13 ms·

What I learned in two years of moving government forms online (2018)

262 points by williamsmj 6y ago

wiz21c 6y ago
FTA: That sort of works, but it also creates a weird dynamic because the tech teams don’t have the training nor the explicit mandate to mess around with other people’s jobs. Here in Belgium, I did that kind of work for 14 years. The fact is that you have to have in your IT team people knowledgeable with business. When I say knowledgeable, I mean, they understand the business at least as well as the business people themselves. When you talk to business with that kind of team, it's much easier. Now, the problem I had is not the form, it's the business process behind. Changing these is super hard because inertia is there. Also you have to take into account years and years of little shortcuts, exceptions, etc. that somehow now are part of the process. It's really tough to bring everything together.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Reminds me of this interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about Conway's Law and how they mitigate it at SpaceX: https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=206 https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=206 It's very hard to design an efficient system when the people writing the requirements and the people implementing them don't really understand or talk to each other.
ilikerashers 6y ago
What I've seen continually in government is the dreaded form-builder Frankenstein. 1. Gov thinks it needs some simple form building 2. Chooses a vendor form building framework, some mashup of ASP.NET usually with workflow tools 3. Oh, we'd like documents stored, and an integration with another system, and a custom reporting tool, and a payment function, and a appointment booking. 4. Vendor doesn't want to lose business so builds custom code into the "simple" form/workflow tool. All of sudden the simple form tool is customized beyond belief, falls behind on updates and becomes impossible to change. Worst still, nobody wants to invest in it because it just-about-works.
- stopyellingatme 6y ago
  Nail on the head.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I work in medical and there the top guys often make decisions that are really hard to implement in software. If they understood only a little of the consequences of their decisions have they would probably think a little more about the rules they are creating. I see the same in product development. Marketing comes up with something that has words like "most of the time", "sometime" or "somehow" in the description. Really hard to impossible to implement. When I ask them what they really want to achieve we usually end up with something simpler and straightforward that fulfills the needs, is well understood and easy to implement. I think in government with most of the work being outsourcend this feedback loop doesn't exist. A committee comes up with something and the contractor implements it without questions asked. The more complex the work, the more money for the contractor.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    I work with authentication protocols and access control. Product people want magic.
    - spaetzleesser 6y ago
      I am fine with product people expressing their wants. But we shouldn’t accept their requests blindly but put them through a reality check. The customer is not always right or at least the customer doesn’t explain his real problem properly.
      - cratermoon 6y ago
        That's true, but power dynamics don't always align with wishes. If the professional recommendations of security people weren't so routinely ignored, you'd see a lot less stupid breaches. A great many disasters^1 could be prevented if experts weren't ignored. [1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
oezi 6y ago
"All of our submissions were handled via Google Drive." stopped reading there
- oezi 6y ago
  Clarification: How can anybody be serious about such an approach that is clearly violating data protection requirements?
  - motoboi 6y ago
    How is this different from forms being scanned and saved in a network folder at a file server? Is CIFS a better data protection protocol?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      The network folder & file server at least doesn't have an advertising business model incentivized to snoop on people.
    - oezi 6y ago
      That would almost as bad and is absolutely out of the question in today's regulatory landscape as it does not follow security best practices such as per record encryption or segregation of data.
idiotsecant 6y ago
It sounds like you spent 16,000 hours to save residents 10,000 hours.
- jdefelice 6y ago
  "They also made government services much more accessible." I would say the value of making the forms accessible was worth it. Also with the flexibility to make changes to the forms in the future will save even more time.
  - fatboy 6y ago
    Plus there's value in just making things better! Not everything should be viewed through the eyes of capitalism.
- 3minus1 6y ago
  This is funny, but each year residents should be saving more and more.
Phenix88be 6y ago
The amount of GAFAM dependencies here is impressive. So Google has all the dead certificate request made by Boston resident ? And more ? I don't like this one bit. And the article didn't even mention if they try to use something else, so I guess they didn't even try. From my point of view, paper is better than any Gafam
- etripe 6y ago
  For those similarly confused as I was, Gafam seems to be the acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I'm sure I would agree to Google and Facebook being bad in this situation. I'm mostly convinced about Amazon, too, but why Apple and Microsoft?
known 6y ago
In my experience it's e-Redtape :)
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> A submission emailed to them. A PDF of the submission dropped into a Google Drive folder. A line added to a Google Sheet spreadsheet with the submission data. This all sound great for the city, but it makes me concerned about privacy. At least with the form somebody had to be in physical access to steal the information. Now they just need access to one cog’s Google drive.
- cube00 6y ago
  I also noticed the GitHub issues are full of city officials' names and email addresses, the perfect base to set up a social engineering attack. I really don't understand why all those GitHub issues need to be publicly accessible like this, all it takes is one team member to inadvertently post something sensitive and you're stuffed.
