#gx-foundry — 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

I didn’t realize you could have something like a “Saguaro Forest” in the desert southwest, but indeed you can. This was on the road to Mount Lemmon, northeast of Tucson earlier this month. The heat wave hitting the area was a little unwelcome during our visit, but as the days have turned a bit cold and grey this week… hmm… that heat wave doesn’t sound so bad.

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

September 16 – 22

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

[1] A bit of branding and awards

This week marked a couple of major milestones.

Our name in lights

First, we finally (FINALLY!) mounted our neon-style LED sign for the GX Foundry in our office. I bought the sign in late 2023 and we waited months for our facilities group to help us mount it. They failed to engage with us for over 9 months so we took care of it ourselves. The credit for the clean mounting really goes to Aaron Szabo, our designer, who has a lot of experience with building and mounting branding elements like signage, conference displays, and more. Aaron also developed the GX Foundry logo in 2022-2023.

Here’s a shot from inside my office, looking out into the dark central office (a lot of folks prefer to have most of the overhead lights off), with the “neon” sign lighting up the space:

And here’s a closer shot:

Mission (Patches) Accomplished

The stickers below the sign are the Mission Patches celebrating key 2023 initiatives. We will add more patches later this year. And that leads to the second major milestone passed this week. We formally launched the organization-wide Recognition Program this week, with an all-staff awards ceremony on Tue, 9/17.

We handed out nearly 70 mission patches across multiple teams for work done during 2023. (Yeah, we’re late, but this was our first time and we had to hash out a lot of elements to get this done, including a painful procurement process. We’ll be faster going forward.)

Below is a shot of the Enterprise Technology Mission Wall, with tons of 2023 mission patches to get them started. This grouping represents a bunch of teams that work in multiple infrastructure disciplines and support:

This org-wide program grew out of the mission patch program I launched at the start of the year just with the GX Foundry, with the idea taken from the UK’s Government Digital Service and other sources.

Mission patches may seem a little silly or overdone, but they’ve been really well-received by our teams and they give credit where it’s due. Our teams do a lot of work for our partners, but they also work hard on building positive cultures and practices. Celebrating that work is a great way to get more of the good stuff and say thanks for the dedication.

Mission Patch Technical Details

• Patch designs are developed within a hexagon shape so they can fit together immediately and over time as patch collections grow
• Patch graphics are developed in Adobe Express or Canva, at pixel densities to enable high-res printing at up to 8″ in height (generally a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel image)
• Graphics are sent to a print-on-demand service, with enough 3″ patches for each project participant and one 8″ patch for mounting on the team’s Mission Wall
• All mission patches are custom-printed on vinyl

Our next round of awards are expected before the end of 2024 (celebrating the first half of the year), and then another batch in early 2025 (celebrating the second half of 2024). So we’re catching up fast. We expect to continue the pattern every 6 months, building out our Mission Walls and our personal collections.

[2] Miscellanea

• Saw an excellent AI piece this week: Challenging The Myths of Generative AI, which included a lot of smart quotes, but a key thing I wish everyone understood is this:
  • …a Large Language Model is a statistical model of the language contained within pre-selected training data. The model is a result of that training. As such, it does not ‘learn’ but is created through data analysis.
• We’re building a tabletop exercise to explore the “hand off” between our partner relationship managers (what would be sales reps or account managers in the private sector) and our business analysts. I’ve never built a tabletop exercise before, so… this should be interesting! We hold it next week.
• We had session 6 of our Hack Your Bureaucracy book club this week. Still going strong.
• We completed a whiteboarding / discovery session with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) team this week (yes, they work on what you think they do, and it’s super-sensitive). We’ll be working with them to improve their technology, which will speed up their work dramatically. When you’re routinely pushing 20-30TB around your PC or around the secure network, you need some speed.
• We had session 2 of our Digital Services Academy with Granicus, and started to dig in on some truly awful forms we present to the public. It’s kinda stomach-churning to realize just how far we are from meeting the public where they are, especially when they are coming to us for help. If you think the IRS’ 1040 form is bad, try applying for public assistance anywhere in Ohio. At least Michigan had Civilla to help them along.
• I’m struggling with a resource management / client management problem that has been building for over 2 years and is now reaching a breaking point. There’s no easy or obvious answer and I can’t find a win-win-win solution. Best I can do is win-win-lose (kinda like the iron triangle of project management, I suppose).
• We’re less than a week from making an offer to an Application Developer candidate, to join our GX Foundry team. Very excited to see the culture shifted a little with a new hire.

