 Hi everybody. My name is Cecilia Munoz and I am super, super excited to be part of this event today. Thank you so much for joining us. I am here with two of my colleagues who helped found the Public Interest Technology Project at New America who do extraordinary work, each of them in their own right and have had extraordinary careers. But most importantly, for this particular moment they are co-authors of a book, Power to the Public, which is a book that focuses on public interest technology. It focuses on and in this case we're going to zero in on why data is really only as good as the people who are using the data. I've had the book is not out yet. It's coming out in April, but I've had the joy of both reviewing it and of watching these two authors at work, both writing the book, but also doing the incredibly important work that they do both for our Public Interest Technology Project at New America and also something we call the new practice lab, which Tara developed out of the public interest tech work that we do. So welcome. I am really, really excited about this conversation and we hope that you are eager to take part in it. So I want to start by asking both of you really. It's a two-part question. One, why did you write this thing? And what is Public Interest Technology anyway? What are we talking about and why are we talking about it? So Hannah, let me turn to you first and then over to Tara. Sure. So I'll take it. First, why did we write this book? It's funny because when we first started this program, we had a lot of conversations about like, will anyone ever be interested in this topic and how do we get these kinds of stories out there and who's going to ever want to hear about government and technology and data and research and all that? And little did we know that the world was suddenly going to have a moment, Public Interest Technology moment, in part because of how much we rely on, we're relying on government in a crisis to deliver money and vaccines and things like that. So we are really in a moment here. So we did, obviously, we started the book before all of that happened, thinking we were, and then wrote it during the pandemic, obviously. And I think part of, so we always sort of had in the back of our minds as part of this program that we would start developing books for the field. But I think what we were, we needed an opening and we needed also for the field to be mature enough to have really good stories to tell. So that was part of the impetus. And Tara, do you want to define the field? Yeah, I'll define the field as we talk about it in the book as really a practice that is somewhat expansive and builds on other fields. It really, we focus in on three elements of the practice broadly, using data to understand, real-time data to understand what's happening and if something is working, testing ideas, policies, programs with the people for whom they're designed. So you can call that user-centered research. It's a practice we describe that goes back to anthropological trade, really, or organizing, really understanding what motivates people and keeping a feedback between the people who you're serving and leaders of programs and government officials. And the third piece, which is the most broad is really, we found all the amazing leaders we interviewed were doing some semblance of this combination of three things. And the third was that they had really cultures of learning. They started small, they tried something out, if didn't work, they course corrected before they scaled it up in the kind of tech practices. This would be a minimum viable product, but really the broader ethos was to try, test, see if it works, and if it doesn't, to stop doing that and course correct it. So these are the three practices we really talk about in the book. For me, and the reason, you know, I think Han and I ended up at a book length is that it took a little while to explain and we had done the shorter versions of trying to make this work visible. And it's like a layers of an onion. The more you unpack it, it isn't, you know, straightforward. We, and we wanted to have a chance to really unpack it with all the layers that no app will and homelessness. This is more than a single piece of data. This is a practice in how you solve public problems. So a couple more foundational questions before we dig in. So I mean, maybe there's an obvious answer to this question, but why now? Like there's, it feels to me like we're living in a moment where what's happening in the world is shouting at us that we kind of need this feel to really come into being that we need practitioners to really be present in government and really make sure that we're delivering things for people. But like what, what's, is, am I, am I right? Is this a, is this a good moment to be having a conversation about public interest? I don't know how to do you want to, I'm happy to start or let you go. I think this is a great and also critical moment because so I will tell a very brief story, which is that before this book, we at the New America, we put out a much smaller book called the government fix. And I have a very long time friend who has worked on Capitol Hill for her entire career, who came to this event, where we talked about this book, which had some much smaller stories that we had, that we had shared up until that point. And after the event, she said to me, I finally understand what you do. So I think that it's like public interest technology is not a, it's not a phrase that rolls off the tongue. It's not something that is actually easily defined. Anybody who works in it will, I think can attest to that that like it's very hard to tell people at a party what you do. But at this moment, all of a sudden, the entire country needs to interact with government. So I think part of why it's been hard to explain it is that most people don't interact with government on their day, or they don't think about their interactions with government on a daily basis. And all of a sudden, all of that is front and center. And we are seeing the results of, you know, we at the, at New America have been for a very long time saying something bad is going to happen, and it's going to be really bad. And, you know, it's sad to say that like we are now at that moment that we were trying to raise awareness about. But on the plus side, all of a sudden, now there's a lot of focus on like, oh, government not so good at delivering things to, you know, the way that, you know, we're used to having services delivered. So hopefully this crisis will not go to waste. Tara, this is an obsession with you, isn't it? Yes. You know, it's been almost a decade since I worked on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which is in some ways one of the most high profile failures before it was the most high profile successes in the nexus of policymaking and delivery. But there are many groups, beta NYC, Bloomberg, Code for America, who've been out kind of building the practice among the people who are in it here. And I think we really, for this moment, we felt like we, there's a stride for the folks who are in the