  - prepend 6y ago
    City official names and emails are usually public records and are in Boston. So it’s no more of a risk than current levels. There is a risk of posting the wrong info, but that should be acceptable given the unlikely probability of that happening and the harm of when it does. Posting a citizens form is really bad, but posting meeting minutes probably isn’t too bad. I think it’s important to consider the risk vs the benefit. How much is having better collaboration and avoiding a JIRA license worth?
ramboldio 6y ago
> We’ve got a lot of users and a lot of submissions flowing through SeamlessDocs. They are a great tool, but our contract is structured in such a way that makes continued expansion tough. I feel like an Open Source version of SeamlessDocs would be incredibly useful to tackle these issues not just in the US. Are there people here who would be interested in building anything like this? Let me know.
- impostervt 6y ago
  I'd love a product that is just "drag a pdf into a window and we'll turn it into a form". It looks like seamlessdocs does that, and then lets you edit the resulting form. But they're focused on governments, and I still have to fill out stupid forms for my company on paper (usually health care or tax documents or paycheck stuff) because they send THOSE on to whichever company we've outsourced that work to.
notjustanymike 6y ago
Impressive credit to the author for writing an interesting article about the least interesting topic imaginable: government bureaucracy.
- Angostura 6y ago
  But it's not about government bureaucracy - it's about making both the lives of your coworkers and your fellow citizens just a bit better. That can actually remarkably fulfilling. I'm working with a group of doctors practice in London on their digital plans at the moment, and I love it.
- motoboi 6y ago
  This is not about government bureaucracy. It's actually about optimisation of a complex system in a context of conflicting loss functions and hyper dimensional variable spaces. He managed to find a better local minima (at least for the variables he was considering in the first place). The other uncountable variables will probably readjust to a unpredictable future state.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    > It's actually about optimisation of a complex system in a context of conflicting loss functions and hyper dimensional variable spaces So, what you're saying is that it's an interpretation of a social problem created by someone who's spent far too long doing function approximation? (As someone in this position, i entirely empathise with your interpretation).
DiggyJohnson 6y ago
Fantastically written article. Fantastic article. It's always great to have both.
xvilka 6y ago
PDFs for forms are truly terrible and barely work[1] in anything except Adobe Reader. Online forms are not without their problems, especially from the maintenance point of view, but significantly more accessible to the normal people, especially for the mobile phones, if designed properly. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  I've filled out lots of PDF forms in Firefox and Chrome without issue.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    Because they license Adobe's engine to handle the PDFs
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Firefox uses PDF.js, Chrome's reader is based on Foxit.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I wished I had known that when I filled out a form in document preview on my Mac a few hours ago, including adding a signature. The process was basically perfect and about as simple as can be.
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  I've successfully been using Preview to annotate, sign, fill in annoying PDFs for years. Works great
Bukhmanizer 6y ago
Great article. It felt true to my experience working with govt employees, and I’m impressed that this person had the tenacity to achieve the success that they did. Unfortunately I also think this is the kind of stuff its really easy to write a cheap headline about. “BOONDOGGLE: BOSTON SPENDS $150,000 AND 2 YEARS MAKING PAPER FORM INTO WEBSITE” There, that’s 100,000 shares on a headline that no one will really care to read the details of.
ktsosno 6y ago
The focus on not attempting to improve the forms or workflow alongside the porting of the docs online is key. Cuts down on potential errors, increases buy-in from stake holders and doesn’t turn this into some insurmountable task of being a consultant for several dozen city departments.
tantalor 6y ago
> Get rid of paper forms... moving those forms online ... made government services much more accessible Not everybody uses computers. Not everybody has internet access. Shouldn't paper forms still be available as a last resort? I'm okay with "online first" but not "online only".
- thechao 6y ago
  Paper forms are available ... where? In my county, the only place to get a paper form is by printing it out. A lot of people use the library to get access to a computer ... to print the form. I’m not saying “no” to paper, I’m just talking about the reality that having a computer in at least one part of the process is mandatory.
- jeffgreco 6y ago
  Boston has a number of ways to access online services, including free public wi-fi, libraries, and even a mobile City Hall that brings services directly to different neighborhoods: https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/promising-practices/boston-ma-city-hall-go/ https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/promising-practices/bost... More accessible than requiring someone to go to a City Hall basement!
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  100% spot on here. There are a significant number of people who use their phone as the primary or even sole method of internet access. And that's not just low income people but also young adults. When you start counting homeless people who primarily use the library (if open), you have another problem. I've worked in various "digital divide" issues for almost 10 years. Online first is okay but we can't wipe out the offline approaches without leaving large swathes of people without any feasible options. Innovate but make sure you're considering your constituents' needs.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  I don't think anything about this article implies that there's no non-tech way to utilize these services after this change. Most governments have laws banning that anyway. A quick browse of boston.gov shows at least all forms I could immediately find have an in-person alternative listed on the website.