[3] Watch This

This week saw the public release of new software at all layers of the Apple ecosystem, including iOS 18. There are tons of videos out there to walk through new features, but one of the most accessible to a general audience is just about anything Joanna Stern publishes.

https://youtu.be/7jEeJjMkU74

[4] Internet Funnies

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/09/21/2024-weeknote-38-deck-the-walls-with-mission-patches/

#AI #brand #branding #Civilla #digital #digitalServices #DSA #forms #funnies #funny #Gx #GXFoundry #ICAC #Mission #missionPatch #neon #sign #stickers #tabletop

September 9 – 15

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

[1] Reddit therapy, growth mindset, psychological safety, and leadership

I don’t have a lot this week, but I did stumble across this little gem shared on Reddit…

This brought up all kinds of thoughts. It feels like this is the way government teams often think. And I can definitely point to cases where I’ve done this to myself or seen it in others. Those bars are very comforting to hold on to, even if they can hold you back.

At work, we’ve been promoting the “growth mindset” concept for a couple years now, and this graphic might illustrate it perfectly. Just fly out one of the open sides!

Of course, it’s not that simple. Flying requires energy. Having agency requires energy. It requires taking responsibility.

When all the articles about “psychological safety” at work started coming out a few years back, I thought, “What is this B.S.?” I’ve since changed my mind on that, and I think this graphic hints why. The bars in front of the bird, though they are constraining, are at least “safe” — the bird knows where they are, knows their strength, knows he can’t slip between them. Flying out the side of the cage requires the bird to plot his own course and take his chances. That’s not “safe” in a lot of workplaces.

So what are you doing, as a leader, to make flying to the left or to the right safer for your team? Or are you all about the bars.

[2] Miscellanea

• This weeknote is shorter because I put more energy intp a new post over on the GX Foundry site: Learning to share the joys of UX research in local government
• Next week is the culmination of the “recognition program” awards I started at the end of last year and start of this year with the GX Foundry. Now it’s going wide, with nearly 70 individual 2023 awards spread across our full organization. We share all the work on Tuesday… and it’s only several months late!
• We had our first Digital Services Academy with Granicus this past Friday. Good class, and Sarah had the smarts to invite everyone from across the GX Foundry. It’s a solid intro to some UX research concepts. 9 hours in total.
• We’re working on a proposal for some new branding for FCDC. Excited to put something together for consideration. No idea if it will fly. But it’ll be cool. We’re taking the core elements of the GX Foundry logo and remixing it into multiple logo treatments for use with the broader organization and her teams. It’s a fun “system” of branding. Not holding my breath, though.
• I finally opened a GX Foundry Swag Store this week. You can look, but don’t order if you don’t work with me. Everything gets shipped to our office. So buy me something if you like! 🙂

[3] Watch This

Back in the day I was a regular Chili’s customer and not just at the airport! But like its basic restaurant chain brethren, quality of service and food fell over time and I stopped going. In recent years I’ve assumed they were either out of business or headed there. So it was interesting to see Chili’s is a standout in their sector these days, increasing revenue quarter over quarter in the years since the pandemic eased. This is their comeback story (and I love a turnaround).

Still not going back, myself. (Though I do miss those southwestern eggrolls.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuMjjIjX8_8

[4] Internet Funnies

In the wake of the Harris / Trump debate this past week, there’s a lot less non-political funny stuff online, so this week’s edition of the Funnies is a bit limited.

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/09/15/2024-weeknote-37-i-have-concepts-of-a-weeknote/

#Bluesky #branding #chiliS #FCDC #growthMindset #Gx #GXFoundry #InternetFunnies #Leadership #psychologicalSafety #Reddit #swag #UX

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 24 – 30

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.

[1] GX+ Season 3 is a wrap

Our teams finished “Season 3” this week, and it was another solid effort from the GX Foundry. What’s a Season? In simple terms it’s an 8-week period where we spend 1 week in prep, 6 weeks delivering work, and 1 week in wrap-up activities. We use the “Seasons” terminology to avoid colliding with terms like “sprints” or other concepts. And to make it a little fun, like we’re show-running a TV series.

