About two years into Code for America, we were visited by Seamus Kraft, founder and Executive Director of the [OpenGov Foundation](http://opengovfoundation.org/), and what was meant to be a quick hello turned into a long and exciting conversation about how deeply aligned the organizations are. OpenGov, like CfA a non-profit, helps governments unearth their laws, codes, and legislation, which were previously buried deep within City Hall and replant them in the light of day: user-centric digital platforms that not only keep you informed but also help you to engage. (Tag line for one OpenGov project: “Legal codes, for humans.”) Their underlying belief is that for democracy to work, citizens must know the rules of the game, and how it’s being played. Most notably, they first built [Madison](http://opengovfoundation.org/the-madison-project/) for online crowd sourcing of federal legislation, and have since expanded the [StateDecoded](http://www.statedecoded.com/) to upgrade how we access our laws, and [started the AmericaDecoded](http://americadecoded.org/) network to bring those tools to scale across the country. We quickly realized that CfA and OpenGov were working on two sides of the same coin: CfA was helping make the day-to-day of government -- the bureaucracy -— more efficient and accessible; OpenGov was going after the underlying architecture, the policy and laws, that determine how the bureaucracy functions. Different layers of the same stack. So the conversation quickly turned to this: how should we work together? (“Whether we should” was so obvious, it was implied.) Since then, it has been inspiring to see the way the CfA community has connected with The OpenGov Foundation’s tools: in San Francisco, for instance, the city and local brigade worked together to decode San Francisco’s laws, and they even hosted policy “hackathons” to collaboratively draft new legislation, bringing that bureaucracy-hacking mentality (for the first time I know of) into the policy realm. I think that’s really just the start of how we can think about changing the way policy is written once citizens have the transparency and context they need to be part of the process. Could you start helping cities write laws collaboratively across city lines? Could you start using data to make the laws smarter? And could you — to borrow Tim O’Reilly's phrase, make the law more _algorithmic_ and responsive to citizens’ needs? In these important questions, and others, OpenGov’s work is central. Because first things first: we need to know what the laws truly are. This is why I was so honored when Seamus and his co-founder — open government champion Congressman Darrell Issa — asked me to take a more formal role in helping The OpenGov Foundation. I’m pleased to share that I’ll be joining the Board of Directors, working closely with Seamus, Darrell and the rest of the Board. This is an impressive team with a profoundly important purpose; I’m excited to have a small role in helping push it forward. Too often, we perceive government as something abstract, distant, and out of our grasp—something others concern themselves with, not each and all of us. There are few greater risks to democracy than that mindset. Our collective challenge must be to transform that perception, to make government something we can see and understand, to pull our public institutions closer to where they are meant to be: in our hands. --- # Small (City) Pieces, Loosely Joined > Experiments in stitching together civic technology for local governments URL: https://abhinemani.com/essays/2014/06/11/Small-City-Pieces-Loosely-Joined/ Published: 2014-06-11 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Featured --- I grew up in rural Southern Illinois. Centralia the town is called. Population 13,000. It’s taken on many lives through its history; beginning first as a railway hub, then a well of natural resource, and later as a small, yet productive manufacturing base for the region. When I was growing up, a nearby highway was built that put town miles off the main interstate, and soon the factories began to close. Growth stalled, and population waned. Today, the town remains a primarily service-based economy, and for recreation, entertainment, or growth, you have to look more at St. Louis, MO, the area’s largest metro — and that’s where my family now spends nearly every weekend. We look to the bigger city nearby. I mention that because it’s a fact that I’ve tried to keep in mind throughout my work with local government, and in particular with cities trying new approaches with technology. The bigger cities generate energy and excitement, and for good reason: New York City has been groundbreaking in their use of data, Chicago has masterfully bridged the gap between City Hall and the local developer community, and Boston and Philadelphia have established cultures of innovation that you can feel. Examples abound. Our cities are making us proud with what they are making. But what about the small towns and regions? How do we make sure they aren’t left behind? Because even though we can drive off to St. Louis every weekend, there’s still a city here, where thousand of people live and work, and many, many more just like it. As I look back, now, at the civic technology ecosystem that has emerged over the past 5+ years, I find myself thinking about this a lot. Maybe it’s because I’m spending time here in Centralia, and wishing they had all the great tools we worked on across the country. Maybe too because there continues to be news about more and more cities eager to join the ranks of digital cities, but still feel insufficient answering the most basic question: “Ok, so what do we do?” ### What’s the right model for local government civic innovation? Just as important as any technology is the infrastructure in place to sustain it: human, financial, and technical. When approaching this question — “what do we do?” —we need to have clarity on the systems and structures a city needs to have in place (in-house or not) for sustainable, meaningful innovation. Fortunately, over the past few years, we have seen a number of models emerge for governments keen on leveraging modern technology and modern approaches. #### **The British Model: Government Digital Service (GDS)** A few years back, in the wake of a colossal Healthcare.gov fiasco of their own, the British government created a technology unit charged with avoiding the next one. The [Government Digital Service](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/) (GDS) was born, and quickly they began doing much more than just putting out fires. Today, GDS houses 500+ technologists, and has built a brand that it’s been called the “[best startup in Europe you can’t invest in](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/government-digital-service-best-startup-europe-invest),” beating out Silicon Roundabout companies for talent. And for good reason. GDS’s work on [Gov.uk](http://gov.uk/), the government’s centralized digital interface merits applause not only for its lovely, user-centric design, but also for their remarkable ability to bring both central agencies and local governments into the fold. (In fact, Mike Bracken, the Director of GDS, received a [standing ovation at CfA’s last Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bK9B8_0FDQ).) As a model for innovation within central government, GDS is the standard-bearer. > Our cities are more independent and muscular, number in the tens of thousands, and hold responsibility for core service delivery. Stateside, though, the challenge is more complex, particularly for cities. We don’t have the same manner of government as our transatlantic friends. Our cities are more independent and muscular, number in the tens of thousands, and hold responsibility for core service delivery. Then there are our harsh fiscal realities: small towns, particularly ones with shrinking economic bases, struggle just to maintain current services levels, while citizen demands increase, let alone build out modern technology teams. How could Centralia build its own GDS? And the next city? And the city after that? More broadly, however, an American system where each city was staffing its own distinct product teams seems rare at best, duplicative at worst. Part of the magic of modern technology is that it can scale fast; let’s not ask our cities to recreate the wheel. #### **Creating a Space for Experimentation: Chief \[X\] Officers** Many cities have been able to establish high-level technology leadership: Chief Technology Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, and Offices of New Urban Mechanics. These models not only support the smart use of technology, but also tend to drive a broader culture within City Hall around innovation. These positions, however, often structurally lack some of the resources, in particular the human capital, to invest deeply into product or technology development, a la GDS. Many of the most successful and creative cities have had to lean on a mix of partners (e.g. universities, foundations, or volunteer corps) to create the tech they need. For instance, the City of Philadelphia’s Department of New Urban Mechanics is working on procurement reform through the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies; the city of San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation launched its Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program to turn city’s startup scene loose on civic challenges; and famously (and possibly apocryphally) Chicago’s former CTO engaged a team of volunteers to redeploy some Code for America applications, plying them with pizza and beer. Under budget constraints, you have to beg, borrow, and steal innovation. > Under budget constraints, you have to beg, borrow, and steal innovation. #### A Marketplace / Component Strategy A successful and respected venture capitalist, Mary Meeker each year publishes a [fascinating summary of internet trends](http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends). This year, she highlighted a strategy many consumer apps are taking: moving from multi-use apps to single-purpose. They are “shattering themselves into pieces.” Facebook split off into Messenger and now Slingshot; Foursquare now has Swarm; and Google throughout has taken a multi-app strategy. This uncoupling creates a streamlined user experience for a specific purpose, while taking advantage of common logins, etc, to make on-boarding easy. When you consider the number of players in the civic technology space—a number that’s growing every day — it’s not hard to imagine a similar single-purpose strategy where cities order off the menu as it were for civic tech they need. Indeed this is starting to happen. > a strategy many consumer apps are taking: > moving from multi-use apps to single-purpose Facebook _could_ splinter itself into a dozen little pieces, because it had the identify infrastructure (your login) to make it work, and the product strategy to make it make sense. Built at hack-a-thons, contests, and fellowships, civic apps continue to proliferate, but these tools lack that kind of connective tissue. What’s interesting now is that there are efforts to piece them together into a greater whole. Most notably, there’s [Poplus](http://poplus.org/), a newly launched federation of international app makers to standardize on core, common tools and promote their reuse. You could consider it as an effort to standardize around a civic toolkit, tools that those charged with building a civic interface can leverage, saving time and creating some shared infrastructure around the world. Their platforms make it easy for, say, a local good government nonprofit to deploy a government bill and meeting tracking platform (SayIt), and to do so in a way that could link into their other components as needed. They only have a few components now, but their plans are to bring together an international network for tool-makers to build out a robust offering. While Poplus is focusing on building open source tools, there’s also a concurrent and complimentary movement to build a new breed of for-profit government-focused startups. There’s been explosive growth in this market, as seen in the numbers of startups applying for the [Code for America Accelerator](http://codeforamerica.org/about/startups/), and by the traction they are finding within government and in traditional venture capital. Some have hundreds of local government clients (if not thousands), and have raised substantial capital. Following the disruption eating up traditional enterprise software and other “civic/social” spaces (e.g. healthcare), these companies are offering lower cost software-as-a-service to replace the massive custom builds governments are used to. The result? Dramatically lower costs, better interfaces. And these apps keep getting better. That to me is one of the principle advantage of SaaS for government: there’s a team constantly working to make their solution better and in so doing, helping all of their cities work