Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Either that, or maybe I'll rant about a topic for a while. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about civic tech. Anyway, let's go ahead and start the show. Thank you both for joining us here on civic tech chat. Could Could you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about what you do?

Yeah. Hey. This is Sha Huang. I'm the COO here at Nava and also one of the cofounders. Also, yeah, crossing that crossing that eight year line, and have worn a variety of hats through through the years. But, yeah, excited for this conversation today.

For each of you, what would you say is your personal why? You know, that thing that drives you to get out of bed each morning and do what you do.

Yeah. Plus one thing, everything Rohan said, that kind of centers the why for me personally around, you know, the kind of historic arc we're in about declining trust in public institutions and what, what the harms are or what the cost is of that, what that costs the public, what that costs underserved populations, what that costs us in terms of our ability to act on the coming challenges, that we're going to face, at a systemic at a systemic level. I think an additional lens, I think I think about their you know, that's been pretty centering through the years and as Nava has grown significantly as an organization is being able to do right by the team that we have brought into these problems, into these spaces. Being able to, you know, we talk a lot at Nava about leverage points, being able to be high leverage, against some of the systemic technical or structural or organizational or policy challenges that our institutions are facing, and being able to have a deme demonstrable progress, being able to make some of the outcomes, inarguable, or make some of the the kind of ways of working, in a more modern or more human centered or more resilient way, make those things, feel, feel, irresistible or inevitable, by, the kind of momentum we've built or the outcomes we've been able to demonstrate along the way. I think those are those are things that really center me these days. I think Rohan and I have joked before that if we weren't doing Nava, that we would be trying to work on these problems anyways, like, that the kind of challenges that our country is facing during this moment in history, that the skills that we have, or the experiences that we have, these are some of the highest leverage things that we could be doing with our time in this particular moment.

Your mention of, wanting to work in problem spaces that face this country is perhaps a great segue to get us into some of our main topic conversation. As folks might be aware, you were both involved in the effort to respond to the rollout problems that happened with healthcare.gov. That was a fairly loud moment, for folks, especially those aware of the health care space. I'll throw a piece in the Atlantic in the episode description that is a good read if folks wanna get kinda greater context on some of the story, y'all were involved in. But why did each of you want to jump into that effort?

Yeah. I think when I got the call, it was certainly not something planned or expected. And but it was, you know, a challenge that was very visible. You know, I think all of us who got involved had been seeing it in the news or hearing about it before getting the individual calls that brought us together. I remember at the time when I got my call, I was, I ended up texting with, one of my old bosses, Mike Magerski, who was at that time the CTO of Code for America. And, you know, I was, I think, you know, wondering out loud, you know, is this something is this, basically, like, is this a suicide mission? Is this actually going are we actually going to solve some problems? You know, or is it, you know, for show? Can I actually do this work? You know, what what's kind of needed for this task? And I think Mike I I my memory of this is, like, Mike just let me ramble on, around all the reasons or concerns, not to. And I think his only response was, you know, well, could you make it worse? And, I think that that was enough of a kernel of belief that, you know, that I personally could contribute something to this effort, that got me involved. And I think, like Rohan mentioned, I think, you know, it was not, you know, part of my personal career, you know, five year plan to be working with and for, government services or government programs. But after the experience of healthcare.gov, it was impossible to imagine otherwise. It was impossible to imagine, other work that could be somehow more clarifying or purposeful, or meaningful, to work on in the future.

From that situation, you eventually found yourselves in one where you were initially like firefighters as you got into that moment, responding to a crisis. And, I believe this was a phrase y'all used when we were talking about the episode kinda in prep where you talked about going from that to becoming architects, you know, folks that are now building something that's meant to last beyond just a response. Can y'all talk a bit about the experience of going from that mindset over to the architect one?

Yeah. That's a great question. I think some of the questions so Mikey Dickerson was one of the other, people involved in the in the tech search effort. One of was one of the first people called in. One of the questions as we were working as a team, you know, kind of fighting many of these fires and trying to make the changes that we were hoping would, be impactful. One of the questions he posed to us was, you know, what what do we need to build here for healthcare.gov so that the next year's open enrollment that, you know, a similar team wasn't just going to need to be called again, that, that the healthcare.gov open and yearly open enrollment periods would just roll from crisis to crisis to crisis to crisis and, you know, whatever we built was just kind of uptaping things, temporarily until, you know, the next surge in traffic or things like that. And that was a useful question for us that framed some of the more systemic things that we needed to do on healthcare.gov, like, building a replacement for healthcare.gov's identity management system, which was causing the majority of the outages rather than just, you know, patching something existing, but actually replacing something wholesale, and and thinking about the things that would get healthcare.gov as a as a whole to a more resilient place. But I think that line of thinking led us to, led us as well to think about what it what it would mean to, to stay, or things like that. And I think Rohan can speak to that more.