I won’t go into a lot of detail (I’ll save it for the GX Foundry site), but in a quick list the team…

• Completed the annual Water Quality Reports for print and online distribution
• Launched a completely revamped recruiting section of the Sheriff’s website, with a ton of new content based on their DEI goals
• Completed a collaborative security isolation project to move the county’s Bid Opportunities website into a hermetically-sealed container (so to speak); this was a lot of deep technical work and required security, networking, server, and developer teams to coordinate a ton of configuration and testing
• Developed and launched a new community-driven referral application (online) for the Sheriff’s office, designed to intercept youth that may be heading down a bad path, redirecting them toward better options with direct community support. (I’m not linking to it for privacy reasons.)
• Launched a “2.0” edition of the Unclaimed Funds application for the Auditor’s office. This revised edition now has a fully-digital workflow, including document upload, signature submissions via DocuSign, and an email-based back-channel between residents and staff running the program. All that is new! This work boosted an already heavily-improved process and application. A year ago that app was a green-screen COBOL application.
• Continued active support and tweaking of the Box Fans 2.0 app for the Office on Aging. As the summer heat has taken hold in Ohio, it’s been vital to keep this effort up.
• Attended the Code for America Summit for the first time (well, 4 of us did), picking up ideas, contacts, and validating we’re headed in the right direction.
• Presented our Unclaimed Funds 1.0 app at the national Quickbase annual user conference called Empower 2024.
• Completed initial home page wireframes and baseline design elements for the new 2.0 public-facing website for the county, due to be launched next year. This includes a draft information architecture / menu structure.
• Completed an intensive Power BI analysis on election data for our elections board, slicing and dicing voter demographic data in excruciating detail.
• Built a collection of 2025 staffing and project recommendations, since we budget sooooo far in advance.
• Absorbed the Delivery Services team under my management. While that’s not a GX Foundry activity, it definitely ate up a lot of my attention. And it will devour more in Season 4, too.

Our next season starts immediately and there’s always more to do. We’re even looking at working on something that could have come right out of the book we read last year…

[2] Recoding America just got real

It hasn’t happened yet, but we might be starting work on a project that could have been taken out of the pages of Recoding America. A handful of agencies with a long list of disparate social services—justice, senior, child, job, and family support—want to assemble under one banner and… create a unified, digital intake form.

This is discussed in the book and the mistake called out is simply cramming all the different forms together and having Residents fill out a “mega form” that’s confusing, too long, and often duplicative. We’re on alert for that.

I just typed up the core idea over the weekend and we’ll start discussions next week, but hopefully we can do a tiny version of what Civilla did in Michigan.

The only problem? No one has UX Researcher skills or capacity today—not our team, not the agencies involved. To get started, we’ll likely have to “wing it” for a while, then push to add UX capacity so we can ensure we’re building better GX, not just more forms.

[3] DS: RESET

Our Delivery Services (project management) team still needs help in getting things “reset” for a new approach.

We’re looking at creating a unique “Reset Week” in late July. We’ll bring everyone in-house for the week, clear our calendars, and spend nearly all day every day working on clarifying our mission, our motivators, our methods, and reviewing / updating all our project statuses and documentation collections. I even have a trip to the local ballpark on the agenda.

It’s sooooo hard to change the wheels on the bus… when it’s driving down the highway… and if you drop below 50 MPH you blow up. But we’re gonna try!

[4] Miscellanea

• I have so much email to catch up on it’s not funny. I have communications to get out to multiple folks across the country and county and will be spending most of the day today trying to catch up just on email.
• I’m hoping I might be able to go see what Washington, DC’s local government team is doing with Quickbase at their annual in-house “appathon,” if they’ll let me and maybe one or two others observe. They really are leaders with that platform and we could learn a ton.
• We’re in preliminary talks with Granicus about possibly making a presentation to NACo in August. Because I need more work! 😦
• My weekly recordings of Columbus Business First for the local visually-impaired nonprofit continue unabated. But I wonder whether I should drop it to focus more on work.
• Have I mentioned I love Stickermule? I get all kinds of stuff from them: stickers, wall graphics, floor graphics, posters, and we’re even getting acrylic signs for our upcoming “mission wall” installations. We just got custom Culture Code posters for the Delivery Services team this week. My latest “creation” is a pack of 50 magnets I can hand out, especially to our project managers and product owners:

[5] Watch This

I watch a lot of YouTube. I mean… A LOT. All kinds of stuff. Stand-up comedy, classical music concerts, animals, “fail” and “win” videos, and sometimes in the evening, just to put something on that’s quiet and relaxing, I check in with a particular barber shop in Sicily…

These “ASMR” videos are awesome. I can’t believe how well done they are. Key elements:

• No spoken words. Not a one. This makes the appeal universal / international and focuses your attention on the visuals and sounds.
• No smiling or mugging at the camera.
• Good audio of scissors, straight razors, shavers, shampoo and water, and the rest.
• Solid camera work (not the greatest, but plenty good, even for a 4K TV), including a handful of “trick” shots that play into the theme of the episode.
• Several of the videos introduce the barber shop client as a “character” of one kind or another, like the “hipster” in the video above.
• The shop appears to be run by a father / daughter team, and both appear in the videos, sometimes tag-teaming for different parts of a client’s service.

