 If folks could come and take a seat, please. If folks could come in and take a seat, we are getting ready to get started. Welcome. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to New America. We are so excited to have you here today and so excited to be launching the government fix, which was written by my colleagues here, Hanashank and Sarah Hudson, who did a great deal of research when they were together as fellows of our public interest technology project. My name is Cecilia Munoz. I have the great distinct honor of leading that project as I have for the last couple of years. And what we hope to do, we have the modest ambition of hoping to build a field of public interest technology to have an impact on the way policy gets made, on the way that government delivers services, and most importantly, on the way that people interact with their government. And we have been at it for several years now. And we started with a class of fellows that Sarah and Hannah were part of. And part of the work that they did, which they will describe, is a body of research with people who are in this field to help paint a picture for us of what it takes, what innovation looks like in government, what the results can be, and some of what they found. You may find surprising. So we are going to start with Hannah and Sarah talking a little bit about the book. We'll follow with a panel of experts who have, I think, every single person except me who's participating this evening has come in from somewhere else around the country. And then we'll have time for question and answers. So without further ado, Hannah and Sarah. Hi, so I'm Hannah for, I'm Hannah and Sarah. For those of you who don't know me. So as Cecilia said, we began researching this topic about one and a half years ago. We were interested in understanding the government innovation slash public interest technology slash call it what you want, landscape for two reasons. So first, we had both come out of innovation efforts at the federal level and found them a little bit messy and confusing and like we weren't totally sure we knew what we were doing a lot of the time. And so we wanted to talk to other people to see is there somebody who knows what they're doing and could we talk to those people, somebody who has it all figured out. And then the other reason is that we are both researchers by trade. So if you say to us, there's this new field called public interest technology. We're gonna be like, okay, I'm gonna need to go talk to a bunch of people and confirm there's a new field and see what that field looks like. So we went off and we did our research. We interviewed about 70 people working in and around government innovation. And I will just use the phrase innovation as shorthand but sometimes these teams look like they're actually technically called innovation teams. Sometimes they're digital service teams. Sometimes they are just called public works. So we interviewed people working in these teams at the federal, state and local level. And one of the things that we found really early on is that this work spreads by exposure. So we talked to people who said, well, we saw the work that was being done in Detroit and we figured we could do that. So as part of our mandate to build out the field we wanted to trigger more of those moments by telling those stories and putting them out into the national media and sparking more of those, hey, I could do that moments. So we were doing these interviews and we were probably about a third of the way through. And I remember very vividly that we were doing an interview when I was on Amtrak. I live in New York and have worked in DC for several years. So Amtrak is my second home. So I was on Amtrak and somebody was telling us this completely riveting story about procurement. Really. Like we were on the edge of our seats like and then what happened? This story had everything. It had all bureaucratic institutions that didn't want to change. It had late night panicked phone calls. It had Todd Park for those of you who flying in like at the last minute. It had even this like Norma Ray Sally Field moment of somebody standing up in a really large meeting and saying, we're all gonna need to switch to Agile. So we were like that. So the call ended. We were only able to get through half of the story and we had a second call scheduled and we were just like, oh my God, what a cliffhanger. Like how are we gonna, you know, what's gonna happen? But as we kind of calmed down and caught our breath from this story, we started thinking about how are we gonna tell this story to people who don't actually work in this field, who don't wanna hear procurement stories. You know, the mass media isn't generally like, hey, who's got a good procurement story for me? Like it's hard enough to get good government stories out there. People like to tell bad government stories, for those of us who work in government know. But you know, the city paved the roads when they were supposed to pave them and let me tell you how they procured the services to do that, not so much. So we were talking over like, how are we gonna get these stories out there? And one of the things that we realized was that we needed to divide up the stories into things that we told practitioners and things that we told the general public. And so just a quick shout out, we launched a publication for practitioners called The Commons, where we tell those kinds of stories and then we thought about, okay, so now how are we gonna tell the general interest stories? If we want to expose people to this kind of work, we're gonna have to figure out how to make this palatable for general interest publications. So we hit on this idea that we could use the stories as guides to illustrate simple ways that people can start thinking about how to improve government services. And one of the big stories that we knew we wanted to tell was look, a lot of this work is not very hard and you can do it too. So once we had that as a guiding light, we put together a set of findings and stories and I'm gonna turn it over to Sarah shortly who will talk through briefly what we found. And we were able to partner with Fast Company to run a series of the stories under the heading of the government fix. We also pitched them a procurement series, by the way, which they passed on. So if anyone wants a six essay series on procurement, still have some really good ideas around that. So the series did very well and we started hearing from people all around different corners of our lives who had read it and Josh Seiden, who literally I met on Twitter. He's the only person to this day who I have met on Twitter. We met about 10 years ago, discovered we were both user experience people who lived in the same neighborhood and had coffee. And for those of you who are not in the user experience world, Josh and his partner, Jeff Gotthel, wrote the book Lean UX and they travel around the world speaking primarily in the private sector on agile and design thinking and Lean UX. So they also have, so Josh emailed me and said, hey, I also, by the way, have a small press, because as you do. So he told me that as they do these talks, one of the big questions that they get, there's always one person who stands up and says, but how's that gonna work in government? And that in reading this series that we had put together, that we had started to provide the answer. So here we are today. That is how we've ended up now with a book that you can read in a plane flight for people who are busy and on planes a lot. And one final note is that Josh's partner, Jeff, told us recently that he gave a talk in Helsinki and it was to about like 150 people in the business community. And at the very first question came from a woman who stood up and said, I work for the Finnish Prime Minister and I'm wondering how these ideas work in the public sector. And so he said, do I have a book for you? So we are super glad that we can bring these ideas to the public sector all over the world in a really easily digestible format. And I will turn it over to Sarah to talk a little bit more in-depth about what we found. All righty, good evening, y'all. Good evening. So it is a joy to be with you all and to your respect to Marie Kondo, more of a joy than a well-organized sock door. Just, I'm totally playing into your stereotype. I just realized this. I was about to say, just to take a survey of the room, but I am gonna do that. To take a survey of the room, how many people in here have worked for government and are work for government right now? Well, hello, friends. All right, how many people have ever done research? Okay, so basically nobody in the room is gonna be surprised to hear that when we got started, we had a whole set of questions and we were like, we know what we need to find out. We're gonna go run with this. We did questions and it took us exactly one set of interviews and one synthesis session with a whole bunch of post-it notes to realize that we were asking all of the wrong questions. Or mostly wrong questions. So one of the things that we did find was we immediately started to see themes and it didn't matter where people were coming from. Whether it was inside government, outside government, state, local, or federal, there were some key themes that came across. The first one was where innovation is happening. We often think about technology and innovation going hand in hand and the common narratives around technology is that it happens on the coast. It happens only through engineering and through people who have trained to do it. That was not at all what we found when we started to talk to folks. Innovation is happening across the country. It is happening in the middle of the country. And most importantly, it's not just happening at the federal level and in fact what we really saw was state, local, county, city. That was the place that really was driving a whole bunch of innovation and it wasn't really being talked about. And actually as a sidebar to that, we, if you haven't seen it, there's some new Americans, Tara McGinnis, another Hanna who spells it the same way. Hanna Passon and Denise Ross created a map that actually is a data visualization of innovation across the country and it is called, I'm gonna get the