“I think people need to be more afraid of the status quo than they are of change. Maybe I am incredibly idealistic, but I think part of American values is being risk-tolerant, and being willing to do things differently. That's how this country was founded, it’s what it's supposed to be all about. There's a big difference between giving lip service to encouraging people to be individuals while at the same time forcing them to conform, and getting people to truly live up to their potential.”

Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, Municipality of Anchorage

Odds are the last time you had to interact with the government, it didn’t go well. It doesn’t matter if you were applying for permits to renovate your house, renewing your driver’s license, trying to track down your tax return, or applying to become a citizen. Too often, people’s experience with government is abysmal. Even worse: We expect it will be annoying. We expect we will get trapped in endless loops. There may be yelling.

The two of us have experienced this from the outside, as constituents, and from the inside, working in government as innovators and problem solvers. Between underwhelming service delivery and screaming headlines after a crisis, it’s hard to miss that lack of internal expertise and a lack of funds have led to spectacular failures. We go through our days ordering pizza and buying toasters with three clicks, but when trying to do some of the most vital and important things in life—securing early intervention for a child, getting married, requesting assistance to feed families—we enter a time warp where the internet and customer service often don’t exist. Some of the most basic ways citizens expect to receive services in the digital era don’t apply to government.

When trying to do some of the most vital and important things in life, we enter a time warp where the internet and customer service often don’t exist.

Government failures aren’t just annoying, they’re dangerous. When government websites fail, people can’t sign up for healthcare or pay their taxes.¹ When government fails to protect SNAP recipients from being cut off from their benefits info, families can’t plan their next meal.² When government fails to ensure the water is clean,³ communities get sick and children die.⁴ This disparity erodes trust in government.⁵ Government has no choice but to catch up.

In 2017 and 2018, we interviewed problem-solvers working across federal, state, and local government in the United States on improving the state of government services. This movement is small compared to the number of government agencies running business as usual, but it is growing. Innovation teams, digital service teams, technologists, researchers, policymakers, lawyers, funders, and service designers are rethinking how government functions, reshaping how people solve problems, and helping to restore citizens’ faith in governing bodies.

We had both worked on these types of teams at the city and federal level, and wanted a holistic view of the work, its successes, and its challenges. We knew there were efforts across the country focused on making government work, but less work connecting the field. We had a hunch that these teams knew a lot. They had tested out strategies, saw what worked and what didn’t. We wanted to understand what all of that knowledge added up to when taken together.

Our original plan was simple: interview people “in the field” doing the work of making government work. Or work better. (We were flexible.) Ideally, find great success stories. Aggregate and distill them into lessons learned. Maybe make a playbook. Maybe make a report like this. Definitely write some pieces for national publications, because this kind of work inspires and expands through storytelling.

We focused on people improving government services through technology and citizen-centered thinking. We interviewed people from major cities to smaller locales; chief innovation officers and city managers to service designers, product managers, and engineers.

But after we started to do interviews and synthesis, we realized we had been asking the wrong questions. We wanted tactics on how to get the work done from people who had everything figured out. As it turns out, no one has it all figured out. As a community, we are still trying to answer the most basic questions. What do we call ourselves? This work? Is this a field? What do we really mean by innovation? With so much work to be done, where do we start? What’s the best way to hire people? What’s the best way to keep them once they’ve been hired? How do we affect culture change? How do we get the work done? How do we know when we’ve succeeded? How do we know when it’s time to quit?

What we have compiled in this report is neither a playbook nor a document with all the answers. Instead, this report reflects many of the things people often wonder about at work, whisper in corners at conferences, save in browser tabs, or jot in the margins at meetings to think over later: Where are we seeing solutions? Where are we seeing pain points? Who else is doing this? How are they approaching it? How do I find them?

Ultimately our intention in putting this report out is to shine a light on different methods people are trying, share common struggles, or and create a gut check for the may people wondering, “Am I the only one feeling/seeing/thinking this way?” Take it from us: You are not alone. You are part of a wonderful, frustrating, thrilling, hair-pulling moment in time. Whether it seems like it or not, you are doing good work, and you are part of a national cadre of people who are right there with you, whether you know them or not.

One of the most important themes, which weaves into every piece of this report’s findings, is that people in government care. They want to make a difference, but often aren’t sure how. When given the chance to learn more, and to do better, they jump at it. We’re sharing this to lift up what many such people have learned about how to make change. We hope it inspires more people, cities, and government workers to follow suit.

We conducted this research as recipients of the inaugural New America Public Interest Technology fellowship. Public interest technology is a field funders and foundations are trying to build.⁶ The inspiration for the name “public interest technology” comes from public interest law. By investing in “public interest law” in the 1970s, civic-minded people who attended law school built careers, using law degrees, to serve the public good. Forty years later, many are interested in a parallel playbook for people with technology expertise in and around government, nonprofit, NGO, university, public sector, and social services spaces.

The phrase “public interest technology” is fairly new, and most often applied in the context of career paths and creation of a specific field. Needs and opportunities to do this work and explore this field were captured in the 2015 A Pivotal Moment report,⁷ which focuses on how to improve the quality and number of technologists working in civil society organizations and government at every level.

Public interest technology overlaps with “civic tech” or “civic technology”––related phrases used by practitioners and the media over the last decade––particularly in reference to people working in or around government with a focus on incorporating technology, technology practices, and “technologists.” In the 2010s, the government-adjacent organization Code for America and new federal organizations like 18F, the Presidential Innovation Fellowship, and the United States Digital Service (USDS) became champions and faces of Silicon Valley technical talent doing “tours of duty” in government to improve how it delivered services.

Today, however, both “public interest technology” and “civic technology” stand at odds with the first theme we discuss in this report, something we heard in virtually every interview: It’s not about technology. Or, rather, not only about technology. Or always about technology. And thus, neither are the people doing the work.

“For me, ‘technology in the public interest’ brings up associations of like open data, hackathons, and easy and useful greenfield projects,” said one designer. “‘Civic tech’ brings up a lot of similar associations. I occasionally use it as a hashtag on my tweets. But the real thing underneath it is organizational and procurement change inside government. That's not sexy. That's not easily consumable by the public. So, I say ‘government digital transformation’ is the space I'm in.”

The complexity of innovating in government is mirrored in the complexity of how people self-identify. Over our many interviews, one of our favorite questions became, “What do you tell people at a party you do?” We got an array of answers. Community technologist. Civil servant. Designer. Entrepreneur. Digital expert. Hustler. Community advocate. Data-lover. Policy nerd. Problem solver. User of technology but not a technologist. Plus dozens of others, including but not limited to project manager, librarian, fixer of things, web manager, hacker, engineer, developer, social worker, community outreach coordinator, comms person, university researcher, chief innovation officer, policy expert, and founder.

"The real thing underneath it is organizational and procurement change inside government. That's not sexy. So, I say ‘government digital transformation’ is the space I'm in."

Rather than what people called themselves, we saw common language around what people said they do: solve problems. Not how-to-fix-the-printer problems. Policy, process, and people problems. They actively avoid using the term technologist because it can separate them or their work—with the danger of being framed as loftier or more specialized—than other civil servants. This has lead to shifts even from those who once identified with earlier phrases. Code for America, which is routinely summarized as “a civic tech” group itself has moved away from the phrase “civic tech.” Instead, Code for America now describes its focus as: “making government services work for the people who need them most.”⁸

Expanding the language used welcomes more diverse people, with broader skill sets, to sit at the table, get invited to the table, and see themselves as belonging to the table of problem-solving how we do modern problem solving in the public interest. Doing this research helped us see where there is terminology that sits at odds with how people doing the work currently identify the work, see themselves, or see space for themselves.

As in government itself, user adoption of words and identities takes time and iteration and end-user feedback. It’s an ongoing process. Therefore, throughout this report we chose to use the language adopted by those we interviewed, with a focus on problem solving, innovation, and service delivery. While recognizing five years down the line, this, too, may no longer be the words of choice by those doing the work.

We initially undertook this research with the goal of providing useful information for practitioners. However, multiple audiences can benefit from the findings in many different ways. We’ve outlined below how we anticipate different audiences using this content.

Government Leaders

We aim to inspire leaders to think differently about government, and to provide them with a roadmap for how to innovate within their own cities, counties, states and agencies. Additionally, this report gives a good overview of locales where innovation is happening, with the idea that leaders can connect with others across the country.

Future Innovators

For those who are either working in government, or those who would like to create better government services but aren’t sure how to start, we hope this report will show how change happens. We have provided many examples of small steps practitioners have taken, as well as painted a broad picture of the myriad different models and approaches currently being put into practice.

Practitioners

As practitioners ourselves, we know many of the people doing this work feel siloed and isolated. We also know no one has a bird’s eye view of the work being done across the country. For practitioners, this report should provide a sense of community, and understanding of what other teams are trying––what works and what doesn’t––and should help make sense of many of the ideas that are probably swirling around your head but perhaps you haven’t quite articulated yet.

Funders

Finally, we understand that there are many organizations looking to fund projects to help governments innovate and solve crucial problems. For funders, we have provided different innovation models with benefits and drawbacks, and also identified where the field needs help––where the gaps lie and what can be done to fill them.

“This is not about technology at all. Frankly I think it just furthers the digital divide if governments only think of technology and not the human interaction between the two.”

