This is for everyone who:
If you work in public service — and in one way or another, we all do — your civic responsibilities include a commitment to:
Delivering services is not just the job of government officials. We must all commit to a new standard that meets changing needs and expectations.
Together, let’s serve with and for the people.
Before getting started, swear yourself in.
Take the Proudly Serving pledge:
I, [YOUR NAME], earnestly swear that I will proudly serve with a new standard of public service.
Every day, I will do my part to serve with and for the people.
I will hold myself and others accountable to this responsibility.
Congratulations on taking the first step.
Let’s start proudly serving.
By Luke Fretwell
The pillars of public service include government, non-profit, business, media, academia, and the public. By reframing our context for what it means to serve, we shift power dynamics from “the government” to “we are all public servants.” This empowers everyone to have a shared sense of responsibility, accountability, and unity.
Our traditional image of public service is the taxpayer-funded civil servant who administers the work of government. The power dynamics put government at the top and the people at the bottom. Politicians and bureaucrats are public servants and everyone else, to varying degrees, are observers.
Engagement approaches and mechanisms are generally passive, performative, or non-existent, and lines of communication are limited or one-way.
Anyone who takes part in building and nurturing their community is a public servant and does public service. By actively respecting, recognizing, and honoring that we are all equal civic partners, we can create a better civil society with seamless collaboration, open communications, community pride and a strong sense of individual and collective empowerment.
Civil society is made up of a variety of actors, and each has an important role to play in its operational, fiscal, and social health. Their collective contributions must be seen not as problems to manage, but as opportunities and solutions that support and scale civic impact.
Reframing the context of public service empowers everyone to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and encourages others to take this responsibility seriously. It discards the “us vs. them” mindset that has a negative impact on a well-functioning civil society.
We tend to refer to parts of civil society in monolithic, disconnected “the” terms. “The government.” “The vendors.” “The activists.” “The press.” “The public.”
At times, perhaps more often than not, they’re referred to derisively, as if they’re an inconvenience that must be tolerated or placated. Or they’re used opportunistically, only when it’s convenient or necessary.
But each of these parts is an important pillar of the civic ecosystem, playing a valuable role in its well-being and growth.
The pillars of public service include:
If we consider all of these as pillars of public service, the outcomes outweigh the tradeoffs. While the process may take longer, better outcomes can prevail. Genuinely and intentionally including everyone is the cornerstone of true civics.
Whether formally or informally, take the opportunity to authentically acknowledge and appreciate the players in each pillar. At times, this may be difficult but, ultimately, recognizing and honoring one another encourages a virtuous civic cycle of earnest inclusivity and togetherness.
Everyone, in some form or another, is of service to others.
Government ensures our infrastructure is maintained or services are delivered. Non-profit organizations give support where others can’t or don’t. Businesses employ people, provide products and services, and create revenue that financially feeds into other pillars. The media informs us and, at times, exposes wrongdoings, keeping others accountable. Schools educate and foster intellectual growth that builds leaders, experts, and thoughtful decision-making. Community members vote, volunteer, engage in public forums, and pay taxes.
We’re all public servants. We all do public service.
By Luke Fretwell
Openness is a mindset and culture. It creates opportunities for exponential civic innovation. By embracing the values of collaboration, participation, and transparency, we instill trust while fostering better and faster solutions to problems both small and large.
When we isolate our processes and decision-making from the public, we limit the opportunity to truly create government with, for, and by the people. Opaqueness leads to ambivalence and mistrust. Taking an insular approach to service prevents us from leveraging the collective wisdom and energy of the people we serve.
Adopt an “open by default” culture that publicly shares information and processes — internally and externally — and actively solicits participation. By creating mechanisms that encourage government and the public to engage early and often, we create opportunities for increased participation and collaboration. This builds trust and a sense of betterment for the entire community.
An ethos of openness empowers organizations — public and private — to be more adaptive and responsive to the people they serve.
The Obama administration began using the term “open government” in January 2009, when President signed the “Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government,” which called for increased public sector transparency, participation, and collaboration:
Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with information about what the Government is doing. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal Government, across levels of government, and between the Government and private institutions.
President Obama’s Open Government Initiative ushered in an era of modernization in technology and operations, including open source software, open data, and innovative engagement methods, such as public challenges.
Technologists and designers have been early adopters to a culture of openness in government. This mindset is emphasized in play 13 — “Default to open” — of the U.S. Digital Services Playbook:
When we collaborate in the open and publish our data publicly, we can improve Government together. By building services more openly and publishing open data, we simplify the public’s access to government services and information, allow the public to contribute easily, and enable reuse by entrepreneurs, nonprofits, other agencies, and the public.
The United Kingdom (UK) government GOV.UK team is another example of government actively embracing openness, including a public roadmap that shows “what we’re working on and planning to do.”
From its official design principles:
We should share what we’re doing whenever we can. With colleagues, with users, with the world. Share code, share designs, share ideas, share intentions, share failures. The more eyes there are on a service the better it gets — howlers are spotted, better alternatives are pointed out, the bar is raised.
The Open Organization Maturity Model, a companion piece to the book “Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance,” offers a framework organizations can use to become more inclusive. The five concepts that constitute this framework are central to the values and mission of public service:
“An ‘open organization’ — which I define as an organization that engages participative communities both inside and out — responds to opportunities more quickly, has access to resources and talent outside the organization, and inspires, motivates, and empowers people at all levels to act with accountability,” writes former Red Hat CEO and IBM President Jim Whitehurst in “Open Organization.”
“The beauty of an open organization is that it’s not about pedaling harder, but about tapping into new sources of power both inside and outside to keep pace with all the fast-moving changes in your environment.”
Generally speaking, open by default is just the right thing to do. As the GOV.UK team mantra says, “Make things open: it makes things better.”
By Artem Khomishen
Digital channels — websites, apps, chatbots, social media, texts, email newsletters — are standard when it comes to government services and information. But just having an online presence isn’t enough to qualify as “going digital.”
Be intentional and build government digital services that truly focus on the needs of the people.
Despite widespread use, many government digital practices do not meet the needs of the people they serve. Digital services are often poorly managed and hard to use. Users face fragmented customer experiences that can erode their trust in government’s ability to adapt and improve.
Digital services that work well require a digital-first product mindset and agile approaches to technology procurement and delivery. Transparency and collaboration are the default way of operating internally and externally.
To achieve a digital experience that is easy to use, accessible to everyone, effective and efficient to manage, governments need to:
Digital is the primary point of engagement in everything we do. Governments must prioritize this to meet the needs of the public.
Going digital often means transforming analog or legacy processes into new formats and systems. Simply digitizing a form that was created decades ago does not equal going digital.
Service implementers also need to make sure services and processes are easy to use and address the needs of the public. Going digital means leveraging data, modern technology, user-centered design, and agile processes to deliver better digital services.
Governments use various digital channels to serve the public: websites, apps, emails, social media, chatbots, and more. They also need to think creatively when coming up with digital solutions and not be tied to what already exists.
Government now recognizes the importance of digital transformation. Initiatives like the Digital Service Playbook modeled by U.S. federal government initiatives provide a framework and guideline for developing effective services.
California’s Digital Strategy is an example of how state governments can prioritize a digital-first approach to its service delivery. Local governments can achieve this too, although they may need to innovate creatively and do more with less, relying on technology vendors and local partners.
Having an accountable and designated leader ensures that digital services are continuously improved and aligned with user needs. Accountability for product outcomes must start and end with the product owner, not their partners and stakeholders. Lack of product ownership can lead to digital solutions that are:
Successful digital services are built by teams that:
Ideally, product teams are composed of people with diverse skill sets, including product managers, designers, engineers, and data analysts. Smaller governments can create effective product teams by focusing on upskilling and cross-functional collaboration internally while leveraging external vendor help to fill gaps.
Agile practices are essential for delivering digital services that are responsive to changing needs and user feedback. It is critical to understand customer pain points and behaviors to deliver valuable products. Rather than focusing on specific frameworks and methodologies, teams should prioritize agility, adaptability, and collaboration. Adopting a minimum viable product (MVP) approach helps to deliver valuable services early and iterate based on real user input.
Governments should adopt technologies that are widely supported, open source, and interoperable. Avoiding proprietary technology solutions can improve sustainability, efficiency, and scalability.
Prioritizing best practices, accessibility, and performance across different devices will help deliver government services to more people — especially those who have low-performing devices and limited bandwidth.
The data collected through digital services should be used to:
It is equally important to manage this data responsibly, with a focus on privacy and security. Data often presents opportunities for better transparency — improving trust in government services.
By Jason Schneider
The pace of change has picked up. We used to experience periods of stability between disruptions. Change is now perpetual and pervasive. How do we build the systems, tools, and cultures that meet the changing needs of our communities today and into the future? We do it by thinking exponentially.
