Category: Weeknotes and Essays

2024 Weeknote 25 : You’ll need AI to summarize this

June 17 – 23

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.

[1] Let’s create a national training program for government digital services

This week I posted commentary on the GX Foundry site on the need for a standardized government digital services training program, offered nationally, to challenge governments to focus on fundamentals (human-centered design, iterative development, user research and user experience, etc.) before pursuing AI solutions to everything. The post was sparked by this meme:

Meme created and shared on LinkedIn by Luigi Ray-Montañez at Coforma

I’m hoping, over time, I can convince colleagues at some of the think tanks and/or boutique consultancies to come together and make this real. We’ll see. Not sure I have enough time or energy to lead this charge myself.

[2] When digital service innovation gets real, emotions can run high

I am “workshopping” this section here for a potential post on our main GX Foundry website. I’m trying to figure out the best way to explain our goals for non-tech audiences working in local government agencies. Feedback welcome.

This week was a tough one on the frontier of our own digital service work: overhauling the public-facing website for our county and all her public services. Feelings were… shared.

As noted via our GX site and in other spaces, our big idea—taken from national examples—is to “flip the script” on our county’s various websites, changing them from being a constellation of agency-centric websites to being a unified citizen-services-centric destination. That is, we should meet the people we serve where they are (as much as we can) and not demand they learn the ins-and-outs of local government in order to access the services they want or need.

If we want to be citizen-centric and service-focused, it naturally follows that we will downplay agency names, downplay elected officials, and downplay government jargon of all kinds. We need to collapse all the standalone websites. We need to use plain language to present our services in ways that make sense to normal people. In this big pursuit, we envision ending up with 1 website with 1 root URL and 1 home page, not 40 home pages spread across 40 or more URLs.

For example…

If you need help getting enough to eat, today you can’t go to one website and find all your options. In fact, before you start, you need to think about whether you are a veteran, or over 65, or under 18—or any combination of those factors—before you start seeking services. Depending on your demographics, you might want to start from up to 4 different websites. (If you can figure that out.)

But to us, if you know you need food, why don’t you just show up at our (one) website and look for words and phrases that talk about “food assistance,” or use other words that make the most sense to you? We actually have several food-related services to offer:

  • food assistance in the form of SNAP (a revised “food stamps” program)
  • meals for seniors, whether mobile or home-bound
  • information on local food pantries (that we don’t run, but we know about)
  • dog food—yes, we offer limited assistance for dog owners in distress

Some programs offer discounts. Some are totally free. But they are all about addressing food insecurity issues for you and your family. So if you need food, look for food—don’t try to figure out which Agency to talk to.

Today, to access the help or info we offer, residents must know or figure out:

  • the names of relevant county agencies
  • the names of relevant program names or jargon
  • what demographic categories they fall under, because that might mean they should go to a demographically-specific agency first (like a Veterans agency, or a seniors agency)
  • how to call us or how to visit our offices in person, because a lot of services aren’t online yet
  • whether there are any nonprofits in the area that could help
Our current website model, at a high level. It’s lots of individual, disconnected websites (there are 50+ sites) centered on Agency identities or major Programs that didn’t want to appear under an Agency website. And today there are very few fully-digital online services, which is why I only included 3 boxes. (Click the image for a larger copy.)

Maybe a Google search can point them in the right direction. Maybe not.

The problem…

We have these awesome services, provided by the best public servants you can imagine, but if you’re a resident that needs something, it’s your job to figure out our agencies and program names to get to the right place. That’s unfortunate if you’re looking for a marriage license or trying to register a new vehicle. But it could be really bad if you’re in distress—this approach can make a bad situation feel just a little worse.

Everyone working in our agencies is here to help! But right now our digital services are setup to reinforce agency boundaries, identities, and financial structures. None of which meets the public where they are.

Flipping the script feels like a threat

So we see the problem. We know unifying under a single site, with plain language that makes sense to normal people is the way to go. So everybody’s on board, right? Based on lots and lots of discussions and working sessions and shared research, we sure thought we were good to go. Nobody raised a red flag in the last 9 months.