There are about a billion ASMR videos out there, and this is definitely not the cream of that particular crop. But these are a delight for lots of other reasons. Recommended.

[6] Internet Funnies

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/06/30/2024-weeknote-26-thats-a-wrap/

#ASMR #BoxFans #cfa #CodeForAmerica #DeliveryServices #Gx #GXFoundry #GX_ #InternetFunnies #projectManagement #recodingAmerica #season #stickermule #UnclaimedFunds #weeknote

June 17 – 23

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.

[1] Let’s create a national training program for government digital services

This week I posted commentary on the GX Foundry site on the need for a standardized government digital services training program, offered nationally, to challenge governments to focus on fundamentals (human-centered design, iterative development, user research and user experience, etc.) before pursuing AI solutions to everything. The post was sparked by this meme:

Meme created and shared on LinkedIn by Luigi Ray-Montañez at Coforma

I’m hoping, over time, I can convince colleagues at some of the think tanks and/or boutique consultancies to come together and make this real. We’ll see. Not sure I have enough time or energy to lead this charge myself.

[2] When digital service innovation gets real, emotions can run high

I am “workshopping” this section here for a potential post on our main GX Foundry website. I’m trying to figure out the best way to explain our goals for non-tech audiences working in local government agencies. Feedback welcome.

This week was a tough one on the frontier of our own digital service work: overhauling the public-facing website for our county and all her public services. Feelings were… shared.

As noted via our GX site and in other spaces, our big idea—taken from national examples—is to “flip the script” on our county’s various websites, changing them from being a constellation of agency-centric websites to being a unified citizen-services-centric destination. That is, we should meet the people we serve where they are (as much as we can) and not demand they learn the ins-and-outs of local government in order to access the services they want or need.

If we want to be citizen-centric and service-focused, it naturally follows that we will downplay agency names, downplay elected officials, and downplay government jargon of all kinds. We need to collapse all the standalone websites. We need to use plain language to present our services in ways that make sense to normal people. In this big pursuit, we envision ending up with 1 website with 1 root URL and 1 home page, not 40 home pages spread across 40 or more URLs.

For example…

If you need help getting enough to eat, today you can’t go to one website and find all your options. In fact, before you start, you need to think about whether you are a veteran, or over 65, or under 18—or any combination of those factors—before you start seeking services. Depending on your demographics, you might want to start from up to 4 different websites. (If you can figure that out.)

But to us, if you know you need food, why don’t you just show up at our (one) website and look for words and phrases that talk about “food assistance,” or use other words that make the most sense to you? We actually have several food-related services to offer:

• food assistance in the form of SNAP (a revised “food stamps” program)
• meals for seniors, whether mobile or home-bound
• information on local food pantries (that we don’t run, but we know about)
• dog food—yes, we offer limited assistance for dog owners in distress

Some programs offer discounts. Some are totally free. But they are all about addressing food insecurity issues for you and your family. So if you need food, look for food—don’t try to figure out which Agency to talk to.

Today, to access the help or info we offer, residents must know or figure out:

• the names of relevant county agencies
• the names of relevant program names or jargon
• what demographic categories they fall under, because that might mean they should go to a demographically-specific agency first (like a Veterans agency, or a seniors agency)
• how to call us or how to visit our offices in person, because a lot of services aren’t online yet
• whether there are any nonprofits in the area that could help

Our current website model, at a high level. It’s lots of individual, disconnected websites (there are 50+ sites) centered on Agency identities or major Programs that didn’t want to appear under an Agency website. And today there are very few fully-digital online services, which is why I only included 3 boxes. (Click the image for a larger copy.)

Maybe a Google search can point them in the right direction. Maybe not.

The problem…

We have these awesome services, provided by the best public servants you can imagine, but if you’re a resident that needs something, it’s your job to figure out our agencies and program names to get to the right place. That’s unfortunate if you’re looking for a marriage license or trying to register a new vehicle. But it could be really bad if you’re in distress—this approach can make a bad situation feel just a little worse.

Everyone working in our agencies is here to help! But right now our digital services are setup to reinforce agency boundaries, identities, and financial structures. None of which meets the public where they are.

Flipping the script feels like a threat

So we see the problem. We know unifying under a single site, with plain language that makes sense to normal people is the way to go. So everybody’s on board, right? Based on lots and lots of discussions and working sessions and shared research, we sure thought we were good to go. Nobody raised a red flag in the last 9 months.

