2025 Weeknote 12 : Edging past the equinox

March 17 – 23

Weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work. These are mine. Learn more about weeknotes here.

I’m making a few more format updates this week and I’m thinking about changing up the weeknotes habit itself, moving more toward essays, with less day-to-day stuff. More on that below.

Professional #weeknotes

Got sick again this week

What the hell? I had a hard cold about 3-4 weeks ago and then got a milder version of the same thing this past week. I haven’t been sick with a respiratory ailment since June 2023 when I got COVID-19 for the first time (3 years after the start of the pandemic), and now it’s twice in about a month. Thanks everyone for bringing your sniffles to the office. The sneezing-and-sinus-mess of this week made me miss work one day this week, so I missed…

Q3-Q4 2024 FCDC Recognition Awards

What started at the end of 2023 as a recognition event inside the GX Foundry has turned into an organization-wide program we now do twice per year. This week’s awards looked back at the second half of 2024. I wish I could have been at the event with all 100+ staff!

New hires on board

After what felt like an eternity, we finally had two new folks start this week. One is a Business Analyst and the other is a Project Coordinator. I also completed a massive 180-day draft plan for one of them, chockablock with checkboxes to check off as the new Project Coordinator gets to know our systems and processes and people and more. Our organization has come a long way in improving our onboarding process. Now all we have to do is fix the hiring process, which is mired in an over-aggressive interpretation of Ohio Revised Code 307.844 that requires our board to approve all hires. Plenty of other powers are delegated to our leadership group (like approving technologies and spending money), but not this one for some odd reason.

Considering curtailing the weeknotes to bare facts and instead write a weekly (or semi-weekly) essay on a topic of the day

I’m finding I have more to say about fewer things each week, and I may want to re-focus my efforts on fewer, but longer pieces. As such, this weeknotes habit may need to shrink to some basics so I have more room for the bigger thoughts. For example, I want to address this piece — GovTech Reckoning: A Framework for Government Modernization — but to do so would make for too long a post here in weeknotes, and it would dilute my point. So… maybe next week I can start a more bullet-point version of weeknotes and do a parallel essay whenever I feel the need. After all, this is not part of my job—I do all this on my own time.

Our county’s procurement processes are a disaster. Our leaders need to discover the politics of Abundance to fix it.

I have a massive rant about this, but I will spare you that and make just a few points to share the pain of working in a county that relies far too much on lawyers that don’t know the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Just three problematic examples (and there are many more):

• We have been trying to procure a work management platform from a major international software vendor since November 2023, and we cannot get a contract done. Why? Lawyers. This platform has been sold to the State of Ohio and many other governments, but our lawyers can’t figure it out.
• We have been trying to procure a popular and free events publication service since late last year (rather than letting agencies keep using Facebook for events), and despite it being 100% free and widely used by the public for lots of other purposes, we can’t have it. Why? Lawyers.
• There’s also a very popular blueprint revision and markup software package that has been locked up in our legal procurement channels for more than 4 years. Lawyers again.

In the last few years whole conferences and consulting shops have been spun up to deal with these government procurement problems. But the one underlying problem for government folks trying to get modern procurement done isn’t technical or legal— it’s fear. Everyone fears making a mistake and losing access to the “gravy train” that is government employment. Meanwhile, politicians fear negative press. So fear rules the day and our lawyers are paid handsomely to tell everyone what they can’t do rather than how they can do it under a reasonable risk framework.

Recently Ohio passed a law (which takes effect next month) that changes the procurement game and gives top-cover to everyone in county government to dismiss the pesky terms-and-conditions clauses that cause the most consternation. Basically, the State has declared if a vendor won’t give you the right terms and conditions, the bad terms they do give you are simply null and void. Presto! No legal risk. Even if a procurement dispute went to court over these terms and conditions, do you think the courts would side with a vendor or the government itself (presuming the contract was entered into in good faith)?

But our lawyers don’t care. The fear is overwhelming (not to mention habits). They are proceeding as if there is no new law, so the only way to complete a “legal” procurement is to negotiate unique contractual terms to their liking—vendors be damned, government teams be damned, and ultimately taxpayers be damned. Commonly-available software tools are simply off-limits to government service teams if the vendor isn’t willing to write a bespoke contract with 1 out of 3,000 counties.

