October 14 – 20
My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.
One Thought: What happens when an AI launch is half-baked
(Reposted from LinkedIn) If you launch #AI into your government operation without thinking it through, this is the kind of story you can expect:
‘AI-Mazing Tech-Venture’: National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees
There is no need to deploy #genAI as an early adopter unless you have a large ML-friendly data set that can be mined for BI-style insights that you couldn’t get with traditional methods.
Should you experiment at small scale in lab conditions? Sure, if you have discretionary budget. But launching an LLM at employees (maybe to declare some kind of “leadership” victory?) will look desperate and may cause a lot of trouble.
This is doubly true if your agency doles out facts to the public and adds AI into the official service chain.
And just politically speaking, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should probably be one of the last to deploy AI, not the first.
Do we really want AI bots addressing public questions of who shot Kennedy, or did Trump illegally withhold documents from NARA itself?
Five Notes
- It’s already been widely publicized and praised, but in case anyone missed it, the Digital Service Network at the Beeck Center released their Government Digital Service Team Tracker this week and it’s a fantastic resource for finding other digital service teams across the country and explore their sizes, structures, and roles. And yes, our very own GX Foundry is in there.
- BONUS: That team tracker is just one resource sitting inside the Digital Government Hub, a new centralized database of resources to help out government digital teams as they work toward their myriad goals. It’s a stunning achievement and deep resource.
- Stay tuned to our GX Foundry website for 2 new positions we will be posting next week. We will be adding a Digital Product Owner and a Digital Communications Strategist to the team that is leading the One Franklin County project. Both will report to hiring manager Sarah Gray.
- HBR re-released a podcast episode titled How to Make Better Hiring and Firing Decisions that’s really solid. Recommended advice.
- I can’t remember how this piece got to me, but it was new this week and it’s (sadly) very, very applicable to my broader organization. Nice, nice, very nice. The piece is all about how an excessively “nice” organization culture can—surprisingly—destroy psychological safety and dissolve trust within teams.
- The Rework podcast this week tackled a favorite theme of theirs: saying “no” to most requests and options. As the 37signals guys note in Say No by Default from experience, saying “yes” is deceptive. Because when you say yes, you’re actually saying no to hundreds of other options and possibilities. Saying yes is a cop-out, to get out of tough conversations about what really matters and making tough choices.
One Video: Beedeebeedeebeedee… What’s up, Buck?
I’m old enough to have seen Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) on broadcast TV. No cable. No DVR. No VHS. Just broadcast television, with the antenna and everything. I even had a model of the Buck Rogers fighter ship. This was just one show that came out of an explosion of sci-fi after Star Wars (1977) revived the genre. Battlestar Galactica (1978) was another popular example, and I saw that show’s feature-length pilot in a movie theater before it made it to the small screen. It was a wild time.
This show did not end well. It also didn’t start well. But as a little kid, I didn’t know that, and with only 4 broadcast stations to choose from, I was starved for media (compared to kids today). I was also a little transfixed as a kid because Mel Blanc—the voice of Bugs Bunny and more—was obviously voicing the robot Twiki. That blew my little kid mind.
I had fun taking this tour through a ridiculous bit of TV history. For the kids out there, this stuff is both laughable and cringe, and it shows just how far we’ve come. Compare this cash-grab to the likes of The Expanse (2015). That’s a huge leap.
Five Laughs
One Photo
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