work and know what they're doing. But the work will not expand without getting to Hannah's friend on the hill or the next layer out of chiefs of staff, a fresh turnover in state and federal government offices that whether you care about kids or you care about climate or you care about homelessness, that the practice of how you bring your ideas into the world is changing at such a pace that the crisis in particular does put this on display. I'd say Hannah and I in the middle of writing the book woke up and saw while things seem to be crashing and burning with unemployment sites in the United States and challenges having the government deliver basic information about whether you should or shouldn't wear a mask in the spring. I read the story in the New York Times about Germany where in 10 days dollars went out to gig workers and people described it as refreshing and seamless experience. And so a reminder that this isn't easy work, but that it isn't rocket science. It is possible on around the world. Some governments at moments really did deliver in a way that was different. And we had similar stimulus checks and stimulus efforts here in the United States, but the last mile of making sure those reach people is mission critical. And I think part of what we're aiming to do is say policy is really important. What you decide to prioritize really matters, but whether it makes the impact is really about whether it reaches people, shots in their arms, stimulus checks before you lose your apartment. And so we looked around and we tell a story about places that even in this crisis, we're doing things different and the government was really working. So to dive into the details a little bit, you make that case. And I will say I've read the book and maybe that I start out by us because I'm like the president of both of your fan club, but you make a really compelling case that the practice that you're talking about, the way this needs to work really depends on three things. And they conveniently start with the same letter, design, data and delivery, like that's at the core. So I'd love to ask you to tell a story about each of those things, to help us understand why does design matter, what helps us illustrate why data matters, what can illustrate why delivery matters. And let's start with design and Tara, you tell a story in the book about Seville, about what happened in Michigan. Do you want to talk about that? Sure, it's a really amazing story. Seville is the small design organization, nonprofit that grew out of Scrappy office in Techtown, which is to say we're from here with part of Detroit. The work done by Seville really comes from a long time United Way staffer named Michael Brennan who spent 40 years of his career working on poverty programs and in the course of this, he has a report commission showing the amount that the state of Michigan is spending on poverty programs. And there's a footnote in the report that mentions that Michigan has the longest application in the country for a series of public benefits. And Michael gets obsessed with the forum and he prints it out, which takes nearly 70 pages. He tapes it end to end, becomes a huge scroll. He's the CEO at this point of United Way of Michigan. And he rolls it out as a physical symbol of you need help, you need emergency food assistance, you need emergency cash. Check out this nearly mile long form. And when you fill it out, that's actually only the first hurdle in us helping you. And he really saw for a moment that they were investing huge amounts of dollars, but that it didn't really look like help. And it's the charge that Michael and a new organization, he forms to tackle this with a few Stanford D school designers to really investigate and learn from the frontline workers who adjudicate this forum and from the people who are receiving a series of benefits in Michigan, how the process could be made better. And in the course of their project, which they call reform, they cut the country's longest application in half. They deeply listened to the public sector workers who had ideas about how to make this better. And they fundamentally transformed the access that people have to things like food assistance, and Medicaid and really built a model of what delivery could look like. And the design, you know, you look at a form that's that long. It asked incredibly inhumane questions like how many fathers does your child have? You know, it kind of been built over years by different pieces. It wasn't very effective at collecting data on the backside. It wasn't really made for humans and they talked to people about what it felt like to fill out this form. They even gave them the senior officials in the state of Michigan after doing much of user research and collecting data about how the form worked. They asked some senior leaders from the Michigan Health and Human Services Department to come to their offices for a briefing. And instead of having a memo or a slide presentation, they reenacted the experience of walking into a public benefits office. It was loud. It was noisy. They gave the officials clipboards. There weren't enough chairs for everyone and they asked them to fill out this super long form. And it was very awkward at first. They sat in silence. Many of the officials hadn't actually seen the form that they were the overseers of. And then they walked them through the experience of their own frontline workers in their work. It was from a bunch of user research. And it was this kind of out-of-the-box process where the state of Michigan decided they were going to collaborate with this nonprofit on the spot to redesign this form. But at the essence of Cecilia, the design was not really made for humans. And we have a lot of processes that are made without the final person in mind. Maybe new rules and new questions and new processes can come right. But really returning for nonprofits and governments back to this essence of who am I serving? Who is it that's filling out this form? How tired are they? How much time do they have? How many days off of work would they have to take to execute us helping them with food assistance if they're an hourly wage worker? That really we try to animate the design, the work that brings people back to understanding who is this designed for? And if it's aimed to help them, does it really feel like that? It's an amazing story. It is an amazing story. All right, Hannah, I'm going to just in keeping with the theme, I want to ask you to talk about a delivery example. Sure. So just because delivery is kind of a weird word, especially for New Yorkers who have many things delivered. I just want to clarify that when we refer to delivery in the book, what we're talking about is really that last mile delivery of whether that's like a vaccine into an arm, money into a pocket. How do people actually get the thing that they are that government is offering them? And so in the book, one of the examples that we, one of the stories that we share, which has a great delivery piece, but also has a great piece around how simple sometimes the the fixes are. So Marina Nietzsche was previously the