Pahlka quoted: “Efficiency in government is a matter of social justice.” (Mayor
John Norquist) It is at the often maddening interface with government that the
inefficiency and injustice play out. Two examples (both now fixed)… At the
Veterans Affairs website, you needed to fill out the application for health
benefits, but the file wouldn’t even open unless you had the unlikely
combination of a particular version of Internet Explorer and a particular
version of Adobe Reader. Nothing else worked. In California, the online
application for food stamps was 50 screens long and took 50 minutes to complete.
How did such grotesquely bad software design become the norm? Pahlka points to
laws such as the “comically misnamed” Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, which
requires six months to get any public form approved, and the 775-page Federal
Acquisition Regulation book, which insists that all software be vastly
over-specified in advance. “That’s not how good software is built!” Pahlka
said. “Good software is user-centered, iterative, and data driven.” You build
small at first, try it on users, observe what doesn’t work, fix it, build
afresh, try it again, and so on persistently until you’ve got something that
really works — and is easy to keep updating as needed. Pahlka’s organization,
Code for America, did that with the 50-minute California food stamp application
and pared the whole process down to 8 minutes.
These are not small matters. 19% of the US gross national product is spent on
social programs — social security, medicare, food assistance, housing
assistance, unemployment, etc. Frustration with those systems makes people
want to just blow the whole thing up. Pahlka quoted Tom Steinberg (mySociety
founder): “You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t
understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or
propaganda.”
Government drastically needs more tech talent, Pahlka urged, and the
user-centered iterative approach could have a broader effect: “It’s not so much
that we need new laws to govern technology,” she said. “It’s that we need
better tech practices that teaches how to make better laws. The status quo
isn’t worth fighting for. Fight for something better, something we haven’t
seen yet, something you have to invent.”
She concluded with what she learned from 8 years working with government at the
city, state, and national levels: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”
—Stewart Brand
s...@longnow.org <mailto:s...@longnow.org>
A linkable, illustrated version of this summary is on Medium here
<https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/toward-agile-government-43e8b2d4e421#.sj6vssn05>.
The full video and audio versions of Pahlka’s talk are at the Long Now SALT
site, here
<http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/feb/01/fixing-government-bottom-and-outside/>.
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