Then this past week, despite all that preparation, I think people started to understand what we were proposing because they could see some draft home page wireframes and started to grapple with the information architecture (IA) in the form of menu structures. Suddenly the idea of grouping “Child Support” and “Children Services” under banner of “services for children” was a threat big enough to spark open arguments and back-channel calls to stop this madness and go back to using Agency identities to organize everything.

This was the first “open revolt” to hit the project. (Okay, that’s overstating it, but the change in tenor was palpable and caught us off guard.)

Not everyone was upset or confused. But it was clear our messages about the conceptual design of the “One Franklin County” project had not broken through until this moment.

Every resident, every day

So we’re going back to the drawing board—literally drawing—to develop some visuals and show what the future can look like and why it’s better for residents. The model below is too detailed for most folks, so we’ll do some simple web page wireframes, too.

Our future website model, at a high level. It’s one website at the root, with all the Services gathered into logical, plain-language groups, further gathered in audience segments (Residents vs. Businesses). We also intend to build out more and more digital services, jumping off from this centralized site. (Click the image for a larger copy.)

Ultimately what we want to do here is, in fact, radical. It’s a complete re-thinking of how we serve the public online. It’s Service-focused but we will ensure Agencies get direct credit for all their hard work (“SNAP benefits brought to you by JFS”). It’s Resident-first, not Agency-first. That’s not a minor change. But it’s the right thing to do.

After all, Franklin County’s tagline of choice is “Every resident, every day” — it’s not “Every agency, every day.”

It’s gonna be awesome if we can get this off the ground. We just have to get the shared vision established (or re-established).

[3] Culture Code for GX

Special thanks to expert facilitator Sarah for taking another team through this collaborative culture-coding process

After last week’s Culture Code development session with our Delivery Services team, this week we did it with the GX Foundry team.

These have been really helpful in understanding the thinking and motivations of all our team members, and giving everyone express permission to help build our culture together. We already have a solid team and it’s a positive place to work overall. But digging a little deeper into how everyone wants to work together will hopefully reinforce the best parts of working here and improve the rest.

Our draft set of expectations are below. This one’s a lot longer than the last one, and a lot more wordy! But this team has been together, working as a unit under the “GX” banner, longer than our project management group, which may explain why these items are a lot more specific.

A *draft* edition of the GX Foundry’s Culture Code, from 21 June 2024

Once we work out any remaining kinks, I think we can post this to the main GX Foundry site, to share it with our followers. CODE PA did something similar earlier this year.

[4] “No wrong door” beats “one door”

There’s an initiative in one part of the county to develop a “one door” approach to organizing services, bringing together a variety of human-service agencies under one roof (virtual or otherwise) to make providing services faster, easier, and more comprehensive and supportive for residents. I’m 100% in support of this idea and this work!

However, when it comes to “doors,” I prefer this tidbit over on the CODE PA website…

No Wrong Door “We need to meet people where they are and make it easier to work with the Commonwealth online. There should be no wrong door for Pennsylvanians looking to access government services.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro

This dovetails with our thinking on the One Franklin County digital services overhaul: that we meet people where they are, and we don’t treat Residents as if they are “wrong” if they come in a “door” we didn’t intend for them to use. If they made it here, let’s work on getting them the services they need (and deserve).

This matters because the “one door” initiative—while laudable and innovative and deserving of more support from everyone—only covers about 13 or maybe 16 agencies… out of more than 40. So it’s one door for maybe 16 agencies, but there are still 24 or more doors out there. So yeah, keep going, friends! But let’s keep all our doors open.

[5] Miscellanea

  • Just wanna say… Canva really is remarkable, at least to this old dog (who ran Aldus PageMaker from 3.5″ floppies on a Macintosh SE). What you can do in a web browser today is nothing short of stunning.
  • We finished up Project Manager candidate intro calls this week. We’re taking 8 candidates through first round interviews over the next couple weeks. Hiring is still out in August.
  • Worked with the Project Management team on a project description / summary exercise this week which was illuminating, even though we only got through a couple items. My realizations:
    • There are projects on our books today that we don’t really understand, and even the teams requesting the work don’t understand! These projects are destined for big trouble because things are not spelled out with enough detail, nor are they explainable in plain language at a high level. So… how do you know if you’re doing the right work in the right ways for the right outcomes?
    • This sparked an old idea… If you cannot explain the What, How, and Why of your project in simple terms—that any reasonably-intelligent business person can understand immediately—then you don’t really understand the project, and you can’t lead it.