While the world experiences exponential change, our public institutions change more slowly. This creates an ever-widening gap between society’s needs and government’s services.
There is no one solution to addressing the exponential gap. There are thousands. These thousands of solutions come from practitioners trying ideas far outside the box and sharing results for others to learn from and build on.
The network of thousands of practitioners working to address the changing world creates systemic exponential thinking. This requires our organizations to be more flexible to try new ideas while working to develop systems for sharing results across organizations.
Exponential thinking is really a mental model. It’s a way of thinking beyond what exists right now and expanding the realm of possibilities.
It also doesn’t necessarily rely on innovations. Most often it’s rooted in the combination of two or more existing ideas in a new way.
The printing press is a good example. Gutenberg merged two ideas that had each been around for a few hundred years: movable type and the grape press for winemaking. This novel application of well-known tools accelerated societal change across the world by radically altering the speed and volume with which ideas could be stored and shared.
For the individual, thinking exponentially means breaking out of the linear tracks we usually operate within. This type of thinking comes naturally to children. Watch them mix and match toys, food, or clothes to see what the results are. Each new piece of knowledge exponentially expands what is possible for them.
This is usually trained out of us so we can put the square block through the square hole. However, we can take steps to bring this thinking back into our lives.
We can facilitate this type of thought by expanding our range of interests or expanding our network. Both approaches introduce new ideas for us to play with and create opportunities for novel thoughts, projects, or solutions. Not all of these mash-ups will be worth pursuing. Just like in childhood, many concoctions should never be served during a holiday dinner. But occasionally something remarkable happens.
On the organizational level, exponential thinking can occur closer to its true definition because of the network effect of many people working together. This collective exponential thinking can come from any group of affiliated individuals — be it a club, neighborhood, business, or government.
The private sector has long embraced the benefits of exponential thinking. It creates a competitive advantage for gaining customers and donors. This incentive helps businesses tolerate the risk of experimentation.
Unfortunately, public bodies have the opposite incentives. By nature, we are risk-averse. We do our best to steward public resources. No staff or elected officials want to be responsible for misuse of resources. This risk aversion stands in opposition to our obligation to address the exponential gap.
To meet this challenge, the public sector needs to create environments for exponential thinking without threatening public infrastructure, data, and security. While there are many ways to do this, agencies can facilitate this by focusing on three steps:
The multifaceted nature of exponential thinking in the public sphere is challenging to overcome. It challenges individuals. It challenges institutions. These challenges are uncomfortable.
It’s crucial to remember: Learning and growth only happen outside the comfort zone.
By Dustin Haisler and Joe Morris
Government can build a culture of innovation that survives organizational challenges and drives long-term results. Innovation starts with having the right foundation for sustainable, purpose-aligned programs.
Attempts to innovate in the public sector have had mixed results, and successes are often not broadly shared. Compounding this, many widely-recognized innovation projects have struggled with long-term sustainability because of election cycles and changing leadership. Part of the challenge is a misunderstanding of what innovation is and how to codify it into a public organization’s operations.
Understand that innovation is not the same as invention. Invention is the creation of something new. Innovation is about improvement or adaptation, about finding adjacent possibilities for what you already have (technology, people, etc.). There is no silver bullet for a successful innovation program, but there are elements that can ensure lasting success.
Government agencies across the country have put an increasing focus on being innovative. But they often don’t have a clear idea of what it is and how to implement it. They also tend to confuse innovation with invention or idea generation. True innovation is achieved when it’s embraced as an operating model and as the exploration of adjacent possibilities.
Once well established, innovation initiatives must be codified to survive well beyond election cycles. This can be done through governance models that leverage internal and external stakeholders who provide stability (and diversity of thought along the way). A public agency should have a seat at the table — but not be the sole driver of an innovation program.
Long-term innovation is made possible by laying the right foundation and continuously building on it.
Foundationally, agencies must start by engaging their community ecosystem. This includes employees, businesses, academia, non-governmental organizations, community organizations, and other stakeholders. This group should not just be traditional “leaders” — it must reflect the diversity of the community.
Next, agencies must align their innovation agenda with organizational or community challenges. They can start with pre-identified organizational or community goals (i.e., comprehensive plans, etc.) or leverage an open approach to help identify them. There are numerous tools and tactics that can help with this, including:
Once an innovation project or set of projects is defined and mapped to community needs, leverage agile methodologies for delivery. This means starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) of the innovation and continuing to iterate over time, working in predefined “sprints” (can be two weeks or one month).
Ensure that there are clearly defined milestones and key performance indicators to guide and benchmark the program along the way. Build resiliency in your program by empowering stakeholders with the ability to drive innovation projects.
Measure, adapt, and repeat. Innovation is a continuous process. Once one cycle or project is complete, analyze what has been learned and move onto the next challenge.
Finally, look for opportunities to share success and collaborate with other agencies. Although innovation programs may be regionally focused, many tactics and best practices are applicable to all governments.
There are numerous examples from inside and outside of government that demonstrate this bottom-up approach in action, including:
By Robbie Barton, Shari Davis, and Rahel Mekdim Teka
Serving the public effectively and inclusively is often at odds with top-down government decision-making. A participatory approach enables us to open space, unlock community leadership and innovation, and share power — especially when we center marginalized community members typically left out of government business as usual.
Typical government decision-making does not center the experiences, needs, and agency of the community served. Public servants are often not provided the time, resources, or support to engage deeply with the community. Residents often lack the opportunity, agency, and space to weigh in on the issues that directly impact them. This gap erodes public trust in government, ignores community expertise, and sets well-intentioned projects up for limited success.
By being participatory, we create an inclusive, collaborative culture of governance that connects us with our communities and unlocks shared potential to solve challenges together. By sharing power and centering those most impacted, we build trust and deepen relationships, create stronger lines of accountability and communication with the public, and address community issues at their roots. This mindset also helps us to build new skills, foster stronger relationships, and reimagine government.
A best practice participatory approach to public service is built on empathy, transparency, clear communication, and mutual accountability. It requires actively creating and sustaining multiple opportunities and channels for people to participate in every step of a process or effort. Critically, it places the experiences, ideas, and needs of those impacted at the center.
This opens up space for a collaborative culture to emerge that engenders trust, surfaces ideas, assets, and obstacles in a community, and fosters a deep sense of engagement and participation.
When participatory processes are done well, public servants feel confident and well-equipped to facilitate decision-making rather than tightly controlling it. Through consistent, deep public engagement, community members feel seen, heard, and empowered. The resulting programs and services are fully reflective of the entire community’s needs and desires.
Mutual trust and relationships that deepen over time reveal new opportunities to serve the public well, direct resources effectively, and address issues at their roots.
You can grow participatory culture in government on any level — within your team, across your organization, and with the larger public. Participatory processes of all sizes have been successful. The best ones strive to maximize impact and broaden participation.
For example, participatory budgeting has been used in over 7,000 places around the world to decide budgets for states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions. Community members have used this process to decide budgets ranging from thousands to tens of millions of dollars.
This participatory policy-making (PPM) model can be used for any organizational decision or policy. The PPM process model typically includes six phases:
Moving through these steps seeds a culture of trust and participation that often spills over into adjacent projects and departments. This leads to other benefits, like growing the bench of community members interested in serving their government.
Public servants who use this process also develop stronger skill sets in community relationship building, negotiating between stakeholders (including within the agency), communicating effectively and transparently, and modeling inclusive decision making.
To be participatory, we must ensure that every step of a process is:
By Laine Hendricks and Rebecca Woodbury
Guiding principles help organizations align their values to their goals. They serve as an aspirational North Star to help teams make design and content decisions. Guiding principles enable collaboration and consistency so products and services achieve better outcomes and build trust.
Local governments have a variety of products and services, such as websites, permits, and 311. Each service is managed by teams working within their own context and usually without a shared vision for success and desired outcomes. This can lead to inconsistency and make it hard for teams to collaborate.
A set of guiding principles gives teams managing products and services a shared vision for how to achieve their organization’s goals. Using these principles, teams make decisions and collaborate more easily. This alignment makes services more effective. It also ensures a consistent customer experience across all products or services.
Guiding (or design) principles can be overarching or for specific projects or services. The primary audience is often the people responsible for managing the services. The secondary audiences are typically leadership and constituents.
Principles should be memorable. For example, the U.K. government’s third design principle is “Do the hard work to make it simple.” By acknowledging that making something simple isn’t easy, the concept sticks in your head and feels important.
They should be concise, yet clear and specific. One of the design principles for the U.S. Web Design System is “Start with real user needs.” In five words, they say it’s important to do this at the beginning of a process.
Guiding principles should also be grounded in user research. This ensures they will reflect the needs of the people the organization serves.