name right, Network Connectivity Across American Communities and you can see it at data.newamerica.org and it's amazing. So it's well worth checking out but you can actually see right there how there are nodes all across the country where innovation is happening. The second theme that we saw was around what problems people were trying to solve. So we realized actually that there's a finite set of problems and we identified what we call vertical problems and what we call horizontal problems. So the vertical problems are like every city that you live in, you have to figure out how to take out the trash. Every city, every state has to have a disaster response plan. Everybody you know has a pothole in their community. So what we found was blight, homelessness, child welfare, emergency response, 911. There were common problems that people were trying to solve particularly at the state and local level and common solutions that were being built but often in silos. And so that actually led to the second thing which we realized which was cities are not competitive. People really want to work together and it's really hard to do that sometimes which is something we're gonna come back to. The second thing we identified was these horizontal problems. These are the questions that really often tie to this question of how do we build a field. So one might be how do you actually hire people? What does that look like? Is that a digital team? Is that staff that are integrated into individual departments? Do you create a separate department of doing which was one of our favorite examples from Gainesville? And one of the problems there that actually came up that we asked no questions about irony of all ironies was procurement. So when we came out from our first synthesis session we actually had one finding that we simply called procurement is a thing. Because every single person that we talked to without us asking a question had either a procurement horror story or a procurement, we're trying to solve this by some problems. And that actually brings us then to the maybe one of the most critical pieces of this and something that's gonna come up a lot today which is who is doing the work. One of the things that we heard over and over that this is everybody's work. It is not just folks who come with a specific set of degrees, a specific set of backgrounds, a specific set of experiences. They don't come from specific places and they often don't identify in what you might call technology roles. They don't necessarily identify as technologists, they're problem solvers. They are people who are using the best practices out of technology, things like agile, things like modular procurement but they don't necessarily know how to find each other. So that actually then it's a challenge and an opportunity. Everybody can be involved and at the same time it's hard for people to find each other. They exist in silos. They don't know what you can't Google government procurement who's doing it, wanna connect and come up with anything that's particularly useful. And so luckily one of the things that has happened both what's happening while we're doing our research and has happened since is that organizations like Ford and other academic and other institutions are really coming together and trying to figure out how do we build out this field so people cannot just find their way into it then they can stay there. People tend to often find their way in by falling in sideways is one of the things we found and then they don't know how to keep going. There's a lot of lateral movement but it's hard to go up. It's hard to figure out how to build a career in part because we're doing this for the first time as a known, like this is a career path that we're gonna take. One of our favorite stories is actually from the Code for America summit. We did a talk and then afterwards somebody came up and we had written a report about our findings and he said, we printed the report and then I brought it to my city manager and I have to tell you we marked it up and now we use it as the guide that we're trying to do because we're doing innovation in our city for the first time. Nobody had ever told us before how other people were doing it and now we have a blueprint. So I think that is the last most important thing which is people are really, really hungry for this. They are hungry to connect. They're hungry to find other people who know their particular pains of like trying to figure out how to do garbage delivery better in specific cities and how to actually do some of this problem solving. Who has found something that's off the shelf? Who has built something that might be able that's open source that they can then replicate? People actually wanna connect and they don't know how. So that is actually the segue by which we're gonna pass this back over to Cecilia and our panelists who are gonna talk about some of the ways they're doing these things. Hopefully my mic will start working from here and let me first thank Sarah and Hannah and call up our panelists. I'm gonna tell you who they are as they come up. We're gonna start with Hyon Sui who is the director of technology development in the New York City Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity. She leads an infrastructure team that provides support for data application and digital projects that NYC opportunity builds. So she's working right at the intersection of tech and public service. Ginger Spencer who is the director of public works for the city of Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the nation. This is my favorite part. She likes to say that her job is about talking trash. But what she really means is that she runs a major 24 seven operation, which is at the heart of what makes a city a good place. And her team was recognized by Bloomberg philanthropies with the cities for zero waste award for their sustainability efforts. Jenny Toomey who is the international director of technology and society at the Ford Foundation. Jenny is really a pioneer in building the field of public interest technology. She brings an enormous knowledge, but also enormous inspiration to this work. And Eric Hyzen who is the director of Justice, the Justice and Opportunity Initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He describes himself as an engineer, turned product manager and policy nerd, passionate about using technology to make our country a better place. So thank you to all of you for flying around the country to get here. We really appreciate you being here. You heard from Hannah and Sarah that we are people who are passionate about things like procurement, things like government delivering fairly nerdy, fairly basic things that people don't think about until they actually have to get them from the government. And then when they think about it, it usually comes with a groan, right? Our experience of government services is not, you know, the same as our experience of buying shoes or anything else that we can do just with the swipe of a finger. So let me start with Ginger. The book makes the case that successes can often look very small or they tend not to be big splashy stories. So I'd love to know if you have success stories that either align with that finding or dispute that finding. Do you have a favorite success story? Okay, so thank you Cecilia and thank you everyone. And ladies, Sarah and Hannah, just so you know, I get excited about procurement and I get excited about talking trash. So basically in the city of Phoenix, we are a little bit competitive. We like to have a leading edge, we want to be resilient. And so in order to do that, we have to innovate. And so some of the projects that we've been able to do have been very small, right? You gotta start somewhere. Whereas other projects have been on the larger scale. So one of the things that we were able to do in the trash industry was we knew that we were sending a million tons of trash to the landfill each and every year. And our mayor and city council said this is unsustainable and we have to do something about it. And they basically set a 40% diversion goal from the landfill by the year 2020. And so it was a very ambitious goal. We were only at 16% at the time. And so the question for my team and other city staff was how are we going to achieve this? And so one of my former employees, she came up with this great idea to do a call for innovators. It was basically a sexy way of seeing requests for information for those of you in the procurement world. So what we said is we don't have all the answers, right? We're looking for solutions. We know our challenges, but we put it out to the world and said, what are your ideas? And so we received over a hundred responses to that RFI worldwide. And then basically what we started to do was plug at each one, one by one, right? RFP here, RFP there. One of my favorite projects though, was we had put out an RFP to have folks, if you've ever been to Phoenix, Valley of the Sun, we have our beautiful palm trees. And so the leaves on the palm trees are called palm fronds. We had put out a solicitation and no one bit on it. Then our city manager, Ed Zercher, went on NPR. And at the end of the interview, the reporter said, is there anything else? And he said, if anyone has any great ideas out there about palm fronds, give me a call. And then the proposal started flooding in. So now we actually have a company that is taking our palm fronds and they are turning it into livestock feed for pygmy goats, for horses, for cattle. And it's pretty darn exciting. So that would be my favorite. And this is a crowd which gets excited about stuff like that for sure. So let me ask Hayan, a lot of the conversations, when you start to talk about innovation at the city level, the conversation moves almost immediately to this notion of smart cities and with the idea of specific technologies. But the Hananser's book documents all kinds of examples of much kind of lower tech things, right? Part of the themes I think that they found is sometimes you have to start small and sometimes it's not so flashy. Is that consistent with your experience? Definitely. So before I get into that, it's worth to say a few words about our office. We're part of the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations, but