CTO at the VA at the federal level. And at the end of the Obama administration, she was rolling off and looking for her next thing. And she had always been active in child welfare. She had been a foster parent. She'd been involved with foster kids, even as a college student. And it's something that she cared a lot about. So that she knew that was something that she wanted to work on. And she had the opportunity to work on the foster care system, the child welfare system in Rhode Island, which was one of the states with the longest backlog of applicants for foster parents. So she went in and her team mapped the process of, well, how do you become a foster parent? All these people are so part of what the state was focused on was how do we get more people to apply and more people into the system because there weren't enough beds for in homes for children. But once she started digging in, she realized, actually, this is not an issue about getting more people to apply. This is about there being a long waiting list of people who have already applied and have not been through the system and have not been approved. So anybody who is familiar with government processes, this is a thing that comes up time and again, right, is the approval process for people. So she did a deep dive into all of the steps. This was the first time this had been done. She mapped out all of the steps of what people had to go through for the approval process. And she discovered a few things that were blockers, the most significant being that there were two pages to a medical consent form, which had to be filled out. And the first page, and they were not, they were two loosely pages. And what happened time and time again was people would submit the first page and forget about the second page. And so their application would be held up purely because they had not either noticed that there was a second page or hadn't submitted the second page. And so somebody had to call and ask them for the information. And the people who did the did the outreach to call them were not. Sometimes it was confusing. They would call and say, like, I'm just calling to verify the following information and not fully identify who they were. And so the families were confused. So what they did to solve this was they stapled the two pages together. And I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that increased the number of people who were able to move past that step dramatically. And one of the reasons that we tell that story in the book is to illustrate that a lot of the time, this is it's just a question of having a holistic view of the process and going through step by step by step to say, and why is this here? And is that legally required? And is that actually information that anyone does anything with? And this is it really needed? And is there another way to do it that could be faster? So Marina Nitsi did all of that work and was actually able to clear the backlog in Rhode Island by having a weekend marathon where they sort of crammed all of the services into one room and just got people through when they were able to work through the backlog. But the other reason that we share that story is that her focus was on delivery. So it wasn't just enough to say, oh, well, yeah, it takes a long time to go through the process. Oh, well, she looked step by step at why was everything necessary and how to real focus on the delivery here being how do we get parents, how do we get more beds available? And the way to get more beds available is to have more parents who are certified by the state to be foster parents. And it turns out the holdup was a staple. So this is why we really emphasize looking at not only looking at holistically the process, but also looking at how does delivery actually work. And this is something that we also talk about in the book around the CARES Act, the first stimulus package, and that delivery was not a focus of the first stimulus package. And there are still people, I believe. Tara, you have more handle on this than I do. But I believe there are still people waiting for their checks. 10 million people are still waiting for their check. Say the number again. 10 million Americans, while over 95 million stimulus checks went out to them, low income Americans who don't make enough to file taxes needed to take an extra step in order to get their check because there's no address on record for them to be mailed to check. And there were arguably 10 million of the folks who need this stimulus check the most. So this gets at a pet peeve of mine, which is that we think we won the victory when a policy gets passed, when a bill gets signed, as by the way, the American Rescue Act just got signed, like in the last hour or so. And it is not, which is not to say that that's not a huge victory. And I'm very excited about it. But at the same time, we don't log the victory until the dollars reach the pockets of the folks in question. And as the whole country is getting a lesson in, the vaccine strategy doesn't count as a successful strategy and the success that we need it to have until it actually gets in people's arms. And that's about delivery. But this is also so we're holding this event in coordination with data week. And so I want to talk about data, but before we get into that, I have been asked to remind everybody that we are live tweeting this conversation and you are welcome to join. You can follow at New America pit. Pit is how we refer to public address tech. So feel free to join in the conversation on Twitter. But let's talk about data that is also essential to making sure that policy actually reaches people. I'm not sure which of you are supposed to ask to chime in with a data story, but go for it. I think you're I'm happy to I think, you know, data is like the water now. So maybe just to define how we talk about data in this book in particular, I think there's lots of important uses for opening data for using data. But in particular, we really saw profound impact when data is good enough real time, and allows you to test interventions. And so, you know, one of our favorite examples is the team at Community Solutions, she's a network that works in communities across the country at tackling homelessness. They don't aspire to improve or reduce the number of people who are unhoused, they aim to get to zero. And the key ingredient in how they do this with communities is there's a ton of data in analyzing homelessness, the federal government actually requires communities to spend upwards of $100 million a year on a massive data system called HMIS. Each community has to purchase it from private vendors. And yet, there's also a once a year count of how many unhoused are in the country and neither of these two things, it turns out, are really useful to help you understand the data you need to end homelessness and the data based intervention from built for zero. Basically said, it's not good enough to know if the rate is 1%. We need to know how many unhoused folks are here today, and how many are here tomorrow. And ostensibly, they create an almost with a bunch of data productions of by name