Marin County, CA’s first guiding principle for web content is to be “findable.” This was based on extensive user interviews with the community as well as employees that showed the biggest pain point people had was finding what they were looking for. Community needs will change, so periodically revisit and revise guiding principles to ensure relevance.
Get organizational buy-in on your guiding principles by creating them through an inclusive process. The principles themselves should be written together with your team, and with the community. The user research you use to inform them should be reflective of the community you serve.
Once your principles are established, they should be referenced often. Share them:
By Daniel Soto
To ensure the success of products and services, governments must identify and empower a single product owner as leader.
As governments approach products and services, they often get stuck or deliver a product that doesn’t meet the needs of the people they intend to serve. This can happen when the product doesn’t have an owner. The team may be unsure of its next step, lack a vision, or not know where to go for help.
Governments need to appoint a product owner: one person who is ultimately responsible for carrying out the vision of a product or service.
Governments must empower the product owner to:
An empowered product owner will make sure a public service is successful.
A product owner is different from other leadership roles in government because it entails more than just supervision or management. Not everyone in leadership roles is good at deploying digital products and services.
Instead, government should embrace the concept of a product owner: a person who is responsible for carrying out the vision of a project.
A product owner works with others to champion a product or service from beginning to end. They are ultimately responsible for the success of the product or service. The product owner must be empowered to lead in a new way.
An empowered product owner should:
Know the difference between project manager and product owner.
A project is a one-time undertaking with the goal of creating a product. It has a finite beginning and end, as well as a defined outcome.
A product is a service, process, report, policy, web application, or website that satisfies the needs of users. It goes through a life cycle, being developed and introduced, grown, and improved upon, and retired once it’s no longer needed.
The project manager is a task master who makes sure that tasks and assignments are completed on time.
The product owner’s role encompasses the absolute ownership of the product or service — and extends beyond launch. The product owner’s role follows the life of the product or service.
For product owners to lead effectively, they must be fully empowered by leadership. This means those in decision-making positions within the agency explicitly identify and empower one individual as a product owner.
The empowered product owner:
As 18F’s Hannah Kane writes:
“An empowered product owner is someone who understands your organization, the problem we’re solving, and can advocate for the product we ultimately build together. They’ll be responsible for establishing and carrying out the long-term vision of the project, implementing a strategy, and guiding its progress.”
By Karen Daly
Government teams are often challenged by a lack of resources and focus. The Incident Command System (ICS) used in disaster response frameworks can help teams working on everyday services and projects be more effective. In disaster management, these tools empower teams and keep them aligned to the mission.
Teams are often not prepared to do the work they have been assigned. If they don’t have direction and adequate resources, they have the difficult task of trying to work effectively together to achieve their goal. There is power in teamwork, but it is often left unrealized when teams lack the tools and focus they need to conquer their assignment.
Incorporate ICS techniques to build strong and effective teams. These tools ensure everyone uses the same game plan and works towards a common goal. While designed for disasters, ICS techniques, at their core, are frameworks that help teams organize, respond quickly, and communicate. They’re applicable for any government project.
The tools developed to respond to disasters help disparate groups to work together and quickly align around a common goal. In disaster response, everyone is trained and follows ICS, which has been adopted as a national framework by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The principles of ICS are wonderful tools to use to support team success.
Here are some examples of how to incorporate these principles to create and achieve better teams.
The Incident Action Plan (IAP) is the roadmap that disaster response teams use to establish goals, document tasks, and communicate with each other. The IAP identifies tactics (how a task will be approached) that will be used to complete assignments that advance overarching goals (how the mission will be resolved).
This keeps the project moving along and ensures teams are accountable and timely. Deciding the frequency of IAP updates at the onset is paramount. It will depend on how often the team is scheduled to meet and the timeframe that is allocated to the team.
Regular communication within teams and to stakeholders increases accountability and ensures that the team is staying on track. Assigning a team member to be in charge of reporting progress, tasks, and other notable information keeps everyone on the same page. It also ensures that the team is reporting their progress to stakeholders.
Creating a team to tackle a project should be purposeful. Teams often need to be trained or oriented so they can function as a unit. Ensuring that each team member understands the mission and why they were selected helps the team embrace their role.
When teams have shared understanding of the talents, traits, and role of each member, their effectiveness increases. This can include personality trait assessment or other types of team talent analysis.
During a disaster, tools, equipment, and safety are paramount in the daily updates to the IAP. Giving teams the time and resources they need to complete their objectives is critical to success. Ensuring that individuals feel safe to make recommendations or explore innovation allows the team to be as creative as possible. Encouraging (or requiring) teams to provide frequent updates will ensure the team stays on track.
In disaster response, teams must do work that is not within their normal scope nor in their job description. Because disasters always cause disruption, the team has to adapt and innovate.
Applying this approach to other tasks allows the team to creatively identify solutions outside the norm. They may find outside-the-box solutions that would not be unearthed in typical day-to-day operations.
One of the most useful tools in ICS is the debrief or “hot wash.” This gives everyone a chance to look together at what worked, what didn’t, and lessons learned. It also gives all of those involved a chance to come together one more time to reflect and celebrate a job well done.
Too often, we finish a project and don’t even look up before moving on to the next task. Taking time to celebrate and acknowledge the team’s accomplishments is important to employees. This debrief also allows teams to learn from their experience and identify ways to improve in the future.
By Luke Fretwell
Government must take every action it can to present itself as official on the internet, whether it’s websites, email, or social media. This lessens public confusion about what digital properties and sources are legitimate. It also builds trust in government institutions.
Misinformation continues to spread on the internet. Bad actors spoof official government websites, email, or social media accounts to spread falsities or steal personal information and money. There are also private entities selling government-related services that can be confused as official. Many government websites still use non-.gov domains or don’t follow verification protocol for online accounts. The lack of uniform commitment causes public confusion about what can be trusted as official.
U.S. government websites should adopt the .gov domain extension. When available, government social media accounts should follow formal verification protocol and link to .gov websites. Doing this communicates to the public that .gov websites and verified accounts are the sole, trusted online sources of official government services and information.
Getting digital official gives the public a sense of trust and security needed for a healthy democracy.
“It should be easy to identify governments on the internet, and using a .gov domain shows you’re official,” the .gov registry website says. “The public shouldn’t have to guess whether the site they’re on or the email that hits their inbox is genuine.”
Every website on the internet has a top-level domain, such as .com (commercial), .org (organization), or .gov (government). While most can be easily acquired by anyone through a number of commercial domain registries, the .gov extension is only one available to official U.S. government organizations.
These include:
Registration for a .gov is free. The .gov domain registry is operated by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Government non-.gov domains can potentially confuse users and create opportunities for non-government entities to spoof official government services. Adopting a government-sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) — like .gov, .edu, .mil — ensures users are visiting an official government website or receiving email from a legitimate source.
To emphasize the official, government sites should add a “this is an official government website” with a “here’s how you know” link that takes users to an explanation so they better understand.
Social media is a communications medium used by millions of people globally. With this instant, continuous connection comes the potential for misinformation and disinformation. Bad actors use social media to spoof official government accounts.
Some social media platforms have processes for government verification so that the account is designated as official. Follow this protocol to give a higher level of trust and confidence when the public engages with these accounts.
Take the steps to be government official online. Addressing this important detail brings more trust to government and the internet as a whole.
By Catherine Geanuracos and Rebecca Woodbury
Finding technology for service delivery and operational goals can be daunting. It’s hard to navigate the government technology marketplace and easy to be swayed by persuasive sales people and slick marketing. Simplifying the “ask” and staying focused on problems and users (not requirements) makes buying tech manageable.
Most government procurement practices are outdated, restrictive, and ill-suited to buying modern products and solutions. Overly-specific Requests for Proposals (RFPs) with cumbersome response requirements produce low response rates. Complex RFPs make it harder to evaluate what’s really important from vendors.
This stifles competition and innovative government technology solutions, which leads to lackluster public services, frustrated staff and residents, and wasted time and money.
Procurement practices and policies should allow governments to effectively buy solutions and replace outdated ones when it’s no longer serving the needs of staff and the public. Vendors should be able to easily respond to government needs, expanding competition and choice.
Governments can implement better practices to facilitate streamlined, less stressful tech purchasing. Demanding choice and better outcomes pushes vendors to innovate, continuously improve, and provide great customer service.
Get a sense of what’s out there: search the internet, review case studies, and ask other agencies what they use and if they like it.
Increase limits and only do a full RFP process when it’s really warranted. Your research might find something for less than the amount that requires formal procurement.
Make it easy to respond to your solicitation, if one is required. Drop overly prescriptive requirements (such as having implemented the exact type of project with your exact type of government).
It might be tempting to base your requirements on the capabilities of a specific vendor, but this leads to bias and limits your vendor pool.