better. The confluence of these two trends — the development of reusable open components and the emergence of civic startups—presents a compelling opportunity for cities thinking about changing their approach to technology. With low costs and simplified deployment mechanisms, cities of all sizes could consider leveraging these assets, and indeed many are. > The confluence of these two trends — the development of reusable open components and the emergence of civic startups—presents a compelling opportunity for cities thinking about changing their approach to technology. Challenges though remain. For the components/Poplus, it’s deployment. Who can cities turn to to help deploy a component, customize it for their needs, and work with them to get it into the hands of the people who need it? There’s an obvious need for an [OpenSaaS](http://opensource.com/government/14/1/opensaas-and-government-innovation) company to take those components and support the deployment city-to-city. For the startups, it’s market access and visibility. Government technology is a notoriously closed marketplace: little transparency or [competition](http://blog.dobt.co/2014/01/08/dont-blame-the-client/), and the [many of rules of the game](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2013/05/07/towards-a-procurement-strategy/) (procurement) were designed in an era when we approached purchasing software like purchasing trucks or erecting buildings. It just doesn’t work like that any more. Beyond that, both the components and the startups derive value insomuch as they are _known of and make sense to deploy._ That’s not a light lift. It requires outreach to cities, an understanding of how the pieces fit together, and the supporting infrastructure to actually deliver on those digital services. It requires an ecosystem. We’re on our way there, but it’s early yet. #### Pulling these together Indeed, it’s way too early yet to signal any approach as _the_ approach for American cities, and I suspect we’ll hear more of a remix than a chorus. Bigger cities may take on a GDS-style approach when they have the budget and talent; others may continue to appoint senior leaders to drive forward their innovation agenda; and certainly the mosaic of reusable civic technology will continue to grow richer. These aren’t zero sum. In fact, they would surely benefit from each other. CIOs should be procuring civic startups, and city tech shops should be building new components. That’s the elegance underlying the components strategy: by looking at various pieces of civic technology as components as a broader architecture, then new civic innovations (wherever they come from) can enhance the greater whole. The rising tide lifts all boats. But when you talk about platforms, components, and APIs, it’s easy to lost in the ether; it all feels very nebulous and abstract. (I felt so just writing that last bit.) So I wanted to put some flesh on the bones. What would a city experience look like that relied on various components to deliver great digital service? What emerges when you stitch the civic tech space together? So let’s try it out. ### City Digital Services Prototype Consider the city of Chicago’s slate of digital services (well, some of them): ![Collage of civic web apps including Look at Cook, Trip Planner, PurpleBinder and Chicago Councilmatic](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__iTo7lEyEh21LFS5EzlrFfw.jpeg) These tools come from a host of different sources: some, like PurpleBinder, a social services finder, or the open data catalog, are from civic startups or other traditional IT vendors; others, such as the crime map and Look at Cook, are open source tools built by local groups of developers. You can see here the mix of components that’s possible when you look to the ecosystem. But they are spread across the board—just look at the URLs—making it difficult for citizens to find each service when needed, and more relevantly, without a picture of how these fit together (and ideally instructions on how to replicate it), it’d be tough for another city to follow suit. Where would they start and how? Put another way, the city has a full digital services stack, but you can’t really see it. Well, what if you could? Meet [**DigitalServicesCenter.com**](http://digitalservicescenter.com/). This is very much a **_prototype._** (And I am very much earning the title, “poor man’s hacker” with the codebase.) It’s a quick attempt to link together various digital services in an area and present them in a streamlined, common, mobile friendly format, city-to-city. The homepage features a list of all the cities, indications of how they are doing, and links to city-specific pages (e.g. [Chicago](http://digitalservicescenter.com/cities.html#Chicago), [Oakland](http://digitalservicescenter.com/cities.html#Oakland), or [Palo Alto](http://digitalservicescenter.com/cities.html#Palo%20Alto)). ![City Digital Services homepage with a map of participating cities](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__T0CB7j0__tPVkTHXXghiabQ.png) #### Focus on what matters My operating principle was to **focus on what matters** (at least in my view). Instead of a litany of services and links, can we identify the top 3-4 pieces of information and the top 3-4 services cities offer that citizens want? ![Chicago Digital Services mobile menu: Bills, Bullets, Budgets, Buses and 311](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__a__yTVIGyG__AuxCVINbOfBQ.png) For the information options, I relied on Mark Headd’s “3 **_B’s of Open Data_**” — his recommendation for the three pieces of open data every city should publish: **bullets (**crime data), **budgets (**city expenditure), and **buses (**transit). Since legislative information seems to be an area of growing heat, I appended a fourth: **bills.** On the services side, the bias was towards simple, common functions (e.g. reporting an issue) where digital tools exist and ideally standards linking them together do as well: **211 (**social services), 3**11 (**issue reporting), **411 (**inquiries), and then **open data** writ large for all else (e.g. the city’s open data portal). But there’s no reason this couldn’t be iterative; if over time, we see that a particular component listed isn’t finding traction in our cities, it could be replaced. Fortunately, each of these areas already have a host of options, both from the open source community and from civic startups, which cities can mix and match: * **Bullets**: [CrimeAround.Us](http://crimearound.us/), [Crime in Chicago](http://www.crimeinchicago.org/), [Oakland Crimespotting](http://oakland.crimespotting.org/) * **Bills**: [OpenGov’s AmericaDecoded](http://americadecoded.org/), [MySociety’s SayIt](http://sayit.mysociety.org/), [Councilmatic](http://www.participatorypolitics.org/councilmatic/) * **Budget**: OpenGov.com, [OpenSpending](https://openspending.org/), [Look at Cook](http://datamade.us/civic-apps/look-at-cook/) * **Buses**: [OpenTripPlanner](http://www.opentripplanner.org/), [OneBusAway](http://onebusaway.org/) * **211**: [Aunt Bertha](http://auntbertha.com/), [Purple Binder](http://purplebinder.com/), [Ohana](http://ohanaapi.com/), [Connect Chicago](http://locations.weconnectchicago.org/) * **311**: [SeeClickFix](http://seeclickfix.com/), [PublicStuff](http://publicstuff.com/), [Connected Bits](http://connectedbits.com/), [Service Tracker](http://servicetracker.cityofchicago.org/), [Open311Mobile](https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-mobile) * **411**: [CityAnswers](https://github.com/codeforamerica/oakland_answers), [MindMixer](http://www.mindmixer.com/), [OSQA](http://www.osqa.net/) * **Data:** [Socrata](http://socrata.com/), [NuData](http://nucivic.com/products/nudata/), [CKAN](http://ckan.org/), [OpenDataCatalog](https://github.com/azavea/Open-Data-Catalog/), [Junar](http://junar.com/) I’ll add that in an ideal case, the transaction / service options might be more compelling; for example, updating your personal information the city has about you, or dealing with payments or permits. For this prototype I erred on the side of practicality over aspiration: to my knowledge those deeper services are not yet available, at scale, through SaaS providers. So instead of designing what the ideal city digital service center _might be_, this shows what a real one _could be_. _(Note: Poplus using a_ [_strict definition_](http://poplus.org/components/) _for their components; for these purposes, I’m using a broader one, defined simply as a single-purpose civic app.)_ #### Keep It Simple The other guiding principle was to minimize the burden on the city. What’s the least they could do? In this case, city only has to build a scaffolding. It’s just simple HTML, Javascript, and css that bring together the various _other_ sites (e.g. a 311 app) into a simple experience. (Truly simple: at the core, it just a set of links.) Just by adding links to its existing digital services to a spreadsheet, the city is added to the site, and gets a city-specific mobile-optimized Digital Services Center (like [this one for Oakland](http://digitalservicescenter.com/cities.html#Oakland)). ![St. Louis Digital Services social services finder form](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__xdvb92EfH1JBrbe8Gq5a2g.png) It’s worth pointing out that this site relied on a robust CSS framework called [Foundation](http://foundation.zurb.com/). Out of the box, it comes with clean styles and importantly a mobile responsive layout, which makes creating new pages or even new apps in the same style rather easy. To test that hypothesis, I created a simple [Social Services Finder](http://abhinemani.com/city-services-finder) app, relying on [Derek Eder’s template](http://datamade.us/civic-apps/searchable-map-template/), and the Foundation CSS. It took me **under about an hour** to get the app up and running with data I scraped on St. Louis’s social services. You’re sure also to notice that a city’s page doesn’t have what you typically see on a local government homepage. No news feeds or blogs; no description of department; and no educational information about the city’s history or the like. That’s because this is about _digital services:_ the ways you can interact with your city online. As we move towards a digital strategy where content goes where users already are, and while homepages overall are being [questioned](http://qz.com/209950/the-homepage-is-dead-and-the-social-web-has-won-even-at-the-new-york-times/), the goal here was to centralize the _activities_ you might hope to take online, which you otherwise couldn’t find. In a certain way, this aligns, I think, with the reason we go to City Hall: to get something done. #### _City-to-City Comparison_ With those two pieces in place—a list of the core digital services and a simple way to present them on a per-city basis—I decided to start comparing city-to-city: ![Digital services mobile home screens for Chicago, Palo Alto and Baltimore](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__OaUm7LrUNsXJV8HnbwI8Zg.png) For both cities and citizens, I suspect this may be helpful to see how an individual city stacks up. More interesting, I think, are the opportunities to use a common framework like this to identify gaps and trends in the ecosystem. We can start to see whether, say, 311 is missing in many cities, or conversely that, say, a specific vendor holds much of the market. Consider having quarterly discussions around these core areas: what’s working, what’s not, where are there gaps, and what should we be spreading one city to the next to fill them. ### What’s Possible with a Components Approach Admittedly, this was a very loose way to join the various pieces. Smarter, deeper integrations are needed around data, identify, and design. The point of this prototype, though, was less really to build anything specifically that a city could use — though that’s always fun — but instead to give us all something to look at and consider what’s possible. #### Ladders of engagement & the “Civic Upsell” When you start to see these services put next to each other, you start to think about the connections between them. The notion of an “upsell” is commonplace in retail, online and off. You’ll see it on Amazon after you’ve added something to your cart: consider what other books a customer bought, or think about pairing that new device with a accessory or support package. This same thinking could be applied to the civic space. If we think of cities less as various departments, but one institution with various offerings, then we can create “civic upsells” from one service to another. ![St. Louis pocket guide to social services alongside map mockups](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__7qPn1m5GvXFjAALW7aKFLQ.png) **_Discovery_**: Consider the example using the Social Services Finder from above. Often, social service providers in a city have to refer citizens (typically called “clients”) to another provider. If we were to make it easy for those providers to, say, print out referral information, pointing them back to the mobile site, you open up the possibility that they could find another service or opportunity within the city. It thus becomes both a resource for the service provider and the client. !