#beeckcenter — Public Fediverse posts

October 14 – 20

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.

One Thought: What happens when an AI launch is half-baked

(Reposted from LinkedIn) If you launch #AI into your government operation without thinking it through, this is the kind of story you can expect:

‘AI-Mazing Tech-Venture’: National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees

There is no need to deploy #genAI as an early adopter unless you have a large ML-friendly data set that can be mined for BI-style insights that you couldn’t get with traditional methods.

Should you experiment at small scale in lab conditions? Sure, if you have discretionary budget. But launching an LLM at employees (maybe to declare some kind of “leadership” victory?) will look desperate and may cause a lot of trouble.

This is doubly true if your agency doles out facts to the public and adds AI into the official service chain.

And just politically speaking, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should probably be one of the last to deploy AI, not the first.

Do we really want AI bots addressing public questions of who shot Kennedy, or did Trump illegally withhold documents from NARA itself?

Five Notes

1. It’s already been widely publicized and praised, but in case anyone missed it, the Digital Service Network at the Beeck Center released their Government Digital Service Team Tracker this week and it’s a fantastic resource for finding other digital service teams across the country and explore their sizes, structures, and roles. And yes, our very own GX Foundry is in there.
   • BONUS: That team tracker is just one resource sitting inside the Digital Government Hub, a new centralized database of resources to help out government digital teams as they work toward their myriad goals. It’s a stunning achievement and deep resource.
2. Stay tuned to our GX Foundry website for 2 new positions we will be posting next week. We will be adding a Digital Product Owner and a Digital Communications Strategist to the team that is leading the One Franklin County project. Both will report to hiring manager Sarah Gray.
3. HBR re-released a podcast episode titled How to Make Better Hiring and Firing Decisions that’s really solid. Recommended advice.
4. I can’t remember how this piece got to me, but it was new this week and it’s (sadly) very, very applicable to my broader organization. Nice, nice, very nice. The piece is all about how an excessively “nice” organization culture can—surprisingly—destroy psychological safety and dissolve trust within teams.
5. The Rework podcast this week tackled a favorite theme of theirs: saying “no” to most requests and options. As the 37signals guys note in Say No by Default from experience, saying “yes” is deceptive. Because when you say yes, you’re actually saying no to hundreds of other options and possibilities. Saying yes is a cop-out, to get out of tough conversations about what really matters and making tough choices.

One Video: Beedeebeedeebeedee… What’s up, Buck?

I’m old enough to have seen Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) on broadcast TV. No cable. No DVR. No VHS. Just broadcast television, with the antenna and everything. I even had a model of the Buck Rogers fighter ship. This was just one show that came out of an explosion of sci-fi after Star Wars (1977) revived the genre. Battlestar Galactica (1978) was another popular example, and I saw that show’s feature-length pilot in a movie theater before it made it to the small screen. It was a wild time.

This show did not end well. It also didn’t start well. But as a little kid, I didn’t know that, and with only 4 broadcast stations to choose from, I was starved for media (compared to kids today). I was also a little transfixed as a kid because Mel Blanc—the voice of Bugs Bunny and more—was obviously voicing the robot Twiki. That blew my little kid mind.

I had fun taking this tour through a ridiculous bit of TV history. For the kids out there, this stuff is both laughable and cringe, and it shows just how far we’ve come. Compare this cash-grab to the likes of The Expanse (2015). That’s a huge leap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jGD6r0z_O0

Five Laughs

One Photo

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/10/19/2024-weeknote-42-2025-hiring-is-around-the-corner/

#AI #Beeck #BeeckCenter #BuckRogers #DigitalGovernmentHub #DigitalServiceNetwork #DSN #firing #funnies #genAI #Gx #GXFoundry #HBR #Hiring #NARA #nice #no #Saguaro

July 29 – August 4

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

I don’t have a ton this week. Just one bigger piece and then some small updates.

[1] Clippy 2.0: “It looks like you’re trying to degrade society and the environment. Can I help?”

I’ve made my stance on LLM generative AI pretty clear: it’s intellectually interesting, useful in a handful of tightly-focused use-cases, but in no way lives up to the astronomical hype we’ve been hearing over the past 2-3 years.

So I was delighted to run across this thread on Bluesky that, to me, absolutely nails what is happening with the “AI industry” as it stands today. I am re-sharing it here because it’s just soooooo good. (Boldface added by me.)