Governments are often swayed by vendors offering a suite of products because:
These don’t typically end up being true or leading to better public service. And you might miss out on a vendor who does something you need really well.
If you must list all the things you need in one RFP, allow vendors to only respond to parts.
Instead of overprescribing the solution with pages of requirements, focus on detailing the problem you are trying to solve or the service you want to provide. Provide context, desired outcomes, strengths, known pain points, and the root cause of the problem.
If you don’t have this information you might need to do research to better understand your and your community’s needs. Develop and share guiding principles and organizational priorities with vendors and use them in your evaluation process.
Don’t assume the way your service worked in the past is how things should work in the future.
Government services need to work for everyone, by law. This includes digital information and services provided by third-party vendors.
Look for vendors that work well with others through APIs, open source, and integrations, when it makes sense.
Demand strong security practices, including multifactor authentication, regular updates, and secure hosting.
You are a steward of important data! Make sure you can access and export the data your systems collect. Read and understand vendors’ privacy policies.
Local governments struggle to make good buying decisions. This can result in overpaying for subpar services.
Key factors to evaluate:
Focus your evaluation criteria on the non-negotiables and user experience.
Use each procurement to move towards a modern, modular service “stack” for your government, where pieces can be changed out when a better solution becomes available.
By Rebecca Woodbury
Working in the open makes things better. By sharing what a team is working on, people can follow progress and give input throughout a process rather than at the end. Updates and open collaboration tools help teams keep momentum, get feedback, build trust, and celebrate wins.
Government agencies often wait to ask for feedback on services, programs, and policies near the end of a project. By that time, stakeholders feel their feedback won’t have an impact. It’s costly to make significant changes. When people are left out, you miss out on their ideas and lose their trust. It also increases risk of lawsuits and failure.
Regular updates and open collaboration tools allow teams to share what they’re working on. People track progress and provide feedback while the work is being done. This allows the teams to make iterative changes throughout the process. They build trust because they provide transparency to stakeholders and partners, and the public. Anyone interested or impacted can follow along and avoid surprises at the end.
Designing government services and policies that work for everyone is hard. Not only do they need to work for the public, they also have to work for the departments and agencies that are part of implementation and delivery.
To get this right, government teams designing these services need feedback and buy-in from different stakeholders.
At the start of a project, input is usually general in nature. This input helps align values, develop guiding principles, and shape goals.
Near the end, significant resources have already been spent and changes are more costly. Feedback can be harder to incorporate at a certain point, depending on timelines and budget.
Teams need ways to get feedback throughout the process of designing and creating new things. This allows them to make small changes and test them. The likelihood of project success increases if the team is able to test iteratively throughout the design process, rather than wait until the end to get feedback.
To be successful, services and policies need buy-in from people impacted by them. Often projects encounter challenges when stakeholders feel blindsided or surprised by a change.
Teams need ways to keep people informed throughout a project. Updates should be easy to understand and concise. They should include ways for people to give feedback.
If these updates are regular and helpful, stakeholders will feel informed and part of the process. This will create buy-in and increased trust in the process, even if they may not agree with final decisions.
Provide regular updates with a simple blog, newsletter, or news post. Use links to more context if needed.
Include:
Use open collaboration tools to show what you are working on. This provides context so people can understand the thinking behind the work, progression, complexity, and contingencies. It can also provide a way for people to contribute ideas and suggestions.
Collaboration tools are commonly used to develop software. They can also be used for programs, policies, services, and projects.
Include a:
By Morgan Griffin
When you’re communicating with the public, it’s not about you (or your agency) — it’s about your users. Government must communicate in a way that helps people understand essential information and take action.
Clear communication helps users accomplish tasks, makes their lives easier, and builds their trust in government services.
Too often, government communications face inward. Agencies are talking to themselves. We tout accomplishments — “subcommittee issues preliminary recommendations to panel” — without explaining what they might mean for people and communities. We use acronyms and initialisms and jargon.
Result: we waste time and effort on communication that confuses (or is ignored by) its intended audience. And the public doesn’t find out whatever we were trying to tell them.
As a civil servant, it’s not enough to just release information, to get it up on your website or fire off a press release. Instead, you need to have a conversation with your audience. Don’t just say what you want to say. Figure out what your audience needs, then say that instead.
Better communication is a low-cost solution that has an outsized impact. (It could even reduce cranky phone calls to your offices.)
If your answer is “the public” or “everyone,” think again. Narrow down your target. Having a specific audience in mind will help you focus and improve what you write.
For example, if you’re drafting a news update about improvements to your transit system, your audience isn’t just “the public.” It’s more specific — maybe commuters, students, people with lower-incomes. The most effective approach may be targeted messages to different groups using different channels.
User research might sound daunting and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. You can learn a lot by doing informal interviews at a community center or library. Talk to family, friends, or neighbors. Outside perspectives will challenge your assumptions.
The people you’re communicating with are busy and distracted. They have screaming toddlers. They have learning disabilities. They’re sick, their cat is climbing on their keyboard, their wifi is atrocious.
You are writing for people who are skimming (at best), not reading.
That’s especially true if you’re communicating about difficult topics. Users learning about housing assistance or probate may be especially stressed and struggle with complex information. Be kind to them.
Let’s say you’re really proud of the work your team has done improving your recycling program. It’s taken years of listening sessions, meetings, research, and writing.
But before you make a webpage about that new program, with a timeline and names of everyone on the task force, ask yourself: who is this page really for? Will residents actually care? Maybe all the public needs to know is which color bin their plastics go in now.
Government agencies strive for transparency — a worthy goal! But being transparent doesn’t mean sharing everything. Don’t flood your communication channels with every memo and pie chart of performance metrics. Only share something if your audience needs it.
Oversharing undermines the goals of transparency — because it becomes much harder for people to find what’s valuable amid all the other stuff.
Don’t tell people everything you know about a topic. Share only what they need to know. If you overwhelm people with 25 bullet points on a topic, they may ignore all of them.
Stay targeted on your audience and main message. Use plain language and usability best practices.
While they are blunt instruments, readability formulas give you some direction about how to improve your communication. (This chapter is written at a grade 6 reading level, and aiming for grade 4 is even better.)
After you share information, track metrics — like website activity or a reduction in phone calls. Keep improving your communication based on what you learn (although try not to be too reactive to a few loud voices).
By Echa Schneider
We serve our communities best when we communicate clearly, directly, and without frills. We owe it to the public to make it as easy as possible to understand and access government services. Dense, confusing text is one of the simplest obstacles to remove.
Government websites, forms, and other publications are often difficult to understand. Key information gets buried under technical details and jargon. This reinforces perceptions of government as opaque and inefficient.
Unnecessarily complex text creates barriers to public services for everyone, but especially for those with limited language skills, education, resources, and time. It also increases the workload for public servants due to time spent explaining and correcting misunderstandings.
Write in a way that your intended audience can easily understand. This means speaking directly, plainly, and leading with the most important information.
By taking the time to break complex policies and processes down to their essential parts and communicate them clearly, we show respect for the public and make it easier for everyone to access government services.
Most government improvements are expensive and time consuming. Taking care to write simply costs nothing. Re-writing existing content to be more clear can be done iteratively, quickly, and at low or no cost. It does not require extensive prototypes, a large team, or specialized study. Everyone can — and should — learn to write more clearly.
In an era of growing expectations and increasingly constrained resources, communicating using plain language principles is low-hanging fruit that today’s government agencies should not ignore. A public policy, program or service is only as useful as how well (or not) it is communicated to that public.
Clear, simple writing is especially important when serving people with cognitive disabilities, those using assistive technology, people with low literacy skills, and English learners. But the dividends are not limited to those with special needs. These practices make government more accessible to everyone.
All of us have too much to read, too much to do, too much information coming at us on a daily basis. Just because someone has the education or ability to parse dense writing doesn’t mean they want to or have the time to do so. Surveys have shown that those who spend the most time dealing with complex information have the strongest preference for plain writing.
Often, we try to preempt questions by providing as much information as possible.
This may manifest in lengthy technical definitions, detailed background explanations, or attempts to address every issue or objection. It backfires. Documents that strive to be comprehensive are usually too dense to be useful. When faced with “information overload,” most readers simply shut down.
It is our responsibility to distill the complexities behind our programs to their actionable core. It is crucial for people writing these documents to understand what information is immediately relevant and what is not. When we give people only the information they need to complete a task, we reduce support requests while increasing satisfaction and confidence in government.
When deciding what information to include and what to leave out, focus on impact. Most people don’t need or want to know the reasoning behind every rule or the full backstory of a program, only how it affects them.
Consider why someone would seek out and read your document. What goal are they trying to accomplish, and what do they need to know to be successful? Put the most important information first. Omit unnecessary details.