["Thanks for asking your question" confirmation screen with follow-up prompts](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__qjQQDxJ6VQ2YGVfcl3__ghw.png) **_Being more civic_**: Getting a user’s attention online is always a challenge, and once a city has it, we should take full advantage of it. With the services centralized in one place—and maybe even some, like this St. Louis example—hosted by the city government, you can start to connect the dots between services. After you submit an issue or question, you could be prompted to register to vote or attend a community event; after you submit a 311 request, you could be encouraged to organize your neighbors to address it; or simply enough, after you look up a social service, you could be given public transportation options for getting there. > digital services can be organized to enable a “ladder of engagement” In this way, digital services can be organized to enable a _ladder of engagement—_ clear and simple pathways to deepen engagement by following one activity with another. #### Towards standardized discovery Government usually has the reverse problem that consumer apps are trying to solve with the single-app strategy: there are already too many websites for a government. In fact, it got so bad the federal government had to put a freeze on new top level domains. Cities have a similar problem, and even now as better, more compelling digital services emerge, there is no common way to find a service city-to-city. Top level domains span the gambit (e.g. Oakland’s url is oaklandnet.com, New Orleans is [nola.gov](http://nola.gov/)), and even with widely popular services like an open data portal, there’s little consistency. That means if you wanted to compare one city’s data portal to another, or better yet, their data, it’s next to impossible. If cities were to adopt common infrastructure with these components and tools linking them together, we might inch towards some consistency — at least a hack. Think of citydigitalservices.com/\[CITY\] as a base url for all cities and then _/211_, _/311_, etc. That’s not just making the lives of traveling civic hackers easier, but hopefully opening up the door to more cross-city innovation. #### Opportunities for new efforts / civic startups Seeing the prototype Digital Services Center, you may think that there’s only room for eight startups in this space. (One for each of those little icons.) Or if not, you might at least come to the conclusion that there’s only room for eight in one city. I would argue that this approach if fact opens the door to even more entrepreneurship — and may help even with the pace of adoption. Compare these two screenshots from the Social Services Finder: ![Map popup showing a childcare center's address, phone and services](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__kOjpS1UwST4i59rS5DWWwA.png) ![Map popup with Check Eligibility, Availability and Share buttons](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__XH6B50QbKT7PphRaLv8SiA.png) The second (just a mockup) features calls-to-action for the citizen that indeed could link to different pieces of technology. The city may use a simple mapping tool to showcase the various options, but then use, say, [Benefits Data Trust](http://www.bdtrust.org/) to check eligibility, [Aunt Bertha](http://auntbertha.com/) for availability, and then a **new** startup specializing in referring clients from one location to another. And this thinking applied to nearly every service. Simply put, each of those buttons is an opportunity for a civic startup. The upshot being that instead of those tools sitting aside the city’s website or another offering, they are positioned together ensuring that citizens can get to the right tool for their needs. [As I’ve written before](https://medium.com/lessons-to-work-by/looking-at-things-in-many-different-ways-ef2b3987ff81), I _do not believe_ that we could ever build a single app suite to solve all the civic problems for everyone; no, the world is too complex and user needs vary place-by-place, day-by-day. Diversity is a virtue—as is _understanding_. By putting together the applications in this kind of funnel, government IT managers and purchasing officers can start to see how the pieces fit together, making the sales process for a startup hopefully a little easier. > Simply put, each of those buttons is an opportunity for a civic startup. I was once told, “Good writing is giving your reader a context within which to think.” Those of us working in the civic technology field talk a lot about this notion, “Government as a platform,” and I wonder if that quote—broadly understood—strikes at the heart of what that means: creating contexts through our public institutions within which others can think, create, tinker, and make. The art of stewardship is doing the least to enable the most. As we move forward with our work recoding our cities, context will become increasingly vital; context for citizens to understand how to be part of the work of government; context for entrepreneurs to identify ways to make that work even better; and context for our cities themselves to deliver digital services we can celebrate. ### “Ok, so what do we do?” There’s a sad irony to this entire endeavor for me. My impulse was to find a way to help my own city, Centralia, but to prototype the notion I again had to look to the bigger cities of St. Louis and Chicago. Fact is that those digital components just don’t exist in my hometown yet, and though I tried for hours trying to deploy open source applications to flesh out a _Centralia Digital Services Center_, I was left wanting. Either it took too long to deploy the code, or the applications just didn’t apply here. (There is no public transportation system.) I return then to the earlier refrain: it’s early yet. But let’s keep working. And perfection isn’t a goal. When reading David Weinberger’s [_Small Pieces Loosely Joined_](http://smallpieces.com/)_,_ I was struck by his celebration of the web’s messiness: how it doesn’t always have clean lines; how things have a knack of ending up where they shouldn’t be; how it is perfectly broken. “Links don’t work. Email messages are misspelled,” he rattles off. But he adds, “The imperfection of the Web isn’t a temporary lapse. It’s a design decision… The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose.” In many ways, we designed our governments as well to be perfectly broken. Decidedly inefficient, competing interests, and complex systems of power. It is those very blemishes that drive us into public service to make the lives of those around us better. Our government, like the web, is what we make of it: > But there is, I believe, something more pulling us on to the Web… The Web is _ours…_ the Web is thoroughly ours in the same way that language is ours. It is _of_ us. It is drenched in that which makes us human: consciousness, sociality, meaning, intention, interest. But now we’re \[making things\] it in a world that we’re building for ourselves out of the truly human “stuff” of language and passion. — Small Pieces Loosely Joined _N.B. This was meant to be an experiment in creating a digital services center as a way to flesh out my thinking around city tech. If you have any feedback on the prototype, data to add to it, or thoughts in general about the commentary, please do not hesitate to drop me a line: @_[_abhinemani_](http://twitter.com/abhinemani) _or abhi.nemani@gmail.com. That’s the only way I’ll get good data on the experiment itself._ --- # My favorite books of essays URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2014/05/08/My-favorite-books-of-essays/ Published: 2014-05-08 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Books --- A friend recently asked me for recommendations on some books to read for a trip he had coming up. He wanted something light, preferably fun, but a bit intellectual. My typical recommendation for vacation travel is anything by [Vince Flynn](http://www.vinceflynn.com/); I’m a sucker for his [spy novels](http://www.amazon.com/Vince-Flynn/e/B000APHM1K/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1399525392&sr=1-2-ent). But my friend’s last caveat got me. Instead I figured I’d offer up something different: books of essays. I’m a devout fan of longform prose: good, nonfiction essays, particularly though with a lively or comic flare. And I think for vacation, they’re far more suitable than a long novel. Finish an essay? Go for a swim. One more? Take a nap. Vacation. There’s not the kind of full time investment a big book takes. Plus, having the kind of bird-like attention span I have (and I know my friend has) I figured this would be for the best. #### Chuck Klosterman: [_Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs_](http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Cocoa-Puffs-Manifesto/dp/0743236017) Klosterman will make you feel better for watching so much 90's television. On the surface, he is a media critic, covering music, TV, etc, but probably a more apt description would be something akin to an anthropologist: he’s describing what is media is saying about who we are, and how that is changing. And to do that, he’ll bounce around from Coldplay to Socrates, from porn to self-projection, from the _Real World_ to romanticism. All the while, his insights cut right to the bone, but he’s able to do so with enough wit that you close the chapter with a smile. #### Christopher Hitchens: [_Mortality_](http://www.amazon.com/Mortality-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/1455502758) When you watch, listen, or read Christopher Hitchens, you get the sense that he experiences a wider range of emotions than most, and throughout his career he has poured those into his writing. After being diagnosed with cancer, it took on a humanity though that went beyond flash. You could feel it — feel this battle he was going through, and how it put in perspective the number of battles he fought throughout his life. #### Ron Rosenbaum: [_The Secret Parts of Fortune_](http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Parts-Fortune-Investigations/dp/0060934468) Rosenbaum’s probably best known as a Shakespearean expert, but I’ve found his collection of essays rather enjoyable. Unlike the others listed here, his are more of the investigative sort: he dives into the mystery of the secret societies of Yale in one piece, and Zagat Restaurant Review Guide in another. What brings me back to Rosenbaum’s essays is his construction—the way he puts a piece together, a true craftsman. I can’t get enough of these kinds of essays. Often witty, usually informative, and always entertaining. These writers, and others like them, show a gift a pattern recognition, which I aim to learn from each time I open up one of their books… I ask myself, “_How did they do that?_” How did Klosterman figure out that connection between modern politics and classic sports? How did Hitch go all the way to explore Nietzschean ethics and then all the way down to his physical maladies? How did Rosenbaum manage to find within both the Hitler and JFK stories hard questions about subjectivity? So in this way, I consider longform essays part of my own curriculum in pattern recognition—one that’s both good mental hygiene, and also good fun. --- # Thinking Differently About Vacant Properties URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2014/05/06/Thinking-Differently-About-Vacant-Properties/ Published: 2014-05-06 Author: Abhi Nemani --- Late one evening last summer, my colleague Bob and I were doing our routine walk after a long day in the office to our parking garage on the corner of 7th and Mission, about two blocks away from the office in SF. It’s a walk we had done over 100 times already, so accustomed we were to the environment we hardly noticed the street lights, let alone the buildings around us. For us, it was a good chance to chat briefly about the day, and game out what’s next. But this day was a bit different. Right before our parking garage, there was a bit of commotion, some people gathered in front of a building, lights strung up across what used to be an empty, trash filled lot, and wonderful mural painted aside walls which I couldn’t honestly tell you what was there before (see above). An energetic young man noticed our interest and invited us in. This urban outlier was called “[Freespace](http://freespace.io/),” a project borne out of the [National Day of Civic Hacking](http://hackforchange.org/). ![National Day of Civic Hacking banner](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__29TuKUE0deRzn9UkjyijfA.jpeg) What most had taken to be a one day or weekend event, these organizers had blown out into a month-long affair, resurrecting this building in central SOMA into an maker/hacker/co-working space. So the