The current AI industry is the new oil: they demand the right to extract resources, to pollute both the social space and the physical environment, and they claim there will be massive dividends for society so they should not be required to make safe or to pay. [link]

Essentially they are too important for small considerations like fresh water, energy consumption or the creation of millions of tiny automated lie machines to stand between them and profit. [link]

There are places where this technology can do remarkable things, notably in bio research. But what’s happening now is not the rollout of knowledge engines for the betterment of the human condition. It is the fulfilment of the stupidest prophecy ever made. [link]

The Paperclip AI was always a ridiculous bogeyman when taken literally, and always an excellent metaphor for capitalism or the fossil fuel industry. Yet here it is, actually happening. Tech companies are putting Clippy 2.0 in everything, at our cost. This is about making life into money. [link]

It is the acceleration of the shift from money being a promise to do work – an IOU – to a unit of energy consumed. The billions which will be made here are trash money: the dollar as an accounting of entropy. [link]

Daaaaamn, son. Nailed it. No notes.

We have to dial back the rhetoric on LLM-based generative AI. It’s useful for generic text production and it can be tuned to handle specific use cases that are text-based. But it’s not worth nearly the hype it’s generated.

[2] Miscellanea

• I’ll be joining Sarah Gray for a NACo webinar on Thursday, August 15 alongside Luke Norris from Granicus. You can sign up online here: Transforming County Services: From a Projects to Products Mindset – Insights from Franklin County, Ohio
• Had a great conversation with Keith Wilson at USDR this week. We’ll be working on some team structure / job description modeling in the weeks ahead. USDR also has great resources on talent practices that everyone in government tech circles should check out.
• Met with some Quickbase resources this week and brought in folks from one of our agencies that may get involved in the weeks and months ahead. It’s time we expanded beyond our own digital team to include “citizen developers” from other parts of the county to build solutions. We’re hoping to replicate—in a small way—what Washington, DC has done over the years.
• Attended a nice happy hour event on Thursday, hosted by one of our teammates. Nice to get out and chat beyond the confines of meetings.
• Also attended the Chief Digital Service Officers (CDSO) meeting this week, hosted by the Beeck Center’s Digital Service Network. Always great to catch up with that group.
• We continued our internal conversations about the global “intake” process for projects. It’s coming into focus now, but we’re continuing talks in the weeks ahead.
• Outside of work I also had an HOA board meeting this week. Yeah, I’m on an HOA board. But it’s not one of the bad ones that make headlines! 🤣

[3] Watch This

I am convinced the 1980s were the greatest single decade of pop music (and 1975-1999 is the greatest quarter-century), not just because of my age, but because musically the variety and quality of what was produced outstrips all pop periods that followed. Consider: Auto-tune was not created yet and synthesizers were simplistic devices back then, so the raw musical artistry and creativity required to make great pop music was just flat out higher.

So I’m delighted to have run across this recent cover of Toto’s “Rosanna” (1982) by some contemporary college-age kids. My hope is kids today (and going forward) will continue to discover and appreciate the pop and rock catalog from the late 20th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2yk_XElLM

[4] Internet Funnies

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/08/04/2024-weeknote-31-clippys-revenge/

#1980s #AI #BeeckCenter #CDSO #comics #DigitalServiceNetwork #DSN #funnies #music #NACo #Toto #USDR #webinar #weeknote #Weeknotes

June 3 – 9

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.

As a post-Code-for-America-Summit week, this one went by fast, but still had a lot happening. As I started to write this update on Sunday, June 9 was in Tennessee, south of Nashville, visiting my sister and her new home. She just moved from Minnesota and I was called in to do tech support on the various TVs, computers, Wi-Fi, and so forth. As I’m finishing this update, I’m back home in Ohio, late on Sunday night.

65 years

This past week started on Sunday, June 3 with a visit from my parents, as we got lunch together in central Ohio. But this coming week (June 11) is their 65th wedding anniversary, if you can believe that. These two kids got married in 1959, the same year Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as the 49th and 50th states, Eisenhower was president, and a new car cost $2,200 on average (about $23,700 adjusted for inflation).

A full 65 years of marriage (and counting) is unfathomable to me, so kudos to them for making it work, one way or another. Personally, I’m unlikely to see 65 years of marriage, as I got married in my 30s instead of my 20s.

