When COVID-19 struck, it seemed far away, and we watched as it spread early this year. Things escalated quickly, and we decided to send the Digital Services team to work from home full time. Our previously instituted “work from home (WFH) Wednesdays” became our everyday. A week later, San Francisco issued a shelter-in-place order for the whole city.
We thought things couldn’t get tougher, but more urgent needs kept coming. The terror that Black people face regularly finally reached global media attention with mass protests through the Black Lives Matter movement. California experienced a heatwave, and then thunderstorms, which started 367 fires in the state. With the Bay Area on fire, air quality in San Francisco became the worst in the world at one point. Not to mention the apocalyptic skies.
Public services are stretched thin, and our team is no different. What we thought would be a short stint of working remotely has stretched into half a year. Our 16-hour days eventually became unsustainable, and now we have a marathon mindset. We’re spending every day designing for edge cases we never even imagined.
We have been able to respond quickly because the foundations were in place. We already had the tools we needed to work remotely, so we did. We already had a website that is robust and accessible. Crucially, we already had a team in place that knows how to work in an agile way, using established content and design patterns.
Since March, we have launched many digital services and 200 pages of information for San Franciscans to help them navigate this crisis. If you want to know what that felt like early on, our technical director, Sasha Magee, tweeted about it.
Here is some of the work we’ve done in the last six months:
- Business grants and permits
- Online construction permitting: We sped up our work on construction permitting so that people could apply online for construction permits for the first time ever. We learned a lot of lessons on this one, perhaps enough for a whole separate blog post.
- Supporting city staff: We quickly built tools to help the city’s 30,000 employees, including essential workers, stay healthy.
- Getting involved with the city: We made it easier to donate to the city. We also made a new way for residents to see what’s happening with online public meetings.
- Information campaigns: We launched new ways for our departments to run campaigns and get targeted information out, for example:
I am incredibly proud of the work our team has done. We have received so much positive feedback on the way our content team explained the order to shelter in place. We had compliments from people across the U.S., and most importantly, our residents.
As well as building digital services, we have been building our team. Six new team members have joined us since we have been remote.
I am privileged to work with such passionate, caring, ingenious people who have put their personal lives on hold to serve their city. This is what it really means to be a public servant — in times of crisis, we must put our residents’ needs before our own. Everywhere I look, that’s what I see right now, in public institutions all over the world.
In many ways, it has never been easier to implement digital services. Our partners within the city are finding it much easier to think about small, iterative services that improve over time. In less wild times, we likely wouldn’t have put these services live in their current state. We haven’t had time to build things like reporting tools, automated processes and notifications. But right now, we’re laser-focused on serving our residents and ruthlessly prioritizing. We may not have had “design for a pandemic” on our to-do list, but our approach has made it possible.
For now, we will keep working to help our residents through all that 2020 throws at us, and the aftermath that will surely follow. The health risks might fade, but the social and financial impacts will be felt for some time to come. Our work to get San Franciscans the services they need will not stop.
Stay well, and wear a mask.