lore goes, the building owner was willing to rent the space out, so the lead organizer was able to get his hands on the real estate for all of $1 for the month (no joke), and with that, plus what _had_ to be massive amounts of insanely creative human capital, they transformed what had been a dilapidated oversight into a thriving civic hub. Floor one was hackers, laptops ups clicking away at civic apps; floor two was dinner time, big crock pots, fresh vegetables, and hot places racing around —maybe too fast — with enough to feed everyone and anyone in the building— and the third floor was the art gallery, probably the only quiet spot in the otherwise electric place, where art with an urban twist was on the display — typically “recycled” from old street signs and the like. To say the space was big would be wrong. At most, I would say it felt more like three narrow hallways stacked atop each other, somehow connected with maze like stairways. If possible, that only added to the energy. For all the talk of “citizen engagement” I left Freespace with a rather distinct sentiment; engagement has a kind of transaction feel to it: you are being engaged. This was more expressive, more social, more free. It felt more like _civic life._ Bob and I only stayed for a few minutes, and I wanted to get back there, but I didn’t get a chance to. And to be fair, I can’t speak to whether the outcomes of those projects bore any fruit, and there are some real questions of the sustainablity of this kind of model — it’s hard to imagine more spaces in cities being for rent for just a dollar a month. Still, this story forces us, I think, to explore what could be done with our urban space, particular those underutilized, dilapidated, vacant, or blighted. And, I think, we can do so both in terms of means and ends. By that, I venture to say that, we can think about how _to use those places_ (buildings, structures, etc) differently, and how _to go about_ revitalizing them. #### **Different Uses of Revitalized Properties** The Freespace example is just one such distinct model of how to use a urban space differently. The civic possibilities are endless. The City of Boston ran a fascinating program last year called, “City Hall to Go,” where they took a food truck, and drove it around the city to both boost awareness of city services, but also deliver whatever simple services to citizens that they could remotely, right where citizens are. ![City of Boston "City Hall To Go" truck](https://abhinemani.com/img/1__yOCBYsY9Gjtr7jP3EfptGA.jpeg) Now with mobile technology and the mobile web, there’s less need to be in City Hall for many civic functions, you can set up shop anywhere. Think about that for a moment. Currently, citizens have to line up at a finite number of centralized government offices. That doesn’t make sense in the 21st century. Just as Boston’s City Hall to Go took city services to the street, you could envision setting up tech powered, demand-driven, remote service delivery centers throughout the city. Put another way: **What if you could turn any revitalized vacant building into a pop-up City Hall?** _(Note: I realize both staffing and communications challenges with such a radical shift for local administration are real, but given the_ [_challenges_](https://medium.com/san-francisco-ca/47434acb50a8) _facing traditional service delivery, I think we ought to get creative.)_ Beyond that, there are limitless options for uses for this spaces when revitalized: small after-school, interest-based tutorials for neighborhood; Skillshares for young professionals thinking of changing careers; new community centers, pop-up immunization clinics, job training centers, etc. And of course, there’s the housing opportunities. In Utah, the state invested heavily in building new housing and revitalizing old housing to make affordable units for the homeless and pairing them with social services (which they found was cheaper than previous tactics), and they are on track to “[end homelessness by 2015](http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183).” #### Different Means for Revitalization None of those ideas, though, are all that novel — the urban revitalization space is one with many great thinkers and doers (including the Freespace team), who have been active for years. What excites me in particular now, is that I think there’s a real opportunity to bring to bear technology on to this core urban problem. [As I’ve written before](https://medium.com/lessons-to-work-by/ef2b3987ff81), [BlightStatus](http://blightstatus.nola.gov/) (now [CivicInsight](http://civicinsight.com/)) helped the City of New Orleans understand its challenge around vacant properties, first collecting its disparate data, then visualizing it, and finally getting it into the hands of the people who needed it. What’s fascinating about their story, though, was who ended up being their “power user”. Sure the city found value it, and indeed, many citizens living on blocks with blighted houses use the tool. But the user whose life they truly made better was the local [**Habitat for Humanity**](http://www.habitat.org/). They had an itch that BlightStatus scratched. The tooled included a simple emailed notification featured that let subscribers know whenever the city deemed a property ready for tear down, construction, etc — very valuable information for Habitat. Now Habitat can more quickly, and more cleverly make decisions around which properties to revitalize. So it turned out that [BlightStatus](http://blightstatus.nola.gov/) incidentally closed the feedback loop between the city and community, between the decision-makers and doers, the problem and the solution. In Philadelphia, a similar story took place, but [went one step further](http://technical.ly/philly/2014/04/28/streamline-solutions-open-data-danny-phagoo/): > The company \[Streamline Solutions\] hired a software developer to build a tool for them that used the city’s Licenses and Inspections API, which offered a real-time feed of data about property violations. > Since then, Streamline has identified about 100 properties each month that it hopes to purchase and fix up… Before they would have to drive throughout the city, hoping to spot run-down houses to then make a bid on. Now, using the city’s open data around vacant and abandoned properties, they systematically identified opportunities for revitalization, and each month are now able to purchase two to five of those to fix and resell. Other business owners have used similar data to target historical properties with broken windows for repair. Open data of this kind — the kind released from the day-to-day operations of a city — has been called “civic exhaust”. What we’re seeing is that this civic exhaust can be fuel for businesses looking to not just power their businesses but also improve the communities within which they live. But why stop there? There must be smaller, simpler tasks, which urban properties require to be brought back up to code — say an unkempt lot or the graffiti on the wall of an abandoned building. With the emergence of real-time “small” job marketplaces, such as [TaskRabbit](http://taskrabbit.com/), what if we were to take this Philadelphia example to scale, and start funneling these opportunities towards jobseekers in a city? **How about we hook up a city’s building inspection open data into the TaskRabbit API?** You could even pair this with training and the [federal smartphone program](http://www.fcc.gov/lifeline) that’s gaining traction to ensure that citizens that wanted to participate had the tools and know how to do so. If it could work — and I realize that’s a big “if”— it’s a kind of “smart” city that systematically creates jobs and strengthens communities. The challenges our cities face in this century are many, and so are the opportunities that technology affords. One thing that’s becoming increasingly clear is that there’s a profound desire to try new things, in San Francisco to make a one day event into a month long residency; in New Orleans to rebuild homes; in Philadelphia to build systems that do so even faster. You’ll notice that all of these examples used technology in some manner or another — either as an excuse to get together, or as the fundamental of the initiative. What’s next, though, is to think deeply about all of the technology at our disposal in the urban environment: the fact that we can very quickly move things around; the fact that we can easily connect with other people and share opportunities with them; and the fact that once one of our little handheld devices enter into a room it can take on a different life altogether. Cities have immense potential to rethink properties, public or private, vacant or not. On all that, we’re just getting started. --- # Let’s build some infrastructure to make things matter even more. > Increasing the go-to-market velocity for civic tech. URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2014/04/24/Let-s-build-some-infrastructure-to-make-things-matter-even-more/ Published: 2014-04-24 Author: Abhi Nemani --- For years now, hundreds and thousands of people have invested their time and money into thinking about how to use technology to change the way government works. [Amazing](https://medium.com/p/be37621f947f) things have happened. Staggering, impressive, disruptive things. Looking back, now, though, I’m wondering if there’s a need for some focus on the infrastructure for the ecosystem. Ecosystem is a word that’s used a lot for people in this space. (If you google just my name and “ecosystem” you’ll find over 2,000 results. And that’s just me.) This is a good thing, because that means people in the civic technology space are thinking about more than just the one app and about the many—how we are stitching together a picture that makes sense. But to think about the ecosystem comes with a certain responsibility. It means to be not just a builder, but a steward. I worry a bit if we haven’t been good enough stewards. In particular, I worry if we should have — or should be — building better infrastructure for our ecosystem, the watering system as it were, for the next yield of civic goods. What do I mean by that? This didn’t become clear to me until recently whilst I was talking to a number of civic organizations working on getting their civic apps into the hands of users. Each was facing basically the same set of problems: where are their users; how they access them; what will they respond to; how do they get their attention? Now, some organizations or institutions are fortunate enough to have the resources or bandwidth to invest in researching those important questions and then taking advantage of the outcomes. Most, however, don’t. Civic startups already face an uphill battle: a long sales cycle, market intolerant investors, and well just generally hard problems (but the good kind of hard). Adding on top of that go-to-market challenges is a stretch, particularly for, say, non-profits or the volunteer organizations (e.g. CfA’s brigades). As the number of weekend hackathons and civic tech groups continues to grow, the challenge of each and every event or groups developing a user acquisition strategy seems like a burden at best, a fantasy at best. Unlike startups, these apps even lack the ongoing ownership and champions they’d need to try, fail, and iterate on a go-to-market strategy. The weekend ends sooner than you think. That’s ok, because not every app needs to scale, and the point of many of those events is more so community building than startup generation. But for the apps that _should_ scale that come out of our events, incubators, accelerators, etc, how can we credibly say we’re _picking winners_ without backing them up with the _tools to win_. If we can’t help them get into the hands of the people that matter, what we getting done? This is what I mean by infrastructure. Capacity to promote the viability, scale or sustainability of tools developed by volunteers, startups, etc. This could take many different forms: technical resources, data platforms, marketing assets, user acquisition resources, clients, etc. Imagine focusing on a particular issue area in a jurisdiction. Instead of just building one application, the institution did a host of user research and testing, building a list of users along the way, and each application that was built was tested against that list. Each app would be made better for it, and the list would grown. That’s capacity building. The upshot is that they would have have, say, a growing list of contact information for their core user base that that institution could turn to in the future. Or say something else. Maybe an ID platform that apps could share. Or an ad exchange. Or just best practices around how people use mobile devices… All of these things are infrastructure that should be shared given our common purpose and challenges. Let’s think big about the things we could build that would help make any app get into the hands of easier faster, easier, and simpler. To take a metrics approach: how