Another common instinct is to convey authority by writing in a formal or bureaucratic tone. In practice this creates distance between ourselves and the people we serve. We show the most respect by communicating in a straightforward, conversational manner.
Speak directly to your audience, addressing them as “you.” Write in the active voice. Use a friendly, helpful tone: imagine you are speaking to your reader face-to-face. Read your draft out loud before publishing, and revise any parts that don’t sound natural. Remove acronyms or jargon that may be familiar to you but not to someone who doesn’t work for the government.
Make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for and then take action.
By Stan Sarber
Making government products and services usable by people with disabilities is not only the right thing to do, it is also a legal requirement.
Many government websites, digital services and mobile apps were created without accessibility in mind. Community members with disabilities often find it frustrating (or impossible) to use these services.
Inaccessible services also expose local governments to litigation risks. Many local governments are aware that accessibility is required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) but don’t know how to ensure accessibility of their services.
Public agencies should treat accessibility as a high priority and not as an afterthought. Government services should be designed with accessibility in mind. This means including someone with accessibility expertise in the early stages of digital projects.
Governments also need to know how to hire vendors who understand the importance of accessibility and are compliant with accessibility standards.
Most local governments know that making their digital assets such as websites, mobile apps, and PDFs accessible is important. But what does it actually mean?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 adults in the United States live with a disability. There are different types of disabilities, for example:
Digital accessibility means that digital products are usable by people with disabilities. Some common accessibility features are:
The de-facto standard for digital accessibility is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). There are three levels of compliance: A, AA and AAA. Many government agencies and organizations strive to meet Level AA.
Some local governments employ people dedicated to accessibility, but often they are not technical enough to communicate what needs to be done to make digital products accessible. Even when accessibility is identified as a requirement, it may be unclear how to actually implement it, how to vet vendors for compliance, or how to educate on-staff developers.
It’s hard to get accessibility projects off the ground. Designate an accessibility lead to set goals and timelines, hold the team accountable, and verify quality.
Everyone working on digital service projects can benefit from training on accessibility fundamentals. When every team member understands the basics of accessibility, it’s easier to “bake in” accessibility into your projects.
To make digital content accessible means to:
Using free tools like WAVE, Lighthouse or Contrast Checker, you can identify common issues such as insufficient contrast ratio, missing text alternatives, accessibility labels or video captions. Even someone new to accessibility can fix these kinds of issues.
For more complex issues, you may need to contract with a vendor specializing in digital accessibility.
Accessibility is not easy and can be confusing to navigate both the legal and technical landscape. However, it is achievable with some process improvements and technical help.
By Mai-Ling Garcia
Local governments address making services better and more inclusive — frequently all at once. Local governments are often leaders in redesigning public services. As a result, we need an inclusive approach that includes everyone.
Government services are often not designed to focus on people’s needs. Agencies prioritize technical details or features staff want instead of considering what residents need. This focus on features and organizational needs creates overcomplicated processes and exclusionary designs, limiting people’s access to services.
We can create services that meet community needs by including residents and government staff in the research process, allowing their feedback to inform decisions and testing ideas. It’s important to keep improving and making changes based on community input. Through research, metrics, and ongoing testing, we can ensure services increase everyone’s access to city services.
Local governments can better reflect the populations they serve by considering lived experiences, accessibility, and data in their work. While larger cities may assemble comprehensive teams of product managers, designers, UX/UI experts, and engineers, smaller cities tend to succeed by leveraging hybrid teams of contractors, in-house talent, and community experts to design government services.
Building diverse teams improves decision-making and can increase your organization’s connection to its constituents.
“Lived experience” is critical expertise about social issues, places, and people based on a person’s personal and professional experiences. This expertise offers valuable perspectives and knowledge to solve community problems and design for resident needs.
Including “lived experience” experts from your community can take many forms, including:
Local governments can source quantitative information from call centers (i.e., 311), website analytics, and other data sources. Any service redesign should also include qualitative interviews with people using the service, especially the most vulnerable residents significantly impacted by your service.
Your research should tell you:
Use a combination of community insights and industry standards to determine success. Metrics could include:
Once you understand resident needs and successes, think about creative ways to address those metrics. Explore different possibilities before you begin prototyping.
A prototype is an initial model of a product designed to test and refine concepts before the final version is developed. Once a service prototype is built, it is crucial to test it with people from different backgrounds, demographics, and abilities.
Testing prototypes generally involves observing someone using your product and noting their behavior against your success criteria. This allows you to identify opportunities for improvement and refine the prototype to better address user needs.
This iterative design approach allows for continuous enhancement of prototypes and even burdensome policies based on user input.
Closing the loop After launching a service, it’s crucial to collect continuous feedback from the community and agency staff. You can:
Regular user testing sessions can help prioritize new features, updates, and adjustments. Leverage open communication channels like social media and newsletters for ongoing dialogue.
Responsiveness to this feedback is key, as it will inform the iterative changes that keep the service user-centered and effective in meeting the community’s evolving needs.
By Shannah Hayley and Joel Peña
In local government, digital security is often treated as an add-on rather than a standard expectation. From ransomware to downed operations, the costs of a casual approach to security — both financial and to citizen trust — are too high to ignore. When it comes to public services, security is not optional.
Failure to secure digital systems leaves government organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks, unauthorized access and data breaches. This compromises sensitive information, including classified data, and puts citizen records at risk for privacy violations and identity theft.
Inadequate online security systems expose public agencies to substantial financial, reputational, and operational consequences — including erosion of public trust.
Governments must treat security as non-negotiable. This involves committing to cybersecurity best practices like:
Organizations must also budget to keep technical operations secure and continuously train staff on digital security.
By implementing robust strategies and adopting best practices, your organization can mitigate risks, protect sensitive data, and maintain the trust of citizens.
Digital security is everyone’s job. Tackling this topic effectively requires a coordinated multi-pronged approach.
Digital security starts with fostering a culture of cybersecurity awareness and responsibility.
Begin by training employees on best practices. Encourage a proactive approach to identifying and reporting potential threats. This will establish a sense of ownership in protecting online systems among all staff. There are many free and low-cost tools for cybersecurity education from trusted organizations, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Cybersecurity should be considered a critical component of your organization’s infrastructure. Make sure you account for it in your Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP).
Adopt robust security measures to protect your websites and online systems. At a minimum, this should include:
These measures, combined with fundamental best practices such as use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), password management, and regular system backups, can significantly reduce the chances of hackers accessing sensitive information through your digital systems.
Create and enforce robust security policies. This will establish clear guidelines and expectations for maintaining secure digital systems agency-wide. Policies should address areas like system access controls, password management, data encryption, incident response procedures, and regular system updates.
Work with your employees to identify all of the digital systems currently in use, number of users, and loss of access impact. Make sure to catalog the purpose of each digital system and its value to the organization (i.e., operational, mission critical, or nice to have). Finally, identify the recovery time objective for each system after an outage.
Conduct a security audit at least once a year. These are essential for identifying vulnerabilities and gaps in online systems.
A comprehensive assessment will help you understand the effectiveness of existing security measures and detect potential weaknesses. There are online tools available to start this process. Vendors can perform more detailed audits.
Actively participate in threat intelligence sharing networks. By collaborating with other government agencies and security organizations, you stay updated on emerging threats, attack trends, and countermeasures. Timely information sharing will help you be proactive in defending against cyber threats.
By Albert Gehami and Rob Lloyd
Many view privacy as another compliance exercise. In reality, digital privacy is about building trust in our responsible use of information. Governments and residents should understand what data are collected, how they are used, what controls are in place, and how residents can engage to create responsive community services.
Residents may reject technology when it isn’t aligned with their priorities — like sensor-laden sidewalks in Toronto, San Diego’s “smart” streetlights, and automated license plate readers across California. Invasive data collection has a history of harm, since it’s been used to segregate communities, justify racial policing, and deport undocumented families.
When local governments don’t partner with residents before collecting data, they risk justified public backlash. Governments are responsible for the outcomes of technology, not the intentions.
A commitment to digital privacy can turn the introduction of a new technology from combative (“why are you installing cameras?”) to collaborative (”I want you to put cameras there to increase safety”).
This requires setting principles, developing a policy that aligns privacy practices with community values, and then implementing that policy through organization controls such as procurement and project management. It also demands periodic improvements to policy and operational structure.
Starting a digital privacy practice at your organization begins with:
Agencies should review every technology and data initiative from a privacy perspective. Appoint a dedicated owner — a privacy officer — who is part of the review process for all technology purchases and uses. Cities like San José and Seattle house their privacy programs under their technology departments in part because of their nexus with procurement, city operations, and policies.
The privacy officer will need to work closely with:
The privacy officer should also provide agency-wide education so everyone can identify what personal information is and knows who to go to for guidance (the privacy officer).