devtul 6y ago
> Dogs (can this be a drop down as well from 0-9) Ooh boy, I wonder how long the drop down for cats would be.
codingdave 6y ago
The entire landscape of this problem changed this year -- The latest version of Word now can open PDFs and edit the content, then save back to PDF. PDFs are no longer roadblocks, they are now a document type that just works.
- jdsnape 6y ago
  only if you can afford to buy word, surely?
  - codingdave 6y ago
    True, but most government entities I work with use Word as their primary authoring tool, so that isn't a major barrier.
    - munificent 6y ago
      I think the people filling these forms out are generally citizens of Boston, not city employees.
ccleve 6y ago
Well-written article, useful insights, total misunderstanding of the way things like this should be done. There's an old saying: don't pave cow paths. That's exactly what he was doing. He was putting a different front end on an existing process. You end up with a total nightmare. Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up. For example: a form to request some document. Start with the documents: how are they stored? Should they be stored differently? Are they in a database? Should we really even be storing documents, or should they just be database entries? For that matter, should the department that manages them even exist? (Here in Chicago, the answer was no. They merged the County Recorder of Deeds office with the County Clerk.) You should never just move things online. The web is different, and enables different business processes. Change the process first. Forms come later.
- avmich 6y ago
  Did you try to do something like that - moving a government office into digital world? What is your personal experience with this?
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  Do you see any middle ground between the 'rebuild everything from the ground up' and 'rework the user interface' type approaches?
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  The argument in the article for gradual change sounded reasonable to me. Just moving a process online is at least a first step. > Some departments had sort-of insane business processes for submissions. If I tried to change those, I would spend a whole year on a single department. By focusing on the priority, moving forms online and making it easier for the customer, I could make consistent progress rather than be consistently blocked. Re: should they just be database entries? he did do this or make other changes when the department agreed.
- CityOfThrowaway 6y ago
  This approach is likely to produce better experiences if it could be seen through to the end, but also likely to go nowhere inside a large organization. Change is hard. Radical change, all at once inside a big organization is near impossible. In this case, it’s a great first step to get all this info out of paper and wooden inboxes and into a more accessible form. Doing so still leaves open the potential for reinventing high-priority forms and workflows. It also makes it easier, because now the team can easily ask questions like, “how many people use this?” And “how much time do we spend on this?” Etc. In short, while you might be right wrt. producing innovation, sometimes the first step is to just put it on the internet.
matsemann 6y ago
This is the first step of digitization: Putting electricity on the paper. But it's only the beginning. For the long-tail it may be good enough. But for lots of government forms there are so much more that can be done. Like, we discovered some absurd amount of forms sent to us (like 90% or so) had errors that actually would make the applicant ineligible for whatever the form was for. Stuff like "if you answered X on Q14.2c, you have to answer Q32.5". All this is something good UX and logic can help make a breeze. Instead of a huuuge form to cover all edge cases, it only expands when veering from the happy-path. Also, next step of digitization is actually getting the data as structured data. So that it's automatically put into whatever software the govemp uses to handle the form. Without that, majority of the amount of time spent from a caseworker can be to just transcribe the form into application before it's actually being worked on. Next step after that is of course to automatically approve/deny stuff. If not for everything, there are lot of simple cases that often don't need much scrutiny. A big step is to actually get the gov to change the process/law. Putting electricity to paper is a small win over the incredible wins with just fixing the process. Like one form I worked on was so complicated (maternity/paternity leave) because the law had basically hundreds of small edge cases accrued over the years. Either to fix a loop-hole, or to help some group of people a bit extra. But that just ends up in regulation not even the experts approving these forms understand. It's a hard battle and can take years. Like, sometimes a new rule the politicians invent will cost far more to implement and execute for the small case, than just making it apply to everyone and grant them some extra money...
- zentiggr 6y ago
  All very valuable and extremely on point for the person/team who will be taking over the process after the OP. I've had my own very small share of experience delving into existing workflows and teasing out the early/simple cases and only getting into further processing once the basic conditions are met. It can be an interesting challenge to get those who do the current processing to see where efficiencies can be teased out. The level of legal/higher management mandates for significant process changes is something I've never had to deal with, but I've seen the edges of just how crazy the complications can get. (I once did an implementation of Form 1040 handling via spreadsheet... I was surprised to find that proper math REQUIRED a circular reference and iterating to correct numbers.)
jimmaswell 6y ago
