#cfasummit — Public Fediverse posts

August 19 – 25

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

[1] GX+ Season 4 complete

At the start of 2024, we created a new model for how work would be organized across the GX Foundry. We used a “seasons” conceptual model, where we take an 8-week period and break it up into 1 week of prep, 6 weeks of work, and 1 week of wrap-up, all in a TV show or streaming TV service metaphor. We used the metaphor in order to escape the dogmatic thinking that often pervades things like Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and other models. (A big inspiration was the Shape Up concept pioneered by the folks at Basecamp.) By creating something new, modeled on familiar things, we could make it our own and create our own rules and definitions. The TV stuff made it more fun, too.

Well, this week was the end of Season 4. At the end of each Season, we gather and share accomplishments from the past 8 weeks. It’s a mini-celebration, and a chance to tell our peers about the work we’ve been doing, because we’re all so heads-down focused on our stuff we don’t get much of a chance to see what everyone else is doing.

We’re working on a post for the GX Foundry website that should come out this week that will summarize everything and share versions of our slide decks. We’re still evolving this model and how we share the results, but one thing is clear — we want to hold ourselves publicly accountable and share our work with others in the #govtech space.

For fun, here are 3 individual slides from each of the decks created by the teams:

Our GX Concourse team (just 2 people so far, working on our new countywide digital service hub) shared their top-line accomplishments from the last 8 weeks. High design is Sarah Gray’s specialty, so it really stands out in our collection.This is the “overview” slide from the GX Development team, as assembled by Eric Nutt. Eric has become a nut (see what I did there?) for Charlie XCX, so he’s having a brat summer and decided to use the user-hostile design popularized by the artist. The whole deck is like this. So you either find it endearing or your find it annoying. No middle ground!Finally, just one slide from the GX Platforms team, assembled by Denise Roberts. This one had multiple animated GIFs and shared some of the challenges we’re having with getting Atlassian products into the hands of multiple agencies—all because the county’s lawyers don’t know how to balance business benefit with risk management in the procurement process. The lawyers are holding up digital transformations that would improve the work of hundreds (if not thousands) of county employees simply because they’re not sure if we can “trust” one of the biggest software corporations on Earth. Yeah, okay.

Stay tuned to our GX Foundry site for a GX+ Season 4 recap soon!

[2] Excited to work with USDR on matters of #govtech talent

Also had a brief meeting this week with Keith Wilson from the talent division at U.S. Digital Response (USDR) to prep for our engagement around talent development and structure within our GX Foundry digital services team. It also happened to be a big announcement week for USDR…

• USDR announced the fully public launch of their Talent Toolkit
• And you can access the Talent Toolkit right now on their Gitbook site — https://usdr.gitbook.io/talent-toolkit

We’ll be talking with USDR volunteers in the weeks and months ahead to review job descriptions and our team compositions and structures. We want to be growing in the right ways to handle current and future digital needs.

[3] Storytelling for fundraising

Much has already been said about this, but I didn’t want the week to pass by without calling attention to the sharpest example of storytelling I’ve ever seen when it comes to fundraising. Yes, this is the infamous “Doritos” email message from the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. A snippet is below:

This is just a remarkable use of storytelling to evoke feelings and images and human-scaled relatability for the reader. I’m sure this is at least a part of the reason they’ve raised $540M since Biden dropped out of the race. And this kind of message would work with either party — storytelling is a territory anyone can traverse.

[4] Miscellanea

• I recently appeared in a NACo webinar and shared the info and links on the GX Foundry website — A bit about how we moved from projects to products in our digital work
• Our friends at Code for America dropped all their 2024 Summit videos, and I shared the links and my favorites — Code for America Summit 2024 videos now available
• HBR posted a great collection of ways to build team cohesion regardless of team location — 17 Team-Building Activities for In-Person, Remote, and Hybrid Teams
• We have a brand new Project Manager starting this next week, and I’m excited to see how she will mesh with the changes we are bringing to our processes.
• We also selected a new Business Analyst to hire next month. He joins us from the Help Desk and has a keen solution-focused and user-supportive mind to add to our abilities.
• We finished the first pass of 2025 budgeting this past week. It was like pulling teeth this time. But we’ll vastly improve it for next year.
• One key request in the 2025 budget is the purchase and deployment of a countywide Employee Experience platform. I’m assuming it will be shot down this year, then the outcry from users will become evident over time and we’ll have to do it in 2026. Of course, it’s possible county leaders will see the value and fund it right away. We’ll see!

[5] Watch This

As noted on the GX Foundry site, the Code for America Summit 2024 videos are out. There are several really good ones, but the one below is one of my favorites. It’s wonky stuff aimed at the #govtech and #civictech folks out there, but it’s a good discussion. I can’t thank the Beeck Center or USDR enough for their public service.

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

[6] Internet Funnies

This next one is another masterpiece in social media promotional messaging. Whoever did this at the National Park Service needs a raise. (And yes, I have been to Mammoth Cave National Park — it’s a very, very big cave system, so… what were you expecting?)

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/08/25/2024-weeknote-34-gx-season-4-is-a-wrap/

#budget #CfASummit #civictech #CodeForAmerica #comics #funnies #Govtech #Gx #GXFoundry #GX_ #NACo #procurement #storytelling #talent #USDR #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).

Married in 1959 — a full 65 years ago this month

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

A post liked by civic tech luminaries and Bob Sutton, of all people

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

May 27 – June 2

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

I’m not going to tell you what the way is. You’ll have to figure that out yourself.

This week was mostly consumed with flying to San Francisco, attending the Code for America Summit in neighboring Oakland, flying back to Ohio, and trying to catch up on a few things at home and at work (including sleep).

I’ve already detailed thoughts and reactions to the conference over on the GX Foundry site, so you can see those notes here:

• Code for America Summit – Day 1
• Code for America Summit – Day 2
• Code for America Summit – Day 3

Got to see Kara Swisher at the conference, which was fun. She didn’t really belong there, naturally, but she had some nice comments and was plenty entertaining.

Miscellanea

The conference was the thing this week. I’ll be catching up more next week. But one minor note…

The latest “story card” for the “We Are #FCDC” series comes out on Monday, June 3 in print but already came out via LinkedIn newsletter. That’s the third one so far. And I may be getting some help with that going forward. So far that’s been a solo effort.

Internet funnies

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

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/06/01/2024-weeknote-22-code-for-america/

#blogging #cfa #CfASummit #codeForAmerica #conference #FCDC #Oakland #sanFrancisco #SFO #weeknote