Something you mentioned there that I'd like to follow-up on a little bit, if you don't mind, is, you mentioned the the the part of the story where you replaced the identity system as opposed to patching it. I think that's one of those situations where at the service level, it may look like it's, say, more risk to replace a component because, you know, more effort, therefore, more risk. But perhaps it's one of those unique situations where it's actually kinda counterintuitive, where there's actually, like, a greater amount of risk in attempting to patch the thing. Can you talk a bit about, you know, how, how did you communicate about that about that choice? And, because often it can be kinda tough to say, convince a stakeholder, go ahead and go with, like, the replacement strategy and and see that it is actually, like, the less riskier option.

Keeping in the theme of making choices, toward the the end of this process, I gather you've formed a company, one we've talked about, a few times here. I'd be curious to hear a bit about the why for that. You know, why take that step? Were there other options that y'all were considering at the time?

The organization is also unique in that it's a public benefit corporation. Can you all talk a bit about what that is for folks that might not be as familiar and why you made the choice to use that structure?

Yeah. That's a great question. We're yeah. So we're a public benefit corporation, and we made that choice as we were talking about founding Nava because, the public benefit corporation designation was relatively new at that time in 2014, 2015. What it meant was and, you know, the intention of the PBC designation was that you could have a corporation that had a social charter or a public benefit mission that was baked into, its governance structure, that was baked into, the kind of duties, of the shareholders. So instead of just, you know, a for profit corporation that has a fiduciary duty to kind of return value to shareholders, that incorporating as a public benefit corporation would mean that we also had this parallel responsibility, baked in at the deepest level of the organization to deliver on our mission, to help serve the government and and build these more resilient public institutions. It was a it it was a harder it was a, I I think, a strange decision for us to make at the time there. You know, our lawyers didn't know what a public benefit corporation was. It's still you know, there are not many PBCs. But we felt like it was, you know, the government providing a designation that aligned with our values. And if we were building an organization to work with government agencies and be active stewards of their, missions and their desired outcomes, it would feel somehow contradictory to then ignore this corporate designation that was created to to be in line with some of the same values that we shared. So we felt like that was a way to make, you know, our our mission or our values baked into something deeper than just, you know, a Google Doc, but actually bake that into the structure of the corporation.

To follow-up on that last statement about having the values be more than just a Google Doc, I I think I recall from our kind of prep conversation that one of y'all meant used the phrase, like, we wanted our values to have teeth, which I think kinda uniquely applies to this sort of structure. How does a public benefit corporation, do that with with a set of values in an organization like yours?

Yeah. That's a great question. Yeah. We we did want our values to have teeth, and the public benefit corporation designation, I think, allowed us to do so. To the other point, I think Rohan mentioned around the kind of vendor ecosystem, we did see some of the dark incentives or negative incentives of the ecosystem pulling you towards, you know, prioritizing, maximizing revenue, or bidding on anything at all costs, under delivering for the government, or or kind of, not holding to some promises or commitments, or not aligning with the the vision or mission of the agencies you were serving. So we saw that as a real risk. And I think in terms of having teeth, what being a PBC means is that, you know, even if and I I use this as an example. You know, Nava has no outside investors. The only shareholders of Nava are current or former employees. So even if everyone at Nava were to resign today and a fully new set of new CEO, new executive team, new anything like that, if we as past sharehold as kind of existing shareholders, but not even current staff, saw Nava straying away from its stated public benefit mission or stated kind of social charter baked into, its incorporation, then we could, then we could litigate. We could kind of bring a suit to Nava about failing to deliver on its, on its mission in the same ways that, activist shareholders in public companies, you know, litigate corporations for failing to maximize, you know, revenue to to their shareholders. And we felt like that, you know, that allowed us to make, some of these commitments, not just in good faith, but with some with some backup, that even if, you know, if everything at Nava changed hands, there were still some mechanisms for accountability, for this organization long term.

Listeners might recall that in June, we had the privilege of getting to chat with, someone named Mark Funkhouser to talk a bit about the impact, the pandemic has had on local government. And as it turned out, there's been a fair share of problems to solve and crises to respond to at those levels. I'll, toss an episode link in the description for folks that wanna dive into that context and come back. As an organization that's focused its energy on that space, how's the pandemic affected the work you've been doing with those government partners?

Yeah. I think the a different thing to think about, and I think, Rohan, you touched on it as well with the unemployment surge is I think the the pandemic has disrupted the the entire country in so many different ways. But it's also just revealed so many cracks and seams in our safety net that were already there, that were there for decades, that I think anyone who's been on SNAP or Medicaid, or TANF or WIC could have told you about were were true of their experiences of the program, even prior to a pandemic. So I think what has been, I think, I think there's that, that saying, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste. I think there's a much broader and more visceral, sense of understanding of the cost of failure, the cost of not making some of these systemic changes, the cost of not thinking about business process and, you know, just focusing on technology, or the cost of, focusing on business process, without thinking about policy. I think those those things have been borne out in in pretty staggering ways. And I think that's been that point has been hammered home pretty well. I think also the point around resilience has become, closer to a lot of the agencies we speak to, as not a hypothetical resilience they need to build, but a real and pragmatic one, that they need to build to be able to respond to the the kind of current crises, and and the coming challenges that our public institutions are gonna face.