Sometimes the best form is no form at all. The Washington state license/registration process was incredible, just show up with the documents and they ask some questions and type the relevant stuff in for you. Compare to the ridiculous waste of time and paper in NY where you have to arrive with about half a dead tree of redundant information that they just retype into a computer anyway. As a more general point, living in multiple states shows you how much bloated government is a complete waste of time when other states just don't do it and get along fine - other examples are car inspections and even income or sales tax. Did the city decide to simply eliminate any of the functions the forms you found did instead of moving them online?
vorpalhex 6y ago
I was in tears with the amount of manual labor on easily scripted tasks the author spent. Months of work that could have been scripted in a few weeks. You can't script the human element out, but you can save a whole bunch of time clicking through pdfs looking for forms and filing github issues.
- beckingz 6y ago
  How would you go about programmatically determining if a PDF is a form or not?
  - prepend 6y ago
    Mechanical Turk? HTTP get each pdf, look for tillable fields? Flag those for review. Even manually, 2 months to review 2000 links is a long time. I don’t think the author meant he literally sat there for 40 days, but likely did other stuff too.
  - hoten 6y ago
    Puppeteer should work. I believe PDF form controls are turned in HTML form elements, which can be queried by Puppeteer.
  - abraae 6y ago
    Our product automates pdf forms in a specific area (HR). From experience, the presence of form fields in the PDF will tell you that it is a form, but the converse is not always true. Plenty of people flatten their pdfs to remove the form fields, or maybe they were never there in the first place. I believe it's sometimes driven by misguided attempts to stop people from "hacking" (aka automating) them. Or pure incompetence. Some other things I would have like to see in the article would be some details of how they handled signatures. We do electronic signatures but it is certainly an area where accessibility comes into play.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    + check for actual form fields + check rectangles as % of form + flag burned pdfs for review
jackconsidine 6y ago
At my company we use Github Issues for all task management. Like this author discovered, it is underrated. SaaS products like Asana and Trello have prohibitive pricing models for what we consider pretty minor integrations. Jira is too complicated. I have seen some open source projects recently.
motoboi 6y ago
> I put in my earbuds, fired up a podcast, and started going line by line through the list. That took about 2 months. I would open the PDF, see if it was a form, and log it. You can see this guy is not a developer because he didn't spend 2 months learning machine learning and computer vision while trying to automatize the form classification task only to give up after 6 months and do it by hand anyway. And clearly government because he didn't spend 10 dollars in mechanical turks to do it in 24 hours.
- josefresco 6y ago
  Form Yes/No certainly but mechanical turks can't handle this part: "I also reviewed contracts and documentation and interviewed employees in the various city departments to ask if they had other forms."
cube00 6y ago
It's scary that they're now locked into SeamlessDocs which has stopped publishing its pricing. 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seaml... Today: https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing
- mattmanser 6y ago
  Perfectly normal for this sort of product to not have fixed tiers, they've just pivoted off trying to sell to self-serve customers, to switching to a different pricing structure. You can't make money like that if you have to negotiate contracts with government agencies. Not sure how that's scary. Imagine sending in a salesperson, and occasionally an developer, to 5 meetings, each lasting 2 hours, over the space of 6 months. Now calculate how long it would take to pay for that back at $55 p/m. And you'll note that the page already had an "enterprise" tier, for which you had to enquire.
- prepend 6y ago
  This is what makes paper forms so hard to crack. Paper and PDF is a predictable price that will be about the same in 10 years, 20 years, whatever. Not knowing what SeamlessDocs charges (or will even be around) is hard to plan around. They do call out a new contract that I think is meant to help with this.
bottled_poe 6y ago
It’s not even my final form
specialist 6y ago
Nice writeup. One likely factor for Josh Gee's notable successes is his youth. Because he's outside of the power structures and politics. I started "adult" (office) work at 15yo. I got a lot done. Everyone loved the geeky computer whiz who could fix stuff. I got bonuses, perks, praise. This track record set me up for long-term failure. By the time I turned 25yo, I hit a wall. I was now an adult. With my own power. So I was now perceived as a threat. Sadly, I was completely oblivious to the changed dynamic. And I didn't have a mentor or any one else to clue me in. Since then, I've encouraged promising young talent to color outside the lines (eg be bold, don't wait for permission) while they still can. Just from his writing style, I think Josh Gee will avoid my mistakes.
effnorwood 6y ago
Summary - "We are fucked"
hoten 6y ago
Very interesting! side note but... _why_ do so many articles like to repeat things they just said in bigger text? It's usually somewhat spaced apart, but in this instance the sentence is repeated (but BIGGER) right after its written. > On average, it took me about 30 minutes to make a digital form and five weeks to meet with, earn the trust of, and get buy-in from the employees who would use it. > """ <same thing but BIGGER> """ I noticed this sentence is highlighted because it is popular; did Medium decide to auto-bigify a pull-quote, or do authors decide to do this?
dsego 6y ago
For administrative fees maybe there could be a digital version of the tax stamp?
FounderBurr 6y ago
Why? It takes less than 5 seconds to pull out a form, scrawl a name and check a box. It can be done anywhere and with no tools other than the form and a pen. Just finding a computer will take longer for people who don’t sit in front of one all day, then navigate an app, a browser, etc, etc. You’ll find most people just end up clicking “print” when they do find your beautiful web form and then write on the paper copy.