our office, we call ourselves NYC Opportunity with a specific mission to reduce poverty and increase equity. So a lot of work we do is under this umbrella. We have a team called Program Evaluation Team. So my love story, this is kind of old. A lot of you probably have heard about this before, but we just really love this story. It's tax season, so you all know the tax credit program, meaning that if your income is below a threshold and you're working, then you're entitled to receive a certain amount of tax refund. It's a thing everybody knows, but the fact is for many years, a lot of people, they are eligible for this program, but they don't apply. And especially for those low income New Yorkers. The reason, a lot of reasons, one of the big ones is the process is very complicated so people don't know how to go about it. The Department of Finance came to our office. They did a lot of research and eventually they came up with a solution. So the solution is very simple. There's nothing to do with the technology. They basically look at the people who previously filed this application and they have everybody's, all the residents' tax information, so they know who potentially are eligible for this program. They prefilled those forms for those residents and then they mail it out. All you need to do when you receive a form like this is just verify that information, you sign it and send back. I think the number that we have, this program has been running for over 10 years and average every year there are thousands of people get benefited through this way. It's not a big number in terms of the tax credit that you get but over $1,000 for a low income New Yorkers, it's a big number. So again, there's no technology component involved at all. The whole effort is literally just a stamp, mail something out. So definitely aligned with what the book has been talking about. Right. So Jenny, you and Darren Walker who you work with have had the foresight to think big and try to build a field of public interest technology. How far along are we? And what do you think needs to happen next and what does it look like when we get there? First of all, thank you so much for having me. And it's always fun to come to New America but particularly in this new way, speaking about public interest technology. So we're nowhere near where we need to be in relation to public interest technology but I feel like we are on the highway for the first time in the 11 years that I've been at Ford. I feel like people finally understand there is a road that we all need to drive down and it needs to be extended and broadened and there needs to be a lot of on ramps to it. So that was the first question. Was there another question? What does it look like when we get there? What's the world we're trying to build? Well, I really liked the metaphor you used about like how many of the people you found only began to do this work because they saw someone else doing it. Like we did a paper, I wanna say it was like seven years ago, it's called The Future of Failure, you can read it and we interviewed all the kind of weird people who managed to find their way into these jobs where they were doing something with one foot in academia and one foot in public interest or one foot in an NGO and one foot working with government with a technology background. And in all of those cases, they just kind of were these magical people who figured out a way to bridge these divides. And I think that's true with everything. You know, like I was a musician in punk rock bands only after I saw Wibbit in punk rock bands. You know, like you actually have to see that there's a potential to do this thing and when you see it in school, you absolutely wanna do that. So I'm so happy that you've written this book to raise up those stories because that's one step of what we need. But one fascinating thing about this paper was that what we learned was one of the biggest barriers and there was like a hundred barriers. Everything from the fact that they don't teach code in public schools all the way through to governments not knowing that they need these people all the way to NGOs knowing they don't need these people they can't recruit, they can't hire. It was like a hundred reasons why somebody wouldn't end up in a job like this. But the biggest one was because the computer scientists couldn't imagine themselves in a role where they would work with government or NGOs. Like that, you know, they wanted to do good. I mean, how many of them are starting startups to try to change the world in different ways? And what they realized or what we're realizing now is actually there are so many other ways that you can actually bring a tech lens into government, into NGOs, frankly, into philanthropy. We've brought technologists all into every area of the Ford Foundation in order for us to see the way that technology is changing the world all around us. So what it will look like is I think, you know, Darren uses the metaphor of public interest law because Ford as a foundation played a role in building up the field of public interest law back in the 60s and 70s. And I think there are some corollaries, right? You have a cultural corollary where, you know, in the 60s and 70s, a lot of people who were going and getting law degrees were people who thought like, you know what, if I get this degree, I'm settled financially for the rest of my life. But then there was also the civil rights movement in the 60s and there was the Vietnam War. And these things were making people feel like, is it enough for me just to be a lawyer and know that I don't have to worry about anything in the future? Or should I take this very rare thing I have, which is this skill set of this language of law? And can I bring this to other work besides just working at this law firm? And now lawyers all know that they can go into public interest law and they can also have a career that goes in and out. They might work at a company, they might work at a law firm, they might work for government, they might just do private practice or advisor teach. And we'd like technologists to feel the exact same sort of thing that they can go in and out of these different sectors and bring with them a public interest perspective because we certainly need it. We need it in the private sector, we need it at government and we need it in philanthropy. So Eric, you're a person who has gone in and out of this field, right? You've worked at a tech company, you're working at a philanthropy now, you also worked in government, you're yet another USDS alum. Does that ring true to you? If we're trying to picture what this field looks like when we get there, are we training people who are specifically gonna be public servants? Are we training people who are gonna be moving back and forth? Is it some combination of those things? Yeah, well first, thank you silly for having me and thank you to Hannah and Sarah for doing this work. I think we're a community that can be so focused on the massive amount of work in front of us that it is really hard to step back and look at what is and isn't working and take the time to share that. So I'm really appreciative that you've done that and you've created a really important resource. I think it's a little of both. When we created the US Digital Service, the focus was exclusively on tours of duty. We thought that we were going to recruit people like me. I was an engineer at Google when I joined who would come into government for anywhere from two weeks to four years, get some things done, put up with a lot of pain and then go back and then that would be a period in your life you would then infect the rest of your company and bring them along. And we definitely saw that. I think we, many of our, we had a lot of people who came in for short tours of duty, got very significant work done and are now doing things that are completely unrelated to this field. But what I don't think we expected, mostly because we were naive about the people that are really innovating in government, which are the career officials that have been doing this their entire lives, was that we also needed to create a new sort of type of technologist in public service. And I think that's where the work that Jenny has been and Ford have been leading is so important. We found very quickly that many of those of us that joined were didn't want to go back. We, I had as, and I talked to many of my colleagues as we rotated out this almost existential crisis trying to find work back in the private sector that even approached the level of significance and impact that we felt like we were having in government. And I see a lot of heads, so I know I'm not alone there. And I look at some of the folks that I hired in who are still in government who have now spent most of their careers in public service who are going through different roles. They might have started as a engineer and moved into management and policy roles. And then like most of us realize that procurement is the most important problem and started to work on that. So I think that we need those two tracks. I think there's an important role to play for tours of duty. We need to see more of that. It's a very important option, but where I think we also need to continue and need to do more to develop longer term career paths as well, which will be the right fit for some. So the, let me, Ginger and Hyann, let me go back to you. So, I mean, we've heard, right, and I've had this experience too when I worked in government, this experience of watching folks with technical backgrounds who had worked in industry kind of fall in love with public service. I mean, you've started your career as a public servant. You've been, you are career public servants. One, does this resonate with you? Are there skill sets you wish were present in the circles that you work in? Does this notion that the people who were the real innovators are career public servants who are diving into the work because what you are are problem solvers. Does this, does that resonate with you? So I always say I actually started with private sector, worked many years and only joined the government a few years ago. And I have to be honest, when I made that transition, a lot of friends are