lists, so they can see whether they're making progress and the interventions that you might need, if your Tara McGinnis might be different from the interventions to become housed if you're Hannah Schenck. And so it isn't a rate, it's a set of people for whom your needs are served. So the way that built for zero creates ostensibly works with their communities to build a system to sort of establish data hygiene on understanding the total population of unhoused by community. And then they work the list until it's zero. And to get to zero, you have to get up and get to zero every day because someone new is evicted and you're back at one. And so kind of assessing on this way really allows you to understand whether you are making progress. And also they really twin their data with what is a human-centered design, finding out what that person needs, what is the obstacle for them. It may not be enough to have a house if what you really need is a job. They found in one community where they reached technical zero was that it was access to transportation that was fundamental and getting might not be the first thing you think, but is something that you learn when you interview a bunch of unhoused individuals and families to see what their barriers are. So pairing kind of macro data about who's unhoused with important data about the needs of the individuals. And so this real-time data monitoring, many, many social problems that we address, whether it's how many people in the United States have COVID to what is the rate of suicide, our general data collection happens a year, two years after. And so while it's incredible data that's available gets rolled up at the state level to the federal level, if you want to get ahead on a rash of teenage suicides, if you want to tackle in real time the opioid epidemic, you need to know what's happening now in your communities. And it's imperfect and there's ways to make sure that the data really represents everyone. It's part of the reason you need to go out as built for zero does and talk to people because data just on that list can lead you really far astray as we find in other examples. And who gets left out or who's overrepresented in data, we talk about a great deal. The kind of structural assumptions on race and gender and class that are baked into data can really read you quite far astray if you only look at numbers on a chart without actually asking people what they need. But twinning this kind of real-time assessment, how many people are unhoused with an understanding of the communities and individuals that you need was really a transformational intervention for community solutions and dozens of communities are getting to zero. And that's something that I think some people believe is impossible when it comes to the persistent challenge of homelessness. Thank you. So that what you just said speaks to a question which showed up in the Q&A and I want to invite our participants to feel free to ask questions. You can use the Q&A, you can use the chat function, we are keeping track of them and I'm going to do my best to ask whatever you all want to ask. But so the question that came in relates to structural racism and it sounded like it resonated, Tara, when you told the story about the 70-page benefits application in Michigan, whether or not that structural racism plays a role here. The example that you just gave with respect to addressing the needs of people who are unhoused also kind of referenced that there are some racist assumptions that sometimes get made like how much of this is, how does structural racism play in here and are there ways that the strategies that you guys are recommending address it? So one of the things that we talk about in the book and Tara just alluded to is that it's not enough to, like a lot of places have data, it's not enough to have, just have data in order to really understand the why, the data will tell you the what but to get to the why requires actually going out into the community and talking to people and one of the, so I will say that we have discovered that there is structural racism embedded in, I mean I think the world has also discovered it along with us but in some of our work we digging into, for example, unemployment insurance that there are structural racism baked into how decisions get made around who should get help and who shouldn't. And so one of the pieces, one of the benefits of going in and actually engaging the community and talking to people and unpacking all of the pieces that make up the larger system and asking why at every single point is a way to at the very least start to extricate some of the structural racism that has been baked into so many of our systems. Anything you want to add, Tara? Yeah I mean I think this is where you know who's curating the data and are they members of the community you know we from which the the data is being assessed. There's an incredible book that details exactly how communities of color and low income Americans show up more in data sources so if you're mining for certain things then you know wealthier communities may privately pay for public services so that if you are trying to establish a sense of who's in and who's out and who's counted and who's monitored that there are tremendous assumptions baked in based on race and class. I think the unemployment insurance really resonated for me if you're working on unemployment insurance and you were unable to disaggregate the data by race. You would you know we saw over the past summer that Black and Latinx workers were overrepresented in the unemployment data and dramatically underrepresented in the Americans who were receiving unemployment insurance but you wouldn't you know you couldn't see that if you just looked at across at unemployment insurance you really need as a state system to understand well for every you know white applicant applying for unemployment insurance we are getting fewer through who are actually receiving it. Some of that as Hannah said goes way back to program design about which workers were cut in and out of the social policy from the beginning but some of it comes down to default certain last names that automatically trigger people hyphenated last name that automatically trigger a second look on the back end of public data system so the importance of being able to see how a program how a policy how even a community organization is serving people um the the data aspect of understanding whether it's working for the average person they tell you nothing at all about how it's working for Latinx men and so it's incredibly it's both a tool that can be used to advance under our understanding of the inequities but I think could be used in a way that weaponizes um you know baseline assumptions and I think we we spend a lot of time teasing out um that it is only as powerful as the as the measured nature and understanding of the folks who are using reading and analyzing the data as well as who's in and who's out so so that question I should have said came from Kenneth and we have another data related question from Ashley how do you balance asking or adding questions