could you each year bring down the \*cost\* of innovation for civic innovators? If every project every year got a _little_ bit better, or overtime summed to a greater whole, that’s a real win to the civic tech sector. Importantly, if the ecosystem were to build this kind of ecosystem the increased the go-to-market velocity, all-the-while continuing its growth in projects, innovation, and membership — that is, surface area — we could create a model for _exponential_ value creation. Institutions care more about the community than any particular app. This kind of infrastructure — let’s experiment on what it looks like — will enable us to engage that community for the apps that _matter_ when they _matter_. And that should be our goal. Always. In a world where [diversity](https://medium.com/p/ef2b3987ff81) is a virtue, we as stewards of the ecosystem should be investing in this long-term play. --- # On Boston, Politics, and the Arc of Civic Innovation > Thinking about tenure and transition in government URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2014/04/17/On-Boston-Politics-and-the-Arc-of-Civic-Innovation/ Published: 2014-04-17 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- > “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards... — Max Weber Cities are hard. Decidedly so. In fact, we designed them to be. Often terms are limited, management structures are complicated. (Mayors, councils, departments split power in tricky ways, and money is tight and often dependent on streams coming from fickle coffers at the state or DC.) That’s why it’s just staggering to consider what some of our modern local leaders have been able to accomplish. (A wonderful chronicle of recent successes is found in Bruce Katz’ [_Metropolitan Revolution_](http://metrorevolution.org/)_._) Doesn’t, though, this chorus of success inevitably comes to a close when an administration turns over? In high profile cities including New York and Boston, we are answering this question in real time, and for those of us passionate about civic innovation, there are few questions quite so crucial. In those cities — and many others across the country—many years, thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars, and countless man hours have been spent towards leveraging technology to make those cities work better. Through the natural course of human events, through, those very cities have undergone mayoral changes — and even in other where the mayor has stayed in office (e.g. Philadelphia) — some of the civic innovation champions have left City Hall for other roles. So what happens? How sturdy are the changes put in place, when the individuals who championed them, are no longer there? Do they stand the test the time? Or do they erode? Quickly or slowly? Loudly, or quietly? > How sturdy are the changes put in place, when the individuals who championed them, are no longer there? Do they stand the test the time? Or do they erode? If there’s any case I’d bet on — and I’m not a betting man — it’d be Boston. (Full disclosure, I’m a bit biased here. I worked rather closely with the [New Urban Mechanics](http://newurbanmechanics.org/) team there over the past few years: Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, along with past Code for America Fellows Joel Mahoney, Ryan Resella, Erik Michaels-Ober, Talin Salway, Karla Macedo, Max Ogden, and Scott Silverman. On the flip side, I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and the Red Sox did [womp](http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2013/10/31/5049404/world-series-game-6-red-sox-cardinals-gif-recap) on my Cards last year, so I think I’m safe, no?) So here’s the Boston story: In 2011, CfA worked with Boston on educational data. The focus to start was opening up student data broadly for technological innovation: create an API for educational data to enable an ecosystem of educational apps. Turns out: that was tricky. The school district wavered. Lawyers got involved. Cycles were burnt. Then crisis came. The [_Boston Globe_](http://www.boston.com/news/education/specials/school_chance/articles/) ran an expose on how the city had frustrated parents who were trying to understand which schools their kids were eligible for. They were handed a 40-page booklet with tiny fonts and complicated maps. This critical decision-making process was ostensibly transparent but effectively opaque. Parents threatened to leave the city. I mention this because this is the backdrop upon which we saw a case study in meaningful, long-term structural change. **Showing What’s Possible.** First, there were the fellows. Since Boston had fellows in place, they were able to build [DiscoverBPS](http://www.discoverbps.org/), a Yelp for Schools, that make a simple and easy-to-use interface for the school selection process. (See the 2011 v1 designs here.) **Changing the Conversation.** 2011 CfA fellow Joel Mahoney was the lead on the project, and [he details the application development and roll-out process in greater depth in his chapter for the book, _Beyond Transparency_,](http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-1/open-data-and-open-discource-at-boston-public-schools/) and he notes that initially, there was some push back on some of the design designs and the level of transparency / openness embodied in the application: > DiscoverBPS launched in November of 2011 and has received upwards of 15,000 unique visitors since then, with a substantial increase in traffic during school registration months. For context, about that same number of people register for school in Boston each year. It won praise from parents and school officials, who felt that the intuitive UI and data-driven content made the complicated school selection process more intelligible. The most significant feedback, however, came a year and a half later, when Superintendent Carol Johnson told me that DiscoverBPS had “changed the way \[the School Department\] relates to parents.” **Building upon Success.** The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics leveraged this success to build out the City Hall innovation capacity by both hiring innovation fellows (two former CfA fellows) and extending and RFP to further develop the DiscoverBPS platform; the lead fellow/developer from CfA was awarded the contract. The application, with this additional support and attention, now has over 12,000 users and is estimated to have over half of the parents in Boston using the tool. Beyond that, the now relaunched and redesigned tool — building upon significant user research — was recently awarded the [International Public Sector Design Award from UX Magazine](https://uxmag.com/articles/announcing-winners-in-the-international-design-for-experience-awards), writing: > The judges were impressed with the way the search engine made a very difficult and alienating process easier and by the way it improved relations between parents and school administrators. **Fundamental Reform.** Building upon this technological change, the school department then opened up its doors to a conversation about how to directly reform the school selection process itself. As documented in the [New York Times article, “No Division Required in This School Problem,”](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/education/no-division-required-in-this-school-problem.html?_r=0) they had a host of ideas; changing this rule or that. In fact, though, the idea that caught on was not a new rule, but an algorithm — a new technology-based solution to more fairly and dynamically assign students to their schools. This kind of reform had been decades in the coming, and the city staff credits the successful technological innovation across the board as useful precedents in making this happen. The educational reform in Boston is more of an example than a case study. They pushed forward meaning innovation in the 311 space, sustainability, and citizen engagement. Lots of things, important things, **over 3 years**. And that isn’t even counting the ground work New Urban Mechanics (Nigel and Chris and the rest of their team) had been putting in across City Hall for years before with StreetBump, etc, that surely made DiscoverBPS and the entire CfA engagement possible. tl;dr: This is a compelling story, an inspiring one, but a long one. Multiple iterations of the application, landmark changes to the way students are assigned to their schools, and more broadly a deeper appreciation for what’s possible through technology in managing this critical piece of urban life: our schools. > …no matter how committed you might be to re-orienting public attention _from_ politics _toward_ bureaucracy, you’ll inevitably come up against the politics _of_ bureaucracy. The fact of the matter is, no matter how committed you might be to re-orienting public attention _from_ politics _toward_ bureaucracy, you’ll inevitably come up against the politics _of_ bureaucracy. The lesson from Boston might be that longevity and staying power — along with stringing along win after win — might provide the requisite momentum to help turn the bureaucracy against itself and make institutional change sustainable. I suppose, we’ll see. Transitions are inevitable, but maybe if this story has any import, then we should also be asking ourselves another question about tenure. How long does innovation take to take hold? Should we be pushing for one or two year stints for CIOs in cities or longer 3-5 year commitments like what we saw in Boston? Transition might be a second order issue. **Tenure might be more important**. I’ll close with the often overlooked ending from the Weber quote: > “\[Politics\] takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.” --- # Is the App Store the Right Metaphor for Civic Tech > Do we *want* for an GovTech App Store? URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2014/04/16/Is-the-App-Store-the-Right-Metaphor-for-Civic-Tech/ Published: 2014-04-16 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- “We need an app store for cities,” is a line I swear I’ve even written. I’m starting to rethink that. Here’s why. The mobile app landscape is rich and vibrant, but not in any meaningful way interconnected. Mostly apps don’t talk to each other. Identities don’t really map app-to-app (your twitter profile and facebook profiles aren’t fully synced). Interactions often don’t fully align (are your foursquare and yelp checkins 1:1?). And for all the talk of the “walled garden” of the app store, the more attractive fruit lies is the data within the apps themselves — and currently accessing that data systematically, openly, is plain hard. So much so that someone recently wrote that [“mobile is in a pre-page rank phase.](http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/whatsapp-and-19bn)” That is to say, mobile lacks the kind of open connectivity the web provides, thanks to Google (pagerank/backrub). John Lilly, Board Member at Code for America and Partner at Greylock, [expanded on this notion](https://medium.com/new-industrial-revolution/3f606bf985c6): > And mobile today, and the promise of what is yet to come, is so much more massive than what we saw with the web. So many more people. Connected more often. To more of their friends. And more of the things in the world connecting too. Orders of magnitude bigger... But it’s also more fragmented, more siloed. Backrub was possible because links were open & inspectable, and the web was crawlable by anyone.That isn’t really the case for mobile yet. Much of the content & services & connections is all locked up by the big, sophisticated players. So data is more fragmented, more separate. And less mash-uppable. So we got apps, and daily/hourly engagement with billions of people. But we haven’t figured out how to sort it yet. Haven’t figured out how to find & share. That’s why network platforms like this are so critical, and so important for the future. Mobile & connected is so much bigger than the PC web ever was. We are in a pre-pagerank phase of mobile. Such a profound statement, and so, so, so much opportunity implicit in that very short sentence. This is a big — **big** question—and it’s not trite to consider it a Google scale one. I mention here because I think it should force us to rethink the use to the “app store” analogy when thinking about government software. If we are seeing challenges already, and big, important, fundamental ones with the app store model, and ones that strike at the heart of the open government movement, should we not reconsider our organizing metaphors? If the achilles’ heel of the mobile app world is its lack of openness, why would we follow in its footsteps? Instead, I wonder, though, if the better comparison is between governments and open social platforms, such as Twitter. While immensely less complicated, as a organizing metaphor, it may have more import. The twitter platform / api enables customization around a common data set, while enabling integration of other data, features, or tools. The key being that the stream (or hose) is