questioning, are you sure that's the right movement? Not to say why they ask, but I was a little bit hesitating whether or not that was the right move. But I think the truth is after I went into the government, I was very surprised by what I saw, by the people around me, the passion, the dedication that I saw. It's absolutely not what I imagined when I was outside of the government. So that's one thing that I want to say. In terms of the skill set, I do think it's very challenging for government to find some new skill sets, meaning like technology, service design. My team, when I started, we had quite a bunch of open positions and it was very painful to feel those positions. Competing with the private sector to get technology, people coming into the government, it is very hard. But I do think there are very passionate people out there that are waiting to come to the government. But government also has, we have our own job that we need to do. We need to change our image, attract the people coming in. And does it resonate this notion of what we heard Han and Sarah say that, I mean, we're hoping that by telling these stories, that that will help you recruit the kinds of people that you're looking for and help those kinds of people kind of fall in love with public service. But does that seem useful to you? Are we onto something? Totally. When those articles in the book came out last year, I have to say everybody in my office was following those articles because we just love those stories and it just resonated with us. It's exactly what we're experiencing. And we also noticed a lot of young kids coming out of college, they started really asking what's going on? What can we do? We have a very fantastic design team. They're really design champions in New York City. They go to a lot of events. They try to socialize with people similar to what the message that the book is trying to deliver. Working in the government can be really fun and it can be innovative. Ginger, how about you? Yeah, so I am a 21 year public servant and I started off as a management intern. In graduate school, I actually was trained to compete in the private sector. Went to Carnegie Mellon and our coursework was very heavy on quantitative courses as well as technology. But I wanted to give back to my community. I wanted to be able to drive through a city, right? Pothole or not. And see the fruit of my labor. And so that's what I did. I started off with the City of Phoenix as a management intern. And in the city, what we do is we train generalists. And basically what a generalist is, is we can, you have a certain skill set, right? And we can put you in any city department. And you'll go in there and you'll figure things out. You'll learn enough to be dangerous. You'll get things done. And then it's time for us to move you onto another department. About 10 years ago, the city created an innovation efficiency task force. And basically it was during the recession we had to come up with $100 million in savings. We got it done. And we got it done little by little. During that time we also tried to create a chief innovation officer but trying to compete with the private sector. We weren't able to get that done. So what the city did, we actually took the approach of, let's train people within with these skills. Let's get them Six Sigma certified, lean certified. And now we have a program called Advanced Phoenix where people are trained. And we can put them in any city department, give them a challenge, right? And they'll go in there and come up with solutions to help you solve your problems. And so that's what we're doing. And so I really love that approach, the generalist approach. And you can work in arts and culture. You can work in public works. You can work in IT. But we're really looking for those individuals that have that balance. Not just the technical skills, right? But the soft skills as well. So that's a perfect segue actually, Jenny, into something that I wanna ask you. So Ford, New America, Hewlett Foundation, a group of partners, really at your instigation launched a network of universities because you've been thinking hard about pipelines. Where is it that we train policymakers? Where is it that we train the people who are gonna be innovators in government? Can you talk a little bit about that and what you hope that it'll produce? Sure, I mean, what I would say is that when we did that first report six years ago and we saw the hundred things, we thought, all right, well, Ford is not gonna fund the hundred things that we need to fix in this space. But there are a handful of ones that we probably should play a role in. And by the way, this stuff has been going on for a long time. And it's not all called public interest technology. We call it that just because of our specific history with the Ford Foundation and with public interest law. And we think it's an easy way to talk to the universities about the kinds of change they could mean, but you could call it civic tech, or you could call it community technology. And there are lots of incredible people who are doing it under all sorts of names and you don't have to call it one thing or the other. I just wanna be really clear because there's so much good work going on at all these different levels and we need it all. Whether you're a civic hall in New York City or Code for America who's already been referenced or Allied Media Conference who work with activists on their technology, all of that is necessary. So with regards to the network, that was just an interesting thing that we found out. We started making some grants about six years ago and some of them were at universities and some of them were piloting fellows programs and just trying different things to get a sense of what might actually build this infrastructure out. And we funded this class which is an incredibly successful class between Georgetown Law School and MIT. So computer scientists and lawyers learn together. It's, you know, they've got, you know, they do it, they're connected to each other visually. They come and meet with each other a couple of years and they work on real problems that like the FTC is trying to solve right now in real time. What are the legal and technical solutions they could bring forward? It's a hugely successful oversubscribed class. But the professor who was working on at MIT came to me and he said, you know, I'm a little worried and I said, why? And he said, well, because even though it's oversubscribed, there are a lot of tenure professors who are dissuading computer scientists from taking this class at MIT. And I said, well, why is that? And he said, well, because if you're good enough to be a computer scientist that goes to MIT, well, you're, you know, the people who are gonna be your advisors on your PhD are gonna say to you, you know, why did you waste any of your cycles on anything but computer science? And it just shows how that discipline was naturally very siloed, you know, that a handful of these schools, it's kind of like economics has a similar kind of thing where, you know, you have to go to one of seven schools to be somebody who teaches economics at a certain level. And that all the other economists who are doing other kind of pragmatic ones, you know, they go to the lesser schools and there's this kind of bifurcation between, you know, what it takes to be computer scientists which is this level of purity and then this other thing about this set of ways of thinking about things and these kinds of understanding of certain kinds of language that could be useful a lot of different places. And when we heard that, we thought, all right, well, let's bring the presidents and provosts of a whole bunch of schools together and let's talk about whether or not they need to continue to silo their engineering and computer science from the humanities. And what we were really excited to hear is some of the most powerful heads of schools said to us like the students are demanding this. You know, the humanities students are demanding to be able to understand the technology. The computer science students are demanding to be able to use their skills towards more meaningful work and you've now just given us a frame that we can help use to sort of catalyze. We've seen a lot of exciting announcements like a 10 year plan at Stanford and a brand new college in MIT and enormous gifts at Virginia Tech and all sorts of other wonderful things. So I think it's one piece, you know, like a lot of what you're talking about in your book is not about, you know, the person who's, I don't know, building the next internet necessarily, but we'll need people across the entire trajectory and I want the person who builds the next internet to have taken some ethics in humanities classes, frankly, and I also want people who are gonna be, you know, the next senator of ex-state to have taken some computer science classes and in a perfect world, that's what's gonna happen. So, and just, I'm gonna get back to Eric in a second, but Jinger and Hayan, so you are people who are working in government now, right? So how does that strike you as meeting, you said, Hayan, that it's hard to find people. How does that strike you? And I'd love to know kind of where you recruit from now and from your end of the pipeline, right? For Jenny's talking about sort of helps with the supply of public interest-minded people with these skill sets, you're on the demand side. Right, so I think there are two approaches that we're taking. One is look at who is inside the government and help those people to get new skill set to come into our group, work with us, because within government, there's so many people that they want to learn new skill set, they want it to grow. So that's naturally one of the approaches that we take. And the other one is speaking of hiring people from outside. It's been very challenging. Our effort has been focusing on, let's not very focus on the solid, the hard skill part, more focused on the softer skill and then that could be fresh graduate student, could be someone with very limited experience, but the softer skill is there and then we can take time and train those people. There is still a challenge there in terms of getting over the requirement, in terms of the minimum requirement