to find out what people need without making the process even longer for the people who are trying to apply for assistance oh look at the big smiles as that question comes up well we uh I think we're just having some back and forth about a form today so so as the resident uh UX designer person I'm always uh against adding I'm always like is that this absolutely necessary so um there there is of course always a tension between getting the information that you need and like getting any information at all so you know that the more questions that you add the less the fewer people are going to be able to complete whatever it is that you're filling out but when we're talking about um government asking questions um I've my experience has been that um and I think that this holds up also just from the examples in the book um it's worth questioning every single question that government asks um there are a lot of reason there are government is old and we talk about this in the book too government is old our structures are old our our funds are old um the information that we needed to process something 50 years ago is probably that's probably not the same information that's needed today um so the of course the ultimate goal for most processes and it's workable for all government processes but um just speaking sort of globally about processes is the the ultimate goal is for them to be invisible so the thing you need shows up because somebody knows you needed it and it's just there um so every question that you add in so if you think about like so that's a distance of zero between what the person needed and what they received and every question that you add increases that distance so um I think people need to think really carefully and also really dig into why is this being asked is that a legal requirement where does it specify that it's a legal requirement who actually is doing something with this information what are they doing um are they doing something that maybe is the should they shouldn't be doing or maybe there it opens the door for uh structural racism and for racist practices um so those are all good questions to ask um and I I know we're gonna move on but I did want to just circle back to the last question for a second um and say that the fact that there is structural racism baked into so many of our systems um is also why it is critical that um teams be diverse and that especially the people who are looking at the data and and um collecting the data and analyzing the data must include people from the community um who and must include diverse viewpoints because all data is not you know you think you have a number and it's there are only so many ways of looking at that number um that is it turns out to not actually be true um and we in the book we tell a story um from sexually a new york story um about rat abatement um and this may be a story that people in this audience already already know but I um and should I wait or should is it okay to go into okay um this is this is one of our our well now we'll say it's my mom's favorite story so um I just use that as a bellwether of like that's a good story to tell um uh so um New York City was looking to do rat abatement um and in order to do that um they looked this is the um I believe the moda team um the mayor's office of data analytics looked at um the 311 the calls from 311 311 to see where the date where the rat complaints were and they mapped that data onto a map of the city and the um somebody who is in the office of in in the moda office um Amman Aminra Mashariki who believe was one of the early data analysts um looked at that data and he did the thing that a lot of people do would do when looking at a map of the city he looked at his neighborhood and he saw to see like well how about are the rats in my neighborhood like I live there I know what the rat problem is but I'm curious to see you know how is it represented by through on one data um and according to through on one data where he lived um in Bed-Stuy did not have a rat problem um and he the well the and actually I should say um he grew up in um public housing there and so he looked specifically at the public housing there was no public there was no rat problem in public housing he still is in the neighborhood or at the time he still lived in the neighborhood so he um also looked at the larger neighborhood and thought this is weird like I definitely have seen rats so on my way to work um so why are why are there no rat calls showing up on the through on one data and then he called a friend in uh who still lived in the housing project um a friend of his from childhood and said uh so no more rats all the route all the rat problem all gone there and his friend was like what are you talking about of course there are rats and he said well then how come you never call through on one and his friend said what's through on one um so I think what we learn from that is it's really important that somebody from the community is involved in parsing the data um particularly when you are looking at something that is community based and location based and we know now that through on one data is biased to certain communities um but that was sort of an early instance of why it's so critical to um have a diverse data team so I love that story too um and we have more questions that are along this theme about the connection between racism between structural racism and the data so this is an anonymously sent question which is how do you put policies in place to root out the kind of inherent racism that you see in data we um I think we'll offer some learnings from our uh from the folks we interviewed and spoke to I also think this is a this is a live experiment and there won't be one single clear cut path we're going to need to try test and improve you know I think a couple of the a few simple basics one check the sources just as you saw with through on one if if our entire understanding of a problem comes from a single data set we should really scrutinize the making of the data set to um the the analysis even is who's questioning this represent being representative of of communities engaged and three I think we would strongly caution against anyone using going exclusively down the road of data alone or design alone or of a learning culture you need to use these three things together so the data is only as useful but you should take the big data and then go talk to 10 people and see if it if it shakes 10 representative people see if it shakes out and so that practice of both using data but really testing the assumptions in um uh with folks who are represented by a single digit in a spreadsheet um is the third kind of piece of advice and if you're doing all three of those things you have a higher degree of discovery of what might be baked in an unseen one representative so we have another anonymous question also in the same vein so at one point in the conversation we've said that there's that there are ways in which data can be inherently racist we know government systems can be racist um so how do you make changes without changing the actual systems like is