262 points by williamsmj 6y ago

FTA: That sort of works, but it also creates a weird dynamic because the tech teams don’t have the training nor the explicit mandate to mess around with other people’s jobs. Here in Belgium, I did that kind of work for 14 years. The fact is that you have to have in your IT team people knowledgeable with business. When I say knowledgeable, I mean, they understand the business at least as well as the business people themselves. When you talk to business with that kind of team, it's much easier. Now, the problem I had is not the form, it's the business process behind. Changing these is super hard because inertia is there. Also you have to take into account years and years of little shortcuts, exceptions, etc. that somehow now are part of the process. It's really tough to bring everything together.

Ajedi32 6y ago
Reminds me of this interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about Conway's Law and how they mitigate it at SpaceX: https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=206 https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=206 It's very hard to design an efficient system when the people writing the requirements and the people implementing them don't really understand or talk to each other.

ilikerashers 6y ago

What I've seen continually in government is the dreaded form-builder Frankenstein. 1. Gov thinks it needs some simple form building 2. Chooses a vendor form building framework, some mashup of ASP.NET usually with workflow tools 3. Oh, we'd like documents stored, and an integration with another system, and a custom reporting tool, and a payment function, and a appointment booking. 4. Vendor doesn't want to lose business so builds custom code into the "simple" form/workflow tool. All of sudden the simple form tool is customized beyond belief, falls behind on updates and becomes impossible to change. Worst still, nobody wants to invest in it because it just-about-works.

stopyellingatme 6y ago
Nail on the head.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
I work in medical and there the top guys often make decisions that are really hard to implement in software. If they understood only a little of the consequences of their decisions have they would probably think a little more about the rules they are creating. I see the same in product development. Marketing comes up with something that has words like "most of the time", "sometime" or "somehow" in the description. Really hard to impossible to implement. When I ask them what they really want to achieve we usually end up with something simpler and straightforward that fulfills the needs, is well understood and easy to implement. I think in government with most of the work being outsourcend this feedback loop doesn't exist. A committee comes up with something and the contractor implements it without questions asked. The more complex the work, the more money for the contractor.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  I work with authentication protocols and access control. Product people want magic.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    I am fine with product people expressing their wants. But we shouldn’t accept their requests blindly but put them through a reality check. The customer is not always right or at least the customer doesn’t explain his real problem properly.
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      That's true, but power dynamics don't always align with wishes. If the professional recommendations of security people weren't so routinely ignored, you'd see a lot less stupid breaches. A great many disasters^1 could be prevented if experts weren't ignored. [1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf

oezi 6y ago

"All of our submissions were handled via Google Drive." stopped reading there

oezi 6y ago
Clarification: How can anybody be serious about such an approach that is clearly violating data protection requirements?
- motoboi 6y ago
  How is this different from forms being scanned and saved in a network folder at a file server? Is CIFS a better data protection protocol?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    The network folder & file server at least doesn't have an advertising business model incentivized to snoop on people.
  - oezi 6y ago
    That would almost as bad and is absolutely out of the question in today's regulatory landscape as it does not follow security best practices such as per record encryption or segregation of data.

idiotsecant 6y ago

It sounds like you spent 16,000 hours to save residents 10,000 hours.

jdefelice 6y ago
"They also made government services much more accessible." I would say the value of making the forms accessible was worth it. Also with the flexibility to make changes to the forms in the future will save even more time.
- fatboy 6y ago
  Plus there's value in just making things better! Not everything should be viewed through the eyes of capitalism.
3minus1 6y ago
This is funny, but each year residents should be saving more and more.

Phenix88be 6y ago

The amount of GAFAM dependencies here is impressive. So Google has all the dead certificate request made by Boston resident ? And more ? I don't like this one bit. And the article didn't even mention if they try to use something else, so I guess they didn't even try. From my point of view, paper is better than any Gafam

etripe 6y ago
For those similarly confused as I was, Gafam seems to be the acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I'm sure I would agree to Google and Facebook being bad in this situation. I'm mostly convinced about Amazon, too, but why Apple and Microsoft?

known 6y ago

In my experience it's e-Redtape :)

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> A submission emailed to them. A PDF of the submission dropped into a Google Drive folder. A line added to a Google Sheet spreadsheet with the submission data. This all sound great for the city, but it makes me concerned about privacy. At least with the form somebody had to be in physical access to steal the information. Now they just need access to one cog’s Google drive.

cube00 6y ago
I also noticed the GitHub issues are full of city officials' names and email addresses, the perfect base to set up a social engineering attack. I really don't understand why all those GitHub issues need to be publicly accessible like this, all it takes is one team member to inadvertently post something sensitive and you're stuffed.
- prepend 6y ago
  City official names and emails are usually public records and are in Boston. So it’s no more of a risk than current levels. There is a risk of posting the wrong info, but that should be acceptable given the unlikely probability of that happening and the harm of when it does. Posting a citizens form is really bad, but posting meeting minutes probably isn’t too bad. I think it’s important to consider the risk vs the benefit. How much is having better collaboration and avoiding a JIRA license worth?

