“Civic Tech” in Government: Vectoring the collaborative, open and transparent ethos, platforms and processes of the civic technology movement into government
I’ve spent the majority of my career working in and around city government, most recently as the Co-Director of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Philadelphia. In my work, I increasingly used technology to cultivate civic participation and innovation. Just eight months ago, I joined Microsoft and my mission to use tech to get things done, both for citizens and government employees, remains the same. I was intrigued by IDC Government Insights’ prediction that U.S. state and local governments will invest approximately $6.3 billion in civic engagement technologies in 2015. My first reaction was to think of the implications of such a significant investment in how governments manage collaboration, openness and transparency with their citizens through technology. There will certainly be myriad beneficial outcomes delivered by civic tech technology solutions from Microsoft and our partners. Having been a City of Philadelphia employee for a decade during two “tours of duty,” my second thought was: How much of that $6.3 billion might go toward technologies that empower government staff at the same time citizen-facing platforms are being developed and deployed. My guess: Not as much as I’d like to see. My hope: To stimulate dialogue around empowering governments and their employees to become more open, transparent, collaborative internally, ultimately more productive and, as our CEO Satya Nadella has said, “… empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.” What’s interesting to me is the notion of using typically externally focused civic tech platforms, tools and techniques inside the government enterprise to make work-life easier and more productive for government employees. Some examples:
- Just as many governments and companies use social media for citizen and customer outreach, Microsoft and many of our customers use Yammer as our enterprise social network to share information, provide resources, and encourage employee collaboration and peer-to-peer connection.
- Insights offers a tool that allows large organizations to solicit employee or customer input and “crowdsource the consulting process.” This platform can be used within local governments to engage employees, aggregate and analyze their wisdom, and decisively drive towards strategic and tactical conclusions that produce better government.
- EastBanc Technologies created an app-based solution (SnowTrax) that allows the easy and low-cost monitoring of the location, active work and duration of contractor support for operational functions of government, including snow and trash removal. Furthermore, the solution allows for analysis of the received data and reporting of service performance to contract managers.
- Citizinvestor – basically a “Kickstarter for Government” – provides a crowdfunding and civic engagement platform that makes it easy for governments to bring visibility to prioritized projects that need funding and enable citizens to donate to them.
- Having managed the launch of the Philly311 system, I have often thought about the need for a similar internal platform for government employees. In other words, a single 311-type, non-emergency number and intranet site for city, county or state employees to issue service requests or glean knowledge from their respective organizations. Not only would government employees save time and avoid frustration, they would become more productive.
These are just a few thoughts about how civic tech can be effectively incorporated into the government enterprise and why I’m hoping governments will contemplate directing a portion of their estimated $6.3 billion investment in civic tech projects this year for solutions that better serve their own employees in addition to those that are solely citizen-facing. After all, improving internal government functions will manifest benefits for the citizenry and what could be more civic-minded than that?
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Jeff Friedman
Director of eGovernment Business Development, Microsoft Corporation