it is it possible to make changes if the if the overall structure hasn't changed is it possible to make progress and reach the people that we want to reach you know I think that we're in a I mean we talked about that Pitt is having a moment and I I maybe this is hopelessly naive but I do think that we are in a moment where everything is up for grabs um in terms of systems and processes and I think that that is partially related to just where we are as a society in terms of how we expect things to function that has changed dramatically in the last five to ten years just in terms of like everything's online now that that didn't happen and not only is everything online but when things are online you expect stuff to happen very quickly and you expect a certain amount of rigor I think uh so I I think that we are in a spot where you know there was sort of this revolution in the late 90s um early 2000s where things were starting to be digital and we're now at another place um and I also just want to add on the on the data piece I'll echo what Tara said which is um that we're kind of in a brave new world when it comes to data there is suddenly publicly available data that didn't exist before massive massive amounts um scary amounts in some ways and there are for sure going to be missteps and one of the things that we are looking at at New America is how to um elevate the ethical use of data and create some kind of ethical pause or ethical ethical impact statement or whatever it is but um to how to insert ethics into the practice of public interest technology and I don't think that like that hasn't figured out we're still figuring out the the practice um so there are for sure going to be missteps um I think that um it's fair to be concerned um that something might go very badly um and I think that we also know in part because this conversation about structural racism and racist policies has been elevated and people are having it openly um so I think there is some hope that at least by keeping that conversation alive um it opens the door for people to say oh actually this process that we've had in place for a hundred years needs to be rethought thank you so I want to dig in a little bit to this we've so we've talked about design data and delivery I want to dig into kind of public interest tech as a field a little bit because you're part of what this book really is about is kind of making the case or um why it should be a field why it needs to be strengthened and how that might happen but I'd love for you to disentangle for me because there's a variety of different terms public interest tech is kind of a relatively new term but there are other terms which get at similar themes so can you and maybe Tara I'll ask this of you um civic tech gov tech public interest tech like are they all the same thing are they how do they do they differ like what what are they standpoint um I think we we make the case they're not all the same thing but you may think of them in kind of a growing family tree of some of them birth um you know I think civic tech birthed a bunch of this work some people associate more strongly with one of these affinity groups and aim of our book is to kind of say actually there's a group of people some of whom associate not at all with any of these terms but are just the person in the basement of the police department who sits on the data and said city who's just trying to use it to problem solve who feel no affiliation with any um annual conference but that there is kind of an army of public problem solvers some who have emerged out of a real focus on making data open and accessible some who were their government partners who uh saw wow we've now been first we didn't want to make this data set public but now that we've cleaned it up it's very useful for us for our own um management piece a bunch of companies that have grown up to help um governments that are struggling with this um so I think we we isolate civic tech gov tech um into different um kind of streams in a larger river but we really think for the change that we need um to be in service of citizens around the world uh we're hoping people can see each other can share practices and think of themselves under broader tent and that if we are really successful the term public interest technology will be irrelevant that this will just be how we do solving public problems hon I don't know if I've tackled that but please pilot um yeah well I think that the first step to having a thing is naming it um and drawing a circle around it and so the effort to name it public interest technology there and that there we also at new america I don't think we we'll go into it a little bit in the book but not really um we have a whole other piece of our work which is um the uh our university network and trying to um to stoke the pipeline and also create an academic field that is called public interest technology so um there is that piece which is like maybe it's an actual academic field um and uh to that end maybe that you know grows out of growing out of an it's not unusual right that you would have economics as um an academic field and then it permeates um the and that's probably a terrible example because I don't know the history of economics um but um the point being that you know this is a case where we're looking to have some interplay between um how people get trained to be public servants um and public interest technology and I think that just to echo Tara's point that um there is a hope that maybe it doesn't even like the name isn't a thing that will stick around because it's not needed because this is just how you solve public problems amen to that so that um so let me first of all remind folks that we're having this conversation on Twitter as well so you can join us um and follow at New America pit also invite people to ask to continue to ask questions either through the chat or through the Q&A and thank you to Kate who has just asked whether we do a podcast because she could listen to you all day which makes me so happy um but getting to this um so you talked about Hannah about the public interest university network which um which uh New America and our colleague and dream solely uh coordinates helps run um and the our CEO and we slaughter likes to draw an analogy acknowledging that it's not a perfect analogy but that it that it was it's been useful and kind of framing the concept that um of kind of matching public interest tech to public interest law in the sense that there used to be a time where you went to law school you worked for a corporation you worked in the government you worked at a law firm and then because of investments from from civil society we kind of created and investments by government we created a field of public interest law and now it's a thing you can study and like grow up and do and then you can you know work at the end of ACP and be a public interest lawyer and you know use the law to help make policy help drive policy to help make the country a better place I think that I like it's not a perfect analogy but I like that analogy because I think one of the things that