The Child Welfare Digital Services (CWDS) project has become California’s state-of-the-art agile demonstration. The project has been in the public eye for its new perspective on building out a system that brings together multiple stakeholders and responds to user experience feedback.
The effort to replace the early '90s legacy system with a new, responsive mobile system has been started on a free software and agile development foundation. In order to support that, leadership has worked to increase transparency through quarterly stakeholder updates and monthly sprint reviews; to “embrace agile,” pre-qualified vendor pool contracting; and to deliver on-the-go module demonstrations.
“We are hiring developers and there is no precedence for these skills in the state,” Deputy Director at California Office of Systems Integration at CWDS Anthony Fortenberry told Techwire in an interview.
Along with agile development, the project has baked in free software principles to its programming and legal principles.
Fortenberry describes the software being developed for the CWDS system as a “public good.”
“Any computing that a government agency does, it is doing for the people. And it has a duty to the people to maintain its full control over that computing,” founder of the free software movement Richard Stallman said on Nov. 15 at CWDS’ Noon Speaker Series.
The project has aimed to pull more talent and innovative thought from the private sector, especially through its Noon Speaker Series, which has hosted 18F Co-Founder Robert Read, Agile Application Security co-author Laura Bell and Stallman.
“Bringing together thought leaders and innovators from outside of Sacramento and bringing them into a government agency that is doing innovative work, it raises the image and brings the conversation into the light and out of the dark,” CivicActions CEO Henry Poole told Techwire after Stallman’s talk on Nov. 15.
CivicActions works to use free software and dev ops to build more accountable governments.
“It also makes people want to come in and want to do government service, which is really important,” Poole said.
