#gov 2.0

[greggyour]

US government releases new design standards so its websites can stop being ugly

[greggyour]

[collaborativestudy]

https://medium.com/@hallm13/four-actions-for-citizen-engagement-ed5a01a1afa5

[collaborativestudy]

Town of Blacksburg: Using Surveys and Crowdsourcing for Government Solutions - Granicus Blog -

Blacksburg, VA, received over a thousand responses with their first online survey! Not bad for a pop. of 46,620... Keys to success: 1) Hot topic (Downtown Parking) 2) Stakeholders shared survey 3) Anonymous responses

[collaborativestudy]

Connecting Digital & Physical Discussions (Part 2)

This is recap from the project to connect digital and physical discussions as part of the City of Santa Rosa’s DINE engagement event

In part one of the this post I outlined that one of our biggest challenges in using CivicIdeas for DINE was that Santa Rosa’s CivicIdeas site was very new and people had yet to get a chance to become familiar with it before inviting them to the DINE discussion.  We tried to overcome this challenge by inviting a lot of new people to the online discussion and cross-promoting it with the in-person dinners.  It turned out that we were able to get a lot of new people to come to the site and read through the live-posts from the dinner I attended but we didn’t receive a lot of additional comments or discussion.

Our results remind me of the 90-9-1 principle or “participation inequality” which basically states that in an open system with voluntary participation and selection of tasks 90% of participants will merely consume content, while 9% will edit, and only 1% will create content.  The key to our online discussion with DINE was to create a larger 90% opportunity where people could participate in some way without having to commit to attending one of the dinners, which was more of a 9% or 1% activity.  

Overall DINE had a great feeling of, try out a little non-threatening civic engagement, see how you like it, and then we’ll update you on Facebook or email when we’re having our next event.  It offered a low barrier to entry for people just getting started in civic participation.  Our use of online discussions in CivicIdeas lowered that barrier to entry even further because people could simply read the discussion without even having to attend.

DINE felt very much like a civic hackathon in that it was primarily a community building event.  The purpose was not to build products or to definitively solve problems, instead it was to bring people together, share knowledge, and give them a demo of civic participation in Santa Rosa.

[measuredvoice]

Costa Rica: Day 2

I got back from Costa Rica on Friday last week. The second day of the trip was even busier than the first. My first presentation was to about 100 communicators and leaders from municipalities around Costa Rica. Following that, I presented to journalism students at the Latin University and the University of Costa Rica, the two largest universities in the country.

My presentation to the municipal leaders was largely the same as the presentation I'd given the day before, but with a bit more emphasis on the importance of customer service. Just like in the United States, Costa Rican municipal governments are better positioned to provide service through social media than the federal government, simply because they're more closely connected to citizens' day-to-day lives.

In all of the sessions we had with government officials, people asked questions about how to handle negative comments on Facebook pages (Facebook is extremely widely used throughout Costa Rica). I was surprised to find out that everyone understood the word "troll." We spent a considerable time talking about troles. Most people understood the importance of not engaging with people who are simply trying to start fights, but they weren't sure if they could delete highly offensive or inciting comments.

I recommended GobiernoUSA.gov's Facebook commenting policy, which explains that certain violent or offensive comments may be deleted at the discretion of GobiernoUSA.gov. This allows governments to quash abusive behavior without eliminating people's right to share criticisms of the government, even if they include strong language.

My presentation to students (slides, in Spanish) was similar to the one I gave to government, but I focused on how government's usage of social media was altering the future job landscape. I explained that writing jobs are going to be harder to find at traditional media organizations with shrinking revenues, but that more writing jobs are cropping up within institutions like government agencies. This quote from Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, sums up my advice:

Many businesses, NGOs, arts organisations, public bodies, universities, etc are now publishers of extremely high quality stuff. [They're] good places to practise your craft before moving on.

Many thanks again to the State Department’s office of International Information Programs for the opportunity to visit such a beautiful country. If you'd like to have me speak at an event, please feel free to write me at [email protected].

[dobtco]

How Healthcare.gov Went Wrong

Here at DOBT we talk a lot about How To Fix Procurement, but you don't hear a lot about why things go wrong. The Healthcare.gov Fiasco is instructive in that it highlights every piece of our procurement process that's broken. How, with a half-trillion dollar a year spend, could something like this botch even happen? Here's how:

A High-Friction, High-Overhead contracting process

The contract for Healthcare.gov wasn't a fully competitive process. In fact, there was no competition for it at all. To get the work done, the Department of Health and Human Services used an existing contract it already had with CGI Federal to get the work done. The contract, as they say, was "greased."

So why was it greased? Technically, "greasing" something means reducing its friction. Running a public procurement of this size, and visibility -- it would probably take at least 18 months just to get through the procurement process and start the job. The awarded contract would almost assuredly get protested by those who didn't win, and it would yield to a very public, very political, and probably very bad outcome.

So what they did instead, and very rationally, is they opted to take a contract that they already had -- one with CGI Federal -- and amended that contract to add the Healthcare.gov stuff onto it. CGI had already built some of the systems that Healthcare.gov would depend upon, and already had "boots on the ground" as it were. So giving the contract to this vendor for this kind of work "just made sense" if you wanted to get a website done in time.

Requirements Written By People Who Don't Understand Technology or Procurement

So, well, if it was going to take a long time to do a procurement, and to have an open competition, why didn't they do that? Were they just lazy? Did they just not want to do the actual work of having a full, fair, open competition?

The more likely answer is that the Affordable Care Act set a date in stone, and during the contentious passage of the bill, Congress and the President gave very little consideration to the federal procurement process. They wanted it done, and wanted it done sooner rather than later.

