“Alpha’s culture, tools, technology and systems thinking approach to operations is something California’s (Technology Modernization Fund) participants should adopt if it’s going to realize a return on that $25 million investment.”
"There is a gray area with respect to internal digital service teams and external vendor support. What we don’t talk about much is that the reality is the smaller a government gets, the less likely they’re able to attract or afford digital talent, regardless of the sense of mission it brings."
"A small group of civic-minded designers and technologists has started CivicDMV, a community project working to re-imagine the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you’re working inside of DMV, we’d love to learn about your issues and what open projects we can develop to help solve them. If you’ve ever experienced DMV in any form and have ideas on how it can be made better, we want to hear from you."
Innovation is great and necessary, but Luke Fretwell contends that the state of California should first focus on deliverables. Some steps: Establish a single state government domain, name a chief executive for the state Department of Technology, and establish guidelines to determine when an out-of-control IT project needs to be shut down.
Luke Fretwell, founder of Gov.Fresh and co-founder/CEO of ProudCity, picks up where he left off on his last column, about re-imagining the DMV: "It’s been almost two weeks since I published my thoughts on re-imagining the California Department of Motor Vehicles website. During that time, the issues I had with not receiving my Real ID were resolved, and the process inspired me to think and prototype a little more on the first iteration."
I recently visited my local California Department of Motor Vehicles field office to renew my driver's license and, because I scheduled an appointment ahead of time, my experience wasn’t the nightmare it’s traditionally made out to be. However, the designer in me couldn’t help but think about how the entire DMV process could be redesigned, both offline and online.
For its part, Code for America has done a huge service building Brigade, and the idea that local community developers can hack their cities and positively impact and inspire government from the outside. By enabling the foundational infrastructure, it has created an incredible service for those who aspire to impact civics in a big way. Other than a very limited staff role commitment on Code for America’s part, I’m not sure there’s a need for much more or that we should even should expect it
While the report provides high-level recommendations, here are a few tactical areas that must be addressed in order for any of this to be effectively implemented.
The White House will soon open a limited beta test to developers on a new We the People Write API that allows third-party applications to submit information to official petitions.