[6] Internet funnies

A roundup of stuff that made me chuckle this week.

2024 Weeknote 24 : Reboot. Restart. Repeat.

June 10 – 16

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.

What a week. It was 5 days in the office with lots of meetings to keep lots of things moving forward, including whole teams, big projects, and so on. Very little time for personal stuff this week.

Rebooting a culture

In May 2024 I took on a new team, in parallel to the GX Foundry group. It’s a team that pre-dates my arrival in my role and a team that has struggled to consistently get great work done. There are a lot of reasons for this, all of which have nothing to do with the people on the team and everything to do with past poor management (that’s now gone). It’s now my job to lead the team through a “reboot” of both culture and processes. And culture comes first.

On Friday I presented my own perspectives on the past and asked the team to help me think about how we’re going to build the future—which will be radically different from that past. Everything is up for discussion, debate, and re-consideration. This is a team that’s had 133% turnover in the last 3 years. They’ve had 5 major leadership changes in the last 15 months (including reporting up through me last month). Any team that goes through all that is going to struggle in one way or another. And those are just 2 of the stats holding them back. We’ve got work to do.

To kickstart the reboot, I got help from the amazing Sarah, who facilitated an “expectations exercise” that began to pull from the team what we’re all going to expect from one another, in terms of behaviors and attitudes. It was my first time through the exercise, expertly facilitated by Sarah. (And we’re gonna do it again with another team next week.)

The result is a (draft) collection of expectations that (1) Leaders have of the Team, (2) the Team has of Leaders, and (3) we all have of one another in general. You can see the draft above (click for a larger image).

This is all subject to future revision, of course, as the team matures and we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. But this feels like a great start. Now we just have to live up to these expectations, values, and beliefs. I’m excited to see where we take this!

You can be undermined with or without intent

This week revealed some of our efforts were being undermined by forces beyond our organization, out in the broader government environment.

When there’s a person behind the undermining, making it happen, it’s easy to get mad at that person. But when there’s just cross-cutting priorities that conflict—without anyone’s intention—you can’t get mad, but it’s still frustrating.

In the first case this week we learned a former employee in one of our partner agencies was actively undermining our major new countywide project. We’re trying to switch public-facing websites and digital services from government-centric content to citizen-centric and service-focused. A laudable goal we thought everyone would support. But this person was mad it wasn’t happening in his department—despite (a) never having proposed anything even remotely similar, and (b) sitting in an agency that is not a neutral player in our broader government, and therefore cannot effectively host this kind of project.

It wasn’t really a surprise this person had done this—he was a known irritant on past projects as well. What was surprising was the extent of his success in deceiving powerful people in the upper echelons of our county. (Proximity to power is a power of its own.) He was communicating directly with certain leaders, and we were communicating indirectly. We assumed positive intent. He did not.

At least he’s gone now. Starting next week we must establish direct communication lines with the affected leaders to both give them the facts and ask for their support. Then we’ll have to keep those communication lines open.

Photo by Gratisography on Pexels.com

In the other example, we have apparently bumped up against the aspirations of someone we’ve been working with for a while. But their personal aspirations and our team aspirations appear to conflict in ways we didn’t anticipate. It’s created some friction and we have to figure out a way for everyone to win. This is a problem I would much rather solve because there are usually ways for everyone to “win” either together or in parallel. The conflict still hurts, but it feels like we can make something good out of this.

Naturally, I’m being coy by not naming names or describing the situation clearly, as I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or create more conflict. My point? I’ve had to acknowledge some conflicts in the world are created by intentional negative action, but others are emergent properties of people working in close proximity. It’s important to know the difference and deal with them differently.