ramboldio 6y ago

> We’ve got a lot of users and a lot of submissions flowing through SeamlessDocs. They are a great tool, but our contract is structured in such a way that makes continued expansion tough. I feel like an Open Source version of SeamlessDocs would be incredibly useful to tackle these issues not just in the US. Are there people here who would be interested in building anything like this? Let me know.

impostervt 6y ago
I'd love a product that is just "drag a pdf into a window and we'll turn it into a form". It looks like seamlessdocs does that, and then lets you edit the resulting form. But they're focused on governments, and I still have to fill out stupid forms for my company on paper (usually health care or tax documents or paycheck stuff) because they send THOSE on to whichever company we've outsourced that work to.

notjustanymike 6y ago

Impressive credit to the author for writing an interesting article about the least interesting topic imaginable: government bureaucracy.

Angostura 6y ago
But it's not about government bureaucracy - it's about making both the lives of your coworkers and your fellow citizens just a bit better. That can actually remarkably fulfilling. I'm working with a group of doctors practice in London on their digital plans at the moment, and I love it.
motoboi 6y ago
This is not about government bureaucracy. It's actually about optimisation of a complex system in a context of conflicting loss functions and hyper dimensional variable spaces. He managed to find a better local minima (at least for the variables he was considering in the first place). The other uncountable variables will probably readjust to a unpredictable future state.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  > It's actually about optimisation of a complex system in a context of conflicting loss functions and hyper dimensional variable spaces So, what you're saying is that it's an interpretation of a social problem created by someone who's spent far too long doing function approximation? (As someone in this position, i entirely empathise with your interpretation).

DiggyJohnson 6y ago

Fantastically written article. Fantastic article. It's always great to have both.

xvilka 6y ago

PDFs for forms are truly terrible and barely work[1] in anything except Adobe Reader. Online forms are not without their problems, especially from the maintenance point of view, but significantly more accessible to the normal people, especially for the mobile phones, if designed properly. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...

jimmaswell 6y ago
I've filled out lots of PDF forms in Firefox and Chrome without issue.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  Because they license Adobe's engine to handle the PDFs
  - anoncake 6y ago
    Firefox uses PDF.js, Chrome's reader is based on Foxit.
tomjen3 6y ago
I wished I had known that when I filled out a form in document preview on my Mac a few hours ago, including adding a signature. The process was basically perfect and about as simple as can be.
wildrhythms 6y ago
I've successfully been using Preview to annotate, sign, fill in annoying PDFs for years. Works great

Bukhmanizer 6y ago

Great article. It felt true to my experience working with govt employees, and I’m impressed that this person had the tenacity to achieve the success that they did. Unfortunately I also think this is the kind of stuff its really easy to write a cheap headline about. “BOONDOGGLE: BOSTON SPENDS $150,000 AND 2 YEARS MAKING PAPER FORM INTO WEBSITE” There, that’s 100,000 shares on a headline that no one will really care to read the details of.

ktsosno 6y ago

The focus on not attempting to improve the forms or workflow alongside the porting of the docs online is key. Cuts down on potential errors, increases buy-in from stake holders and doesn’t turn this into some insurmountable task of being a consultant for several dozen city departments.

tantalor 6y ago

> Get rid of paper forms... moving those forms online ... made government services much more accessible Not everybody uses computers. Not everybody has internet access. Shouldn't paper forms still be available as a last resort? I'm okay with "online first" but not "online only".

thechao 6y ago
Paper forms are available ... where? In my county, the only place to get a paper form is by printing it out. A lot of people use the library to get access to a computer ... to print the form. I’m not saying “no” to paper, I’m just talking about the reality that having a computer in at least one part of the process is mandatory.
jeffgreco 6y ago
Boston has a number of ways to access online services, including free public wi-fi, libraries, and even a mobile City Hall that brings services directly to different neighborhoods: https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/promising-practices/boston-ma-city-hall-go/ https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/promising-practices/bost... More accessible than requiring someone to go to a City Hall basement!
caseysoftware 6y ago
100% spot on here. There are a significant number of people who use their phone as the primary or even sole method of internet access. And that's not just low income people but also young adults. When you start counting homeless people who primarily use the library (if open), you have another problem. I've worked in various "digital divide" issues for almost 10 years. Online first is okay but we can't wipe out the offline approaches without leaving large swathes of people without any feasible options. Innovate but make sure you're considering your constituents' needs.
TotempaaltJ 6y ago
I don't think anything about this article implies that there's no non-tech way to utilize these services after this change. Most governments have laws banning that anyway. A quick browse of boston.gov shows at least all forms I could immediately find have an in-person alternative listed on the website.

