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This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful.
by cjoh 12y ago
This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful.
But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this:
https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s-Office-for-People-with-Di/fazv-a8mb https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s...
Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there.
After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done.
Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.
- ENGNR 12y agoHow is this not a success for the vendor? They got paid. I do agree with you though that UX is one of governments biggest problems. Imagine the training dollars that could be saved if enterprise software was as intuitive as consumer software, let alone the intangible efficiency gains from things getting done more quickly/effectively. And not some ham fisted usability standard, the best response I can see is getting user advocates involved early in the process. Get some vendor trials going asap and immediately disqualify anything that isn't even trying in the UX department. Just one more thing for gov project managers to think about sadly which is why it won't happen.
- andrewliebchen 12y agoI'm designer for OpenGov, we're an a16z-backed startup that's doing precisely this: the usability and simplicity of consumer apps to the world of government finance. So far, we have a financial transparency product available to cities. Check out Palo Alto's site on OpenGov: http://paloalto.opengov.com http://paloalto.opengov.com. Transparency visualizations for the public are one thing, but one of our ultimate goals is to positively impact the civic financial planning. Keep an eye on OpenGov.
- modarts 12y agoVery nice; any plans for a public data api?
- andrewliebchen 12y agoYeah, I think that's on the road map. We're growing fast and looking for developers, designers, and data scientists. If you're interested, hit me up: aliebchen at opengov dot com. YOU could help build our public API. http://opengov.com/careers http://opengov.com/careers