Tag: CfASummit

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.

Pixels: #CfASummit Day 0 (Code for America Summit 2024)

Monday, May 29, 2024

After getting up at 4:45 a.m. Eastern and catching a 7:30 flight, our little team from the GX Foundry made it all the way out to SFO, arriving a little before 10:00 a.m. Pacific to a gorgeous day in the Bay Area. (Thankfully it was a nonstop flight.)

We join the real Code for America Summit conference, or if you prefer the hashtag, on Tuesday afternoon. We wanted to arrive early so we could settle in and not run into any flight complications that could cause us to miss a full third of the conference.

Here are some photos from “Day 0” just for fun.

Looking back at SFO from the BART terminal on a sunny day with some fog on the horizon. The flight was about 5 hours in a straight shot from Columbus to San Francisco.
Since our hotel in Oakland is directly on top of a BART line, it was the fastest and cheapest way to make our way from airport to our destination. I love a good public transit system, and while the Bay Area has its challenges, it’s still one of the better-connected cities in this country, at least. In this shot you can see Eric descending the stairs and Sarah and Kristen already on the platform. It was a quick 45 minutes to reach the hotel.
Being the Memorial Day holiday, and being a downtown location, the hotel was basically empty, so an early check-in was easy. And the weather was perfection.
We walked to lunch and I noticed the bilingual street signs. Everyone knows San Francisco has a vibrant Chinatown section. I didn’t realize Oakland had followed suit.
Of course we had to get a West Coast lunch after our long trip and 3-hour time shift, so we found a local Japanese grill joint near the hotel and had fun playing chef. Kristen (out of frame to the left), Sarah, Eric and I tried ALL the meats.
Monday afternoon Sarah—a long-time Art Institute of Chicago employee and an expert in museum management—played impromptu tour guide in a visit to SFMOMA. That included a giant wall of album art in their “ART OF NOISE” exhibition, which included an original iPod and other electronics, concert posters, and more.
SFMOMA also had a fun Scandinavian piece at the top of their atrium that allowed sunlight to play through a few thousand glass panes so you could walk through it. (It should have been sponsored by Windex.)
Here’s another view of the walk-through glass installation from the lobby. The dark smudge on the bridge is a person, about 7 large art museum floors up.
And here’s a detail view from down below. And yes, you could see down through the floor when walking through.
Finally, I took a little walk after dinner and enjoyed some of the classic architecture in downtown Oakland. There’s not a ton of it—Oakland has really grown in the last 40 years, so most of the buildings are new. Still, nice to see some classics still around, and often very well-maintained.

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.