Then this past week, despite all that preparation, I think people started to understand what we were proposing because they could see some draft home page wireframes and started to grapple with the information architecture (IA) in the form of menu structures. Suddenly the idea of grouping “Child Support” and “Children Services” under banner of “services for children” was a threat big enough to spark open arguments and back-channel calls to stop this madness and go back to using Agency identities to organize everything.

This was the first “open revolt” to hit the project. (Okay, that’s overstating it, but the change in tenor was palpable and caught us off guard.)

Not everyone was upset or confused. But it was clear our messages about the conceptual design of the “One Franklin County” project had not broken through until this moment.

Every resident, every day

So we’re going back to the drawing board—literally drawing—to develop some visuals and show what the future can look like and why it’s better for residents. The model below is too detailed for most folks, so we’ll do some simple web page wireframes, too.

Our future website model, at a high level. It’s one website at the root, with all the Services gathered into logical, plain-language groups, further gathered in audience segments (Residents vs. Businesses). We also intend to build out more and more digital services, jumping off from this centralized site. (Click the image for a larger copy.)

Ultimately what we want to do here is, in fact, radical. It’s a complete re-thinking of how we serve the public online. It’s Service-focused but we will ensure Agencies get direct credit for all their hard work (“SNAP benefits brought to you by JFS”). It’s Resident-first, not Agency-first. That’s not a minor change. But it’s the right thing to do.

After all, Franklin County’s tagline of choice is “Every resident, every day” — it’s not “Every agency, every day.”

It’s gonna be awesome if we can get this off the ground. We just have to get the shared vision established (or re-established).

[3] Culture Code for GX

Special thanks to expert facilitator Sarah for taking another team through this collaborative culture-coding process

After last week’s Culture Code development session with our Delivery Services team, this week we did it with the GX Foundry team.

These have been really helpful in understanding the thinking and motivations of all our team members, and giving everyone express permission to help build our culture together. We already have a solid team and it’s a positive place to work overall. But digging a little deeper into how everyone wants to work together will hopefully reinforce the best parts of working here and improve the rest.

Our draft set of expectations are below. This one’s a lot longer than the last one, and a lot more wordy! But this team has been together, working as a unit under the “GX” banner, longer than our project management group, which may explain why these items are a lot more specific.

A *draft* edition of the GX Foundry’s Culture Code, from 21 June 2024

Once we work out any remaining kinks, I think we can post this to the main GX Foundry site, to share it with our followers. CODE PA did something similar earlier this year.

[4] “No wrong door” beats “one door”

There’s an initiative in one part of the county to develop a “one door” approach to organizing services, bringing together a variety of human-service agencies under one roof (virtual or otherwise) to make providing services faster, easier, and more comprehensive and supportive for residents. I’m 100% in support of this idea and this work!

However, when it comes to “doors,” I prefer this tidbit over on the CODE PA website…

This dovetails with our thinking on the One Franklin County digital services overhaul: that we meet people where they are, and we don’t treat Residents as if they are “wrong” if they come in a “door” we didn’t intend for them to use. If they made it here, let’s work on getting them the services they need (and deserve).

This matters because the “one door” initiative—while laudable and innovative and deserving of more support from everyone—only covers about 13 or maybe 16 agencies… out of more than 40. So it’s one door for maybe 16 agencies, but there are still 24 or more doors out there. So yeah, keep going, friends! But let’s keep all our doors open.

[5] Miscellanea

• Just wanna say… Canva really is remarkable, at least to this old dog (who ran Aldus PageMaker from 3.5″ floppies on a Macintosh SE). What you can do in a web browser today is nothing short of stunning.
• We finished up Project Manager candidate intro calls this week. We’re taking 8 candidates through first round interviews over the next couple weeks. Hiring is still out in August.
• Worked with the Project Management team on a project description / summary exercise this week which was illuminating, even though we only got through a couple items. My realizations:
  • There are projects on our books today that we don’t really understand, and even the teams requesting the work don’t understand! These projects are destined for big trouble because things are not spelled out with enough detail, nor are they explainable in plain language at a high level. So… how do you know if you’re doing the right work in the right ways for the right outcomes?
  • This sparked an old idea… If you cannot explain the What, How, and Why of your project in simple terms—that any reasonably-intelligent business person can understand immediately—then you don’t really understand the project, and you can’t lead it.

[6] Internet funnies

A roundup of stuff that made me chuckle this week.

https://digitalpolity.com/2024/06/22/2024-weeknote-25-youll-need-ai-to-summarize-this/

#AI #CODEPA #county #cultureCode #digitalServices #emotions #funnies #government #Gx #GXFoundry #Hiring #IA #informationArchitecture #model #noWrongDoor #OneDoor #projectManagement #training #weeknote #wireframe