we're trying to do is kind of create the market in government for people to use this skills that the technology skillset to solve public problems in the way that you're describing and one of the challenges is um that I mean that we've worried about the notion that government can never compete with industry for the talents of the technologists that we're talking about um can you can you talk about that a little bit like do we have a shot at at bringing this kind of talent into government when everybody can just go work for google and make five times as much um so it's kind of fascinating to me actually that people um we've been doing a lot of interviews with the vaccine rollout and one question that I get all the time is like who would go who would turn down free lunch and stock options and the you know the cache of saying they work for some startup or google or wherever it is to say that um you know they work it they they work in policy at health and human services or whatever it is um like that doesn't sound like a uh not to not to reign on everybody who um hey who who's with me who has worked on policy and um HHS but what's that sorry I was the highest co-authors I play the role of like policy nerd it's harder than you think some people actually sign up for it Cecilia and Hannah you know this is our blend yes yes um so uh yeah so I get this question a lot like who would turn down the money how can at you how can the public sector ever compete with the private sector when we're talking about technology and that was the question so I was at the United States digital service um in fairly early on and that was also the question when they launched um USDS it's like who would ever do this work who's ever going to leave their cozy stock options and I think that um that first of all there is a there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the public sector and how great it is as somebody who I spend the majority you know 20 years in the in the private sector um and uh yeah the like the offices are better um and okay yes there are free meals um but like I think if you wanted if for people who want to do work that they feel like um makes a difference and has a really big impact like those people are always going to be drawn to government um the issue is finding places for them right now there's a real problem with there not being enough technical roles and enough places for excellent people to come into government um we're actually seeing right now um USDS has been completely swamped with applications they have far more people than they can um process efficiently um so many people are raising their hands right now to say please let me help the country um I think in part because the government failures are so the government technical failures are so obvious right now um but you know government has a long history of um of being a place where the smart uh ambitious people went to work um that was before the our present moment um when government has kind of seen us like why would you go there when you could go to google um but people for a very long time have answered that question with you know they have they're internally motivated it's more valuable to them to spend their time in government so I don't think like yes the the difference between salaries is bananas right now um and maybe bigger than maybe the gap is bigger than it's been in the past but um there are still people who are really invested in their communities and who want to do do good work for them um so um let me maybe ask a larger pit question but actually I'm noticing in the comment Alan just pointed out that the ruined housing markets and coastal metros make it hard for someone to choose work based on meaning rather than money which is I think a very good point um right because you need to be able to afford stable housing especially if you're early in your career I would just also say that so there's the federal government and and as Hana said that there are you know there are opportunities and people are flocking to them because they're interested in making a difference but city and state governments are also a place where we need pit right it's the states right now which are implementing vaccines and in some cases it's the counties um and it's states which are implementing unemployment insurance and the states failed really really badly um in getting those resources to the people who need them and some of the most exciting innovations are happening in cities around the country and not even necessarily the largest metro areas um but even in small cities so there's I think the truth of the matter is that we need public interest tech everywhere in government um and that I mean that's not only on the coast but it's everywhere in the country right because some of the most important interactions that people have with their government happen locally so that's just another focus of activity that I wouldn't take off the table but let me ask a general pit question and I realize that we're rounding the corner on the hour we want to keep the conversation going but I'll also kind of keep an eye on it and we'll um continue it a little bit um uh but we recognize that everybody's committed time to this and we're grateful for you um so pit as Hana said is having a moment um when we um started the public interest tech program at new america now more than four years ago we wondered how we might ever get a story about policy design or government tech international publication and like all of a sudden it's kind of everywhere um so char do you want to talk about um about like the moment that pit seems to be having and why that might be in some ways um the crisis has really pushed us to a moment where people kind of take a strong stance in the book that there is no solving the world's hardest problems without governments period will stop that there's critical roles for nonprofits and private sectors but that we still need city state county government and I think if there were ever a time when you looked around and picked up the newspaper and saw that it is your local county health officials who let who are keeping track of the first cut of data who has COVID and that it's a time when millions of americans lost their jobs and we do have a social insurance program through unemployment insurance um that that in some ways the in in high and happy times although frankly for many of us the crisis was brewing before the pandemic when it comes to income inequality and structural racism but in high and happy times I think it's easier not to see the purpose of government and we are not in a moment I think anywhere in the world where you don't see the purpose and role of government and I think part of that has helped me the focus on how do the emergency benefits the help in the flood and and you know and weather that we saw and and power outages around that in Texas that the course of need um for these things which we as citizens can't do alone is on display and therefore making the work of a delivery invisible the package that sign law today the american rescue plan will have a if implemented well will cut