Anthony Lyons, City Manager, Gainesville

As noted above, one of our early findings was that the phrases “public interest technology” and “civic tech” didn’t resonate for many practitioners because they didn’t connect their work inherently to technology. Despite the fact that many people we spoke with work for digital services or technology teams, they de-emphasized the technology part of their work. People talked about improving processes, introducing service-oriented models from the private sector, and changing the building blocks of how government solves problems: incorporating user research, human-centered design, agile work processes, open data, prototyping, iterative design and metrics. Many of the ideas teams are working on tackle not only one instance of a problem, but how government approached problem solving.

However, in talking to people about how they identified with technology, we found common themes in the relationship or connections they made to its use or application to their work.

Many of our interviewees eschewed the popular narrative that it requires special wunderkids from the technology industry, or even specialized technology training at all. Nigel Jacobs is the co-founder of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, one of the first innovation teams in government in the United States. He’s also one of the first to challenge the notion of technology as part of any title or qualifier for hiring or description of the work:

“Whether you use the word ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘hustler’ or some other euphemism, it’s useful as a way of challenging the language that is typically used in local gov. We are more often than not service delivery people. I think that new language and new concepts are needed to highlight the kind of work that needs to get done.”

Several people noted that they worked hard to shift the view of their team’s capabilities from tech-solution provider (e.g. “We need a website.” or “We need an app.” or “This tech thing is broken.”) to solution-agnostic problem solvers. Lamar Gardere, the former chief technology officer of New Orleans, described his team’s approach to shifting the focus:

“We would go into conversations and say, we're not going to talk about IT or technology at all. That is not where your solution lies. We're just going to talk about where your difficulties are, where your problems are, where your pain points are, what are things that you struggle with and could see yourself doing a better job if you had some solutions in that space.’”

Technology is “the easy part” compared to improving business processes, and implementing and maintaining technical solutions, we heard. But at the same time, even though practitioners said that technology often wasn’t the most difficult piece of solving a larger problem and wanted to be recognized for bringing more to the table, they also found others in government often downplay the degree of technical complexity many projects entail, to the point that unqualified people get assigned, resulting in technical disaster. One practitioner told us:

“You see a lot of things where they ask an intern to manage a website redesign project. And you look these senior people in the face and think, website designers make more money than you do in the private sector. Why are you asking your intern to do this? Just because your intern knows how to use Photoshop?”

This push-pull between wanting to de-emphasize the tech part of practitioners’ skill sets, or the degree to which technology can solve problems, while also wanting it to be recognized as a serious, complex skill, while also needing to differentiate it from IT work is a source of frustration for many practitioners. Some practitioners told us that simply getting their coworkers or senior government staff to recognize these three elements was an important first step in moving their city toward a culture of service design and innovation. Ashley Meyers, a product manager at San Francisco Digital Services, explained:

“It's got to be baby steps towards understanding what this field of expertise even is, how it is different from IT, why do we need it, how much does it cost, what kind of roles would be on that team. It's very slow bringing them along with us and I think the way to do that is showing them what's possible.”

Even though technology often isn’t the solution, and is frequently undervalued or misunderstood, it serves as an entry point to tackling larger problems in government. Several teams took on small technical projects early on to prove their worth and help build relationships.

Marina Martin, former chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, described her approach to winning people’s trust as simply being helpful, while having a larger plan.

“I wanted to automate how disability claims were processed, and I knew how to do that, I just didn't have resources or political buy in,” she said. “Instead of going in day one announcing that was my plan, I just tried to be very quiet and listen and leverage the people that I had a relationship with, and ask them where I could be helpful to them. Sometimes they would be like, ‘Oh, could you explain this technology thing?’ Sometimes it was, ‘Can you help me set up my printer?’ Whatever it was, I was willing to do that to help build the relationship.”

"You can’t sell people on ‘all management things are terrible.’ You can sell ‘modernizing technology in government.’"

The emphasis on technology can also open doors to larger strategic conversations. It can be easier to talk about fixing technology than fixing less precise problems in government. It feels like a category, a point of entry. Dana Chisnell, co-director at the Center for Civic Design, points out that, “You can’t sell people on ‘all management things are terrible.’ You can sell ‘modernizing technology in government.’ Because there is no shortage of engineering problems.” No shortage of engineering problems means that there are multiple entry points into this work.

Technology can also serve as an entry point because it presents the greatest, most immediate need. As government services increasingly incorporate technology either on the user-facing side or the back end, basic technology literacy becomes increasingly important for all government workers. Ariel Kennan, former director of design and product at the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity notes:

“Competency in technology is essential if you're delivering public services in the twenty-first century. You may not be delivering a service via a website, but you probably have a case management system or data analytics or metrics or something that has something to do with technology. You have to be literate in it at some level.”

Because there are so many quick-hit tech needs across government, teams who are just starting out are often best served by finding bite-sized technical problems to solve first. In addition to pulling low-hanging fruit, they can give teams key capital for getting real work done: political capital and strong relationships, Both of these build preliminary steps into tackling larger problems down the road.

The endgame for every team we spoke with was to shift the thinking in their city or government agency toward service design and solving process problems. When governments try to employ technology to solve problems without also considering the process on the back end, predictably they run into problems. Beth Noveck, director of the Governance Lab at NYU, described a familiar scenario she’d encountered recently in her consulting work:

"Madrid built a platform for citizen engagement. They can make proposals to the city for things they want fixed or changed. In the first year they got 19,000 citizen proposals. Exactly two have moved forward, and none have been acted upon. It's not that the website or the app isn’t great. The technology is fine. The challenge is you don't have a process that works the way the city does."

Anyone who has worked in or around government has come across a project conceived with the best of intentions, but undertaken as though technology is a silver bullet that can pierce the thickest bureaucracy and create internal processes where none exist. When government fails to use technology correctly––leaping at exciting projects over practical ones––the entire field suffers, as projects falter or fail, and the entire idea of employing technology or trying new things gets scrapped. Ben Guhin, head of design and technology policy for Austin, says:

“There are so many ways this work can get discredited because you're doing bright and shiny things because you think they are cool. If the work isn't grounded in these desired outcomes in solving real problems for real people, then it's not going to be sustainable.”

To this end, practitioners tend to think of technology as one of multiple tools they can deploy to solve human problems. Jesse Taggart, formerly director of service design and user research at California’s Child Welfare Digital Service, summed up this sentiment:

“I don't think of myself as a technologist. I think of myself as an experience designer and a strategist and we're using technology to do that. Like a carpenter would use nails, or like you would use a bowl to get water out of a stream.”

As a result, many reported that simply shifting the way their city or agency thought about technology was a significant success. They spent large amounts of time working on process design and staffing or organizational improvements––in some cases teams reorganized entire departments and workflows––and worked hard to help their colleagues view technology as one potential tool to help improve citizen services in conjunction with these other changes. “Our biggest accomplishment was getting people to the idea that you've got to do this work up front to study what's happening before you start having any conversation about technology,” Lamar Gardere told us of his time as New Orleans’ chief technology officer.

"If the work isn't grounded in these desired outcomes in solving real problems for real people, then it's not going to be sustainable."

When governments aren’t able to make this shift––when they implement technology without considering process and people implications, or when they start with the technology rather than viewing it as one tool in an arsenal of possible solutions––they risk reinforcing the concept that government can’t do anything right. This narrative isn’t wildly off. Over the course of the year we conducted this research, huge government tech failure stories made regular headlines, including the Hawaii false missile alert,⁹ an IRS failure that prevented people from paying taxes,¹⁰ a fiasco involving the state of Rhode Island’s massive benefits system that left residents unable to collect SNAP benefits and health insurance,¹¹ and the shutdown of Canada’s payroll system.¹²

People’s trust in government depends on the ability of government to successfully meet their needs. Every failure chips away at the belief that government is there to serve the people. While these appear to be tech failures, those on the inside also see them as people and process failures. As Beth Noveck puts it, “We risk increasing people's frustration with government and their apathy with democracy if we don't focus first on the finding of problems more than we do on the technology.”

“This isn’t our work. This is everyone’s work and it can be your work. You don’t have to be a Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck to do innovation in government, you just have to have the guts to apply a different playbook.”

Jen Pahlka, Executive Director, Code for America

Practitioners told us that in order for this work to grow and be sustainable, we must broaden the way we think about the people who are capable, qualified, and empowered to do it. The origin myth for much of the work in the field centers around the rescue of healthcare.gov. The truth is that people have been attempting to innovate, reorganize, and redefine government work for generations. But because the healthcare.gov rescue is the canonical national example of saving government from technical failures, much of the thinking around innovation focuses on bringing external technologists into government instead of identifying homegrown or already present talent.

We heard from multiple practitioners that this line of thinking can be exclusionary, and lead to negative results. Leaders in the public interest technology movement told us that they originally thought there wasn’t a place for them in the field because they didn’t have engineering backgrounds, or didn’t know how to code a simple website. Ariel Kennan told us, “I am designer first and foremost. I followed a lot of what the chief innovation officers and chief digital officers were doing. I always thought, those roles are really cool, but I didn't think they were ever for me.”

Garren Givens, the first executive director of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program (PIF) and founding member of 18F, observed that at the federal level a lot of the language used to describe the work sets up an us-versus-them narrative, with people who are screwing up and the people who are there to save them:

“The first thing that I wanted to blow up was this whole narrative around dropping fellows in behind enemy lines. I didn't feel at any point like my life was in danger at Department of Education. That narrative immediately establishes this idea of good guys and bad guys and who's smart and who's not, who's here to fix it and who's not. If you ask a room full of people who's a good driver, the entire room is going to raise their hand."

Givens notes that many people in government joined, at one point in time, to serve the public, and that he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt. This devaluing or undervaluing of government employees––and the value of doing the opposite––was something we heard across our interviews.