the keystone piece of the ecosystem, holding everything together. You can use Instragram if pictures are your forte; Hootsuite if you need to manage multiple accounts; Radiant6 if you’re a marketer; or build something entirely else if you have another need. Back to civic technology. Given the interconnectedness of government agencies, the latter picture is much more appealing. The iOS framework makes it easier for developers to push their apps into a delivery mechanism (the app store) that’s common and fairly ubiquitous. Governments, however, have no such operating system: OS’s range from Windows 98 and Windows 7, and everything in between. Sometimes there are even DOS systems. (I’ve seen it [firsthand](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/02/how-to-cash-in-on-government-as-a-platform/).) And of course, many government officials BYO-Macbook. This means government lacks the same distribution channel that consumers enjoy through iOS. You couldn’t build “the civic stack”: what operating system would it run on, what hardware would it require? The cacophony is too loud for harmony. The silver-lining is that nearly all governments can have access to the internet, and so web-apps that use data streams from various sources, and increasingly, the legacy platforms are opening up their data in common formats for new developers to build upon. You then start to see a civic landscape marked more by pronounced streams of data. Data that enables common applications to be built for common problems, but also the uncommon apps for the rare or unexpected situations. In this model, governments play more a data stewardship role, than an app developer or RFP manager — something they are both much better equipped to do, and happier to do. What emerges, then, are a few core needs: core enterprise systems with open data (preferably open source as well), middleware connecting those systems to each others, and open access to both enabling a multitude of various citizen interfaces, optimized for that particular situation. These are ripe opportunities for new or existing vendors in the civic technology ecosystem. It’s easy when thinking about government to make parallels to other markets or verticals: healthcare, education, or even just traditional enterprise or consumer markets. But values matter. As do principles. While some other markets may be able to vary their values and principles around topics of openness and access, government hasn’t that luxury. Nor in my view should it. The lesson from the modern web seems simple: open platforms win. Putting that lesson into practice with increasingly complex, distributed, and fascinating tools in ways that matter is now the responsibility for those of us hoping to make government work in the 21st century. --- # Looking at things in many different ways > The need for diversity in the civic technology ecosystem URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2014/04/14/Looking-at-things-in-many-different-ways/ Published: 2014-04-14 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, Code for America --- For nearly four years I was at Code for America, and [many, many lines](http://github.com/codeforamerica) of code have been written — all the while, one of the operating assumptions was that we could build locally and spread nationally. That is to say, that once problems were identified within a particular city’s context, it could be spread to other cities nationally. Or even internationally. In indeed that happened, [many, many times](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2012/12/13/announcing-winners-of-the-race-for-reuse/). But then why so much code? So much. Aren’t cities all in all common animals with common problems and shouldn’t we overtime be able to architect a kind of “civic stack”— a civic app suite that covers all core city services? Even if we we’re aren’t there, shouldn’t we have a progress bar of sorts for our collective march down that path? I think not. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, [most](http://www.promptly.io/) [exciting](http://ohanapi.org/) and [important](http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2013/11/08/whats-really-at-stake-in-better-interfaces-to-government/) [things](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/us/in-texting-era-crisis-hotlines-put-help-at-youths-fingertips.html?_r=0) [happen](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10617233/Does-Labour-have-the-appetite-to-support-the-Casserole-Club.html) when you think about the _few_, not just the _many_. Let’s consider blight. Vacant housing. This is a problem we tend to think is something that’s just something that a city such as New Orleans has to deal with with, but ask almost any American mayor, he or she is thinking about it; it’s a reality of modern urban life. It’s a challenge. As a point of fact three or four different CfA apps took on this core urban problem: each with a slightly different take. [BlightStatus](http://blightstat.us/) visualized existing city data, tracking the progress; [LocalData](http://localdata.com/) collected citizen-generated updates; and [CityVoice](http://cityvoiceapp.org/) created a VOIP system for logging complaints. Beyond that, you’re now seeing companies like Trulia and Accela [take data](http://housefacts.me/) from all three and others into other interfaces. A thousand flowers and all… To say one tool is better than the other is folly: each serves a distinct, but real purpose. They match a particular experience a citizen has when interacting with their government in their own context. And each of those experiences and context merits a distinct tool. The beauty of modern technology is that the cost of delivering each of these tools is dramatically lowered by open access to the data, and the prevalence of frameworks, opensource tools, developer tools, hosting platforms, etc. Roll-you-own experience. The modern web has shown us that individuals needn’t be beholden to “suites” or packages of bloated software. Indeed, one size doesn’t fit all — nor should it in a democracy. --- # Opening Data to Improve Public Health > The Landmark Launch of the California Department of Public Health’s Open Data Portal URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2014/04/04/Opening-Data-to-Improve-Public-Health/ Published: 2014-04-04 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Government, Skills, Training --- Health and Human Services may be _the_ (or one of the) most important agencies to engage with open data. Public health departments, in particular, analyze and understand threats to the public’s wellbeing— a vitally important civic function. Your local Department of Public Health, for instance, strives to keep you up-to-date of your risk of contagious disease, the emergence of environmental hazards, and the likelihood of contracting food borne illness. Those are just few examples of the wide array of measures and indicators they watch vigilantly. Through a vast network of agencies ranging from state and county public health departments to the federal CDC and HHS, public health officials now have access to more data and tools than ever to accurately monitor and assess threats to the general public. But that’s just the start. After you understand an issue, you have to do something about it. For that, they need to have effective mechanisms to engage the public. Indeed, public health departments actively reach out to the public through various means including newspaper inserts, physical ads, etc. New mediums including email, social media, and other digital interfaces are helping dramatically widen that reach. In many ways, these agencies have always been in the open data business, just through older means, but by going open and online, they can become more connected and innovative. Central, however, to a public health department’s operations for any outreach function in the 21st century should be _open data_. [As has has been seen](http://beyondtransparency.org) time and time again, open data itself acts as an information delivery mechanism, just be having it online, and when integrated into apps, existing services, or new ones, they take what’s too often cooped up in a government server and deliver it into the palm of your hand. Just consider how San Francisco opened up its restaurant inspection scores to integrate them into the widely popular consumer platform, Yelp. Indeed, this role of the public health agency as a _communicator_ means that _open data_ can be a game-changer. To advance an open data agenda with a health-oriented institution comes with it serious concerns around privacy, integrity, and access — real challenges, but solvable ones with care and leadership. That’s why I was pleased to see that recently, with the support of the [California Healthcare Foundation](http://chcf.org), the California Department of Public Health [launched](http://www.govtech.com/data/California-Department-of-Public-Health-Soft-Launches-Open-Data-Portal.html) its [open data portal](https://health.data.ca.gov/): > “The California Department of Public Health today launched its [Open Data Portal](https://health.data.ca.gov/), which will allow user-friendly access to the data it collects about important public health issues. This data can be used to craft solutions to public health concerns while providing more transparency in government… This — to my knowledge—is the [first state-level open data portal](http://www.govtech.com/health/California-HHS-Open-Data-Portal-Paves-Way-for-State-Health-Data.html) in California. The Golden State boasts many of the most active open governments (Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Oakland, just to name a few) and entrepreneurs abound in both private _and_ public industries. Yet, this marks a watershed moment for the state government, as CADPH embarks on its open data journey. One can only hope that other agencies follow their lead, and learn from their example, as I’m sure governments across the country can and will. Why? Because CADPH‘s open data rollout, by most accounts, breaks fresh ground in terms of design and launch. Indeed, this role of the public health agency as a _communicator_ means that _open data_ can be a game-changer. ### Design ![California Department of Public Health open data portal homepage](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_ZdvQveDM36fMBUr2j0-eiA.png) The CADPH site seems to strike a balance, with a richly graphical user interface. The homepage includes data, stories, visualized metrics, and developer information, with clear navigation right at the start. (Diving in deeper, you will see that this homepage sits a front a typical [Socrata](http://socrata.com) open data portal with typical rows of sortable, searchable datasets — wrapped in a slightly cleaner design.) ![CDPH portal featured story: poverty rate by census tract map](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_cIl3tRIpVZ1l9so_0C4ZXw.png) What this homepage design tacitly does is segment the user base into personas: say, subject matter experts seeking **data**; citizens or journalists exploring **stories**; and developers eager for **APIs** and design references. Consider the value this kind of structure could have for analytics and user understanding: if properly instrumented, this site could tell the government (and any interested citizens) what kinds of users are coming to the site, where they are coming from, and how valuable they are finding it. This is vital data as you [consider and design calls-to-action](http://www.govexec.com/state-local/2014/08/ahbi-nemani-civic-interest-action/90695/) for these high value demographics. !