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Technology and Trust:The Challenge of 21st Century Government

Tim O’Reilly@timoreilly

TEDx Market StreetMay 10, 2014

codeforamerica.orgSaturday, May 10, 14

When you see the title of this talk, Technology and Trust, you perhaps think of Edward Snowden and the ongoing scandal of NSA spying on the American people and our allies. But I’m actually here to talk about something that is perhaps even more fundamental. And it starts here...

Saturday, May 10, 14How many of you are old enough to remember a time when you had to physically walk into a bank and talk to another human being in order to get cash?

I remember….

And that memory seems quaint to all of us because we know how much personal finance has been revolutionized over the last 25 years because of digital, networked technology.

Saturday, May 10, 14Even a few years ago, people would have been amazed to take a picture of a check with a phone and the money will show up in their account a few hours later.

The same digital, networked technologies, it seems obvious to say, have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives. Not just banking but everything from education to how we interact with our friends.

Saturday, May 10, 14But there’s one place where that revolution has largely not yet taken place: in government. This is the Department of Motor Vehicles, which in the US is a symbol of bureaucracy. Just about everyone has to go at some point in their lives and almost no one has a good experience.

91% of Americans own a cellphone67% use Facebook, 33% have a tablet...

Why is this how we engage with government?

Saturday, May 10, 14And this is a microcosm of the problem we try to address at Code for America--when the tools are available for people to connect with anyone in the world and access every piece of information one could ever want, why do we make it so hard to access government?

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Saturday, May 10, 14Even when government tries to do digital, we get messes like healthcare.gov.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But when the government does end up building technology that doesn’t work and costs way too much, not only do ci@zens get gypped, but it breaks our trust in government.

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Saturday, May 10, 14Democracies get their strength from the people’s trust. When the interactions that people have with government are so divorced from how they live their lives, or are hard and unpleasant, what is that doing to the trust that underlies our democracies? Obviously, the decline of trust in government has to dowith a lot of other factors besides technology, but the way government is so out of step with ordinary life certainly is symptomaticof the deeper problem.

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Saturday, May 10, 14

Tom Steinberg, founder and execu4ve director of MySociety, one of the pioneers of the open government movement, wrote “Good governance...”

This is one of the key principles that we work from at Code for America. It isn’t just a maGer of geHng smart tech people into government -‐ that’s magicalthinking. We need to completely reorient the way government creates policies, so that it works much more like a “lean startup,” where you constantlyare trying to learn what works, rather than deciding what you want to do, and only then trying to implement it.

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Saturday, May 10, 14The problems with healthcare.gov were made worse by greedy contractors who charged hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps up to a billion dollars when youcount the state exchanges) for a site that many of us in Silicon Valley think could have been done for a few million at most, and by feckless bureaucrats who didn’t knowhow to manage the project. But the problem started here, with a 900+ page “specifica@on” (the Affordable Care Act) plus tens of thousands of pages of addi@onal regula@onsthat had to be followed to the leTer. (By contrast, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was only 29 pages long.) Imagine that Google, or Facebook,or the iPhone, had started with a huge specifica@on wriTen by a commiTee of hundreds of lawyers (and lobbyists) and you realize where the real problem lies. Policy people at the top, implementors at the boTom. Completely the inverse of the way it works in Silicon Valley.

(Lots of people say Obamacare was 2400 pages long. This is incorrect. For details on the page count of Obamacare, see hTp://www.leadertelegram.com/blogs/tom_giffey/ar@cle_c9f1fa54-‐d041-‐11e1-‐9d01-‐0019bb2963f4.html and hTp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-‐checker/post/how-‐many-‐pages-‐of-‐regula@ons-‐for-‐obamacare/2013/05/14/61eec914-‐bcf9-‐11e2-‐9b09-‐1638acc3942e_blog.html )

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The UK’s Government Digital Service is the best example of a government agency that is doing things right. One secret to its success is thatMike Bracken, the head of the GDS, reports in at the highest level of government, and has a seat at the table in shaping policies that affect digital services.In the past couple of years, the GDS has replaced something like 1700 bad government web sites with one that has more usage than all 1700 combined had before. The service has had ci@zen sa@sfac@on go through the roof, and has won plaudits from everyone.

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The GDS has aGracted a talented team of technologists and has been described as “the hoGest startup in London.” But one of the most important things they’vedone is to rethink how to design government digital services. The GDS Design Principles are, in my opinion, the most important user interface document sincethe original Macintosh User Interface Guidelines, which set the tone for the mouse and window era of compu4ng.

A lot of our work at Code for America is informed by the UK’s Government Digital Service Design Principles.

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The first of these is to start with needs -‐ user needs, not government needs. This is so cri@cal. The GDS works a lot like any Silicon Valleystartup. They iden@fy a problem area, and learn how to solve it incrementally, with a build-‐measure-‐learn cycle.

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Code for America follows the same approach.Our flagship program is our Fellowship, which brings talented startup teams into ci4es for a year to develop innova4ve solu4ons, but perhaps more importantly, to teach city partners how to think about a more modern,user-‐centric approach to government technology.

@timoreillySaturday, May 10, 14

A great example of how our Fellowship teams apply the GDS Design Principles is a project that we did in 2012 in Honolulu, where we worked on a project to improve the city’s website.


With only three fellows, they couldn’t take on the task of rebuilding the content for the en@re website. So what they did instead was to build a site that beTer conformed to the way people look for informa@on. They’re usually looking for quick answers or steps for ac@on they need to take and a site that looks like this is really frustra@ng to navigate. How ojen have you come to agovernment website like this, full of press releases (mee@ng government needs, not ci@zen needs).