Something that I I imagine both of you are well aware of working in this space is that at that point where you're delivering a service, particularly using technology as needed, that's very much a point where kinda like policy systems meet computer systems. And there's kind of problems that can be created by the implementation of both and also, like, the relationships they have with each other. How as you've been doing this work in in these in in these benefit systems, how have you seen your role as as a partner where those things meet?

A a common thread in the conversation we've had so far is thought behind how one makes choices. So something I'd be curious to to hear from y'all is how have the collective experiences you've had so far, some of them we've talked about here in this conversation, fed into the way that y'all make decisions for and as an organization?

Yeah. I think that, you know, it's on there there's two sides of that of how we make decisions. It's like how we make decisions in building the organization and how do we structure it and set us up for success to deliver on our mission, or make progress on it. And then on the other side, it's how do we continue to, be active stewards, and play the role that, we feel is necessary to exist on the vendor side to help government agencies, you know, continue to serve their, their publics. On the organization building side, I think, you know, one one choice that I think Rohan and I were reminded of recently was a choice to actually not build something, that we, decided to make at Nava several years ago. You know, that identity management system that Rohan mentioned earlier that we, built to replace the existing identity management system on healthcare.gov. At some point, you know, we also migrated medicare.gov, onto another instance of that same system so that, you know, that was serving, almost almost 70,000,000, user accounts across healthcare.gov and medicare.gov. At the time, you know, login.gov had just gotten started. It was a small small effort out of '18 f, and there weren't, weren't as many kind of off the shelf products or products serving that space. Id.me had just started. There was a conversation we had at the time of whether or not Nava should build a product for, you know, a SaaS product around identity management and resell it back to the government. And it was a it was a strange kind of decision to to sit with, and I think, you know, there were many potential financial upsides of a decision like that to Rohan's point earlier about, you know, fiduciary responsibilities. But I think when we played that decision out, we felt like this was, I think, around 2016 or 2017 probably. When we played that decision out, we felt like if we built a SaaS product around identity management or identity proofing, sold it to government, we might be able to, earn a ton earn a ton in terms of profit. We might be able to, solve a specific problem that the government was experiencing at the moment. But over the long term, I think Rohan, you know, said to said to us, you know, after thinking about it for a while, he said, you know, over the long term, our interests and the government's interests would diverge. Over the long term, at some point, you know, we would want to maximize lock in to our product for the agencies that we had as customers. We would want to monetize the user data that we were accumulating on behalf of the government and reselling back to the government. And over the long term, our interest in building a kind of SaaS product along those lines and and kind of privatizing this piece, of government data would would not align with the interests of the public. So we decided not to build that. We decided not to go down that direction. I think we could do that because we were a public benefit corporation. I think that made the answer easy, rather than, you know, a conflicted one. And it's been, I think, pretty sobering, actually, to see some of the recent conversation around ID. Me and and IRS announcing that they're moving away from it because, you know, in many ways, it's played out almost exactly like we were afraid it would have if we had gone down a similar path. So I think that's that's a kind of choice in the negative. It's not something we chose to build. It's not something we chose to do with the organization. It's something we made a decision not to do several years ago. But I think that's been telling over the last few months, watching some of the concern, and risks raised and conflicts of interest be raised, that I think have been that have helped us reflect on how we made that decision then and, you know, what factors we were taking in, and how that has kind of played out in ways that, that we were concerned might play out for Nava. That's on one side. I think in terms of, you know, choices we've made that have impacted, you know, our ability to make progress on the mission, something that has we have learned and I think have made a choice around is beginning to we started over the last couple years hiring people with some of the policy and program experience, or, you know, with more policy or program experience, on the actual programs that we're working with. And I think that doesn't you know, Nava is not, you know, a policy think tank. Nava is not, you know, trying to kind of direct that level of work or participate in that level of work. But recognizing that, you know, to Rohan's earlier point, like, so many of the, visible technology problems, what is underneath those or the root causes of those are business process challenges, our lack of clarity and regulations, our contradicting regulations, or legislative or policy, challenges. I think having that experience on our side and partnering with the agencies that we're working for has helped us build a better translation layer so that we're able to meet with, you know, policy and operations folks on the government side, deeply, deeply understand their needs and not just bring a technology first mindset into those settings, and then figure out, you know, as Rohan has talked about, working backwards from the policy goals or the program goals. You know, is technology even the way we should solve this, or are there simple business process changes, that could make sense here? So I I think using using kind of technology, not as, as a hammer and thinking of everything as nails. I think that's been, I think, something on, making choices in how we've structured and what type of talent we've brought into the organization that I think has helped us better serve our our mission.

A term that's been used, quite a few times in in our conversation is the term outcomes as, in particular, something that you wanna focus on. In my experience, it can be easy to, like, lose track of those or get lost in the noise of all the other stuff that's involved with whether we're talking about a project or the way our organization's running, and it can kinda get wedged into the decision making systems that are there. How have you all gone about maintaining focus on that outcome, in quotes that that we've been talking about in the face of all of that?

I wanna thank you both for taking the time to come on Civic Tech Chat today. I have no doubt that folks listening are gonna find some nuggets to learn from this conversation. Again, thank you both for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having us. You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at civic tech chat. Visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.