If you want an IT project to fail, allocate a bunch of dollars to it. If you want it to be a total disaster, do that, plus let Congress design the requirements and set the deadlines. The disconnect between Congress' view of software and the developer's view of software has never been more vast. Then you have a force multiplier: Congress' seemingly willful ignorance over how the procurement process actually works.

Building a Battleship like a Website

Healthcare.gov isn't a book by itself. It's a chapter in an epic saga of large IT implementation screw-ups. From SAM.gov to the DoD's electronic healthcare record problem, an IT project's probability of failure is positively correlated with the amount of dollars allocated to it. This experiment has failed. So why does it continue to happen?

Because that's the way the regulation is written. Changing the federal acquisition regulation is a hard task, and it hasn't been modernized in years. Frankly, I often wonder if the regulation could even keep up with the rapid developmental changes of the technology sector. As an example: today, in 2013, the regulation requires that all systems be Y2K Compliant.

The process leans towards a write-down-all-the-requirements-then-build-to-those-requirements type of methodology. That's the kind of methodology you would use to build a space shuttle or a battleship, not the kind of methodology you'd want in building a website -- the tools themselves may change over the course of the time it takes to build the site, and it becomes impossible to course-correct even if you know something's going wrong.

Lack of Pricing and Accountability

In a functional marketplace, companies that do a good job at a low cost grow. Companies that regularly do a bad job at a high cost shrink. In the federal IT marketplace this isn't the case. This is for two reasons: the federal government has no idea how much stuff should cost, and the federal government does not do a good job at sharing performance based information.

The best source of contractor performance information to-date is probably the Project on Government Oversight's contractor misconduct database. But this database only catalogs instances of misconduct, not poor performance. The federal government does keep a database of performance information, called PPIRS (hilariously pronounced "peepers"), but predictably, this database is closed off from the public.

But even as an internal tool, it's inadequate. The GAO estimated that it's actually used less than a third of the time. Why? Because the information in it is unreliable -- and from what I've been able to determine from asking around inside the federal government, it's because people are afraid of being sued by the companies for saying that they do a bad job.

Layered on top of the missing performance information is a complete lack of pricing information. The federal government keeps no central database of pricing information. You read that correctly: there is no database inside of the federal government that says "we paid X for Y." This information is traditionally unshared because contractors view their pricing information as confidential, and while I might be convinced that it shouldn't be shared with the public because of anti-trust/market coercion reasons, certainly we want federal buyers in good negotiation positions. There's no reason this cannot be shared internally. Fortunately work on this has started, but I'm still shocked that it took 237 years to make it happen.

Inappropriate relationships between Congress and Contractors

I'd be remiss if I didn't finally mention that contractors are free to lobby the federal government. CGI Group, Inc, lobbied the federal government on the Affordable Care Act itself. Whilst there's little data on what they lobbied for, or why they lobbied, it seems strange to me that the procurement process and the ethics process of government allows for this. The good point of the procurement process is that it divorces the buying decisions from the political decisions -- meaning you can't become president and then give all your buddies contracts. But this is a back-door way in to ensure it. No contracting officer wants a call from a Member of Congress asking why their backyard IT integrator wasn't selected.

Fixing it

These problems are systemic. I'm sympathetic to all the people involved in building Healthcare.gov -- anybody that's been following IT procurement knew it would be a disaster from the start. But at this point, it's time we started fixing this stuff.

The White House has the power to do so. An executive order could be passed that would require an approval from the Office of Management and Budget for any IT integration over a million dollars. We already do so for every government form that gets created, as well as every high-impact regulation.

I think it's time we very forcefully closed the book on this experiment of large federal IT integrations. The experiment has failed. Instead, let's develop new ways to build software, and open the doors to the small to medium sized businesses who regularly do this job well, and at reasonable prices. America is the world's hub for innovation, and we can do better than this.

[collaborativestudy]

Connecting Digital & Physical Discussions

Using civic tech to connect digital to physical conversations is a big idea that is very tough to execute.

This week I’m heading to California to help the City of Santa Rosa use Granicus’ online discussion software (CivicIdeas) to connect their in-person engagement program to more citizens.  Discussion Involving Neighborhood Engagement (DINE) consists of around ten simultaneous dinner table discussions where Santa Rosans will discuss questions of ethnic and cultural diversity.  

This year Santa Rosa wants to use CivicIdeas to extend the discussion to people who are unable to attend the dinners.  The idea is to host the discussion questions online a week prior to the event in order to give people a preview of the discussion topics before the event and a chance to get the conversation going early.  For the night of the event itself, the goal is to do a sort of “live-tweeting” (via CivicIdeas) of one of the in-person discussions in order to share it with a larger group online.  We also want to keep the online discussion open for a couple of weeks afterward in order to enable the participants to continue the conversation.  

A possibly obvious question is, why not use Twitter to live-tweet the event?  A possibly obvious answer is that we want to see how well Civicideas handles this type of use case!   Also, live-tweeting an event via Twitter has a tendency to overwhelm your audience with a barrage of tweets that most of them may not be interested in.  Live-tweeting via Twitter also requires a popular hashtag in order to be fully successful and I’m not aware of hashtag for such a specific topic as ethnic and cultural diversity in Santa Rosa, California.  We could include some universal hashtag communities but it’s important to the City that this conversation focus on their population’s opinions.  

One of the main challenges in this project is that Santa Rosa’s CivicIdeas site is still very young so it will be difficult to attract enough participants for a vibrant online discussion.  Like with Twitter, it will be tough to keep from entirely dominating the discussion with live posts of comments from the in-person discussions.  The advantage that CivicIdeas has over Twitter is that the discussion is entirely focused on a single topic so there is a far smaller chance of annoying our audience with irrelevant content.  

The keys to success will be to invite interested people to the online discussion and move the conversation forward by offering links to next steps and additional resources.