So they built Honolulu Answers, a super-‐simple and elegant search interface that allows ci@zens to enter keywords or ques@ons and get quick answers.

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They applied another one of the GDS design principles, to design with data.

They mined the visitor logs of the existing site and the city’s call center to find out what people are really looking for, instead of what government departments want to say about themselves. And one of the things that they found was thatdriver’s license information was one of the top searches. (In Hawaii, the city manages this for the state.)

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Take a look at the city’s exis@ng start page of driver’s license informa@on, complete with such “need to know” informa@on as thefact that the driver’s licensing sta@ons have a new statewide computer/camera licensing system! We even have a link to a picture of a driver’s license. But the informa@on about how to get one is hard to find. That’s what ci@zens really want.This is the kind of thing that breaks trust with government.


And get back plain language answers that direct a user toward [email protected] site itself was easy enough to build. But the team was faced with the challenge of how to populate all the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long @me, especially considering none of them were from Honolulu.

So they did something that’s actually preTy radical when you think about how government is used to working.


So they asked ci@zens to write the content. You’ve probably all heard of a hackathon. Well, they held a writeathon. Members of the community suggested topics, picked from among the most popular ques@ons, and wrote the answers to them.This led to some ques@ons government doesn’t usually try to answer, like this one about wild pigs.Over the course of a Saturday ajernoon they had created almost all of the content for the site.But more importantly than that, they created a new way for ci@zens to par@cipate in—to build—their government.

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Our second major program, the Code for America Brigade, works with local volunteer groups to redeploy Code for America apps (as well as other civic apps), and to do other work to improve technology in ci@es.


In June 2013, on the Na4onal Day of Civic Hacking, in Oakland (where I live) the Oakland Brigade held their own writeathon for Oakland Answers. The Code for America Oakland team took the code base from Honolulu Answers and redeployed it (everything is on GitHub hGps://github.com/codeforamerica )


When I participated in the Oakland write-a-thon, I wrote this answer to the question about hazardous waste disposal. I knewwhat needed to be said, because I’d discovered a few months before that there was a limit on how much you could bring in. I found this out when I was turned away because I had too much in my truck. The information about limits was in the footnote on a formthat you normally fill out on site, but that they say you can print out and bring with you if you like.

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But is simply building beGer websites that important? I wrote a blog post about this recently on the Code for America site: What’s really at stake inbeGer interfaces to government.

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“One privilege the insured and well-‐off have is to excuse the terrible quality of services the government rou4nely delivers to the poor. Too oben, the press ignores — or simply never knows — the pain and trouble of interfacing with government bureaucracies that the poor struggle with daily.”

Ezra Klein, Washington Post


It was fundamentally a reflec@on on this quote from Ezra Klein, wri@ng in the Washington Post, to the effect that all the furor overthe failure of healthcare.gov hides a far deeper problem. He wrote:


That’s why one of the things I’m proudest about at Code for America is the work we have done to improve interfaces to social services.

Last year, our team in San Mateo worked on building a social services search engine, and an API that allows social services inother cities to register their offerings so that they can easily be found. http://ohanapi.org/


In San Francisco, the Fellows debugged the system to figure out why people were being unnecessarily cut from Food Stamp benefits.

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People were geong dropped from the system because they didn’t know what to do when they received leTers like this, full of gobbledygook and legalese.

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The Fellows built a simple Text messaging system telling people to call the office when they were out of compliance.

We built a similar system in Louisville KY to remind people of court dates. We also built a system in New York to help the criminal jus4ce system help evaluate candidates for alterna4ves to incarcera4on.

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Jake Solomon, one of the Fellows who worked on the San Francisco project, wrote a fabulous post on Medium called “People, Not Data: On Disdain and Empathy in Civic Tech,” that is required reading for anyone who cares about making government work beGer for its ci4zens.

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Saturday, May 10, 14And that’s what we’re all about at Code for America. The organization was founded to change the culture inside government that supports bureaucracy, breeds disengagement with citizens, and makes it hard for government to come up with innovative solutions to longstanding problems--all using modern networked, digital technology and user-centered design principles.

We take four approaches: 1) we work directly with government officials (at the local level) to create the capacity inside government to build innovative solutions to hard problems; 2) we build communities of technologists and citizens who want to lend their skills to help build their governments; 3) we build tools that make citizen interactions with government easier, simpler, and more elegant, so that the experience of government is positive and breeds trust. 4) We incubate and accelerate civic startups to create new economic models for those tools. In this, we’re influenced by the idea that government should act like a platform. Before the iPhone, phones had twenty or thirty applications; now they have millions. When governments open data, for example, private companies can deliver innovative services. (Eg GPS, weather, healthcare innovation)

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“The legi4mate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854


I want to end with this reminder from Abraham Lincoln. Government is one of the key plaporms for improving the quality of oursociety. Bringing modern technology and user centered design to government, so that it truly serves its ci@zens, is one of the great opportuni@es of the 21st century. It is key to restoring faith in government, repairing the breach between government and itsci@zens, and delivering the services that will make our society more just, fair, and prosperous.

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•Don’t stop believing that government can work, and can be a force for good•2015 Fellows Applica4on Deadline July 31, 2014•2014 Accelerator Applica4on Deadline May 15, 2014•Get your city involved -‐ codeforamerica.org/ci4es•Join a Brigade near you -‐ codeforamerica.org/brigade•Follow @codeforamerica for news and progress•Donate -‐ codeforamerica.org/donate

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