The privacy officer should be familiar with state and federal privacy laws and comfortable with data analytics. Critically, digital privacy succeeds when the organization sees the privacy officer as a productive partner in navigating legitimate issues to enable innovation.
Privacy reviews take time, so it is essential to quickly triage projects based on risk.
Key questions to include in your review:
For technology with high privacy risk and high civic benefit, a privacy-first approach to explaining the technology can build resident confidence and create a collaborative environment for responsible innovation.
The main topics to engage residents on include:
It is important to engage online, in-person, and virtually. Typically this includes a webpage with a feedback form, in-person discussions and surveys, and webinars. Focus in-person engagement on underserved neighborhoods in the languages they speak.
By Luke Fretwell
Government generates tons of data — code, policies, meeting minutes, news releases, and more. Being able to access and share this data is essential for helping agencies evaluate and improve services to the public. It’s vital that government takes steps to organize data in clear, consistent ways.
Government data is often siloed, unstructured, not interoperable, nor easily shareable. This disorganization is often reflected back in public information and services — which are too often disjointed, inefficient, inaccessible, or broken.
The result: the collective work of public servants is wasted because users can’t find or access it. This issue is compounded as we increasingly rely on machines such as applications, search engines and artificial intelligence bots to access this information.
We need to make government data easy to read, share, and use. That means changing how many public sector agencies operate. For data to be open and accessible, we need to consider formats that machines can read easily — like application programming interfaces (APIs) — instead of locked in inaccessible or unstructured formats, like PDFs.
The Open Data Charter, a collaboration of governments and organizations, rightfully sees the public sector as the bridge to our machine-readable future:
“We want a world in which governments collect, share and use well-governed data to respond effectively and accountably to our most pressing, social, economic, and environmental challenges.”
Making data machine-readable is a technical way of saying that information should be accessible to digital systems, such as web crawlers, artificial intelligence robots, or third-party applications. As the Charter’s “machine processable” principle states, data must be “reasonably structured to allow automated processing.”
Government heavily relies on static documents, like PDF and Word files. Unfortunately, they are proprietary, non-standard, and unstructured. This makes important information like text, images, and charts inaccessible, especially for machines trying to read and syndicate across multiple channels.
An example of structured, standardized data is the Schema.org protocol. Search engines use this to display information in search results. AI chatbots use it to better deliver prompt responses.
Adopting a system of structured, standardized data allows for more seamless integration across internal and external systems.
Government data is scattered across many departments and systems; some are self hosted while others are vendor hosted. There is often duplicate data that leads to confusion as to what’s most accurate and up-to-date. This is compounded when multiple data sources with the same information are delivered to different endpoints, such as a website or application or internal business intelligence systems.
The idea of a single source of truth means there should be one authoritative dataset per domain (meeting agendas/minutes, municipal code, financial transactions, news, budgets, etc.). This guarantees clear data ownership and governance rules.
The entire organization must be on board with machine-readable public service.
Agencies need to appoint a primary data leader and train staff on data principles and best practices.
Contracts must require data standards and API-first or direct access to structured data in vendor systems, and that quality assurance systems are put in place to validate compliance. Public records policies should default to machine-readable responses and let requesters specify format preference.
Governance frameworks like Open Data Charter’s principles and data integration protocols like Data Management Association’s Data Management Body of Knowledge can help guide public sector data into the future.
Data integration practices must be adopted. Examples include:
Data in open formats that move seamlessly between systems future proofs government against technology changes, but also opens it up to new opportunities.
Machine-readable government means public sector organizations adopt a culture of data. Staff and vendors are knowledgeable and aligned on principles and practices of managing and making government data standardized, structured, interoperable, and accessible.
Open access to government information — directly to the public and to the machines that we rely on — is essential. It will allow people — both in and outside of government — to connect dots in ways never before imagined.
By Joy Bonaguro
Governments must actively manage data rights when working with vendors and contractors. If not, unscrupulous vendors or contractors may hold your data hostage.
Vendors and contractors may claim ownership or other rights to public data. Depending on the contract terms, this can create problems. For example, some jurisdictions have lost access to their public data. Some vendors may attempt to retain your data even after the contract is complete. In the worst cases, data ownership problems may lead to a vendor claiming that the jurisdiction cannot use their data in another tool.
Ensure that contracts include terms that manage rights for data that you create, collect, and/or manage when providing a public service or function. Work with your legal and procurement team to review and update data terms. Include these terms in any agreement that involves the use of public data. This may include contracts with software vendors, service providers, and even consultants.
Most vendors and consultants have fair and standard data terms. Yet each bullet below describes a real data problem from a jurisdiction.
You must manage your data rights to avoid these types of problems.
Many data terms exist for privacy, security, and data management. Data ownership and data access are the two most important data rights to manage.
Data ownership terms ensure that:
Do not grant public data ownership or intellectual property rights to vendors or consultants. Instead, retain ownership of public data when vendors collect, store, manage, or otherwise use data on behalf of your jurisdiction, as well as derivative works made from public data.
Do grant vendors and contractors the right to use public data to perform services per any contract or agreement. But you should forbid them from using the data for their own purposes or later use.
Data access terms ensure ready access to public data. This includes the ability to extract data from vendor systems for analysis, migration to other tools, and more.
You must be able to access and extract data from vendor systems. You should be able to access the data in machine-readable and non-proprietary formats, such as .csv. This lets your team use the data in common tools like Excel.
For data in a relational database, you should have access to the database design. This will help you and other service providers use the data for reporting, analysis, and systems integration.
You should also have access via an application programming interface, or API. An API is a language that allows software and computers to talk to each other. Vendor APIs should be well-documented and maintained. This will support future interoperability with other systems.
The learn more section provides links to resources with sample legal terms. Share this with your lawyers.
By Shira Honig
Successful government digital delivery depends on technology-literate employees applying digital skills and values to public service, from policy and procurement to product testing and upkeep. Sustainable training requires smart use of resources, continuous learning, and a culture of exploring, observing, and experimenting.
Continuous learning and experimentation are often not a priority in government. This may be because of a lack of resources, cultures that value complex policy and rule-following over continuous learning or experimentation, or leaders too overwhelmed to prioritize professional growth. Because technology is ever-changing, failing to improve leads to ineffective government digital services that people don’t like and don’t use.
Upskilling is the process of continuously learning new digital skills in a current role. Government best serves its community by building an upskill culture throughout the organization.
Adopt an upskill culture in technology where learning — and learning by doing — are valued, encouraged, and seen as assets for both individuals and organizations. Governments that prioritize tech upskilling through a variety of methods are better positioned to stay abreast of digital change, empower staff, keep employees, make smarter technology purchases, and better serve their communities.
Upskilling starts with leadership. It thrives when leaders are proactive champions culturally and, when possible, financially.
Leaders do this by:
Digital values are key to an upskilling culture. One critical digital value is continuously working in the open, internally between teams or hierarchies, and between governments and communities.
Openness inspires innovation, increases transparency and accountability, grows civic participation, improves policy design, and elevates public trust.
Focus on respecting and understanding users when a policy or product is being developed, communicated, tested, adjusted, and implemented. Prioritizing user needs in government leads to the delivery of programs or services that people actually need, understand, and use.
Key digital government skills:
Choosing the right upskilling initiatives depends on the skills you need to achieve your goals.
Do you need to:
Gather data on your organization’s digital skills baseline. This will help you understand gaps where upskilling is needed.
Upskilling initiatives depend on an organization’s gaps, size, and culture. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but variety is important, as is on-the-job application of new skills.
Upskilling methods:
Technology is ever-changing. Applying a growth mindset to your skills will ensure you’re always building better services for the people you serve.
By Lori McNeill and Carlos Moreno
Open, collaborative solutions can help public agencies address civic demands in ways that are inclusive, transparent, and quickly respond to changes. Governments can empower communities and create better digital services by engaging skilled volunteers, embracing experimentation, and leveraging local technologists — or civic hackers.
Local governments face a growing demand for digital service delivery to diverse constituencies while struggling to keep up with emerging technologies. For many agencies, funding limitations present a barrier to creating and improving digital services. Governments may also have difficulty competing for qualified technical talent.
Municipalities have an untapped capacity of volunteers willing and able to help serve their local community. Engaging with civic hackers who have both technical know-how and the desire to help solve community problems creates connection, subsidizes innovation, and gives volunteers a sense of public service.
Governments that build a framework for continuously working with civic hackers can build sustainable, scalable digital services while creating a pipeline of technologists to fill government service roles.
Civic hackers are creative problem solvers who enjoy exploring and understanding complex systems and frameworks. They are normal people — designers, technologists, policy wonks — that tinker alone at home or local library or coffee shop, or together at unconferences or through formal organizations.
They apply their skills — software development, user experience design, product, data management — to explore problems and create innovative solutions.