Several teams told us about efforts to empower and train others within government in order to grow the innovation workforce. In Syracuse, the innovation team asked code enforcement staff to participate in task forces and offer opinions on solutions that the innovation team developed to tackle buildings-related challenges around the city. While others within government expressed doubt that anyone would want to participate in the task force, two-thirds of the code enforcement staff ultimately signed up for the task force.

People have been attempting to innovate, reorganize, and redefine government work for generations.

“The laborers and people who are the boots on the ground, this is their career. They've been doing this job for years, but nobody has ever asked them their opinion about how to make something better,” says Adria Finch, the director of innovation for the city’s iTeam. For Syracuse, soliciting opinions and feedback from on-the-ground workers is in essence a part of expanding their innovation workforce.

The director of the innovation team in Mobile, Jeff Carter, observed something similar, but found that simply asking the frontline employees their opinion wasn’t always productive:

“The people who know the most about the problem are the frontline employees that do the work every day. The trouble is that frontline employees don't have the language to explain the problem in a way that crosses that barrier. They express things like, ‘This sucks’ or ‘This is broken’ or ‘This doesn’t work.’ They don't know how to say, ‘This doesn't work because we don't have an organizational structure that allows me to complete it’ or ‘This doesn't work because we don't have the tools that we need.’ So they can only say, ‘This sucks,’ but those guys really are the ones with the right information.”

The Mobile team found success empowering the middle-management layer. The team is focused on reducing blight. They worked with frontline employees in the code enforcement department (the code inspectors) to help reshape their roles so they were more effective in reporting code violations across the city. As the code inspectors became more productive, it reflected well on middle management, who were able to report positive numbers and successes to the senior staff within the agency. The result was that code enforcement managers felt incentivized to keep moving the department ahead.

In San Jose, the innovation team organized a Scrum boot camp for city employees. The team had been using agile themselves, and wanted to find a way to offer the approach to others in the city. Ten non-technical staff from the city took the bootcamp––all employees who had never heard of agile before (“They’re not reading the blogs saying that if you’re not doing agile then you suck,” Michelle Thong, the service innovation lead for the City of San Jose told us)––and immediately began implementing the approach in their own teams. San Jose now has nearly two dozen teams using Scrum. Thong says:

“On the civic tech side, people wring their hands a lot on how you get government staff to adopt new methods when the terminology is weird, or how do we get them to change how they think. This shows that people are totally willing to take on new terminology when it solves a really important pain point for them, which is prioritizing their work and being able to say no, or at least say hold on.”

It’s also worth noting that the San Jose team’s founding members were also all existing city employees. So in essence they recruited their own innovation workforce from people who already worked in San Jose government. This proved highly beneficial to the team when it came to understanding the inner workings of the city (in that they already understood them) and also in building relationships and gaining trust. Because the team already knew the players, and weren’t viewed as external, fancy hires, they were able to move quickly when they first formed.

Practitioners also agreed on the need to find people who can be passionate about this work, whatever their backgrounds. Some discussed ways to appeal to people with computer science degrees, or those working in Silicon Valley, and attempts to instill the value of public service in those arenas. One engineer noted the lack of a tradition of public service in the tech sector, and described how surprised he was at the degree to which he found himself passionate about his public sector work in a way he’d never experienced in the private sector, despite the fact that he’d come from a high profile company. “I suspect that if I’m a lawyer, this is not a shocker. But it is news for tech developers who work in big tech.”

This is the tack that USDS has largely taken, in an effort to woo highly qualified engineers and others away from big paychecks and stock options. But most local governments we spoke with don’t have the budget or the resources to entice workers from Silicon Valley, so in many cases shied away from hiring technical talent and instead looked to hire “do-ers” or “hustlers”––people with a passion for public service, who will try multiple angles to get the work done, and who in some cases can be trained in the fundamentals of service design and human centered design. While many of these teams noted that they would like to bring on more technical talent, many of them have functioned for years without it. They’ve found ways to use free tools like Instagram or Google Sheets, or they’ve trained select city employees on human centered design methods. In some cases, as with the Memphis innovation team, they partner with technical talent from local universities.

"The first thing I wanted to blow up was this narrative around dropping behind enemy lines. I didn't feel at any point like my life was in danger at Department of Education."

Additionally, some teams have had success recruiting from the veteran community. Travis Moore, founder of TechCongress, reports: “The veteran community is a hugely untapped resource. There is expertise and a desire to serve that is, and people coming out of service need jobs.”

Finally, we heard the need across the country for greater diversity in government innovation workers, with a particular interest in bringing more minorities into the work, and a broader range of ages. Anecdotally (i.e. go to an innovation conference and look around), innovation workers tend to be young (20s and 30s) and white. Although women are underrepresented in technology, they make up a sizeable chunk of the civic innovation workforce. We made an effort in the course of our research to interview a diverse range of people, but we also found that many teams have equal or greater numbers of women. On New York City’s Design and Product Team, for example, six of the 10 staff members are women. More broadly, within the leadership team for the Economic Opportunity office, six of 10 directors are women. USDS staff is 50 percent female, the leadership is over 60 percent female; Code for America’s staff consists of 65 percent women/non-binary, with 76 percent women/non-binary on the leadership team. And our own Public Interest Technology team at New America is run by a staff of five women.¹³

Teams who looked beyond bringing on engineers as innovation workers also tended to be more socioeconomically and geographically varied. Many teams looked to hire locals for several reasons. The Mobile team, for example, found success in hiring a diverse range of Mobile natives who not only cared deeply about their town, but also were more affordable than employees from the tech sector. Austin, Orlando, Syracuse, and Anchorage, too, have hired local talent. Two teams who wanted to bring on experts from the tech sector noted off the record that they were struggling to staff up. Even though they were able to offer competitive salaries (for government) they found it hard to entice their top candidates to relocate to places outside of the large urban areas where most technologists live.

Although women are underrepresented in technology, they make up a sizeable chunk of the civic innovation workforce.

But the teams who focused on finding and nurturing local talent had more success, pointing us to a critical and overlooked understanding that the best opportunities for growth lie not in luring technologists away from Silicon Valley, but in convincing people who are passionate about their communities that they can find a path to change through government.

Ron Bronson, formerly a UX strategist and service designer for the City of Bloomington, Indiana, made an early career of working in obscure local governments:

“I go to places no one else wants to go, like Wyoming or Kentucky. Someone has to come to these places and help folks understand things and make things easier and better and work better for ordinary everyday citizens. Because the folks in these places deserve that. It’s like a mission. It’s not religious, but it feels like missionary work in a sense.”

But for the most part, people don’t want to move to small locales they’re not connected with, no matter how enticing the work. Which means growing the field and growing diversity within the field will require empowering the people who are already working in government. “There's a network of people who really, really care about this and they don't all look alike,” Jen Pahlka observes. “These aren't the people that go in Wired magazine. Bureaucrats in the most obscure state government department are part of this movement and we should celebrate that diversity and recognize it, because that's where all this happens.”

"Going through that process of rebuilding my credit and rebuilding my life after bankruptcy, that’s one of the other reasons that I [entered public service]. I want to prevent people from falling to the same structural challenges that I did, and to help those already there get out of it. There are ways out. It’s personal for me."

Tishaura Jones, Treasurer, St. Louis

We started interviewing problem-solvers working in government in the summer of 2017. By spring of 2018 many of the people we interviewed had left their jobs. Some had left government altogether. Why? Just as interacting with government can be hard, working within government to improve those interactions is also hard. People management is hard, the silos are hard, the bureaucracy is hard. It’s hard to get in through civil service, it’s hard to stay because of burnout, and it’s hard to stay in the field because finding the next step is more akin to “choose your own adventure” than following a predetermined career path. Upward management jobs are scarce, and lateral moves are common. Yes, this is everyone’s work. But systemic challenges prevent everyone from staying.

There is no playbook on how to redesign government, or to scale or sustain the work. Practitioners typically cite 2010 as the earliest domestic example of an innovation team embedding in government, when Boston formed New Urban Mechanics. Many people who have joined since became the first of whatever their title is, taking roles that never before existed. To figure out how to do their jobs, they use practices taken from the private sector, common sense approaches, or intuit what they know about simply making stuff better. They face a number of structural challenges, including shifting skills sets, a slow pace of change, challenging people dynamics, lack of career pipeline, and burnout.

The pace can be a huge source of frustration for problem-solvers who live in a world where everything keeps getting faster but work in a job where time itself can seem to stand still. Marni Wilhite, head of product at the City of Austin, says:

"The biggest challenge is that measuring impact is such a long term game. Over the course of a six-month project we came out with these great prototypes, but knowing whether long term we’re going to have an impact remains to be seen.”

The dire needs of constituents served by government compounds frustration with the slow pace. Practitioners come to do these jobs because they are deeply committed to change, and their work is critical to improving real lives of the people government serves. It’s painful to know you have the intellectual, technical, and resource capacity to improve a parent’s ability to feed their children, but you can’t press ‘go’ until you get two heads of agencies that don’t work together in a room, and the negotiation to do so takes five months. Or you have to get a policy changed before you can change a piece of code. Or you have to reject a qualified contractor’s bid on an RFP because they used the wrong font in their proposal. The list goes on.

At the same time, slow work and small work has huge potential for impact. When Durham’s innovation team wanted to improve outcomes for residents returning from prison, they took a small bite off a huge problem: focusing on people who need drivers licenses to get, or get to, a job. They thought a few dozen people would respond when they created an amnesty day where people could text to see if they qualified for license reinstatement. Two-thousand people texted, and the team helped 700 of them. It took months of research to figure out how to make a small change in a huge problem, but the results improved hundred of people’s lives, and gave the team inspiration and ideas for how to expand the service.