devtul 6y ago

> Dogs (can this be a drop down as well from 0-9) Ooh boy, I wonder how long the drop down for cats would be.

codingdave 6y ago

The entire landscape of this problem changed this year -- The latest version of Word now can open PDFs and edit the content, then save back to PDF. PDFs are no longer roadblocks, they are now a document type that just works.

jdsnape 6y ago
only if you can afford to buy word, surely?
- codingdave 6y ago
  True, but most government entities I work with use Word as their primary authoring tool, so that isn't a major barrier.
  - munificent 6y ago
    I think the people filling these forms out are generally citizens of Boston, not city employees.

ccleve 6y ago

Well-written article, useful insights, total misunderstanding of the way things like this should be done. There's an old saying: don't pave cow paths. That's exactly what he was doing. He was putting a different front end on an existing process. You end up with a total nightmare. Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up. For example: a form to request some document. Start with the documents: how are they stored? Should they be stored differently? Are they in a database? Should we really even be storing documents, or should they just be database entries? For that matter, should the department that manages them even exist? (Here in Chicago, the answer was no. They merged the County Recorder of Deeds office with the County Clerk.) You should never just move things online. The web is different, and enables different business processes. Change the process first. Forms come later.

avmich 6y ago
Did you try to do something like that - moving a government office into digital world? What is your personal experience with this?
droopyEyelids 6y ago
Do you see any middle ground between the 'rebuild everything from the ground up' and 'rework the user interface' type approaches?
jimmaswell 6y ago
The argument in the article for gradual change sounded reasonable to me. Just moving a process online is at least a first step. > Some departments had sort-of insane business processes for submissions. If I tried to change those, I would spend a whole year on a single department. By focusing on the priority, moving forms online and making it easier for the customer, I could make consistent progress rather than be consistently blocked. Re: should they just be database entries? he did do this or make other changes when the department agreed.
CityOfThrowaway 6y ago
This approach is likely to produce better experiences if it could be seen through to the end, but also likely to go nowhere inside a large organization. Change is hard. Radical change, all at once inside a big organization is near impossible. In this case, it’s a great first step to get all this info out of paper and wooden inboxes and into a more accessible form. Doing so still leaves open the potential for reinventing high-priority forms and workflows. It also makes it easier, because now the team can easily ask questions like, “how many people use this?” And “how much time do we spend on this?” Etc. In short, while you might be right wrt. producing innovation, sometimes the first step is to just put it on the internet.

matsemann 6y ago

This is the first step of digitization: Putting electricity on the paper. But it's only the beginning. For the long-tail it may be good enough. But for lots of government forms there are so much more that can be done. Like, we discovered some absurd amount of forms sent to us (like 90% or so) had errors that actually would make the applicant ineligible for whatever the form was for. Stuff like "if you answered X on Q14.2c, you have to answer Q32.5". All this is something good UX and logic can help make a breeze. Instead of a huuuge form to cover all edge cases, it only expands when veering from the happy-path. Also, next step of digitization is actually getting the data as structured data. So that it's automatically put into whatever software the govemp uses to handle the form. Without that, majority of the amount of time spent from a caseworker can be to just transcribe the form into application before it's actually being worked on. Next step after that is of course to automatically approve/deny stuff. If not for everything, there are lot of simple cases that often don't need much scrutiny. A big step is to actually get the gov to change the process/law. Putting electricity to paper is a small win over the incredible wins with just fixing the process. Like one form I worked on was so complicated (maternity/paternity leave) because the law had basically hundreds of small edge cases accrued over the years. Either to fix a loop-hole, or to help some group of people a bit extra. But that just ends up in regulation not even the experts approving these forms understand. It's a hard battle and can take years. Like, sometimes a new rule the politicians invent will cost far more to implement and execute for the small case, than just making it apply to everyone and grant them some extra money...

zentiggr 6y ago
All very valuable and extremely on point for the person/team who will be taking over the process after the OP. I've had my own very small share of experience delving into existing workflows and teasing out the early/simple cases and only getting into further processing once the basic conditions are met. It can be an interesting challenge to get those who do the current processing to see where efficiencies can be teased out. The level of legal/higher management mandates for significant process changes is something I've never had to deal with, but I've seen the edges of just how crazy the complications can get. (I once did an implementation of Form 1040 handling via spreadsheet... I was surprised to find that proper math REQUIRED a circular reference and iterating to correct numbers.)

jimmaswell 6y ago

Sometimes the best form is no form at all. The Washington state license/registration process was incredible, just show up with the documents and they ask some questions and type the relevant stuff in for you. Compare to the ridiculous waste of time and paper in NY where you have to arrive with about half a dead tree of redundant information that they just retype into a computer anyway. As a more general point, living in multiple states shows you how much bloated government is a complete waste of time when other states just don't do it and get along fine - other examples are car inspections and even income or sales tax. Did the city decide to simply eliminate any of the functions the forms you found did instead of moving them online?