["Build stuff with our stuff" developer section of the CDPH portal](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_yQ-lprFBfmFdrROhbjuiEQ.png) None of this is groundbreaking on its own; yet, _together_, they do give us a new opportunity to engage users and understand their use of open data. ### The Process: Design & Launch How did they come to this savvy design? Through community engagement. The CADPH worked hand-in-hand with state officials and [members of the local civic hacking community (Code for Sacramento)](http://code4sac.org/were-coding-for-california/) to hammer out an innovative design. (See the [video](http://vimeo.com/102955602) above for more.) In a collaborative event, the group printed out screenshots of a number of data portals from around the world, tearing them up into their constitutive parts, and then piece them back together with their favorite elements: a data portal reconstruction. This illustrates one of the benefits to later entrants into the open data space; instead of having to start from scratch, they can weave together the best elements of previous efforts into what’s just right for them. It’s a kind of patchwork innovation. ### The Role of Open Data Reading through CADPH’s announcement one sentence stood out: > While much of this data is currently available on the CDPH website, the Open Data Portal will improve access, so researchers, policy makers, technology experts and others can, for example, use the data to create mobile applications (apps) to solve local challenges. This sentence reminded me of the obvious relationship between city websites that have been around for years and these new data portals that have only come onto the scene (sometimes in just the past few months). It’s a reminder that in a certain way, open data is not anything new. For older stalwarts of the transparency movement, they’ll know what I mean. Decades ago the civic hacking movement began with “scraping” government websites for data, and pushing them into old school data portals: hosted FTP servers, and the like. That’s a very different world than the one we live in now. With the advent of government-sponsored data portals, the appointment of Chief Data Officers, etc, it’s clear we’ve come a long way. The world of civic data is very different now. But the fundamentals remain: Government has always been in the communications business. Before it was websites and even handouts, now it’s open data portals and APIs. Better access to government data means that that information is more democratized. Paired with the democratization of technology — the ease with which a research can take open data and run an analysis, the speed with this a developer and port over their existing tool to a new location—we start to see this role of government as a _communicator_ turn into one as a _collaborator_. **Data then becomes less of a one-way dissemination tool, and more of a connective tissue for many-to-many collaboration.** With the various institutions working towards better health outcomes — public health agencies, hospitals, nonprofits, startups, etc — now more than ever coordination is needed, and open data, along with open dialogue, can make that happen. Consider the opportunities for alignment: the agency could make simple updates to refresh the data catalog; that data could be pushed to citizens directly via, say, a startup developed app; new citizen behavior could be mapped by an NGO; and the overall health outcomes could be tracked and reported by the hospitals, feeding back in then into the data portal. Then repeat. The cycle continues. The sequencing will surely vary, but the similar, positive outcomes should not: improving public health by helping people dedicated to a cause _do their jobs better and faster._ This cycle, however, would not be possible with the older systems for “open” data — getting the data would be too complex, using it too time-consuming. But that legacy is one we can build upon: since whatever information is already being put out there for the public through older channels is just that, _public_, these agencies have fewer hurdles to clear when building an open data _program_. For such a program, a data platform is just the start. As we’ve seen time and time again, the truism, “If you build it, they will come,” just does not hold true. Open data has to be backed up by community management, developer relations, and constant vigilance to ensure data quality and relevancy. Committing to an open data program, in the way CADPH is doing, you are embracing a new model; you are pulling out unstructured, hidden data and bringing it into the light — not just for transparency and accountability, but moving beyond that for meaningful usage by entrepreneurs inside government and out. --- # What Kenya Reminded Me about Technology and the Liberal Arts > What Ought Technology Do URL: https://abhinemani.com/blog/reflections/2014/02/01/What-Kenya-Reminded-Me-Technology/ Published: 2014-02-01 Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: Civic Tech, Open Data, Los Angeles --- _These are abbreviated notes from my address to Claremont McKenna College (my alma mater) at the 2013 Forum for the Future event. Video and slides from the talk are available below._ Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149980231 Good morning. My name is Abhi Nemani, and I’m a CMC grad of 2010. I want to start by apologizing to Darren, who helped organize this. I was supposed to get him slides by Monday. I’d prepped a deck, was going to send it. Then I looked at all the other talks on the agenda and realized mine was entirely out of place. Last night I scrambled and tried to write something different about the liberal arts and technology because I felt like that was a theme for this set of talks and also for this weekend, so I’m going to try to connect the dots, if I can, between technology and the liberal arts, but it’s going to take me a minute, so bear with me. Okay? This story starts in Kenya. Last year I was fortunate enough to be brought along by the World Bank as a consultant to Kenya to help them look at open data. When you get to Kenya, you see a lot of new things — particularly if you grew up in a small, rural town in Midwestern America. You see a country dealing with corruption — the legacy of a corrupt regime — and struggling to press on. You see [baby elephants](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4144495173180&l=579cbd78db), as well, and that’s fun, but you also see this: ![Person holding Kenyan shillings and a phone beside an M-Pesa sign](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1__fO_TVIToCv8-CLWPyImWg.png) You see people exchanging currency with their cell phones. You get out of a cab, and you just see someone text the driver. You’re at a convenience store, and you see people texting the cashier. That surprised me. Kenya is not exactly as advanced technologically as the US. We have Square here or other modern technologies. We have our iPhones. Not as much there, so it’s like, what’s going on? I asked somebody, “What is this?” They said it’s a thing called M-Pesa, and I said, “What’s that?” They said, “It’s revolutionary,” and this is why: > In a country like Kenya, they don’t have the kind of financial security that we have here. The banking system can’t be trusted. Currency can be stolen. You can’t trust the means of currency. Well, M-Pesa changed that. M-Pesa let’s you send money from your phone to somebody else, actually initially just changing minutes as currency, and eventually they built that as it’s own form of currency, itself, where you could trade real dollars. Initially that’s just interesting, right? You think, “Wow, they leap-frogged modern currency, right?” You don’t have to use as much paper. You don’t have to use credit cards. You can just use your phone. iPhone users would love that, and I don’t have to carry around my wallet (and even here in the U.S., I’m a huge fan of Venmo, which does basically this), but the real interesting thing was the impact on that society. ![Anti-corruption suggestion box](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_k5z4A-9RLOydNnqV8aGcmQ.png) Beforehand, you were fearful of public and financial institutions, which were historically corrupt and inaccessible. And so, you keep your money, literally, close to your chest. You would keep your money under your mattress. You stay regionally within your home. You couldn’t move into the city, but M-Pesa changed that. It let you take your money out from the mattress. It created a modern economy, and here’s what’s great about it: It got people back into the cities, and created trust in civil society. Now you see vibrant urban corridors, bustling with street life and economic activity, and humming with the sounds of busses and cars shuttling residents back and forth from their rural homes and their urban jobs. Not at all unlike what you see in westernized countries, but instead of payment by plastic cards, it’s by SIM card. I bring up the story of M-Pesa to show you an example of how profound technology can be, how big of an impact it can make on a society and on a people in a positive way, but we all know that it’s not always the case. Sometimes technology can be used for identity theft. Sometimes technology can be used for privacy violations, and most recently we all know about PRISM and its effect on our country here. **Technology can be a double-edged sword.** I tell these two stories, these two examples juxtaposed to pose a question, _what ought technology do_? What role do we role do we _want_ technology playing in our society? You may not think this is an important question, but let me tell you why I think this might be one of the most fundamental questions we have to address. Let me share a a quote from Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, wildly successful, early in Google, early in Facebook, and he watches technology very closely. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he said this, > “Software is eating the world.” What did he mean by that? He’s looking at the way software has disrupted core industries in our society. The post office is gone, publishing is gone, media, and let’s return to financial institutions. We all probably don’t remember this but back in the day, you’d have to get to the bank before 4:00 on a Friday. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have any cash on the weekend to go out. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve gone to a bank because this industry has been so profoundly disrupted by technology. You can take a picture of your check and deposit it in your account. You can pay people with Square using your mobile phone. The financial system in this country has been revolutionized with technology. **Software is eating the world.** ![Before and now: bank queues versus mobile banking](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_RdEuhy6FH3uNS7T0EJ1XHg.jpg) Then, bringing those two themes together, I think we’re asked another question. How will technology reshape our society? Now for a lot of the folks in this room, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that’s not a question that I can grapple with. I’m not a technologist. I don’t know how to code, and you know, the apps on my phone work just fine. Whatever.” Let me tell you something. This is something we all here have to answer, and I’ll tell you in a minute why I think we’re best equipped to do that. This is a quote from a former Google engineer. He was riffing off Ginsberg’s “Howl.” He said this. He said, > “The greatest minds of my generation are optimizing click ads.” Fantastically talented engineers aren’t using their skills for good. They’re using it to make a profit. They’re not asking these hard questions, so who will? I think we have to, and this is the connection back to the liberal arts because even if you think you don’t have the skills for technology, because of the liberal arts, you’re equipped with the skills to analyze, to think, to read, to write, the skills you need to grapple with these important questions. More than that, I think the liberal arts also teaches us important values. You guys know this, right? In Gov 20, we read Tocqueville and learned about how democracy works in the modern age. In Lit 10, we read Orwell and learned about the importance of good communication and the curious dynamics of power. In Philosophy 10, we learned about Rawls and our connection to people. These are our values, and the liberal arts gives us the tools to understand how they could be borne out in our real lives. I’m arguing that we should use them to think about how technology is changing our world because in today’s age, it is technology that best enables us put them into action. That’s what’s changed. Now, when you see corruption, or inefficiency, or disenfranchisement, something as simple as a few lines of code can dramatically shift the status quo. With a few lines of code, you can take your liberal arts degree off of the shelf, and put it to work. I want to tell you that I’ve seen this firsthand. I’m fortunate right now to work in an organization called [Code for America](http://codeforamerica.org). Has anyone heard of the organization? For those of you who haven’t, let me give you a little bit of background. I think I know a lot of the folks in the room. For those of you who knew me when I was here, I was a political nerd. I was a Rosie \[the on-campus state and local government research institute\]. I worked on the Port Side and Forum \[the campus newspapers\], but I was also a geek. I think I spotted a couple of people in the room who I personally built websites for when I was here, so I happen to be the curious mix of someone who’s passionate local government but also into technology. So I didn’t have the most traditional college career, in class or out; thus a fair question is, what did I do with that education? Well, I was going to end up actually going to Google full time after I was graduated, but then one day on the Internet I saw this logo, and it caught my attention. I’m like, “_Code for America_,” what does that mean? I went to the website. It was a startup. It had just been founded a couple months prior, and it had this basic notion: “_Let’s use technology to change the way government works_.” It’s like, “Whoa, that’s kind of cool,” so I checked it out. It was just getting