The dire needs of constituents served by government compounds frustration with the slow pace of change.

In Memphis, the innovation team also approached the mayoral priority of neighborhood economic vitality in smaller chunks. It would incubate a single idea, test and tweak it, scale, and then transition the project to agencies who had been partners in the entire process. This process birthed MEMFix, the idea that Memphis could revitalize a street with small, low-cost neighborhood changes like planters, bike lanes, re-striping streets, changing storefronts, and cleaning vacant lots. The team paired it with MEMShop, a retail incubator that would pop up shops into vacant storefronts in areas with the infrastructure upgrades, helping them ramp up with some subsidized rent, technical support, and promotions. Today, many of the corridors MEMfix touched have seen lasting change. Justin Entzminger, director of the iTeam, said:

“It’s a really great success story for how the model can work. You do a deep dive, you understand what needs to happen and how change can take place. Then you do well-planned, well-executed interventions and resource not through beyond the testing phase when you can say, okay, we believe in this. This works. This is how it was executed, and then determine how to sustain it in whatever way makes sense for that specific program.”

Brendan Babb, the chief innovation officer of Anchorage, Alaska, encapsulated the sentiment of many:

“I've made something to help people find bus routes. That might make their day five seconds easier but it's like 10,000 people whose days are five seconds easier because of that. That is really addictive.”

There are hundreds of thousands of civil servants working across state, federal, and local government. Many have been there for decades, working their way up the ladder, slowly but surely. Many problem-solvers in government come through what often seems like a back door: an appointed leadership position, a civil-service-exempt digital services position, a temporary fellowship. They often arrive with a blessing not bestowed on many who have been in line for promotion, recognition, or idea adoption far longer.

This creates on-the-ground friction that must be addressed to get work done. We heard this story from one city in many forms: “Public Works played with us, but they didn't want to. They were doing it because the mayor told them, ‘You will be interacting with [us].’ I think they were like, ‘Who are these, for lack of a better term, kids coming in and telling us how to do our job?’”

Practitioners spoke constantly to the importance of not being superheroes descending on work that needs doing. In Orlando, the team requested to be moved out of the mayor’s office and into the IT shop in order sit with the rest of the city, as well as to move away from the “needs of the week” focus of the mayor’s office and toward the longer term projects the IT shop takes on.

“I found that staff were saying ‘yes’ in meetings because Matt-from-the-mayor’s-office was there. It was really difficult to know if the staff was buying in because the mayor’s office was asking or because they actually bought in,” Matt Broffman, director of innovation for the City of Orlando, recounted.

We heard many stories of how teams worked to win over the civil servants they encountered. In order to build a relationship with the code enforcement team, the Mobile i-team joined themselves at the hip to the code inspectors. “Whatever they did, we did. If they washed their cars on Friday, we did that. If they took their garbage out, we did that,” Jeff Carter told us.

"Who are these, for lack of a better term, kids coming in and telling us how to do our job?"

The Syracuse i-team followed a similar playbook with public works crew while reducing the number of water main breaks in the city. “One of the things we've seen with working with departments is that we need an element of street cred,” Adria Finch says. “We don't want to be afraid to get dirty. We want to get out there. Some of my coworkers went and picked up garbage. I went out and filled potholes.”

Without such care, these dynamics can breed resentment, roadblocks, and friction between newly-arrived problem-solvers and longer-term civil servants. We’ve seen this firsthand as government technologists working at the city, state, and federal levels. Recommendations to put metrics in place, reduce wait times, or simplify processes for citizens can often be met with puzzled looks. Puzzlement that shifts into resentment can turn into roadblocks to getting work done, and can ultimately force problem solvers out of government service. Stuart Drown, deputy secretary for innovation and accountability in California, said:

“My job in terms of innovation is finding new ideas, proven new ideas, which can work in public sector. There are a few things that are obvious, few things that scale up. But mapping the processes and seeing what works and what doesn’t with core teams is critical. You have to send signals that say ‘we want you to participate in making your life better. You’re important.’ There’s more than enough work for everyone.”

Civil service has traditionally been a job people approach with the mindset of securing a stable job, having a career, and securing a pension. People entering government to problem-solve and disrupt often come in dreaming of big impact. National storytelling about saving state foster care systems, getting veterans healthcare, and building food stamp access are powerful ways to attract people who haven’t been part of government. But it also can do potential practitioners a disservice when the work does not look like the stories.

In a model like Teach for America, the call to serve grounds itself in clarity that the work will be slow, hard, and impact one child at a time. When encouraging people to problem-solve in government, the call to serve is the opposite: It focuses on the federal level, on radical change, and on success. It’s a powerful narrative, and one that draws in people who have never before considered government as a career. As engineer Brian Lefler noted:

“I’d read about [government] software failures, but you assume what you see in the news is an exception not the norm. Seeing healthcare.gov fail convinced me that there was a serious problem.”

Many people we interviewed joined because of huge crises like healthcare.gov and resulting calls to serve. But most people’s experiences do not involve swooping in to rescue the signature piece of legislation for an administration while simultaneously saving the day by giving Americans healthcare. Nor are they ushering thousands of refugees into the country or saving the lives of scores of veterans.

At city, county, and state levels––the wellspring of much of this work––impact is smaller scale, often slower, and focuses on mundane elements of people’s workaday lives. Innovators at the city level are thinking about potholes, garbage, and homelessness. They’re increasing the appeal of parks and they’re getting streets paved more efficiently. They’re helping connect citizens with homes, jobs, and food. These are the essential elements of people’s lives, and it is tiring, sometimes tedious work. Compared to the big stories the field prizes, it’s not surprising that most people’s work may feel small.

"Seeing healthcare.gov fail convinced me that there was a serious problem."

This gap between what we sell and what we do when joining government both undervalues the importance of the “small” wins and sets people up with skewed expectations, both of which threaten the ability to stay in the work. In a model like Teach for America, expectations coming in help define the kinds of working environments and challenges people may encounter, from lack of support to lack of supplies.

People who love this work and want to stay are many, and the numbers are growing. But the ways for them to stay and grow are not matching pace. There is no career path for “problem-solving in government incorporating modern processes or better technology.”

The fellowship model and/or temporary funding are common introductions for professionals going from private industry into government. Particularly on the federal level, people hop from temporary gig to temporary gig. They don’t move up the ladder. They renew contracts or go to another two year assignment in another agency. Lack of common vocabulary cripples people’s ability to find ways in or sustainable jobs. Civil service and hiring rules often prevent renewals. This leaves people, often with unfinished work, floundering to figure out how to stay, where to go next, or how to scale.

The combination of lack of career path and the emotional weight of the work create critical risks for a sustainable talent pipeline. Because those who commit to this work tend to have high emotional intelligence (EQ), they are often also sensitive to the problems they are trying to solve—often some of the hardest in society. Like teachers, social workers, and public interest lawyers, public interest technologists often work long hours in high-pressure situations. All take the work home with them, literally and emotionally. It can be emotionally and mentally exhausting, rickashaying from banal to burning-up, everything-is-on-fire crisis mode. And yet for those who choose to stay, the cost is worth it. As Marina Martin said of her work at Veterans Affairs:

“I had an idea it would be hard. I don't think I knew quite how hard it would be. But anytime, even in the very darkest moments, I would just remember that the people I was trying to help, in many cases literally gave their lives for me. So the least I could do was be super, super stressed out for four and a half years.”

It requires a lot of effort to be connected. Most of our jobs are delivering things for others. But it’s hard to stay connected to each other.

Harlan Weber, Product Lead, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Early in this project, we were struck by the number of interviewees who said something like, “I’m so glad you’re doing this. It’s important work, and needed.” We came to understand that practitioners are desperate for a shared understanding of best practices, views into work others have done and want to do, and connection. Most are connected to a few other places or people––typically those they’ve met at conferences or convenings, through Twitter, or via peers or networks––but people lack ways to find places that have tackled similar problems.

The field lacks professional organizational resources––not surprising given how young and undefined it is. Many find themselves in a netherworld, caught between government convenings and private sector conferences, with neither really hitting the mark. Many practitioners noted that they eagerly look forward to the Code for America Summit, but that beyond the summit, opportunities to share with and learn from practitioners engaged in similar work are limited.

A few people told us they had attended existing conferences for city managers, CIOs or others in government in an effort to “find people like me” and had come up short. Practitioners reported that the conferences and professional organizations that dominate government lend themselves to rehashing the same approaches, and a limited understanding of technology, data and human centered design.

Lack of in-person opportunities means that the opportunity for professional development is severely limited. Practitioners who have spent the bulk of their careers in government, or who have been out of the private sector for a long period of time, told us they would like to have an opportunity to learn modern private sector practices without spending tons of money or being talked down to. Unfortunately, they weren’t clear on how to make that happen.

Conferences and professional organizations that dominate government lend themselves to rehashing the same approaches.

The success of New York City’s office hours and San Jose’s Scrum boot camp demonstrate a true hunger for these kinds of resources in government. In the private sector, employees can sign up to attend trainings offered either by their company or by professional development organizations. But government doesn’t have a history of professional development, and government-specific training in this area is limited (or possibly nonexistent; we didn’t hear about a single person who had attended this type of training).

So much of the work in the public interest technology field involves breaking down silos, figuring out how to get person A in one agency to talk to person B in another agency, or taking a holistic view of a process. Yet, the field falls victim to the same silos. We’re too busy to share information, lack an obvious point of connection, a standardized format, or a designated repo for work. In turn, practitioners reported defaulting to things like Googling examples of other places’ work—paradigmatic of inefficiency. (e.g. Google “government” and “innovation” and “blight” and then try to figure out how to connect to practitioners who worked on any given project.)