vorpalhex 6y ago

I was in tears with the amount of manual labor on easily scripted tasks the author spent. Months of work that could have been scripted in a few weeks. You can't script the human element out, but you can save a whole bunch of time clicking through pdfs looking for forms and filing github issues.

beckingz 6y ago
How would you go about programmatically determining if a PDF is a form or not?
- prepend 6y ago
  Mechanical Turk? HTTP get each pdf, look for tillable fields? Flag those for review. Even manually, 2 months to review 2000 links is a long time. I don’t think the author meant he literally sat there for 40 days, but likely did other stuff too.
- hoten 6y ago
  Puppeteer should work. I believe PDF form controls are turned in HTML form elements, which can be queried by Puppeteer.
- abraae 6y ago
  Our product automates pdf forms in a specific area (HR). From experience, the presence of form fields in the PDF will tell you that it is a form, but the converse is not always true. Plenty of people flatten their pdfs to remove the form fields, or maybe they were never there in the first place. I believe it's sometimes driven by misguided attempts to stop people from "hacking" (aka automating) them. Or pure incompetence. Some other things I would have like to see in the article would be some details of how they handled signatures. We do electronic signatures but it is certainly an area where accessibility comes into play.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  + check for actual form fields + check rectangles as % of form + flag burned pdfs for review

jackconsidine 6y ago

At my company we use Github Issues for all task management. Like this author discovered, it is underrated. SaaS products like Asana and Trello have prohibitive pricing models for what we consider pretty minor integrations. Jira is too complicated. I have seen some open source projects recently.

motoboi 6y ago

> I put in my earbuds, fired up a podcast, and started going line by line through the list. That took about 2 months. I would open the PDF, see if it was a form, and log it. You can see this guy is not a developer because he didn't spend 2 months learning machine learning and computer vision while trying to automatize the form classification task only to give up after 6 months and do it by hand anyway. And clearly government because he didn't spend 10 dollars in mechanical turks to do it in 24 hours.

josefresco 6y ago
Form Yes/No certainly but mechanical turks can't handle this part: "I also reviewed contracts and documentation and interviewed employees in the various city departments to ask if they had other forms."

cube00 6y ago

It's scary that they're now locked into SeamlessDocs which has stopped publishing its pricing. 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seaml... Today: https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing

mattmanser 6y ago
Perfectly normal for this sort of product to not have fixed tiers, they've just pivoted off trying to sell to self-serve customers, to switching to a different pricing structure. You can't make money like that if you have to negotiate contracts with government agencies. Not sure how that's scary. Imagine sending in a salesperson, and occasionally an developer, to 5 meetings, each lasting 2 hours, over the space of 6 months. Now calculate how long it would take to pay for that back at $55 p/m. And you'll note that the page already had an "enterprise" tier, for which you had to enquire.
prepend 6y ago
This is what makes paper forms so hard to crack. Paper and PDF is a predictable price that will be about the same in 10 years, 20 years, whatever. Not knowing what SeamlessDocs charges (or will even be around) is hard to plan around. They do call out a new contract that I think is meant to help with this.

bottled_poe 6y ago

It’s not even my final form

specialist 6y ago

Nice writeup. One likely factor for Josh Gee's notable successes is his youth. Because he's outside of the power structures and politics. I started "adult" (office) work at 15yo. I got a lot done. Everyone loved the geeky computer whiz who could fix stuff. I got bonuses, perks, praise. This track record set me up for long-term failure. By the time I turned 25yo, I hit a wall. I was now an adult. With my own power. So I was now perceived as a threat. Sadly, I was completely oblivious to the changed dynamic. And I didn't have a mentor or any one else to clue me in. Since then, I've encouraged promising young talent to color outside the lines (eg be bold, don't wait for permission) while they still can. Just from his writing style, I think Josh Gee will avoid my mistakes.

effnorwood 6y ago

Summary - "We are fucked"

hoten 6y ago

Very interesting! side note but... _why_ do so many articles like to repeat things they just said in bigger text? It's usually somewhat spaced apart, but in this instance the sentence is repeated (but BIGGER) right after its written. > On average, it took me about 30 minutes to make a digital form and five weeks to meet with, earn the trust of, and get buy-in from the employees who would use it. > """ <same thing but BIGGER> """ I noticed this sentence is highlighted because it is popular; did Medium decide to auto-bigify a pull-quote, or do authors decide to do this?

dsego 6y ago

For administrative fees maybe there could be a digital version of the tax stamp?

FounderBurr 6y ago

Why? It takes less than 5 seconds to pull out a form, scrawl a name and check a box. It can be done anywhere and with no tools other than the form and a pen. Just finding a computer will take longer for people who don’t sit in front of one all day, then navigate an app, a browser, etc, etc. You’ll find most people just end up clicking “print” when they do find your beautiful web form and then write on the paper copy.