Another realization? The cacophony of modern work makes fully communicating intentions, goals, and actions really, really hard. Even if everyone wants to align it’s hard to establish and sustain the alignment. When you’re “done” communicating, you’re not.

Take me out to the ballgame

This was fun. 😎 Lucinda put together an outing to the Columbus Clippers this week, and several folks from the office took part. I did a lot of these games last year (and need to do more this year) because Huntington Park is an awesome venue and a baseball game is a great place for some casual socializing with workmates. Thanks Lucinda! And thanks also to Brian, Michael, Eric, Nora, and Tony for coming out to make it fun.

Group selfie photo courtesy of Eric Nutt

Miscellanea

  • The Recognition Program I started earlier this year (with mission patches in the form of stickers) was paused a little while some other stuff got done, but it’s coming back. We’ll have stickers galore coming our way soon, with distribution to folks across the organization in July. Really looking forward to that!
  • We’re hiring for a Project Manager role, and that always keeps me super-busy with calls, interviews, and discussions as we hash out exactly what our priorities are with each hire. I try to use every hiring event as a chance to diversify skill sets across the target team. It’s hard to do that with a 30-minute call and maybe 2-3 hours of interview time.
  • We were making some high-level design decisions this week about the next wave of website overhaul work, slated to go live in early 2025. There’s definitely some disappointment out there that we’re building a kinda “generic” site. But when your focus is public service, “generic” is a plus — you don’t want people to have to learn how to use your unique cutting-edge website. We actually want them to find our services, not be dazzled by graphic design. We gotta remember our True North here.

Internet funnies

A roundup of stuff that made me chuckle this week, mostly from Bluesky.

Yes. Yes, I would. It’s called vaccination, Mara.

2024 Weeknote 23 : Back from the Summit, with ideas

June 3 – 9

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.

As a post-Code-for-America-Summit week, this one went by fast, but still had a lot happening. As I started to write this update on Sunday, June 9 was in Tennessee, south of Nashville, visiting my sister and her new home. She just moved from Minnesota and I was called in to do tech support on the various TVs, computers, Wi-Fi, and so forth. As I’m finishing this update, I’m back home in Ohio, late on Sunday night.

65 years

This past week started on Sunday, June 3 with a visit from my parents, as we got lunch together in central Ohio. But this coming week (June 11) is their 65th wedding anniversary, if you can believe that. These two kids got married in 1959, the same year Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as the 49th and 50th states, Eisenhower was president, and a new car cost $2,200 on average (about $23,700 adjusted for inflation).

Married in 1959 — a full 65 years ago this month

A full 65 years of marriage (and counting) is unfathomable to me, so kudos to them for making it work, one way or another. Personally, I’m unlikely to see 65 years of marriage, as I got married in my 30s instead of my 20s.

Meanwhile, back at the office, a few updates…

My critique of AI

I launched a post on the GX Foundry site that got some traction: AI is a tool, not a mission. This one was a little bit of a rant about the prevalence Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatter at the Code for America Summit and elsewhere in civic tech. I just couldn’t take it anymore and had to fire a shot across the bow, staking out the ground that LLM-based AI is not transformational, it’s just on a hype cycle, and we need to think long and hard about what use this tool has in our public service mission. Plus, how about we get some fundamentals right first? I shared the post on LinkedIn, where it also made some ripples.

Hack your LinkedIn mojo

A post liked by civic tech luminaries and Bob Sutton, of all people

Meanwhile, another post on LinkedIn made bigger waves, at least to me. While away at the Summit we got the shipment of Hack Your Bureaucracy books we’ll be using to run a book club where about 20 of us read the book together, discuss it, and figure out how we can improve our operations. I shared a photo of the stack and noted what we’re doing. This got noticed by one of the authors, Marina Nitze, and she even offered to join us for one of the book club sessions! It also got liked by Bob Sutton, author of The Friction Project, worthy of a future book club. Even Jennifer Pahlka dropped a like on the post.

This stuff on LinkedIn doesn’t really change the world, but it is fun, and a chance to read a book where the author actually joins us for a chat is pretty special.