While it is not as easy to connect over silos without specific programs in place, everyone we talked to reinforced that unlike industry, innovators in different places are not competitive. So perhaps the most frustrating element of the siloing is that cities want to share. They are looking to swap stories, specific solutions, and technologies tried and failed. They want to share for good reason: most cities are working in the exact same areas.

As we conducted our interviews and started doing synthesis sessions, we had a running joke was that everyone we interviewed was, unbeknownst to them, solving the same 10 problems. While 10 was a number we plucked out of the air, the truth is that most cities aren’t working on issues that are unique to that city alone. Government has responsibility for a limited scope of services, and those services replicate in many ways, both across agencies and across cities. At the same time, the challenges of the siloed field means cities and agencies who may spend weeks, months, or even years seeking solutions for a problem without knowing, connecting, or learning from others gone on the same journey.

Understanding where others have succeeded can help government scale its capacity to deliver better services, as well as save time, money, and staff. Equally important is learning where others have failed. Because of endemic fears of public failure and wasting taxpayer dollars, getting government to discuss failure can be even harder than figuring out where someone else has already solved your problem. Not discussing failures can have cascading impacts, as other places with the same problems in turn fail to learn from solutions that other places tried that failed—and try them again.

We are not the first people to recognize the overlap in city problems, but we would like to help push that conversation further. To this end, we’ve broken down the types of problems our research unearthed into two areas. The first are shared thematic problems specific to services government delivers to solve constituents’ problems. We call these “vertical challenges.” The projects people are working across cities and states on can be distilled to a small vertical problem set. While this is not an all-encompassing list, some of them include:

• Child welfare
• Blight/Code enforcement
• Affordable housing
• Infrastructure
• Street homelessness
• Poverty/SNAP
• Permitting
• Public works
• EMS/911/Emergency response
• Criminal justice reform/police/justice-involved citizens

A second set of problems cuts across specific service delivery issues, regardless of department. We have labeled these “horizontal challenges.” They include, but are not limited to:

• Data transfer across departments and agencies
• Procurement
• Moving to the cloud.
• How to structure digital services
• Recruitment and hiring
• When to build in-house vs. find an existing solution
• Effective mail to citizens
• How best to effect culture change
• Design literacy
• Finding good vendors or off-the-shelf solutions
• Online forms

Procurement folks have found the state can do things much faster than it was. It’s working harder and faster, but not necessarily smarter yet.

Dan Hon, former Content Director, Code for America

When Giancarlo Gonzalez, former chief information officer of Puerto Rico, started to put together a tech summit, he remembers, “Someone told me, ‘The most important people you need to bring in are the procurement experts. We need to talk about how we're changing the way we contract.’” Gonzalez took this advice still champions today the impact of having experts in procurement talking about modular contracting.

When Peter Kelly worked as a consultant for the California Administrative Office of the Court, he saw what happens when procurement goes wrong when the court procured a statewide custom-built management solution to replace fractured and varied systems around the state:

“I watched it go horribly awry from the inside for a myriad of reasons. It was a contract that didn't actually incentivize the right behaviors. It was a development staff that was built for the wrong reasons and therefore couldn't deliver. It was requirements that had been built years in advance that didn't adjust and adapt. It was government bureaucracy that got in the way of good outcomes. It was so incredibly enlightening and it really, really frustrated me.”

Gonzalez and Kelly are not alone. It took a single synthesis session from our first set of interviews to realize every single person we interviewed volunteered the same topic over and over: Procurement is broken. Badly. And it has (and exercises) the power to limit real change. Sooner or later, it seems, everyone realizes the importance of procurement. Despite the bland phrase, government procurement has become a hot topic of deep discussion—and often the root of the worst war stories—among practitioners.

The potential for problem-solvers to have impact is far too often only as good as the procurement systems of the agency in which they work. Procurement is often the root of why we fail users. It’s also often the root of why government fails public interest technologists. Many of the technical challenges specialists work on come from procurements of technologies that were out of date, scope, or line to meet the problem they were trying to solve.

Technologists in the private sector have to ensure that their products are simple, effective, and intuitive, or else users will turn to a competitor. But when it comes to government, users don't have a choice. For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s goal is to prevent terrorism. They don’t care if you had a good experience when you went through TSA.

The idea that government is in the service design business is a radical rethinking of everything that has come before. You can't go somewhere else to pay your taxes or ask for the pothole on your street to be repaired. Without competitive pressure to deliver better technology, the goal for most federal, state, and local entities is simply to get the thing launched by a certain date. No one gets extra points for making it exceed expectations. This means when government purchases technology, how well it functions for the end user—a key tenet of the technology industry today—isn’t part of the decision-making process. Instead, it buys only technology that serves the goals of the agency.

“The most important people you need to bring in are the procurement experts. We need to talk about how we're changing the way we contract.”

Over and over we heard how the compliance-only framework challenged procurement offices working with problem solvers to deliver better services. Hanna Azemati, Assistant Director with the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, said:

“Many cities are stuck in this kind of cycle where they're pushing money out the door without paying attention to what it gets them. They're very focused on activities, they're very focused on compliance, they're very prescriptive.”

Laura Melle, who has become a procurement champion within the City of Boston, agrees, and points to the importance of empowering those who do the hard, detail-oriented, critical work of writing and analyzing RFPs.

“Seeing senior leadership really value their operations teams and their administration and finance people is really exciting because I think for a long time, procurement staff have been told that their job is compliance. Their job is to keep you out of jail, you know, their job is to make sure that all the paperwork was filled out correctly and that nobody broke any rules, rather than being told that their job is to help deliver amazing services to the people in the city of Boston, or wherever it may be, and to help make sure that our project is successful.”

Government systems aren't built this way because of lack of funds, or laziness, or broken promises, or stupidity. Nor do people working within procurement deliberately set out to purchase systems that do not value the end user’s experience. Many within government care deeply about the state of its technology and the procurement of it. But to improve it, they have to overcome massive, systemic hurdles. We found that those working in procurement who want improve government have created multiple paths to change the process.

The public sector buys software and systems the same way it orders battleships. An agency can spend years gathering requirements. This creates RFPs and contracts that are so large that they which it gives the contract to one of a handful of companies with the resources to handle such a massive order. Because of their enormous scope, these projects often take years to complete. By the time they launch, the technology is old.

For example, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spent three years gathering requirements for a system that would digitize immigration forms;¹⁴ the system was outdated before anyone even began building it. After more than 10 years and a cost of more than $1 billion, only three forms have been digitized, the system crawls and often stops working, and many of the civil servants who rely on it say they wish they could go back to paper processing.¹⁵

The Department of Homeland Security’s goal is to prevent terrorism. They don’t care if you had a good experience when you went through TSA.

Across federal, state, and local government, innovators are working to change standard procurement practices. At the federal level, 18F has taken a lead partnering with both federal agencies and local agencies to break down procurement into modular parts. Code for America, one of the foremost government-adjacent groups, frequently leads procurement charges at the state level. This increases government’s ability to be nimble, increase diversity of solutions, and flag failure early. As City of Austin Head of Design and Technology Policy Austin Ben Guhin notes, “[when you] introduce modularity, if one piece of it is failing, you can just replace that piece.” This is a far cry from buying a billion dollar system over ten years that won’t be built for another 10. It also helps government start to tackle the impact that the technology industry has had, accelerating the pace at which better solutions emerge.

Many companies responsible for failed government systems continue to get government contracts. Because it is so hard to meet the requirements to become a government contractor, few companies qualify, and the usual suspects continue to get new work. Oracle was largely responsible for the humiliating launch of healthcare.gov in 2013,¹⁶ yet afterward it still received millions of dollars a year in federal contracts.¹⁷

Some cities, like St. Paul, Minnesota, have focused on improving their communications with local vendors and increasing the diversity of those who apply. Like compliance, the fear of accusations of advantage given to one vendor or another often paralyzes procurement vendors. So support from external, neutral organizations has become a critical way for local and state governments to reach new vendors.

In St. Paul, the Department of Public Works worked with Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab to conduct interviews with vendors and share candid feedback. Jessica Brokaw, the city’s Deputy Director of Procurement, said:

“It was invaluable. It gave vendors a level of comfort to state what was on their mind, and we learned there was a perception that we had preferred vendors. We had to change what that perception was.”

They took a number of steps, including launching procurement vendor fairs and changing how they listed contracts to show where women- and minority-owned companies could apply. The next time St. Paul put road repair contracts out to bid, six different vendors won the seven contracts, instead of the same two vendors winning everything.

Many companies responsible for failed government systems continue to get government contracts.

Sometimes help comes from the vendors themselves. Green River is a software design and development firm that has worked extensively with local governments. When the City of Boston put out an RFP for data systems to track homelessness and coordinate access to social services, Green River tried to apply, but the system rejected the application because it hadn’t fully uploaded by the deadline.

Green River CEO Michael Knapp called every person he could find in the government, because he was determined that bureaucracy would not take away the opportunity to make an impact on the homeless problem:

“Eventually we were selected to build that project, and our work with governments on homelessness has since spread across the country—to other cities in Massachusetts, to Virginia, St. Louis, and San Diego. If I had walked away, that would never have happened.”