to hire somebody, but that's in general the direction that we're heading. How about you, Ginger? Yes, so we're also hiring and basing it off of soft skills. And we are hiring from the outside, but sometimes there is a challenge as far as competing with the private sector when it comes to salary, but we're also focused on growing from within, building our own. And so we've had a lot of success in that area. The other thing is, so we're looking for folks with when it comes to those soft skills that have the right attitude, right? And I think it's back to what you were saying that they have a balance of some technical skills. They took some coursework there as well as they want to help the community. There's a passion there for public service. And so we're looking for the right folks. We're gonna bring them in, we're gonna get them trained and we're gonna put them in various departments, but technology and innovation is a big piece of that. So no matter if you're in the municipal court department, where they're working with restorative justice, or if you're in the public works department, we want folks who are gonna basically come in, learn all they can, and then help us find solutions. It's really about problem solving at the end of the day. And just so Arizona State University is part of this network, the rate that we built. So does that give you hope that you might be able to build a pipeline? So I'm actually associate faculty at Arizona State University and that's my passion right now is developing a future public administrators, right? And future leaders to come and run our cities. Great. So Eric, let me turn to you. So in the book, the book makes the point that innovation in the field tends to be slow and small. And like both you and Jenny represent philanthropies that are thoughtful about this and enlightened, but as somebody who deals with philanthropy a lot, frequently the incentives are all about finding big ways to change the world, things that can get to scale, potentially scale quickly. And in an environment where sometimes the most useful things are the place to start are kind of small and maybe unsexy changes. I mean, does that feel like attention to you? And what's the mechanism for resolving that tension? How do we make the case that sometimes slow and small is actually the way that change happens? Yeah, it absolutely does feel like attention. I mean, I work for philanthropy that professes that we do believe that ultimately we seek to scale change through government and investing and believe that we are investing in driving change there, not through philanthropy alone. And it still can be difficult because this entire sort of sector is rooted in how can you demonstrate the shiny object syndrome as some of the articles talk about. But I know that that's not how change really works. One of my favorite examples from the book is Hannah tells a story that we actually worked on together about trying to improve the process of becoming a registering for trusted traveler programs like TSA Precheck or Global Entry and the sort of accomplishment after three months of work was changing a few lines of text on the TSA FAQ on their website and how that was a huge accomplishment because it was actually what people needed. They were getting the wrong information in it and it was correcting that, but also because it got agencies that weren't talking to each other to talk and started a process that then actually led to a lot more change. And now that I'm in philanthropy, thinking about reporting a chain, reporting the impact of a grant as we change the language on our FAQ is really tough to think about. So I wish I had a silver bullet. I think the sharing examples like this book is a really great place to start. I think we need to be better about celebrating what real change looks like. I think we also need to do more to sort of increase and promote the brand of government period. Particularly now when trust in government is so low, when it's so easy to associate the work of one administration with the entirety of the public sector, not even just the federal government. Even for large funders that should know better, I think it's really easy to get caught in this trap of avoiding investing in that basic currency of improving how government does business. So I think the more funders are people too. We watch the news, we are in society and in culture in the same way. And so I think one of the largest things that we can do to impact funding is changing the conversation about government period, which will have many other benefits as well. Jenny, does this resonate with you as well, this problem? Do you have ideas for us? I don't know. If Derek was here he would say the really big problems don't have quick fixes to them. I mean, our major focus at the Ford Foundation is inequality. He refocused all of our work around inequality and I don't know that there's a quick fix for inequality in a globally connected world. And so I understand that people want to see the return on investment. One of the dangers I think of new wealth that's tied specifically to money that's been raised in a business environment is they think they can measure that kind of change the same way they measure other kinds of change. And I think that's very dangerous. That said, the danger of old money is that they don't ever need to change how they do things. And I think that's part of the problem that we have with government, right? Because if you get to be the head of a department in government or you get to be the head of a foundation or you get to be head of an NGO, well, you've earned the right not to feel like you're stupid. And technology makes people feel stupid. And so there's been this huge denial of the scale of the shift that we're experiencing. And it's only been in a lot of like the crises that have come up in relation to your work. I'm sure like thehellterror.gov gave you a lot of opportunity to change things that were harder to change before than afterwards. So I also don't think it's necessarily slow. Like our network, we talked to presidents and provosts at universities in June. We've announced a network of 21 of these incredibly powerful universities who are gonna change how they give degrees to students to allow for a lot more intersectional learning. And the fact that they've done it means that the 15 or so other universities who wanna be in the network are gonna do that too. So did it take six years for us to like diagnose a problem and pick something and pilot some things? Yes, it did. But I think we picked a good problem and people made a good case. So some things move very, very, very quickly. And I wrote one other thing. Oh, and also infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't have a fast fix. It never does. It really doesn't. There are components of infrastructure that can be made better with quick fixes. Like the problem where governments build all their own technology instead of using off the shelf technology, that's a big problem. And you fixing that can solve a lot of problems or getting the questions right, like you said, that can solve a lot of problems. But yeah, I don't think that the slowness is a problem. I think the fastness is a problem. And if you look at history of philanthropy, funders will wanna do the shiny thing then it won't give them the return on investment and then they'll back away from it for like a decade. And we saw this like with funders funding websites, 15 years ago, or like doing hackathons seven years ago, whatever, and oh, it didn't have the solution that government had. Well, of course it didn't. It's a component. So I guess that's what I would say. So let me take you back, thank you, to something that Sarah mentioned. So she lifted up some work that our colleagues Denise Ross and Tarmiganist did, which was a map of, they mapped out networks that frequently that philanthropies are investing in or that others are investing in. That are designed to solve all kinds of different kinds of problems. There's one that they focused on, that focuses on homelessness. There's another that focuses on helping cities develop bike lanes. So it's really a vast array of different kinds of networks around the country. But among the things, if you click on this wondrous map that Sarah lifted up, which I also am super excited about, you find that something like 80% of the network connections that they mapped were happening in the same 60 places, which is to say that we're investing in a lot of the same places over and over again, and that those places tend to be highly, highly networked, and then there's kind of the rest of the country. So as a person from Michigan, I think of this as the Detroit and Flint problem, where as many challenges as a city like Detroit has had, lots of people are investing in it, and there are things happening and it's amazing and super exciting. And so Detroit is one of those heavily networked places. Flint is not, and Flint spurs down the national scene because of a really epic problem with the water, which is still continuing. And one of the things that we worry about, and it's a place where our public interest technology works intersects with the work of a national network that we're building here at New America, is this notion that if governments really gonna be responsive to people, we obviously have work to do with the federal government and state governments, but we also have work to do in local governments everywhere. So we have representatives from two cities that are among the five largest cities in the country. My question I want to pose it to each of you is, what do we think, do we think this kind of innovation is possible in Flint or some place without the resources of New York or without the resources of Phoenix in a smaller city in your own states? And as philanthropy says, people who care about inequality everywhere in the country, what should we be thinking about to make sure that this capacity arrives in every community? Does that make sense? Hyang, can we start with you? And we'll just work our way this way. And let me, before you start, let me ask our audience to also start thinking about questions, cause when we're done with this, when we're gonna turn to you and we're gonna call Sarah and Hannah back