Rebooting “projects” somehow

Back in the real world (but still shared via LinkedIn), we posted a Project Manager position to start gathering candidates. But I have to admit, I’m conflicted about this role. Classic “project management” isn’t getting the job done for us, and I’m not entirely sure why. We’re starting to explore some new thinking around this, but we don’t have an alternative model to share yet. If we figure out a new way of running projects, we’ll share it somewhere.

Chat with USDR

A U.S. Digital Response (USDR) contact I made at Code For America was kind enough to spend about 30 minutes with me this week to explore setting up a consulting agreement where we would get some volunteers from the USDR network to review our current staff construction, compare it to industry exemplars, and advise on how we could change over time to meet our intended digital service mission.

I know we are not currently setup for maximum success in the digital services space, but it’s hard to know where to focus next for improvements. For example, I know we need actual UX Research capacity, but is that the most important thing to hire next? What about an experienced Product Manager (or Owner) to teach us how to get that practice moving? Whatever the case may be, I just want another set of eyes on our current team capabilities, compared against our aspirations so we can prepare for the future thoughtfully.

Hopefully something comes together with USDR in the next month.

We need a national boot camp for government digital service teams

I have some notes and want to spend time writing this up, but in short I realized at the Code for America Summit that there’s no “boot camp” or other onboarding program to teach the fundamental concepts of developing digital services in a government organization. There are tons of resources out there, but they are not organized in a “teaching” mode where someone can get up to speed quickly on the basics. I think this is a problem to be solved.

Imagine: You’re working for a government entity that has not yet even thought about digital services, but to get started you go to the Code for America Summit. You’d be completely lost. I was able to keep up with all the presentations and ideas at , but only because I’ve been self-studying this stuff for the past 2 years.

Given how many government teams need to build digital capacity, we need to get something together in the industry that teaches the basics, points to examples, and builds a core set of resources to learn more. A “Government Digital Services 101” course, if you will. The raw elements are out there, they just aren’t organized.

I shared this idea with the Beeck Center and turns out Kirsten Wyatt was thinking the exact same thing! Indeed, she had at least one meeting last week to start some of those talks! So maybe something will come together, maybe even soon. I hope I can help out somehow.

Miscellanea

  • My latest drive-to-Alaska photos post is live. Only one more to complete the set (coming next week).
  • The Chief Digital Service Officer (CDSO) meeting, hosted by the Digital Service Network (DSN) at the Beeck Center was held this past week, showcasing a research report from students at UNC that looked at the structures, funding, and goals of digital service teams across the country. Can’t wait to see that published for everyone.
  • Before the night is out, I will be filing my response to the Beeck Center’s request for survey responses for a new fellowship they are creating. I’m a little late, but hopefully I can help out.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle, most often from Bluesky.

2024 Weeknote 22 : Code for America

May 27 – June 2

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

I’m not going to tell you what the way is. You’ll have to figure that out yourself.

This week was mostly consumed with flying to San Francisco, attending the Code for America Summit in neighboring Oakland, flying back to Ohio, and trying to catch up on a few things at home and at work (including sleep).

I’ve already detailed thoughts and reactions to the conference over on the GX Foundry site, so you can see those notes here:

Got to see Kara Swisher at the conference, which was fun. She didn’t really belong there, naturally, but she had some nice comments and was plenty entertaining.

Miscellanea

The conference was the thing this week. I’ll be catching up more next week. But one minor note…

The latest “story card” for the “We Are ” series comes out on Monday, June 3 in print but already came out via LinkedIn newsletter. That’s the third one so far. And I may be getting some help with that going forward. So far that’s been a solo effort.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle, most often from Bluesky.