Decades of budget cuts have reduced the number of government employees across the country, so when an agency needs a large technology project, it has neither the resources nor the expertise to do it in-house. Government also lacks workers with technical expertise who sit at the intersection of what agencies need and what they buy. As a result, officials who don't know better can spend absurd sums of money on ludicrous technology. And contractors—who do know better—line up to take advantage: In 2016, the Transportation Security Administration spent $47,000 on an app whose sole purpose was to generate an arrow to point airport travelers left or right in a security line.¹⁸ One innovation team member reported:

“A critical success factor is having a person on the inside to ask the right questions. I remember one meeting where the vendor told us straight-faced that to scale would be an additional cost per instance, times the millions of people who would touch the system. It was total BS. I knew it didn’t cost them any more. And I knew they shouldn’t be charging us more. But they didn’t know I knew. And my colleagues who know everything about procurement didn’t know the technical specs to challenge them.”

Sometimes, innovation in the procurement space happens not from partnerships inside government, but adjacent to it. In Charlotte, Code for Charlotte’s Jill Bjers frames partnerships with government as ways to boost the great work it is already doing.

“We wanted right from the beginning [to] be an unbiased tech savvy partner to the city where we could sit in our meetings. We could help them decipher tech languages. Help them do some community outreach before they go buy something and make sure that it's really something that they should be buying and then make sure they're getting the best price for what they're spending on it.”

In some places, government goes straight to the ultimate expert on resident experience: residents themselves. In St. Louis, when Treasurer Tishaura Jones was upgrading the city’s parking meter inventory, instead of having her staff do a review and pick one vendor, they picked four, and then had the vendors put their equipment on St. Louis streets for a six month pilot. They then assembled a citizen advisory council to do the evaluation. Jones said:

“They would go around and score each vendor on usability and whether they liked them or not. Then we also put out a public survey to get input from people who weren't on the committee who wanted to weigh in on which equipment they liked the best. Then we took that public input piece as 20 percent of our decision making process on which vendor we chose.”

This kind of citizen participation in procurement mirrors work many cities have done to develop participatory city budgeting. This kind of targeted, iterative innovation, alongside new pairings with complementary subject matter expertise, reflect a few examples of the kinds of small, critical steps governments are taking take toward procuring solutions that put users first and supporting civil servants who keep the country running.

As we undertook this research, we wanted to understand which of the many models of team structure works best for sparking change, getting the work done, and making it sustainable. But as we moved through several rounds of interviews, we came to understand that the field is still in too early a stage to know which model(s) works best. We identified one model that people across the board felt didn’t work, but otherwise saw pros and cons for different organizational structures.

As a result, the question we ended up answering was “With what models are people experimenting?” This felt more true to our research; experimentation is really what people are doing. Case in point: Some teams shifted the models they used over the course of our research. Some are trying multiple models at the same time. Here are different approaches and advantages and disadvantages we observed with each.

Examples: Asheville, New Orleans

In some cities, the IT team has evolved to also be the innovation team. In Asheville, digital services director Eric Jackson has been working to change the IT department’s reputation. “We’re not the typical IT department of no,” he told us. “Our primary orientation is, ‘How can we get you what you want?'” That’s helped make other departments feel more comfortable bringing ideas to him, and has led to city-wide projects that benefit multiple departments.

Hiring someone with no support and no grounding in government is an excellent recipe for leading someone to rage quit.

As CTO of New Orleans, getting the email up and running was task number one for Lamar Gardere. “When we would try something new, folks would say, ‘Okay, that's great, but why doesn't email work?’ There wasn't an opportunity to do anything beyond the basics until we mastered the basics.” Mastering the basics won the IT team trust of other agencies across the city, which gave them the opportunity to dig into city issues beyond email. They started with open data and eventually moved to developing human-centered services.

In the case of both Asheville and New Orleans, because the IT team was already positioned as a cross-governmental, cross-agency entity, with hard work and strong leadership, teams parlayed standard IT projects into service design work.

Examples: Bloomberg i-teams, San Jose

Bloomberg i-team grants help individual cities establish a small team focused on solving a specific issue that spans multiple agencies and/or departments. These teams work to “unpeel the onion,” as Mayor Sandy Stimpson of Mobile put it, on issues including reducing blight, improving economic outcomes for people returning from jail, or reducing the murder rate. i-team members have reorganized entire city departments, redesigned forms, stickers and notices, rewritten call center scripts, used free tools to capture data or coordinate agencies, and in one case altered the state constitution. Whatever a team deems is necessary to solve a problem, they figure out how to get done.

These teams are highly focused. By chipping away at a single problems for years, they often make significant progress. On the down side, this model imposes innovation onto government agencies externally. Because these teams are not invited in––instead they show up at the behest of the mayor––they often face tension with people who have been working in an agency for years or decades. As discussed above, these teams must then deliberately focus on building partnerships and mutual respect to minimize this friction.

A variation of this model is San Jose’s approach. The city’s innovation team met with agency department heads to develop a list of key projects. After factoring in risk, impact, and the level of effort required for implementation, the team came up with a prioritized set of cross-agency projects to tackle as they got up and running. These projects spanned city departments and agencies, but took into account the top priorities across the city.

Examples: United States Digital Service HQ, 18F, Boston New Urban Mechanics, Austin Innovation Office, Orlando Digital Platforms and Service Design

In the consulting model, innovation teams live as separate entities, taking on city-wide projects, or projects within multiple agencies. These teams are called in to help when things go awry, or (best case scenario!) at the start of projects when agencies would like help and resources.

Boston’s New Urban Mechanics team started as an incubator for new ideas in 2010. Over the years they’ve grown to assist multiple departments with specific problems. Austin uses a similar model, working with agencies as varied as the convention center and the recycling center. The team also runs a city-wide certification program on content strategy and user research. The value of this model is that work is centralized in one location. Because the same team works on innovation efforts across the city, they can apply what they’ve learned or built for one agency to the next project with a different agency. Lauren Lockwood explained:

“The needs that our Parks Department might have for reserving a tennis court might be very similar to the needs our property management team has for reserving a room. So it's really important to have a central clearinghouse for needs. Otherwise, you end up with asking your constituents to download a hundred different apps for different city services, when two services might actually be very similar.”

And, because teams are invited in, rather than imposed from the top, agencies tend to be more receptive to ideas. (Or at the very least, less hostile.)

But a consulting model often means a constant hunt for work. While the convention center originally approached Austin to take on a redesign project, other projects have required more wooing and cajoling from the innovation team. In one case, the team decided that in lieu of a holiday party they would do a day of service design at the Austin Animal Center, the largest no-kill animal center in the country. (Party on, Austin.)

The team toured the facility, interviewed staff from the animal center, then designed prototypes and shared their work with the center staff. Based on that work, the animal center began scoping a project with the innovation team. This story exemplifies the lengths teams often need to go to win over skeptical agencies. In our own work with USDS, we too saw that it could take months or years of laying the groundwork with a given agency in order to finally be invited in.

A variation of this model is being applied in Orlando. The innovation team runs a three-day academy that takes front-line city employees through a rapid prototyping and testing workshop for forms specific to their agency. (“We call it an academy because everyone wants to graduate from something,” says Matt Broffman, the city’s director of innovation.) Staff members pair up with people from other departments to walk through their service—for example someone from the Parks Department might try to report a pothole. At the end of the three days, the team launches a user-tested beta site. The innovation team is systematically working through all 350 city services. So far, 70 people have gone through the academy

While this model means a steady work stream, some departments have been resistant to the academy. “They say, “I don’t know anything about computers. Why would you have me do this?,” Broffman explains. But typically the most resistant people end up seeing the biggest benefit. “It’s really empowering to see them do this. To give staff the ability to actually make decisions about how their services are designed and how they operate isn’t something that happens very often in government.”

Examples: CA Child Welfare Digital Service, USDS agency teams, New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity

A model we encountered less frequently at city and state levels is embedding an innovation team within a specific agency. This is the model currently being applied by the California Child Welfare Digital Service. Because their work is so new (the agency has been in existence for a little over a year) we are not able to report out any solid findings yet.

A more established team that has applied this model is New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity. The team has been in existence for four years, and their location within the Economic Opportunity office means their initial work has been trained solely on the products owned by that office, all of which are aligned with the office’s mission of reducing poverty in New York. The team sits side by side with others in the agency—policymakers, technical developers, and data scientists—where they serve as the product and design arm of the agency. This means they they’re an integral part of how the agency functions, rather than an add-on entity who is either sticking their face into problems and annoying everyone, or the team the mayor sent in when everyone else has screwed up.

While there are clear positives to being embedded within an agency, one of the drawbacks to this approach is that the work is fairly siloed. So while the Economic Opportunity team may develop a tool that could be useful to multiple other departments in the city, it can be difficult for those departments to learn about or apply the tool. Additionally, other departments within New York have taken on their own individual innovation initiatives. Economic Opportunity sometimes partners with these teams on projects, but there is no single approach to innovation, product development, or citizen needs across the city, which means that for the end-user, city interactions can vary widely.

One of the drawbacks to this approach is that the work is fairly siloed.

Recognizing this, the Economic Opportunity team has taken some interesting steps to try to spread their tools, knowledge and methodologies to other departments, which we’ll discuss below.

Example: Gainesville

Gainesville City Manager Anthony Lyons told us that the mayor of Gainesville became interested in innovation when he heard about another city’s Blue Ribbon report at a conference. When he returned to town he asked Lyons to look into creating a similar report for the town. The mayor’s primary driver was to make the city more competitive. The city is home to the University of Florida, a school with over 50,000 students, most of whom leave after graduation. Was there a way to stop the brain drain and make Gainesville a more attractive place for starting a business?