up to take your questions as well as the panel, so get thinking. Sure, I will give a try. I don't know, I have a very good answer for this question. It's definitely a great question. I think the answer is yes, there should be a way. I like to use our service design team as an example because what we noticed with that team is, like I said, they're really design champions in the city, but not only just in the New York City because of the work they do, they're very well known in the country, so we constantly get a lot of visits, communications with other parts of the country. I think it's through that kind of a model, cities can help each other. The approach that the service design team is taking is when they talk with other people, talk about the service design process, it's not just about do something for somebody else, it's more about teach you how to fish. I think through that way, they were able to help a lot of within New York City, help a lot of other city agencies to understand what design practice is so that people can run on their own. I think for smaller cities, that would be the approach to take, leverage other cities, leverage big cities, leverage the private sector, the nonprofit community. That would be my thought. Thank you. Ginger. So my answer is yes as well, so just a few thoughts. One city's big or small can't afford not to innovate in order to be resilient, right? In order to maintain a competitive edge, in order just to continuously improve services for our residents, we have to innovate. I was talking with Hannah recently and one of the things that I had said was, and I say this to my staff, we don't get paid to come up with the easy answers, right? We're here to come up to deal with difficult challenges. And so I always say if we dig deep enough, long enough, hard enough, we will find an answer. And then it gets kind of back to the book. If a solution is not there, if we can't find it, then we're probably not asking the right questions. So again, that's kind of the approach that we take. And then I feel that all cities, big or small, everyone needs a copy of the book. The great thing about this book is it gives wonderful examples of what cities are doing in order to be innovative. And so why reinvent the will? I think that was one of the articles, the treasurer from St. Louis mentioned, why reinvent the will? There are ideas out there, people are doing it, and some don't have all the resources, right? Some don't necessarily have the money to do it, but they're getting it done. I give one quick example. So City Manager had basically tasked a team of individuals to come up with a dashboard for the city. We worked with vendors, they came in, they gave us a proposal, it was a half a million dollars. We took it to the city management team, we were all excited. And the city manager at the time said, this was great, thank you for the research. However, he said, I wanna liken this to exercise. He basically told myself and the team, he said, you can go out and get a personal trainer, which is what you guys have done. Right, that might cost you 100 bucks a month, or you can go and join a gym, right? Which might be 40 bucks a month, or you can go walk a mile each and every day, which will be free. At that time, he said, I need you to come up with a solution that is likened to walking a mile in the neighborhood. And so that's what we did. And so it was a small step in the right direction until we could get the funds available to have the more elaborate dashboard for the city. It's a great example, thank you. Jenny. I mean, I think we're taking a systems approach. So we're thinking about what are the nodes that are specifically most appropriate for us to engage in and trying to figure out how do we pilot and seed and show the outside results that you have. The successes that I've had have been when the ideas are less me telling people that they should have a technology approach incorporated and when the legacy grantees that are in other parts of the foundation are already telling my colleagues in other areas of the foundation that they need more help looking in these areas. So, I mean, some of it's just about bubbling up best practice and demonstrating the extra value because it really, there's some things that are expensive but mostly I think it's just harder forcing yourself to work in a different way. And like we've recruited, like I said, technologists to sit in every program area at the Ford Foundation. And for the first year, those technologists, some of them had a hard time figuring out like how do we even connect to this work? And the program officers didn't know what to do with them but they figured it out. And now, I'll just be surprised if we don't end up with program officers with technology backgrounds being hired in the future because everyone's demonstrated that's a piece that's a skill set that we're gonna need among the many other ones that we're always recruiting for as a social justice foundation. Thank you, Eric. I love the analogy of trainer Jim walking and that says to me is there shouldn't be a one size fits all approach for all levels of government. The, and if you're going to buy and pay for a gym membership and never go, you're really better off just walking a little bit which we see that through some of the work we're doing in our criminal justice reform program. We are working with prosecutors' offices around the country to help them use data to make better prosecutorial decisions. And we are working with offices that range from major cities where there are hundreds of attorneys that use way too much paper and a complex series of systems that date back to the 90s where it's incredibly hard to change anything. And then we also end up working with offices like a small office in rural California that had about a dozen people and but shocked us when we learned that they were completely paperless. They had a fully digital system that two people in the office had made and kept maintaining and they were using it and they were able to innovate at a pace that completely outstripped these large offices. And so I think we need to acknowledge that it's not gonna look like creating a digital service team for every single government agency or level. It should, it's not gonna look like hiring a whole bunch of people. It can look like two people that are already there being far more innovative than a whole division could. So I think we can see more of that and should promote more of that. So that's a great note on which to bring Hannah and Sarah back up because of the limited size are gonna be sitting behind us because there are folks watching on webcast as well. We want them to be able to see. But that's, I mean, I think that is, I think a great testament to what is important about this book and about the kind of storytelling aspect of the work that we're all trying to do, which is to make it clear and demonstrate that it's possible really for public servants and government at any level and for people who wanna make a difference in their communities at any level that innovation is sort of within your grasp that there are good examples of people doing it already and they are not kind of whiz kids from the Silicon Valley necessarily. They are regular folks, public servants, people who are problem solvers. And so at some level this capacity is available and attainable without having to sort of recruit a hotshot. And that's part of, I think, the message that the book conveys is that this is possible and hopefully possible anywhere. But with that, let me invite Sarah Hannah to add anything that you wanted to add based on what you heard on the panel. And if folks have questions, I have colleagues walking around with microphones so please raise your hands. But anything you wanna say before we turn to questions? We could probably add a million things but I'm seeing hands go up so maybe let's switch over to the room. All right. Tell us who you are and then ask a question. Hi, my name is Steve Sinha. I'm Executive Director of Empower to Run. And we're trying to drive effective government through training the next generation of elected leaders, elected leader candidates. And a lot of the focus of today has been on the civil servant level which is exactly where it probably should be. But what lessons do you want elected leaders to learn to create the enabling environment for this type of innovation both at the executive and the legislative level? Thanks. Who wants to jump in? Ginger and then Jenny. So throughout March 21, your career I've been able to work with five mayors with each of the councils and three city managers in their administration. Government is known for being risk adverse. But if we're gonna, like I said, innovate, right? Be innovative, that means we're gonna have to take risk. And so you may have some failures along the way. But will you like to say fell forward? Let's learn from our mistakes, let's fix it, right? But not be afraid to try again. And so really just coming up with the policy, the goals, but then relying on the staff to get it done, right? But giving them, empowering them to take chances. Jenny. So the reason we started looking at tech fellows or even public interest technology questions was because I ran a policy portfolio. And when I asked the grantees of that portfolio, when I first came into the job, if you had all the money in the world, what else do you need? They all said we need technologists that understand our issues. And it took that long to figure out how to develop a pipeline to bring them forward. I think this period of pretending like the technological shift has not been as huge as it is, is over. But for a period of time, the public ignored that and government ignored that. And if you think democracy is like a three-legged stool where the public and the private sector and government are in this sort of healthy tension, theoretically keeping them balanced. For the last number of years, the only part of the stool that understood technology was the private sector. That's dangerous. And we've seen negative outcomes that have come from that. So I would just say every single elected official needs to, you know, that folksy moment where you could say you did never send an email or whatever is over. And we