Meanwhile, back at the office, a few updates…

My critique of AI

I launched a post on the GX Foundry site that got some traction: AI is a tool, not a mission. This one was a little bit of a rant about the prevalence Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatter at the Code for America Summit and elsewhere in civic tech. I just couldn’t take it anymore and had to fire a shot across the bow, staking out the ground that LLM-based AI is not transformational, it’s just on a hype cycle, and we need to think long and hard about what use this tool has in our public service mission. Plus, how about we get some fundamentals right first? I shared the post on LinkedIn, where it also made some ripples.

Hack your LinkedIn mojo

Meanwhile, another post on LinkedIn made bigger waves, at least to me. While away at the Summit we got the shipment of Hack Your Bureaucracy books we’ll be using to run a book club where about 20 of us read the book together, discuss it, and figure out how we can improve our operations. I shared a photo of the stack and noted what we’re doing. This got noticed by one of the authors, Marina Nitze, and she even offered to join us for one of the book club sessions! It also got liked by Bob Sutton, author of The Friction Project, worthy of a future book club. Even Jennifer Pahlka dropped a like on the post.

This stuff on LinkedIn doesn’t really change the world, but it is fun, and a chance to read a book where the author actually joins us for a chat is pretty special.

Rebooting “projects” somehow

Back in the real world (but still shared via LinkedIn), we posted a Project Manager position to start gathering candidates. But I have to admit, I’m conflicted about this role. Classic “project management” isn’t getting the job done for us, and I’m not entirely sure why. We’re starting to explore some new thinking around this, but we don’t have an alternative model to share yet. If we figure out a new way of running projects, we’ll share it somewhere.

Chat with USDR

A U.S. Digital Response (USDR) contact I made at Code For America was kind enough to spend about 30 minutes with me this week to explore setting up a consulting agreement where we would get some volunteers from the USDR network to review our current staff construction, compare it to industry exemplars, and advise on how we could change over time to meet our intended digital service mission.

I know we are not currently setup for maximum success in the digital services space, but it’s hard to know where to focus next for improvements. For example, I know we need actual UX Research capacity, but is that the most important thing to hire next? What about an experienced Product Manager (or Owner) to teach us how to get that practice moving? Whatever the case may be, I just want another set of eyes on our current team capabilities, compared against our aspirations so we can prepare for the future thoughtfully.

Hopefully something comes together with USDR in the next month.

We need a national boot camp for government digital service teams

I have some notes and want to spend time writing this up, but in short I realized at the Code for America Summit that there’s no “boot camp” or other onboarding program to teach the fundamental concepts of developing digital services in a government organization. There are tons of resources out there, but they are not organized in a “teaching” mode where someone can get up to speed quickly on the basics. I think this is a problem to be solved.

Imagine: You’re working for a government entity that has not yet even thought about digital services, but to get started you go to the Code for America Summit. You’d be completely lost. I was able to keep up with all the presentations and ideas at #CfASummit, but only because I’ve been self-studying this stuff for the past 2 years.

Given how many government teams need to build digital capacity, we need to get something together in the industry that teaches the basics, points to examples, and builds a core set of resources to learn more. A “Government Digital Services 101” course, if you will. The raw elements are out there, they just aren’t organized.

I shared this idea with the Beeck Center and turns out Kirsten Wyatt was thinking the exact same thing! Indeed, she had at least one meeting last week to start some of those talks! So maybe something will come together, maybe even soon. I hope I can help out somehow.

Miscellanea

• My latest drive-to-Alaska photos post is live. Only one more to complete the set (coming next week).
• The Chief Digital Service Officer (CDSO) meeting, hosted by the Digital Service Network (DSN) at the Beeck Center was held this past week, showcasing a research report from students at UNC that looked at the structures, funding, and goals of digital service teams across the country. Can’t wait to see that published for everyone.
• Before the night is out, I will be filing my response to the Beeck Center’s request for survey responses for a new fellowship they are creating. I’m a little late, but hopefully I can help out.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle, most often from Bluesky.

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/06/09/2024-weeknote-23-back-from-the-summit-with-ideas/

#1959 #AI #anniversary #artificialIntelligence #BeeckCenter #CDSO #CfASummit #CodeForAmerica #DSN #HackYourBureaucracy #Hiring #LinkedIn #LLM #projectManagement #Tennessee #USDigitalResponse #USDR

#govtech #civtech #digitalservice friends, please share this opportunity. Come be a #Georgetown Fellow, leading the #BeeckCenter team whose mission is to help governments work together to solve common software problems. The potential for this to help governments serve people better is enormous.

https://universeodon.com/@civicunrest/109627414157598019

https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/jobs/fellow-intergovernmental-software-collaborative/