As Lyons began thinking about the best way to tackle the problem, he took a look at what other cities were doing, but couldn’t find anyone “doing anything special.” So he turned to the private sector to see how companies were handling innovation. Ultimately he met up with IDEO, and the city brought the company in to help rethink the design of the entire city government from the citizen-perspective. IDEO trained city officials in user-centered design and prototyping, and got everyone from building inspectors to the fire chief thinking about how they could better meet citizens’ needs. Lyons told us:

“I think the difference with what we're doing is not trying to do bolt-on kind of programs or ideas, but to change the philosophy for the entirety of the government and then to adjust the government around that, rather than having the innovation adjust to the government.”

Gainesville’s approach is unique. There is no innovation team. Instead, the city trained people across city agencies on citizen-centered techniques, and all agencies think about their services from the perspective of how they can best serve Gainesville residents. One positive outcome from this approach is that front-line civil servants have begun looking at their jobs differently—they feel empowered to bring suggestions to the table—and we heard from multiple people that the attitude change has been palpable.

While Gainesville’s approach is the most dramatic attempt to create internally-motivated change we encountered, New York City’s Service Design Studio has attempted something similar, on a smaller scale, with its Service Design Studio.

The design and product team housed within the Mayor’s Office of Economic opportunity were pleased with the work they’d done within that office, but wanted to figure out a way to serve other parts of the city. They’d run design studio workshops with other agencies. They had also developed a toolkit on human-centered design that they made available across the city. But they were looking for something lightweight to do every week to support people’s efforts to incorporate user research, prototyping, agile development and other standard innovation elements. Ultimately the team hit on the idea of offering office hours for anyone in any city agency to walk through the Service Design Studio door and get help.

Front-line civil servants have begun looking at their jobs differently—they feel empowered to bring suggestions to the table.

The office hour idea was a shot in the dark—the team had no idea if anyone would sign up, or what kind of requests people might come in with. “We had no idea what we were getting into,” Mari Nakano, the office’s acting design director told us. But they quickly found themselves overwhelmed with bookings. As of early August 2018, they’ve held 103 office hours with 34 unique agencies, and a total of 248 total attendees. The office hours have been so successful that they’ve been getting meeting requests from people outside New York City government—to date they’ve held office hours with 17 other governments including Rhode Island, California, Denmark, and Thailand. The team is still relatively new, so they don’t yet have success metrics to show whether their involvement has positively influenced projects, but they are tracking repeat visitors, projects, and how questions evolve. In the eight months they’ve been holding hours, they’ve seen questions shift from learning about our tools and tactics to discussing specific projects or for assistance in achieving stakeholder buy in.

We observed the office hours on a few occasions, and watched the team meet to discuss topics including an agile RFP, how to bring users into the development of the city’s fair housing policy, and how to get more New Yorkers to report animal bites. We observed, and the team corroborated, that the people who come in generally have some understanding of service design and the steps involved, but need guidance or hand holding on specifics. How do you find people to speak to in doing user research? What’s a quick way to develop a prototype? How do you start thinking about changing the way a process works?

The team has enabled others across the city government to start asking these questions, to shift their thinking around how they offer services or develop policy. But because the team is housed in a separate agency, their reach is limited. They can offer help and support, but cannot guide projects to their conclusion. Whether exposure to the service design team serves as a catalyst for other agencies to bring in their own design and product teams remains to be seen.

Sometimes governments dip their toe into innovation by hiring a few individual fellows, or spending a lot of money to bring someone from the private sector in to launch a team. In general this approach has not worked out well. In some cases it’s left both the agency and the person they hired feeling frustrated and angry.

In the early days of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program, the fellows struggled to get a toe hold in organizations that often didn’t know what to do with them. Vivian Graubard, a founding member of USDS, said this about the start of the PIF program:

“The first thing we learned after the PIF program launched was that it does not work to send one person in to an agency or a large organization. There's a very limited impact that they can have, acting as lone wolf. It's so much better to have a team where people have various skill sets than having one person.”

Garren Givens, a member of the first class of PIFs and later the head of the program, concurs, and also notes that while there was a lot of energy and excitement around getting private sector expertise into government, after a while the fellows and the program management came to see that making real change would require a different approach:

“There's no way that a fellowship with 100 people in it could somehow tip the balance of where a two or three million person federal service was headed. It became clear that even if we were a 5,000-person technology service, that you couldn't build all the technology that was required to affect change. At some point, you're going to need to work through partnerships in a sort of federated model.”

Sending a lone wolf in also presents issues for sustainability. Aneesh Chopra, the first CTO of the United States, notes:

“You could establish a program where you do a six-month project, but then its lingering effects, that culture and that reinforcement is missing unless you take the thing and sustain it.”

As we’ve discussed, the work can be slow, and it can be a long wait to see one’s efforts come to fruition. So individuals who come in for short bursts to make change often find their efforts are for naught, with no one to sustain the work after they leave.

In addition to the federal level, bringing in one fancy person from the private sector has also presented issues for cities large and small. As Orlando’s Matt Broffman told us:

“For the first year and a half I failed. I was doing a lot of things but producing very little value. That’s not innovation, that’s just work. If you’re stuck in a large organization as one person and not given an explicit mandate, you’re not going to succeed.”

In a few high profile cases, governments heralded the hiring of someone from the private sector only to have them depart quietly a short time later. We heard that the external hirees found it too hard to make change in government, didn’t get the support they needed, didn’t understand how governmental levers worked, or simply found the bureaucracy and speed of government excruciating. In other words, hiring someone with no support and no grounding in government is an excellent recipe for leading someone to rage quit.

"Every mayor wants to know what others are doing. It gives them the courage to do it in their own cities."

Clarence Wardell III, What Works Cities

While different team structures have pros and cons, one factor stood out as an indicator that a team would be successful: support from the top. Teams who have a city manager, mayor, CTO, or other person in a strong leadership position championing them are hands down more effective than teams who are trying to make it on their own. The trailing second place indicator? Disaster forcing work to begin.

Support from the top means not just that someone in a leadership position likes your team and gives you a budget, but also that they champion change, and empower the team to operate differently. This sometimes means that teams align with a mayor’s passion, as with some Bloomberg teams, or New York City’s Office of Economic Opportunity. In San Jose, the team aligns around a set of city priorities. But for teams everywhere, support from the top means the space to fail, the ability to walk into offices where you might not be wanted and try something new, and the political power to hack through the bureaucracy, redesign departments, jobs and processes, and make change.

Some mayors introduce change by bringing a business customer service mindset into office. In Orlando, the mayor views his job as being the city’s CEO, finding great talent and bringing it into government. In Mobile, a change in leadership catalyzed subsequent innovation—and it too, started with an industry approach. “When Mayor Stimson came to office, he brought a private sector cabinet in,” says Jeff Carter. “They used a model of leadership that understands the rigor of private industry in customer service, but adapts the flexibility needed to implement it in government.” By framing government within the model of private industry, mayors have recognized how they can set the priorities, practices, values, norms to drive user adoption and customer service as priorities within the way government does work.

Support from the top means not just that someone in a leadership position likes your team and gives you a budget, but also that they empower the team to operate differently.

Other mayors framed their approach around expanding staff’s capacity to come up with their own frameworks to dream big and reimagine how government could serve its communities. In Anchorage, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz tells staff to take him out past where he can see. Berkowitz knows trust around innovation comes from leadership: people need to know that if they take a risk and try something new they won’t lose their jobs. At the same time, he understands that innovative ideas stay ideas without hiring superb staff and trusting them to execute. Says his CTO Brendan Babb:

“[Mayor Berkowitz] has a lot of great ideas but he's also interested in people going past that in terms of ideas. When we've gone to visit departments where we kind of had a crazy cop, crazier cop, where we'd say like, ‘What if we had an Uber for snow plows between the city next to us and the school district? Could we share less equipment and be able to check it out? Or, can we do electric buses?’”

Across our interviews, we saw leadership taking up the challenge of hiring good people and trusting them to do the work. During her time as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Cecilia Muñoz brought in USDS to execute a new policy with her team.

“A bit later, my team came to me in a panic and said, ‘What USDS is proposing is not what president asked us to do, it’s going off rails.’ But I realized that USDS saw what was possible in totally different way—and they could make the end product much better. They were starting from what would the user need. We were starting from the solution requested.”

In places like Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, and Minneapolis, mayors encourage departments and innovators within them to both set priorities and to recommend best solutions within them. In San Jose, leadership makes that trust of internal capacity to achieve clear by hiring and promoting from within. When they city created the Office of Civic Innovation and Digital Strategy, the team promoted people from within. Thong notes:

“It’s unusual compared to other teams and gave us a fair amount of credibility in the organization based on who we were and relationships we already had. That saved us 18 months of time compared to other teams, where you might drop in someone who has an incredible pedigree but spends 12 months figuring out who are the allies and how to navigate the process.”

In some cases innovation and change result from a disaster, manmade or otherwise. The short story: Something broke. Generally badly. Almost always publicly. Sometimes in government, a fire can actually kindle a commitment to creating firebreaks. At the federal level, this is epitomized by the wave of private industry, largely-plucked-from-Silicon-Valley specialists who entered government in crisis response mode following public failure.¹⁹

The healthcare.gov crisis spawned both an immediate and longer-term response. President Obama created the country’s first chief data scientist, pulled Silicon Valley talent to fill key roles like chief technology officer and chief information officer, created an Office of Science, Technology, and Policy, and introduced new ways for mid-career industry professionals to plant in government.²⁰

The short story: Something broke. Generally badly. Almost always publicly.