started. I had a couple months before I was going full time to Google, and I said, “Let’s see if I can hang out, maybe be helpful for a couple of months.” I sent an email to the founder, started volunteering for a couple of weeks, then a couple of months, and now it’s become a couple of years. I’m currently serving as an executive director there, trying to help understand how technology can change our governments. So what does that really mean to code for America, and how does it have anything to do with the liberal arts? Let me give you a few examples. Just for reference, the core thing that we do — our bread and butter — is this: a Peace Corps for geeks. Doctors have Doctors Without Borders, teachers can do Teach for America, but developers and designers, technologists, didn’t have an easy way into public service. We wanted to give them that. What we do is we pair a team of three or so developers with a city government, local government, and ask them to take on a hard problem, something like food stamps enrollment or urban blight. Take on this problem and see what’s possible, see how you can use technology to better a society. Here’s an example of a problem they had to take on. The first year we were working in the City of Boston. We send our fellows because we’re cruel, I guess, to the City in the month of February. In Boston that year there was a snowstorm, so instead of being able to do the research that they needed to do, they had to man the call center because people were calling in saying, “I can’t get to where I need to go.” While they’re there, though, they talk to some people in the call center, and they saw a fireman and asked the fireman, “What’s a problem you’re dealing with today in this crisis?” He said, “It’s this.” He said, “In snowstorms or when it snows a lot, hydrants get covered with snow, and we can’t go put out fires. We have to drive around the city and shovel them out.” They were like, “Okay, how can we use technology for that?” ![Adopt-a-Hydrant signup form and map](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_KwIWyilRTRp_LMRNlcx25w.png) Initially, the thought was, “Let’s build an app where you can just map them and track them. That’ll make it easier for the firemen to do their job,” but the fellow who was working on this was a philosophy major from Carnegie Melon, and he thought, “Well, citizens are living right in front of that hydrant. That’s someone’s house behind that. Why shouldn’t that person have the responsibility as a citizen to do something about it?” so we built this, Adopt a Hydrant. It’s a little web app, not complicated. It’s cute. You can click on a hydrant near your house. It jumps up and down. You give it a name. It texts you if you don’t take care of it, but think about this. This is self-interest rightly understood. This is Tocqueville. This is saying, “As a citizen, you should make your society better,” and technology enabled that. Here’s another example of a project from this year. When you have food stamps, you get credit each month at the beginning of the month, and you have to use those food stamps and report on them and what you did. If you don’t submit your report for how you use that food stamps, you get kicked off. If you ask somebody who uses food stamps, they’ll say, “Every day, the first day of the month, we go to the grocery store. That’s the day we get to go to the grocery store.” A mom with her two kids will go to the store, get the groceries, get in line, get ready to checkout, give the person the card, and sometimes they get rejected, not because they’re not eligible anymore. ![Dense CalFresh benefits notice letter](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_20-hiJTuEtFhT1hs5oxTIg.png) ![Illustrated phone showing a plain-language CalFresh text message](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_2TCH67aIE9tRrepKxZ0ojg.png) It’s because they didn’t fill out this form (above), and what happens when you don’t fill out the form? They send you a letter what looks just like this, that oftentimes you can’t understand and oftentimes too hard for you to read, and so you get kicked off .That means for that month you may not have food, or at least you’ve spent three days in line in the bureaucracy trying to solve that problem. Well, our fellows said, “That doesn’t make sense. That’s not right,” so they made a simple SMS app. I’d bet this is something that Hemingway would be proud of, short, direct, to the point. It’s showing how you can change the way you communicate in society. Finally, this is an example from New Orleans two years ago. New Orleans, like a of American cities, has a big problem around blight, vacant housing. Vacant housing can be hotbeds of crime, drugs, murder, and so people like this woman named Aunt Rita, get really concerned about vacant houses in their neighborhoods because they want to keep their neighborhood safe. The City wasn’t telling her the status of those vacant houses. She didn’t know what was going on, so her and her friends walked around each day for hours and mapped out the houses. Is that house safe or not? Is something being done or not? She had to do that herself because the City wasn’t doing anything. Well, we built an app for that. We built a simple app, blightSTATUS, that found all the data from the City, created a visualization, and let her see the status of it. ![BlightStatus homepage for New Orleans property information](https://abhinemani.com/img/medium/1_eV7KnOQ8JliSUwRHHkMq7g.png) Again, the technology here isn’t what’s important. What’s important is this. After we launched that app, Miss Rita ran up to the fellow and gave him a hug, and along with her neighbors, she said, “_You changed the conversation.”_ Beforehand there was a frustrated conversation. The City was on one hand saying, “I don’t know what to tell you, citizen,” and on the other hand, the citizen was saying, “City, you’re not telling us what you’re doing.” The conversation wasn’t collaborative, it was paralyzing. The application gave them a means to communicate, and it changed the conversation. When you think about a democracy and the way that we should be communicating with each other and with our government, this is how technology can be so core. **“You changed the conversation”** I’m getting over time now, so I just want to say that what I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that **your values are infused in what you build**. What you know, what you believe is reflected in the things that you create, and I think the liberal arts education and the values we learn through it are so critical to bring into technology because the technology we’re building now will reshape society. Thank you. --- # GovGeek.Club Newsletter > Join the community of public servants of all stripes, public or private, using technology to serve the public good. URL: https://abhinemani.com/community/ Author: Abhi Nemani Tags: about, Abhi Nemani, Code for America, pandas --- ## GovGeek.Club Newsletter Weekly, curated list of jobs, links, and commentary in government technology and innovation... With an editorial take. ## What's the GovGeek.Club? (For now) a service from govtech practitioners for (current or prospective) govtech practitioners... - What we think & what we think matters in the work of GovTech... - What's working, where? What's needed in the market? - What's missing? - And how to get involved. Send tips to tips@govgeek.club. ## Past Newsletters > The week's [#GovGeek](https://twitter.com/hashtag/GovGeek?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw).club newsletter highlights new leadership by [@wutrain](https://twitter.com/wutrain?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) & [@NYCMayor](https://twitter.com/NYCMayor?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw); viz from [@replica](https://twitter.com/replica?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw), jobs from [@Zencityio](https://twitter.com/Zencityio?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) & [@litterati](https://twitter.com/litterati?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw), and reports from [@govtechnews](https://twitter.com/govtechnews?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [@BeeckCenter](https://twitter.com/BeeckCenter?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#govtech](https://twitter.com/hashtag/govtech?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#civictech](https://twitter.com/hashtag/civictech?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#urbantech](https://twitter.com/hashtag/urbantech?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [https://t.co/3VVydqSozP](https://t.co/3VVydqSozP) via [@revue](https://twitter.com/revue?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) > > — abhi nemani (@abhinemani) [February 2, 2022](https://twitter.com/abhinemani/status/1488933680039043076?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) --- # Talks > I have spoken internationally about government, technology, and innovation, ranging from conferences such as SXSW and the US Conference of Mayors to universities and institutions such as the World Bank and Stanford. URL: https://abhinemani.com/talks/ Author: Abhi Nemani --- Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/2qcmoD0qLSQ I tend to talk about how governments are changing, and using technology to do more with less in the 21st century — and how public servants and entreprenuers can take advantage of that. Embedded video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149984557?h=73bcca338a If you are looking for insight on government technology, innovation, or civic engagement at your next event or conference, don't hesitate to [get in touch](mailto:abhi.nemani@gmail.com). Embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/i62WH37KFdg?si=JAuGQQ026M0TQQ_l ## Selected Presentations * RiseConf2015, **CDO as a Poor Man’s Hacker** [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/the-chief-data-officer-as-a-poor-mans-hacker) [[press]](http://technical.ly/2015/12/11/care-future-city-10-ideas-steal-civic-tech-leaders/) * NAGW: Keynote, **Data, Delivery, and Design** [[video]](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/rethinking-data-portals-30b66f00585d#.hqqnf6jnw) [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/nagw-2015-keynote-data-design-and-delivery) * Fabric of the City (Paris), **Building an Open Data Community** [[video]](https://abhinemani.com/blog/essays/2015/12/28/Reweaving-the-Fabric-of-the-City-with-Data/) [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/fabrique-de-la-cite-datala) * Federal Communications Summit: Keynote, **Government is What You Make of It** [[video]](https://abhinemani.com/essays/2020/07/11/Government-is-what-we-make-of-it/) [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/government-is-what-you-make-of-it) [[press]](http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-blog-agile2013-keynote-the-user-experience-in-government-software-matters/) * Claremont McKenna College, **Technology and the Liberal Arts** [[video]](https://medium.com/p/technology-civics-the-liberal-arts-31bdc93fb86) [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/technology-the-liberal-arts-in-action) * Philly Emerging Technology for Enterprise, **Designing 21st Century Government** [[video]](http://abhinemani.tumblr.com/post/136094903067/via-philly-ete-2014-49-designing-21st-century) * SXSW, **Hacking for Sustainable Cities** [[press]](http://science.time.com/2013/03/12/south-by-southwest-dont-fight-city-hall-hack-it/) * Big Kansas City, **Technology and the Liberal Arts** [[video]](https://medium.com/@abhinemani/disruption-as-a-public-service-a9de086b171f#.u4hjlddmd) * Making a Difference Asia, **Civic Startups as Game Changers** [[video]](https://abhinemani.com/essays/talks/2020/07/11/Changing-the-frame-from-social-innovation-to-civic-startups/) [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/mad-a-nemani) * Health DataPalooza, **Core Principles of Open Data** * Personal Democracy Forum, **Digital Inclusion and Open Government** * Digital Cities (Buenos Aires), **A Tale of Two Cities** [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/a-tale-of-two-cities-digital-cities-buenos-aires) * Agile Alliance: Keynote, **The Principles of Agile and of Government** [[video]](http://www.agilealliance.org/resources/learning-center/keynote-coding-america-how-agile-and-lean-are-disrupting-government-and-why-they-need) [[press]](http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/news/2240203127/Agile-2013-keynote-How-software-developers-help-their-countries) * Next Generation of Government Leaders, **How to be a Poor Man’s (Government) Hacker** [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/how-to-be-a-poor-mans-hacker) [[press]](http://www.govtech.com/e-government/5-Traits-of-Action-Leaders.html) * World Bank, **Spreading Innovation Around the Globe** * InciteXchange, **Redesigning Citizenship** [[deck]](http://www.slideshare.net/anemani10/incitexchange-nemani-feb-16)