With a $12 billion budget for 200 major IT programs and a total of $82 billion to spend on IT projects this year, it’s really hard to understand why the government just can’t get it right with digital initiatives. After all, innovations like Facebook have taken off, whereas Healthcare.gov, well, not so much.
According to Fast Company, “the government doesn’t take the same approach to software development that startups do,” explains Matthew McCall, a health technologist who started a well-known petition urging the government to open-source Healthcare.gov when it became obvious that its problems were copious. The government has tens of billions of dollars to ensure success, yet can’t achieve it — while startups with no money often manage to create popular products.
Why does the government have such a problem with technology? Startups are focused on creating a popular product as quickly as possible and once users provide feedback, it can be changed to better suit their needs. The government does the complete opposite of this.
McCall states, “government development focuses more on gathering comprehensive requirements up front, issuing a contract for the work, and managing the contractor during the build out. This ‘big bang’ approach typically means longer development time with little to no customer validation.” Changes are only made if a requirement is no longer valid, which causes developers to no longer focus on the products usefulness.
There are a number of policies in place that make the government different from a startup, like The Paperwork Reduction Act, which prevents developers from asking the public questions about products quickly. In general, many of the governmental policies in place slow down the process of production.
Of course, the government is also more risk-averse, simply by nature because if they get hacked, it is more of a big deal than if a startup was to be hacked.
Fortunately, there’s seems to be a solution this problem. (And no surprise, it’s a start-up.)
OpenGov, a company founded by Zac Bookman and Mike Rosengarten, is helping state and local governments shed their 30-year-old spreadsheets and visualize all data simply with just a few clicks.
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Need more money to control fires? Cities using OpenGov can immediately see how much money has been spent on fire and safety and where they can reallocate money from to help reduce wildfires.
Bookman explains, “there is an epidemic in governments of all shapes and sizes across the country. If you are the mayor of a city and I ask you a basic question about your data like, How much have you spent on police hours over the last five years?’ you probably don’t know of the answer.” With OpenGov, this answer can be found easily.
Major cities like Los Angeles and Palo Alto are already using this to help with city government, as are residents, as OpenGov isn’t just for city officials. Cole explains, “it’s to our benefit as public servants to demystify budget data to rebuild trust through transparency and accountability.”
So, why didn’t the government create this solution earlier?
Often, the problem stems from the lack available talent. The best engineers want to work for companies like Google or Facebook, not the government. Those big companies have better recruitment tactics than the government does, and according to Rosengarten, “if more students understood the problems or that the potential opportunity to solve real hard challenges with the local governments, they would get more excited.”
Although governmental work will never be as sexy as, say, working for Twitter or Square, the government does offer coders with the opportunity to code for a better world.
McCall notes, “if government can attract and retain people who want to make a difference and are given that opportunity, I think it will go a long way.”
Tag: government
A Historic Minimum Pay Hike on the Horizon for One American City
Want to reduce poverty? Increase the minimum wage. It’s that simple, say a handful of reports, and Seattle is on the verge of a city-wide raise.
On May 1, the mayor of the Pacific Northwest bastion announced an ambitious move to up the base wage there to $15 an hour — the highest of any major city worldwide, reports Quartz.
While workers cheer, a common business-owners’ lament is that increasing their costs will cut hiring and spur layoffs. But early data on a handful of areas that have boosted their pay scales suggests that businesses aren’t going under because of wage requirement bumps.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that nudging the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would put $31 billion in the pockets of American workers, 19 percent of that going to families currently living below the poverty line.
At the same time, however, the CBO estimates that some 500,000 would lose their jobs. But San Francisco saw none of the bust and all of the boom when it raised wage minimums to $10.74.
“Our data show that an increase up to $13 an hour has no measurable effect on employment,” Michael Reich, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor, told the Seattle Times. The same for Santa Fe: The minimum wage — upped from $5.15 to $8.50 in 2004 — “seemed to have helped workers and not hurt business too much,” researcher Nicholas Potter told the newspaper.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray‘s plan rolls out the increases over the next decade, and it still has to pass the city council. So while the local burger slingers can’t celebrate yet, they might be able to soon.
Survey Reveals That Libraries Are Seen as Vital Resource for Communities
No longer is a library’s sole function to lend books to patrons. But despite their mission morphing and adapting to changing technology (hello, e-books!), public libraries continue to play a central role in people’s lives.
Case in point: A 2013 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 63% of people said that closing a library would have a big impact on their community. Additionally, women, low-income people, African-Americans, and people with lower levels of education were especially likely to say that libraries offered essential services to them.
One such important service? Access to e-government, which consists of all the information and forms that the government makes available online to its citizens. A study First Monday published last December sought to determine the extent to which people rely on libraries to access e-government services — everything from filling out tax forms to registering for FEMA assistance to learning about government programs. The study, which was conducted by researchers from the University of Rhode Island and Florida State, found that librarians are spending a significant amount of their time and resources helping patrons access and interact with e-government services.
The researchers examined libraries in Indiana and found a big variance in how much each one is used for e-government, with urban library staffs spending up to 40% of their time helping people with such tasks, while rural librarians spend 15% of their time doing so. The study estimated that it costs each library about $26,000 a year to provide the computers and internet access necessary for e-government — but even at that somewhat reasonable cost, libraries are finding it difficult to fund the broadband necessary for smooth access. The authors of the study write, “Public library budgets are being cut in the face of economic recession, making it more and more challenging for libraries to update computers, support faster broadband speeds, and educate staff.” Perhaps spreading the word about just how much Americans rely on libraries will help rally support to make their funding a priority.
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