Often associated with cybercrime, in tech culture “hacking” means repurposing something (code, hardware, etc.) to creatively solve problems. Hacks emerged from an internet culture of building in the spirit of playfulness, resourcefulness, and collaboration.
You don’t need to know code or be a technology expert to engage with civic hackers.
Understanding and embracing hacking culture — curiosity and a willingness to share context and data — is an important first step in building a productive civic hacking ecosystem with your community. Ask questions and listen to feedback.
Hackers can be found in a number of places:
Civic hacking projects have inspired and directly impacted many digital government efforts.
Examples:
Some civic hacking projects, such as Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks, Open311, and the state of California’s application for food benefits, GetCalFresh, have evolved from ideas to robust digital government services.
These examples share a common element in their origin stories: the willingness of government leaders to engage beyond bureaucracy in hands-on problem solving.
Successful civic technology efforts take a holistic, sustainable approach, where government fosters a framework for continuous collaboration and problem solving.
Civic hacking projects start with public conversations:
After community discussions about what challenges to tackle with a team of civic hackers, implement a plan for delivery. This includes:
It may be tempting to scope a fully-fledged project from the outset, but collaboration takes time. Set expectations, acknowledge limitations, and break large projects into milestones. Think small and iterate.
Recognize hacker contributions as you would other volunteers in your community:
Governments that embrace civic hacking find it has a multiplier effect on engagement, community-driven solutions, and digital transformation.
By Lenae Storey
Every government solution — whether a policy, procedure, service, or system — follows a lifecycle. Gradually, these solutions become outdated, no longer solve the right problem, or get bogged down by aging processes or technology. Deprecation is a systematic way to phase out these unused or outdated solutions so government works better.
Instead of proactively retiring ineffective or outdated solutions or operating models in government, we layer new ones on top to meet new mandates.
Over time, this creates layers of “cruft” — the gradual build-up of redundant and arduous systems and processes. Cruft can be incompatible technology, outdated requirements, duplicative processes, or PDF forms with fax cover sheets. The result? Rising costs, overburdened staff, slower response times, and the erosion of public trust in government institutions.
Deprecation helps government teams proactively address the buildup of old processes and technology and replace them with better alternatives. Deprecation doesn’t mean the solution no longer works — it means there is a more effective or sustainable way to deliver our missions. It ensures continuity, backward compatibility, and gives people relying on the old solution time to adapt to new options. Deprecations are a key part of continuous improvement and iterative delivery of services and programs.
Without intentional deprecation, improvement stalls. 80% of federal IT budgets go to maintaining legacy systems. State offices waste valuable hours each month on outdated, manual processes. Then we spend even more on large modernization projects that repeat the cycle.
Deprecation should be a natural part of solution lifecycle management. Deprecation doesn’t abruptly remove solutions. Like pruning a tree, deprecation removes obsolete governance policies or technology that hinder growth so systems stay relevant and responsive.
Deciding what and where to deprecate is as critical as deciding what to build. Deprecation can apply across all levels of government and solutions, from the smallest software components to overarching policies.
While deprecation is possible at all levels, the feasibility, impact, and risk differ as you move from technical to organizational levels. Make decisions based on a solution’s ability to fulfill its intended purpose and deliver the right outcome.
Deprecation isn’t usually tied to specific timelines. Deciding when to deprecate depends on a solution’s relevance and effectiveness throughout its lifecycle.
Generally, it’s time to deprecate when:
Teams should set baseline metrics to evaluate the need and timing for a deprecation. For example, you could track baseline metrics like application completion rate, user satisfaction, and uptime performance for a system that has remained unchanged since launch. When the system doesn’t meet those benchmarks, teams can spot what needs improving or deprecating. You must evaluate the potential timing and impact, whether quickly deprecating an unused feature or phasing out a widely-used program.
Start by understanding the problem and current state using user-centered research methods like interviews, feedback analysis, and service or dependency mapping. Revisit the original solution or program’s vision to ensure the new solution better addresses the original need.
Create a deprecation roadmap with clear milestones and feedback loops to minimize disruption. Roadmaps should account for offboarding users, staff, and stakeholders from the existing solution to alternative options. Include a communication plan with stakeholders explaining why the deprecation is necessary and highlighting key benefits of the new alternative.
Integrating deprecation into your delivery approach can help you respond to growing complexity, reduce costs, and future-proof existing solutions. Deprecation isn’t just about removing what’s old or unuseful — it’s about intentionally creating room for what’s better.
By Kirsten Wyatt
Government work is essential yet humble — services are used constantly, yet recognized rarely. Showcasing and celebrating government services builds a foundation of community pride and creates a culture of service and professionalism.
Public trust in government remains low. Partisanship deadlocks Congress and family dinners. Social media’s toxicity on anything from public schools to the presidency stifles any fun these platforms used to bring.
When the world of public service feels like a sucking cesspool of anger, going into work each day, let alone trying something new, becomes difficult. This is why it is important to find joy if we are to build community pride, maintain essential services and retain the talented people who work in government.
Celebrating, showcasing, and finding joy in our communities brings happiness to government staff and community members, which allows us to refocus on the essential services that the government provides. Even the most hardened skeptic will see immediate benefits when we tell stories about the wonder, importance, and context behind local government services. Humanizing government reframes public service work to truly be for the people, with the people.
The first step in finding community joy is in humanizing government.
Tell the stories behind the work.
Human interest stories abound in service departments. Programs like “Touch a Truck” or time-lapse construction videos take the exciting parts of major work and bring them to life.
Local media is stretched thin, so proactively send blurbs and photos. Work with bloggers to showcase resources and programs. Once you’ve put a human voice to government operations, tell a story about the critical work your agency is doing every day.
Many public services are out of sight, underground or only on-demand. Talking about critical services like clean water, safety, and economic development affirms their importance. Share a story about a process improvement that saved time and tax dollars. Or, share pictures about how excited kids are when a new playground opens.
Plain language humanizes government. Use words that you’d say over coffee with a friend. For example: “kids” instead of “youth.”
Use local and pop culture to make government work relevant. For example:
Every employee has a connection to the community through their job. Introduce them via profiles that spotlight them and their work. This humanizes the people providing public services, while giving a professional snapshot of your employees.
Daily tasks can obstruct the larger mission. To spark joy internally, put work in a larger context. A budget analyst is not just populating spreadsheets — she’s managing funding for the new water tower. A library clerk isn’t just shelving books — he’s supporting youth literacy. Emphasize impact to stress the importance of routine tasks.
Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL) celebrates “City Hall Selfie Day” every August so local governments can share their pride for public service. Participation is easy: just snap a picture in front of a local government building and share it with the hashtag #CityHallSelfie.
In 2022 #CityHallSelfie had more than 2.5 million social media impressions. It’s a reminder that finding joy in public service does not have to be time consuming or expensive. It can be as simple as a selfie to reframe community pride in the work we do.
There’s also a business case to spark joy. When community members believe in their local government, we increase volunteerism, trust, and support for initiatives.
Finding joy uplifts and retains talent. The days of working somewhere for 30 years are over. Employees job-hop, looking for positions and organizations that fit their lifestyle, interests, and mission. When we make work fun, we improve the likelihood that we can keep talent in our communities. This improves service delivery.
By Marlena Medford
Driving digital change in government is daunting. Yet, we push because we know our government needs fixing, now. This conviction carries us most days. But when it falters, we have to remember what drew us — and what’s at stake if we walk away.
Public service demands compassion. We see people’s struggles and we’re trusted to help ease them. Sometimes, dated, flawed systems stand in the way of citizens and the public servants trying to help them. Over time, our compassion can be tested and worn down.
When the people who keep our systems running — whether they’re government leaders, public servants, community volunteers, or vendors — become hardened or cynical, we all lose.
We all have a reason — or several — we wanted to tackle the herculean task of improving public service. Something fired us up to do this hard work. Reminding ourselves of the initial spark is a balm when motivation runs low.
We also have to grant ourselves grace. Real change takes time, and there will be bumps along the way. When setbacks happen, we can’t lose sight of the mission — or the people counting on us.
Digital leaders evangelize change in a sector that defaults to the status quo. While technology is not a panacea, it can help us push the government to change the way it solves problems. We’re working to put people’s needs at the center of government services, which frankly, isn’t standard.
Our work isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always recognized. Watching systems fall short for the people who need them most can weigh on us. But still we show up, we dig in, and we keep going — because the challenges are real, and so is our belief that together we can build something better.
We can’t lose heart. Building something better takes all of us staying open, hopeful, and committed to serving with heart. Apathy robs us of compassion. We have to genuinely care about people’s needs if we’re going to build people-centered services.
When the challenges pile up, we have to remember what attracted us to this work. We chose public service because we want to help people in tangible ways that scale. We have to remember that it’ll take time to see it through in earnest.
