Martha Lane Fox, who was a fundamental puzzle piece in the UK’s effort to launch its Government Digital Service, told us that she felt GDS would have been more effective had they done more on the cultural change front. “Even though we had levers from the center, I didn’t do enough to bring the whole civil service along,” Fox told us. “You have to

One field office made a video of themselves kicking a computer with “ELIS” taped to it on paper.19

Domenic Fichera, a product manager at Nava, describes his week working together with Crisante in the Barre office, figuring out how long it took SNAP applicants to be approved from the time they submitted their applications. Fichera explains the process used: “He and I went through fifty cases, and I asked, ‘When did this person submit their

Ultimately, the list changed the focus from numbers of beds and meals and services to one single number: people who remain homeless.

In mapping out the process, one of many issues the team immediately identified that was not remotely tech-related involved giving the state consent to contact an applicant’s doctor. The consent form was on a separate piece of paper from the main application, so applicants often forgot to submit it or erroneously sent it to their doctor, who usually

The key is to regard technology as one of the many tools in a problem solver’s tool kit. That tool kit is rich with information just waiting to be unlocked—untapped data waiting to be thoughtfully analyzed, end users eager to tell their stories. But technology only helps if you have a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

They decided to offer help before they asked for help, by launching what they call OpEx Academy—a training school for city employees, run by city employees, to share skills on data. To date, city employees from departments as varied as police to parks have engaged in over sixty-five courses of peer-led training. We spoke to one twenty-year veteran

Jimmy Crisante had already gotten his field office to experiment with having applicants e-mail documents, which technically was against the rules. He was exactly the kind of bureaucrat the Nava team needed. “We had a champion in that office,” Gaudet notes. “And that was the thing that set the office apart as a good place for us to start.”46

We define public interest technology as the application of design, data, and delivery to advance the public interest and promote the public good in the digital age.