Needed Now: Abundance thinking

These lawyers and their liberal political masters need to rethink their role in our shared society and our organization’s mission. We are all here to help build, sustain, and protect our communities, not hold them back because of our fears of making a mistake. Yes, some eggs may be broken along the way. You may need some courage. So let’s do it—let’s show a little courage, as addressed in this exploration of the politics of abundance from earlier this week:

Abundance thinking isn’t just for building houses or roads or other infrastructure. It’s about going back to the basic mission of government: to serve the needs of the majority while respecting—with limits—the desires of the minority. If we can’t even buy commercial, off-the-shelf software (COTS), then what hope do we have when it comes to solving the housing crisis, homelessness, the cost of college, or creating a future that offers opportunity to everyone, not just the children of the rich?

PA AI experiment successful, but small

The press loves AI stories, talking about how these LLM-based tools are transformational. But always look closer. This piece about Pennsylvania deploying ChatGPT sounds great in the headline: ChatGPT saving staff 8 hours per week, Pennsylvania governor says. But it’s from an executive order from 1 year ago, licenses were handed to just 175 people across 14 agencies (averaging 12 users per agency), they provided some training, and the results are… generally fine. I’m sure the ChatGPT deployment helped some folks in some aspects of their jobs. I mess around with LLM tools, too, and get some benefits. So let’s experiment more. But AI is still not going to shake the planet to its core. It’s like the introduction of word processing in a world of typewriters, or desktop publishing in a world of teletype machines. It’s gonna be a really useful tool in range of cases, some of which we haven’t found yet. But let’s keep our analyses clear-eyed.

California looking at banning AI in personnel decision-making

Smart move. Generative AI is only as good as its inputs, and so much of the way organizations write job descriptions, interview, hire, onboard, and evaluate employee performance is… messy on a good day and downright hostile on a bad day, often veering into racism and sexism. So California is looking at getting ahead of bad employers that want to let AI tools deal with employee performance and may soon pass a law to ban the practice. They aren’t talking about banning AI tools entirely, just banning automated acceptance of AI decisions. That may not be enough, though. Once the tools spread, bad HR departments and managers will weaponize the tools. Working with people, teams, customers, vendors, managers, individual contributors… it’s all people. Setting performance “standards” so everyone knows the rules is a good thing. But even without AI tools, you can’t let the standards call the shots. You, as a leader, must use context and thoughtful review to shape your teams. Don’t outsource it.

Personal #weeknotes

Spring equinox in Ohio isn’t like Alaska

The vernal equinox hit at 5:01am Eastern on Thursday, March 20. For the years I lived in Alaska this was a big deal. All the solar dates were—the equinoxes and solstices. Every day you knew how many minutes of light were being added or subtracted. In a city where the height of summer shines down 19 hours of direct light (and 5 more hours of twilight), and the depth of winter reverses that to 5 hours of direct light and 19 hours of darkness, you get attuned to the cycles. During the biggest solar swings you would gain (or lose) a full 35 minutes of daylight in a single week—it was half a daylight savings shift every week for months. That may be the one thing about living in Alaska all the tourists never understood. And why I never forget a solstice or an equinox to this day.

Ending my Bluesky Funnies series

I’ve been posting a weekly roundup of random funny stuff I found on Bluesky in posts here on the blog. But this week’s post will be the last. Three reasons:

• Even the funny people on Bluesky are getting agitated with our political environment and are making trips over there a bit less fun.
• If you’d like to find funny people and posts on Bluesky, you can always do that on your own or you can just follow me as I re-post stuff occasionally
• This blog is more of a professional exploration than a personal one (or at least that’s my intent), so that stuff doesn’t really “fit.”

More on the AI transcribers / life loggers coming

I don’t have the energy to write up observations on the Plaud, Bee, and Limitless AI transcription devices and services this week, but plan to in the future. The tech is interesting and may be great for the right person / situation, but so far, they are not growing on me. Maintaining an exhaustive life log feels like it might actually be exhausting.

This (final) week in Bluesky Funnies

As I noted above, it’s my last week of collecting Bluesky humor and sharing it on the blog. But for one last time, please enjoy this assortment quips, puns, double-entendres, and off-axis observations from the past week: Bluesky Funnies 2025-03-22.

---

About this week’s header photo