We also deserve to remember our wins — no matter their size. Transforming bureaucracies happens in countless strides, some of them baby steps, some of them major leaps.
Even if you didn’t reach your goal, ask yourself where you gained some bit of knowledge that’ll help later.
For example, Power to the Public authors Hana Schank and Tara Dawson McGuinness spotlight the State of Vermont’s effort to modernize how people apply for benefits. Through a small pilot program, the State transformed a paper-application process to a fully-automated version. It cut benefit delivery time in half.
Despite the success, the pilot project wasn’t adopted at scale (or at least that’s true at the time of this writing). This was due to a lack of internal support coupled with the pandemic.
Though it’s disappointing, there are plenty of wins. For starters, it’s a testament to what’s possible when change is piloted in small batches. It also taught staff the value of demoing prototypes to earn buy-in. These are lessons that’ll surely benefit future projects across government.
As author Mitchell Weiss so aptly put it in We the Possibility: “We get the government we invent.”
We need inventors who have the conviction, compassion, and courage to take on the fundamental problems in how we deliver public services.
We need leaders like you who, despite the hard work, will persist for the public good.
Proudly Serving is a guide to building people-centered public services.
Proudly Serving is an open civic organization. The project was managed openly on GitHub, led by maintainers and supported by contributors. We followed a team agreement and code of conduct. Details on how we work can be found in our documentation.
Proudly Serving is licensed under Creative Commons.
Visit the Proudly Serving website at proudlyservingbook.com.
Robbie is an educator, facilitator, and eco-social justice organizer based in Oakland, CA. As part of the Participatory Budgeting Project team, he weaves and bridges stories of participatory democracy in action, advances equitable public decision-making, and connects with folks from across geographies about the issues that impact their lives.
Joy works at the nexus of data, design, technology, and policy. She served as the Chief Data Officer of California and of the City and County of San Francisco, was on the leadership team of a high-growth cybersecurity startup, and started her career helping nonprofits use data.
Karen is a retired Texas city manager who is the executive director of the Texas Women’s Leadership Institute. She loves spending her time preparing and empowering women to become city managers. You can also find her playing soccer or watching the U.S. Women’s National Team. She’s the mom of two grown feminists.
Shari is co-executive director for the Center for Economic Democracy. She formerly served as co-executive director for the Participatory Budgeting Project. As director of youth engagement and employment for the City of Boston she launched Youth Lead the Change, the first youth participatory budgeting process in the U.S.
Luke is the founder and maintainer of GovFresh, a media and innovation lab focused on the intersection of design, technology, and democracy. He is the co-founder of ScanGov, a government digital experience platform.
Mai-Ling directs Emerging Technology and AI at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg Centers for Government Excellence and Public Innovation, leading global strategies for responsible public-sector AI. With 15+ years in digital transformation, she helps cities adopt ethical tech, build trust, and improve services through design, policy, and innovation.
Catherine is a government technology innovator. She led the launch of the City of LA’s Innovation Fund as Commissioner of Innovation and Performance, co-founded Hack for LA, and was the co-founder and CEO of CityGrows (now ClearForms), a low-cost no-code workflow software platform used by local governments in 15 states.
Albert is the City Privacy Officer for the City of San José, overseeing responsible and effective deployment of new technology and data initiatives. The City’s privacy program has been recognized across awards and venues as a national leader on digital privacy and resident engagement on technology.
Morgan is Content Strategy Principal at Bloom Works, a civic tech company that helps agencies improve their digital services. He has over 20 years of experience working with agencies like the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the State of Connecticut.
Dustin is Chief AI Officer and US GM of Darwin AI, helping public agencies safely adopt and govern AI. He’s the former president of e.Republic and an active researcher and educator, including roles with the Center for Public Sector AI, Eisenhower Fellowships, and Texas State University.
Shannah’s pursuit of living life to the fullest has taken her all over the world with various communications-focused jobs, from teaching in Kenya to consulting in the United Kingdom. Shannah now serves as the Director of Communications and Community Outreach for the City of Plano, Texas.
Laine, Director of Communications for the County of Marin, has spent over a decade connecting residents with essential information and services. Named a 2022 “40 Under 40” leader by the North Bay Business Journal, she holds a master’s in Mass Communication and Journalism from California State University, Fresno.
Shira is a Senior Advisor in the Ontario government and served as a member of the Technologists for the Public Good Community Leads Committee. She’s led digital policy, change, and education initiatives inside and outside government, contributed to Apolitical and the Beeck Center, and is a graduate of NYU Wagner.
Artem leads an award-winning team at the California Department of Technology. With nearly 20 years in digital government work, he was instrumental in helping establish California’s first digital standard and community of practice. Artem oversees statewide initiatives and toolkits, helping California departments improve the delivery of digital services and information.
Rob is Executive Director of the Center for Digital Government. He previously served as CTO for City of Seattle, leading a 620-person, $300M technology organization, and as Assistant City Manager and CIO for San José, California. A 20-year public-sector leader, his teams have earned 50+ awards for innovation and excellence.
Lori is a consultant who helps non-profits and institutions use data to benefit from digital. With experience ranging from NASA, to Fortune 500 companies, to small charities, she brings a unique blend of analytical, scientific, and nonprofit leadership lessons to her work empowering change-makers as director of Civic Hacker Network.
Marlena is the Senior Director of Strategic Engagement at the Center for Civic Futures, helping government leaders navigate AI and emerging technologies. She previously led external affairs for Code for America, CivicActions, and Peak Democracy. Earlier, she served as Public Information Officer for Encinitas and spent a decade as a journalist.
Carlos, MPA, is a Business Intelligence Analyst at Family & Children’s Services, supporting the agency’s work to divert individuals from the criminal legal system. Carlos is also a historian and journalist in Tulsa, and serves on the board of Urban Coders Guild, Tri City Collective, and World Stage Theatre.
Adam is a senior product designer with Bloom Works, a civic tech company that helps agencies improve their digital services. He has partnered with state, local, and federal agencies for over a decade to improve and expand their products and processes.
Joe is e.Republic’s Chief Innovation Officer and keynote speaker on government and education. He has written much about funding streams, technology investment, and public-sector priorities. Joe holds a bachelor of arts degree in government and international relations from the California State University, Sacramento.
Joel is a dynamic and innovative professional with extensive experience developing and executing successful strategic website and marketing initiatives. As a high-level problem solver with a keen eye for opportunity, Joel is a forward-thinking strategist who has consistently driven growth and success for a variety of organizations across multiple industries.
Stan is a software engineer at Google and founder at InclusionKit, a digital accessibility agency. Stan became involved in accessibility at Google, where he led projects to remediate inaccessible mobile applications. He also worked with Marin County, California on a WCAG-compliant version of their Civic Center Tour mobile app.
Echa has been working in local government since 2009. She currently serves as Communications Program Manager for the City of Piedmont, CA and has led digital transformation initiatives at the City of Berkeley and Oakland Public Library. Previously, she founded the award-winning hyperlocal news site A Better Oakland.
Jason is an altruistic mischief maker with Civic* Possible helping community leaders solve sticky, cross silo challenges. He has 20 years’ experience playing in the intersection of government, nonprofits, and business. He’s served as an elected City Commissioner, Alaska’s first Innovation Officer, NGO executive directors, startup business coach, and Marion County Oregon Economic Development lead.
Daniel is a Principal Administrative Analyst with the City of Santa Monica. Daniel previously served as an analyst at the cities of Santa Ana and San Rafael, supporting digital services including building websites, policy development, and organizational realignment. Daniel has a Master of Public Administration from Cal Poly Pomona.
Lenae is founder of Perennial, a boutique digital consultancy helping government teams, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations deliver impactful products and tech-enabled services. With experience in gov tech, startups, and public service delivery, she specializes in building product teams, launching digital solutions, and coaching organizations to adopt product operating models and practices.
Rahel is a communications strategist, facilitator, and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She serves as Acting Co-Executive Director at the Participatory Budgeting Project, a national organization that provides education, advocacy, and implementation support for community-led decision-making. She previously held roles at the California Immigrant Policy Center and Caring Across Generations.
Rebecca is the founder of Department of Civic Things. She worked in local government for 12 years and was the City of San Rafael’s first director of Digital Service. A Government Technology Top 25 Doer, Dreamer, and Driver, she holds a master’s in Public Policy from Mills College.
Kirsten is a Senior Director at Georgetown’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation and an elected school board member for the West Linn-Wilsonville School District. She previously co-founded and led the Engaging Local Government Leaders network and has served in state and local government in Oregon, Virginia, and North Carolina.
Beyond our contributors, we want to thank the following for supporting this project with their copy edits, suggestions, and general inspiration and encouragement.
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