AI is overhyped, OpenAI knows it, and we can all see it

Extremely smart take by Julia Angwin on the most recent Pivot podcast regarding how generative AI players, like OpenAI, have hyped the market up for a technology that isn’t actually even close to ready (emphases mine):

The [AI] companies… did themselves a disservice by coming out with this technology and saying “it’s so good… the main concern here is that it’s actually going to take over the world and kill humans.” When you start with that level of hype it’s actually really hard to walk back to where it can barely answer a question accurately. I’m sure it seemed like a great marketing strategy at the time because it did make [AI] seem so sexy and dangerous…

I honestly think that OpenAI disbanding their [safety] team is a little bit of an acknowledgement, like “that isn’t actually the issue we’re facing here right now. We are actually facing the fact that it’s kind of unreliable, it’s not consistently accurate, and we have to kind of solve those problems.”

It’s not that “AI” tools are useless. They have some uses, of course.

It’s that Sam Altman and the sycophantic tech press have been hyping this to a degree that no technology could sustain. “Artificial General Intelligence” is nowhere on the horizon today, just as it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago.

You can hear Angwin’s comments on the Pivot podcast here: https://overcast.fm/+OwaLbGX-U/48:20

2024 Weeknote 21 : Reloading…

May 20-26

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

I moved. Digitally.

I grew tired of the sprawling digital estate I’ve been maintaining personally, so I decided to collapse several digital properties into the one you see here. In fact, this is the first “native” post on the new site and domain name. All other content on this site was migrated from other platforms. This new digitalpolity.com site brings together:

  • My Medium presence, which I used for mixed essays. I really like Medium in terms of features, but I didn’t like how so much of Medium’s content is behind a paywall and they’re not innovating the platform very much.
  • A Substack site I created just for publishing . While I am aware of the “Substack supports hate speech” controversy, that’s not been my main concern. I’m more concerned, about Substack’s future simply because I want to publish for free, but they are moving fast to monetize and free users might get kicked to the curb. WordPress has been a more reliable and responsible player for a long, long time, so I trust Automattic, uh… automatically.
  • A WordPress-based photo blogging site that I like, but I just don’t want to maintain separate sites, so I’m integrating that one into this one.

The GX Foundry site will remain wholly separate and it will stay on Substack. That’s a more formal shared-authorship site and the limited features of Substack are a plus, not a minus. Maybe one day we’ll move to Ghost or even here to WordPress. But for now, Substack is fine. I mean, Jennifer Pahlka is there, so that’s something.

Finally… why WordPress? Several reasons.

  • I’ve used WordPress off and on for a couple decades now, so it’s familiar
  • They now charge real money for their features, which is a good sign — it tells me I’m their customer, not their product
  • There are tons of integrations, in case I need something that’s not there
  • They caught up with the newsletter trend, so it’s much easier to offer that option now
  • They play nice with the Fediverse

See you at #CfASummit

Had fun making this graphic to share on LinkedIn. We really are excited to attend the Code for America Summit for the first time. Wish it could be in DC, since that’s a lot closer, but the Bay Area should be fun, too.

Our team:

Local conferences need an upgrade

This past week I attended an “IT Leadership” conference and it was… meh. As I’ve told my boss and some colleagues, I am a bit of a conference snob, having worked in public media in the past. Go figure: people that run radio and TV stations know how to put on a show.

These days local conferences aren’t organized by professionals in your field, they are run as money-making operations by publications of one kind or another. And while they may have good intentions, it leads to less-than-optimal results because:

  1. local professionals are busy and don’t have the time or energy (or sometimes the expertise) to prep national-quality presentations, and
  2. the publications playing host are more focused on collecting and selling contact lists to sales folks in the industry.

I actually have some ideas for improving local conferences, and even some ideas for starting one from the grassroots level. Shoot, in early 2023 I created my own day-long in-house conference at and it went pretty well. The key, as always, is focusing on the needs of the audience.

So until I have some meaningful direct input over the local events, I won’t be attending any more. It’s too much effort for too little payback. I’ll stick to national conferences or at least major regionals. And I’ll study the agendas closely before committing.

Miscellanea

Not much more to report this week, as there was an all-day meeting, an all-day conference, a day off on Friday (to make up for losing Memorial Day to travel for ), and the rest of the time was just keeping up with stuff. That said, I did complete my initial “listening tour” with the Delivery Services team, getting their thoughts on what beetn going well, what’s not been going well, and ideas for how we can improve.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle, most often from Bluesky.