Simultaneously, federal teams like the United States Digital Service and 18F created ways for skilled, trained industry professionals to circumvent traditional civil service hiring. Both were in the works, but the healthcare.gov crisis jolted their timelines forward. Each brought best practices of industry, including human-centered design, Agile procurement, constant beta, open source code, and user research.

As with other models discussed here, because the work is new and the teams and people doing it are often new, we don’t have data on the sustainability of either of these models. We don't yet know whether teams forged out of disaster are more likely to prosper than teams created by proactive leadership, or vice versa. Disaster is something we would wish on no one. Hiring or election of innovative leadership can be beyond our control. But there’s several lesson to be learned here, starting with the need to to reduce disaster as a mechanism to catalyze change. When it comes to government, guardian of access to our medical care, food stamps, marriage licenses, bridges and roads, taxes and social security, the risks are far too high not to lead proactively.

There are takeaways here for practitioners and leaders. Practitioners should seek to join an organization that has strong support from the top. Don’t start a team because the mayor wants to “get some innovation.” Look for leadership with a serious commitment to improving citizens lives, and where that commitment means taking risks and trying new approaches. If you yourself are a leader, know that it isn't enough to want the latest shiny thing simply for the sake of having it. If you have suffered through a disaster, know you won’t be alone in shaking your fist at those who didn’t take proactive steps, at the slowness of the steps to reverse or try to patch things, or how hard even the seemingly “easy” things are.

When you are buried in your work, heads down trying to schedule a meeting with someone who doesn’t want to meet with you, following up on an email for the gazillionth time, or explaining yet again why metrics/research/agile is important, it can sometimes be hard to feel that you are anything more than a tiny drop in a very large, very bureaucratic ocean. But overwhelmingly what we learned from this research is the degree to which people working in government attempting to solve problems, change process, and rethink everything, are all encountering the same challenges, chewing over the same ideas, and tinkering with similar approaches. In conducting these interviews we met kindred spirits across the country who believe deeply in what they’re doing, despite the myriad challenges.

As we’ve said in here multiple times and in multiple ways: This work is hard. Beginnings are hard. No one has it all figured out. But when change does happen—whether that means watching Scrum spread throughout the department or launching a housing lottery app—it feels magical, which is why we keep coming back for more.

These are the early days of the field. Many of the essential structures that exist in other fields are missing. Career paths are muddled or missing. Professional development is spotty. Jobs tend to be clustered around fellowships or senior to middle management, excluding spots for entry level workers or executives. Practitioners don’t have obvious ways to meet and swap lessons learned. We don’t even really have a name.

Yes, all of these elements are lacking. But we hope that this report sparks the creation of more connective tissue across the field. Specifically:

• A way to share resources and solutions. Practitioners need shared resources similar to the kinds of shared resources teachers have created: work plans, source code, sample job descriptions, off-the-shelf product recommendations, and other such tactical and functional information beyond a press release or a white paper noting that someone launched a new thing
• A better understanding of why people are leaving and how to make the work sustainable. This impacts every group interested in problem-solving in government, from funders who want to make informed and (where possible) quantitative/qualitative data-driven decisions about how to invest in sustainable success to leadership who wants to hire and retain talent, to people doing the work, who lack places to see they are not alone in the struggle to find a career path, and who need clearer signals on how to stay when they want to do so.
• Help shaping career trajectories, including entry points and ways to move up. The many places tackling the challenges of pipeline through workaround, temporary solutions has created a career pipeline based on short-term bandages for a long-term broken system. People can often get in at higher pay scales, but without a sustainable way to stay. We need larger conversations around hiring, beyond one-offs developed in individual locations, and in partnerships with civil service professionals and their organizations.
• Professional development, more convenings. We heard that practitioners would like more opportunities to meet each other and share stories and solutions, but also observed that the field has limited opportunities for professional development. This means that not only is it hard for long time civil servants to learn user-centered, modern practices without the intervention of a designated innovation team, but that practitioners don’t have the opportunity to learn and grow in their own areas of expertise.
• A better way to talk about the work. We spent two and a half pages discussing why it's so hard to talk to anyone about what we call this thing that is problem-solving in government. Practitioners, funders, government leadership, and the constituents we serve all need better language to describe what is this thing we do. The field has yet to settle on ideal terminology, and if we can’t talk about it we can’t scale it.

Our interviews made clear there is a lot of room, and need, for improvement. Despite a year working on this project, and many years doing the work, even as we started writing this report we found ourselves making discoveries by happenstance. Though we used multiple different outlets at many different points in time to recruit interviewees, in some cases we found people simply by passing them in the hallway at conferences, or stumbling across interesting posts on Twitter. We still find out about convenings and conferences through colleagues-of-colleagues, people tagging us in LinkedIn posts, or emails asking, “Are you the right person to talk to about X?”

And yet for all of its challenges, the success stories are beautiful. When government works the way it should, we are all better off. We hope that this report has provided others with a sense of community and a way forward. As with everything else in this field, we know it is a small, slow step. But we see it as a meaningful, important one nonetheless.

In 2017 and 2018, we interviewed people working in or around innovation or digital service teams across the country. In some cases we did not attribute remarks to interviewees by name because they asked that we protect their privacy. The list below reflects people who gave us permission to use them by name in this report.

Adria Finch, Director of Innovation, City of Syracuse

Alan Davidson, Former Founding Director of Digital Economy, Department of Commerce, United States

Amanda Kahn Freid, Policy, Communications and Customer Service Leader, Office of the Treasurer, City of San Francisco

Aneesh Chopra, Former Chief Technology Officer, United States

Anjali Chainani, Director of Policy, Mayor's Office, City of Philadelphia

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Chief Executive Officer, New America

Anthony Lyons, City Manager, City of Gainesville

Ariel Kennan, Former Director of Design and Product, Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity, New York City

Ashley Meyers, Product Manager, Digital Services, City and County of San Francisco

Ben Guhin, Head of Design & Technology Policy, City of Austin

Ben Scott, Former Senior Advisor, New America

Beth Noveck, Former United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer; Director, White House Open Government Initiative, United States

Brendan Babb, Chief Innovation Officer, Municipality of Anchorage

Brian Lefler, Former Engineer, United States Digital Service

Brooke Hunter, Former Chief of Staff and Director of Strategic Initiatives, Open Technology Institute

Cecilia Muñoz, Former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council

Clarence Wardell, Director, City Solutions, What Works Cities

Courtney Jacinic, Sr. Content Strategist, Practices Lead, City of Austin

Dan Hon, Former Digital Transformation Consultant, California Health and Human Services Agency

Dana Chisnell, Former Designer, United States Digital Service

Deepa Kunapuli, Former Communications Director, United States Digital Service

Denice Ross, Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America

Eric Jackson, Digital Services Architect, City of Asheville

Erie Meyer, Former Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service; Former Senior Director, Code for America

Ethan Berkowitz, Mayor, Municipality of Anchorage

Garren Givens, Former Executive Director, Presidential Innovation Fellows; Deputy Executive Director, 18F

Giancarlo Gonzalez, Former Chief Information Officer and Advisor to the Governor, Gobierno de Puerto Rico

Hannah Azemati, Program Director, Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab

Harlan Weber, Former Director of Design & Service Innovation, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Jeff Carter, Chief Innovation Officer; Executive Director, Innovation Team, City of Mobile

Jen Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America

Jesse Taggert, Director of Service Design & User Research, Child Welfare Digital Services, State of California

Jill Bjers, Executive Director/Brigade Co-Captain, Open Charlotte Brigade

Josh Edwards, Assistant Budget Director of Strategy & Performance; Innovation Team Director, City of Durham

Justin Entzminger, Director, Innovate Memphis

Kerry Duggan, Former Deputy Director for Policy, Office of the Vice President, Executive Office of the President, United States

Lamar Gardere, Former Chief Technology Officer, City of New Orleans

Laura Melle, Senior Procurement Lead, Department of Innovation and Technology, City of Boston

Lauren Lockwood, Former Chief Digital Officer, City of Boston

Leigh Tami, Chief Performance Officer & Director, Office of Performance and Data Analytics, City of Cincinnati

Leonard Hyman, Program Performance Auditor, City of San José

Liana Dragoman, Service Design Practice Lead and Deputy Director, Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation, City of Philadelphia

Mari Nakano, Acting Design Director, Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, New York City

Marina Martin, Former Chief Technology Officer & Senior Advisor to the Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs

Mark Lerner, Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service

Marni Wilhite, Open and Smart Cities Program Manager, City of Austin

Matt Broffman, Director, Digital Platforms and Service Design, City of Orlando

Michael Kalin, Former Senior Adviser, Behavioural Insights Team

Michelle Thong, Service Innovation Lead, Office of Civic Innovation & Digital Strategy, City of San José

Mollie Ruskin , Former Designer, United States Digital Services

Nigel Jacob, Co-Founder, New Urban Mechanics

Peter Kelly, Former Chief Deputy Director, Office of Systems Integration, California Health and Human Services Agency

Priya Sarkar, FUSE Fellow, New Orleans

Ron Bronson, Former City Webmaster & Service Designer, City of Bloomington

Sam Edelstein, Chief Data Officer, City of Syracuse

Sonia Sarkar, Chief Policy and Engagement Officer, Baltimore City Health Department

Stephanie Wade, Lead for Innovation Teams at Bloomberg Philanthropies

Stephen Hoch, Chief Information & Analytics Officer, Tulsa Public Schools

Stuart Drown, Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Accountability,

Government Operations Agency, State of California"

Tishaura Jones, Treasurer, St. Louis

Travis Moore, Founder and Director, TechCongress

Vivian Graubard, Former Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service

Wendy Thomas, Director, Department of Doing, City of Gainesville