um child poverty in half by making sure that everyone who could get a child tax credit can access it by making sure that funds move quickly to the states which are trying to make schools easier to access and bring internet to places where schools are still not a safe place for our kids so I think that the you can't look at a single facet of life and not see that there's a role for government and particularly in that last mile of how you've reached people in meaningful times and crisis and that has really helped accelerate attention on a bunch of these um projects so um does that make you hopeful I mean that that on the one hand pit is having a moment and there's a lot of conversation about it on the other hand a lot of the conversation is about like oh government failing again and can never get it right I mean you both strike me as look you both been public servants you both worked in government um you are kind of believers in what government can do and evangelists a little bit for uh for people to do this work in government but you've also seen this moment of crisis where like where there's more meaningful news about government not getting it right than getting it right like are you optimistic about this moment about what lies ahead and maybe we'll make that the closing question so let me turn to you Hannah first um I I am optimistic I I read an article in the in the times I think it was this morning about the the bill that just passed and how this is really a return to um big government in which certainly I growing up in the 80s and the 90s big government like they're bad very bad um so but this is sort of a return to these big signature programs like social security that were you know these programs that are developed to meet a specific populations need um and I think that the fact that some a bill like that could pass the you know the one that today's bill could pass and um 70 percent of the country supports it um I think that we are at a place where more and more people are seeing the role and especially coming off of the last four years where we didn't have where we didn't have an interventionist government um we are seeing that there's a real appetite I think for people need help um people need help and that they're not equipped that they can't give themselves they can't devise their own you know they can't you can't like mix up a vaccine in your basement um you're not going to be able to the um tell tax credit was the big news I think um in this in this piece that I was reading um those are you know lifting children out of poverty isn't something that like sometimes people need help um and certainly we are yes big believers but I think that the confluence of people possibly more people than ever really really needing government right now um combined with the fact that we are in this moment where we have all this um tech capability and we also really understand the value um at least in pet and this is I think why this are very important moment for this book we understand that to really solve people's problems um you need to really understand them deeply um and that it's not just like oh well here's the money let's throw it at the door and see what happens um not to again I'm not the policy person in this conversation so not to diminish past policy practices um but that there is a real a real need and a real understanding and also these new tools um so I think that we are in a very exciting moment and yes there is a lot of failure there's gonna be a lot more failure um people still don't know how to the private sector fails constantly when they build tech tools it just doesn't make the news because who cares um because it's you know people aren't gonna like people aren't gonna starve because the private sector couldn't get their burrito delivery app functioning um not to knock the private sector oh I'm just I'll just stop talking thank you Hannah my time I'm incredibly optimistic that doesn't mean that we're not clear eyed I mean we talk a lot about how how this is long work doesn't happen in a single gestures the work of crisis and culture change and takes place over time but we really we wrote the book because we deeply believe that there are millions of people out there who are working in all different types of jobs um with an with an approach like this that could actually solve problems and we know that that's possible because we found a few who really are making profound impact on things that were inconceivable um and so we really we hope that we wrote it to get out of the of the number of people that we capture and uh in an elevator or in our family meals or in extended visits to say like it's working and you can make it work and you can be a part of this in some way and it and if you are a designer you can be a part of this if you are a policy expert you can be a part of this you may be a back you know working in the back end of a processing effort as a public servant but you can be a part of of the change that makes things possible and so we are it was incredibly inspiring when the world was falling apart this past year to interview people who were putting it back together and really showing results and I think Han and I took a lot of refuge for that uh in that and if you look I myself would not have said three months ago that 18 percent of the united states would be vaccinated and 40 percent uh you know folks would have an hurt community that there are signs that when we pull this together we try new things and we admit when it's hard and try again that we can fix things and I hope folks we know we're speaking to an audience of fixers and designers and doers on the data front um we really just hope everyone will spread the word that it is possible and it is everybody's work thank you so I'm gonna there's one question that I'm just going to answer really quickly from anonymous is asking whether this field is a pathway from urban informatics programs and the answer to that is yes an emphatic yes um right that speaks to the whole question of data is one of the keys to this new kind of practice um and there are places you can read more about this most importantly by getting a copy of power to the public and the link to the book is in the chat new america also does a publication called the commons at wearecommons.us which is a place where you can find stories about public interest technology and in all of its various dimensions it has a loyal and wonderful following you can see also in the chat a way to subscribe um to uh pit universe which is the newsletter of the public interest technology university network there are lots of resources here um uh and we it feels tremendously important as we try to build this field for us to stay um connected to each other so we really really appreciate everybody joining us for this congratulations hana and tara on the book um I'm excited to see it go out into the world but especially excited and hopeful about what this work represents for all of us so thank you all very much we're going to close it off here thank you hana and tara congratulations and we will see you all again soon thank you so much