At the center of the event was the story of 2–1–1 San Diego and its community information exchange (CIE), a collaborative approach to sharing actionable client data and facilitating connections to services addressing the social determinants of health. The CIE takes in data from community partners, such as San Diego Gas & Electric. SDG&E and 2–1–1 San Diego know that consumers who are late or fail to pay their utility bills are more likely to become homeless. So 2–1–1 San Diego has at least four different programs to help citizens make their payments, thereby reducing their prospects of homelessness.
Notwithstanding examples like 2–1–1, government — the system we the people have chosen to organize our society — is generally not citizen-centric. Instead, I believe government has been slowly moving away from productive citizen engagement for decades. Many prolific thinkers, including Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, have described government as operating like a vending machine. Citizens collectively put our money into the machine and, in exchange, we get goods and services. Tax revenue is turned into police and fire services, clean water, electricity, roads, and bridges. When the machine already has our money and we don’t get what we want, we get upset; we feel a need to shake the machine until something comes out, even if it isn’t the service we wanted.
Government does not need to be a vending machine. For the last decade, I’ve been watching and participating in the civic technology movement. Civic tech enables relationships between the people and government via the delivery of digital services and exchange of information. It is exciting to see that there is more support than ever for increased citizen participation in government service delivery. And, within the civic tech community, there is more dialogue between the people and government.
Civic tech isn’t a person, a company, or a product; it is a model of engagement and service design. Civic tech is citizen-centric. It offers what government more broadly does not by recognizing the importance of constant citizen engagement. While the civic tech movement is rapidly gaining momentum, however, there are still too few champions breaking down the barriers preventing a modern digital government. To quote California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, despite changing expectations from citizens, “we have an institutional structure that doesn’t reward this kind of disruption.”
One of the pillars of civic tech is citizen-centric service design and delivery. Citizens must be engaged constantly and throughout the design and improvement of government digital services. Civic tech is about having a bi-directional flow of information and ideas between the people and government. The civic tech community also recognizes that government does not have all of the answers. Government must allow the people to help find and inform solutions since they are the ones who are impacted.
Local government was the birthplace of civic tech, in large part due to the intimacy of the governing relationship. I see my city council member and city workers on a regular basis. Had I not worked in state government, my only interaction might have been my driving test at age 16. As intimacy is lost, the potential reach and impact of state and local governments increases.
I have found that the skills and modes of engagement first pioneered within local government are equally effective and applicable at larger scale. The approach to changing the service-delivery model that I believe should be the first step for any organization is citizen journey mapping. Just like it sounds, a “citizen journey” is the end-to-end process that a person experiences when seeking a government service. What makes this process revolutionary is that it is anchored in how citizens experience the service, not in how government agencies do.
I encourage all government leaders to embrace the ideals of civic tech and spend time experiencing their services with their customers. At your next lunch break, go online and apply for your own service or visit your lobby and ask someone if you can follow them through the process. Be curious.
That’s what 2-1-1 San Diego is striving — successfully — to do. I suggest we all pay attention.
- Peter Kelly is a veteran of the IT industry, most recently serving as chief deputy director and CIO of the Office of Systems Integration, part of California Health and Human Services. In that capacity, he spoke with Techwire in September about the importance of user-centered design in building citizen engagement with government.
- A longer version of this article appears on Medium.
- Author's note: This article was made possible by my clients and partners: KAI Partners, a Sacramento-based consulting firm assisting government with large-scale systems; KAIP Academy, helping government learn in order to lead; and Stewards of Change, which manages the National Interoperability Collaborative , a community of networks that will advance the use of interoperability and data-sharing in health, healthcare, human services and related systems.