should only elect people who actually don't necessarily need to be technologists but are comfortable managing technologists the same way that non-lawyers are comfortable managing lawyers or that, you know, I'm comfortable giving policy grants to people even though I haven't worked on the Hill. And I also just want to say there's a spectacular program that we haven't talked about yet out of New America Foundation, the Tech Congress program that we fund that on a bipartisan level sends technologists into congressional offices and regulatory agencies. And it's really having incredible impact because once people see the value, they want it. They hire people. So that's what we need to see happen. Next question. Hi. My name is Shane Strasberg. I'm a lifelong New Yorker who just moved to DC to start a tour with USDS. So Hyann, we should talk when that tour ends. And I'm gonna use my hometown to set up this question but it will be for the panel. So I was reading today that Mayor de Blasio has expanded a program to create more ferry services to essentially his ideas that it will create more opportunities for people in less served areas to get to work. But the criticism of that is that it's actually serving a niche audience, high income earners who live in waterfront properties in the outer boroughs and are just going to lower Manhattan or Midtown. So the question to the panel is how do we ensure that the things that we're creating or designing with the best intentions actually serve and impact the most deserving lifeblood of our communities? I'll start with the answer that I think is gonna be not a surprise to anybody. User research and who are you asking, to whom are you asking your questions and what questions are you asking? There's an extraordinary amount of listening that happens in our job and it has to happen all across the cycle. We're very good at listening after people get upset. We're less good at listening before people get upset. And it's incredibly difficult to have really the dedicated time, to ensure that there's dedicated time from the get-go to do the listening beforehand, to do the listening as you roll things out, and then to do the listening afterwards. One of the things that I used to say was in the model of press release and press conference that's so common in ways of government, it's very easy when a product or something out of service is built that we chuck it out into the ocean and we think, well it's in there, people will find it and what actually happens is it sinks, the next person who comes to town, et cetera, like you're not still listening. And so having dedicated folks on the ground who are actually ensuring that we're continuing to build for users, for all users, and what people need rather than our conceptions of what we think they need. Hannah? Yeah, and I'll add, so I too read that article and thought, gee I wondered if they talked to anybody and I have to say that I read a lot of articles in the times where I think, I bet they didn't do any research. So one of the things that we are focused on here is bringing this kind of work to the policy table and bringing technologists to the policy table and not making policy decisions in a closed room but going out and talking to essentially the end user. So I think that this actually ties really nicely to the previous question which is around leadership. So there need to be people who are at the top who understand why that is important. Amen. Next question. Andrew Coy with the Digital Harbor Foundation up in Baltimore. But my question actually goes back to something, Cecilia, you asked the panel and was talking about recruitment into positions in the government. Actually, I had the opportunity through an IPA to serve an OSTP on the tech innovation team from 2015 to 2017 and found that incredibly valuable experience. There's been some recent comments about public service generally for 18, I think it was sort of suggesting 18 year old serving doing a year of service. But I'm curious just generally what would you all, do you think that's a good idea? What would you all see as problems or potential benefits of something like that or how would you propose we get more Americans to have the opportunity to spend time towards a service, so to speak, inside government? Eric, do you wanna tackle that? Yeah, I, well, one, I actually, what I'm talking to people that are interested in getting into government, I sometimes actually give the inverse advice when I'm talking to a college student who wants to join USDS or get involved in civic tech early on. One of the things that I will often tell them is actually do a couple of years in the private sector first because it's still an opportunity to build skills and also get some sort of credibility that will let you make a transition and be more impactful later on in your career. So when I, that's sort of the first thing comes to mind when I hear, while I think there are many things to think about with National Public Service early on and in careers, I do think that giving people opportunities to develop skills in a wide variety of contexts actually can make government stronger because you are bringing people with more backgrounds together and enabling them to challenge the status quo. So, no. Anybody have anything to wanna add? I'll just add that I think that in this work there are a number of things that I have anyway been exposed to that I start to think this should be a requirement for all Americans. And I don't know about public service, but I will say that I had the opportunity to watch a naturalization ceremony and thought everybody should be required to do this. And recently had spent time with Ginger and Phoenix and saw the land film, but everybody should be required to go to the landfill. So, maybe we add that to the list. I'll add one thing to that. Going back to Jenny's democracy is a three-legged stool. I think this is actually a huge area of opportunity where industry can really support democracy and it is things like, there's folks in the tech industry right now and there's companies who really support folks both going to government and coming back, but also like going and getting that experience and then considering it a qualification the way that we might consider like a Teach for America qualification or a Peace Corps qualification. And so, they are starting to build within their own institutions, policies and procedures around recognizing the value of that as a service that then both a service to the country but then also a service to the organization that this person might join. And encouraging more of that is an incredible way to continue to build this three-legged stool. So, I saw some women with hands up over here and I wanna make sure we have equal opportunity for question asking. Tell us who you are. Hi, I'm Rosalyn Miller. I'm a policy analyst with the Better Life Lab here at New America. But before I was here, I worked for local government in the Bay Area. And a lot of what we did was working on smaller incremental change solutions in the city. But whenever we met with neighboring cities and we tried to say, oh look, we solved this tiny little thing, we had trouble with buy-in from those cities. So my question is, how do you scale up those small incremental change and improve buy-in, especially when neighboring cities may be better resourced or not think the problem is as significant as your city does? City folks, do you wanna ginger Hyatt? So, one approach that we use in our area is regionalism. And we actually have, through our county, it's called Maricopa Association of Governments, different committees by industry. Where basically those managers get together monthly, quarterly, and talk about issues that are going on. We did a project around green organics and trying to figure out what's available in the community. And then if we were going to set up compost facilities or anaerobic digesters, where would we best place them? So what we did was we actually worked with Arizona State University. They actually did the research for us and convened all of the various cities. So it was eight cities, I believe, two counties, and one tribal nation. And we all came together. Now some of the other cities did not have the funds to contribute to this project. And so Phoenix, actually, what we did was the heavy lifting when it came to the funds. And then we figured out what other cities could contribute so that way they could be at the table. And so again, it's just about building those relationships and getting out and meeting with folks and find out what they're doing and learn from them as well. Eric. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I also would say, I think we need to rethink how we're sharing. It's not just case studies or presentations, but can it be code and guides? And an example I would love to give is not cities, but states. One of our partners is Code for America's Integrated Benefits Initiative. So they're working in five different states to pilot new ways of enabling people to enroll in, SNAP, Medicaid, and other benefit services. And we were at a conference a couple months ago where the states were together and one of the most incredible things in my career happened. We had a state presenting some of the officials there on some of the challenges they were facing on improving their enrollment process. And after they were done, representative from another state stood up and gave them the link to their GitHub repo where they had already been thinking about this problem, had worked on it, had some code up for what they had done and had a guide on what they were doing. So, and I was floored by it. So I think the more we can encourage sharing in some of these different ways, I think we'll be able to see more of that as well. That's great. There's a question here and then here. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Grossman with the Microsoft Cities team. I do our strategic partnerships. And what I wanted to do was touch on two questions. One is to exactly the point that was just made about the adaptation. So I'm a huge fan of cookbooks and guidebooks and I mean I can't cook, metaphorical cookbooks. But what the funding mechanisms are because it takes expertise and money and investment to adapt. And there's a bias towards innovation, right? We're using that word here in this room. And really what we want to support is implementation, not innovation. And so how do we make those investments? So that's one set of questions. And the other set of questions is, I love this event, it's about mechanisms. And the people who've been doing civic tech for a long time are getting into bigger and bigger rooms for these conversations. But for sustainability, I think, and Hannah and I had this conversation last week, is it's integrating that civic tech work into the sector-specific rooms so that they're at the gatherings of the police chiefs. So they're at the gatherings of the Transportation Research Board gatherings. And so how do we start to think about integrating into those? So, two questions, sorry. Anybody, any takers? On the first point around scaling, what's working? One, the way this happens in government is through procurement, right? You have some amount of new development, someone doing something for the first time, but then overwhelmingly you see a government agency putting out an RFP looking for solutions. And if it's something that's already been done and can be implemented quickly, then all the better. And I think the way that this community gets into that more is by not just going into government, but also starting more companies in this space. We need more good government vendors. We need companies that are looking at problems across states and cities and designing solutions and making money from it. So when I look at sort of the team that I hired into USDS, I'm incredibly proud of a lot of them that have gone back into other roles in government. I'm proud of the folks that have gone back to the private sector and are not in the government space anymore, but some of them, and they're actually sponsoring this event, created a company and are now trying to continue in the work in that way. So I think that's something that we don't see enough of yet. Great, yeah, Ginger. What I would add to it is it's about public-private partnerships, so that's how we're able to do what we do. In Phoenix, we have not had a solid waste rate increase in almost 10 years, but we still have been able to come up with new programs. The way that we were able to do it was we identified how much it cost us to send waste to the landfill. And what we said to the community is, bring us your ideas, right? If we're able to divert this waste, and it'll cost us less than, for what the city, it costs us 17 bucks a ton, and city's back eats is much, much higher. But we can actually partner with you to create this new program. So in some cases, we were willing to pay the vendors. In other cases, they were willing to pay us for our feedstock. And then in others, it was basically a net zero, but we were able to divert that waste from the landfill. So that's some of the ideas that we have. But public-private partnerships are huge when it comes to cities. And I think in the book you talked about some cities are doing that as well. I'm gonna give the second one a try. I hope I understand your question correctly. In my mind, when we talk about the sustainability of this model, it's about getting more city agencies and understand what's innovation, what's creativity, what is the design process so that we can deliver better services to the citizens. I think everybody has that, not everybody. I think people working in the government really have that desire to do better work, but a lot of them just don't have the right tools, don't have the right skillset to do that. Have a model that you can have influence to people around you is really important. One thing that our office is doing is our service design team has this office hour that other city employees can come in and talk with us and then learn how we work and hopefully they can take that back into their own agency, apply that process. I think that applies to every field, every skillset. Something like that would help you grow. Great, thank you. Last question over here. There's the microphone. Hi, my name is Lexi Gruber and I'm a consultant at Accenture. So I originally worked in government on child welfare policy, got into work, solving the challenges that I had lived through myself and ended up working in technology because as many of you said, I just sort of fell in my lap. And in my work helping states modernize your systems, I see that a lot of well-intentioned folks who have the opportunity to build the solutions and build the technology are people who lack the personal experiences in these systems. They don't understand that sometimes public sector challenges actually are often challenges about racism and inequality and sexism and those deep structural challenges that our country faces. And when they create solutions in the dark, not factoring in the lived experiences of their end-to-user, they actually perpetuate the status quo and automate inequality. And that's one of the biggest challenges that I've seen and I wanted to get your feedback on how we can first address that. But secondly, how do we bring in the voices and perspectives of the folks who are actually getting those benefits so that we're creating solutions that actually meet their needs and aren't actually making life more difficult for them? It's a wonderful, wonderful question to add on who wants to tackle it. I can't talk about it in government but I can talk about it in the grantee portfolio which is, you know, so the internet freedom portfolio is what it used to be called was fairly siloed. You know, I'm in a big social justice foundation that's funding all of the social justice groups and all of the areas that we work but the technology stuff was seen as kind of isolated. And it's funny because we got those groups to a place where they were actually having some big wins and that was wonderful on the science pages or wherever. You know, it would not be considered a mainstream story when there was a win. And it was only when a number of civil rights groups and a number of the internet freedom groups began working together that they would actually take all their skills and pick the right problems and work on them together with both the standing, the experience, and the technical skills all together towards a larger goal. And so a lot of, like, there's another report that came out, I mean, every other day, there's another report from Upturn about dangers of technology and disparate impact of technologies on communities that may or may not know this is happening to them. That work on all the criminal justice issues, body-worn cameras, stingrays, facial recognition software, all of this stuff only was able to happen when groups who had worked on civil rights issues for years and years and years sat together with people who actually had technology skills and equally, I always call it third spaces because people are like, we should just invite them into our space. That's actually not it. You've got to create a third space where everyone comes in with standing on the thing that they actually understand and together they scope the problem and do the work. And it doesn't mean that they agree on everything. You've got a whole trajectory of people working on different things, but you touch all the different aspects of the landscape in a much better way. And you're absolutely right. That point that I made about when we scoped out everything that was wrong, the thing about not coding in elementary schools in the United States and public schools, like we don't have a representative group of technologists, like geographically, income levels, race and gender, because of that. And it means we start on our back foot and we're always competing with the private sector to bring folks into those jobs. So until we solve that problem, we're gonna have a lot of problems in the problem area that you raise. So I'm gonna take advantage of the privilege of being the moderator to build on Jenny's answer because this is what the question that she asked is actually the reason that I went into this field in this work, in this organization. I come from a civil rights background. I worked for a civil rights organization for 20 years before I went into government. And among the galvanizing experiences, for me, of working for eight years in the White House was recognizing exactly your point that for 20 years I had been at the National Council of La Raza, pushing for people with a particularly lived experience to be at policy-making tables, doing a primitive version of what I now understand to be user-centered design, right? And that if we were gonna be successful at doing what government must do if we're going to address problems of inequality and the other structural problems that you addressed, it will require that we use the skill sets that we have been talking about specifically to engage people in the design of policies that affect their lives and in the implementation of the policies that affect their lives. It's not gonna be enough for policy nerds like me to do our best thinking on our best day about how to solve problems because we're not good enough at it unless we're actually engaging the people who are the point of this exercise in the first place. And the good news is in this country we have invented the tools that allow us to build those kinds of connections. What we need now is the intent and to make sure that the people who are making policy are both equipped with the skill sets and the intention to engage the folks who are the point of this whole exercise in designing the policy in the first place. So I think that the hopeful thing is that that capacity exists. It's what Hannah and Sarah documented. It's what the people on this panel and many people in this room are working on. We just need it to go global in a really big way. And the good news is there are very good people working on it telling the stories kind of in love with the notion of public service working to make it happen. So on that very hopeful note, let me thank you for being here. Thank our panelists for flying across the country to be here and especially thank and congratulate our co-authors on this book. Thank you all so much. There are still goodies out there so we can continue the conversation. Thank you all very much.