70 Civic Technologist Guide Episode Re-Release
For our first episode of 2022 we go back into the archives and re-release an episode from October 20th, 2020. The original description follows below! Civic Design Consultant and author [Cyd Harrell](https://twitter.com/cydharrell) joins us for a conversation about their new book [A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55225556-a-civic-technologist-s-practice-guide?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=paFK2DugTf&rank=1){, which seeks to be a grounding document in the space. 🎧 Listen ### Resources and Shoutouts: - [Slow Ideas](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/slow-ideas) - [Inclusive Design for a Digital World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46113876-inclusive-design-for-a-digital-world?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=BN5R6KdAsB&rank=1) - [Disability Visibility](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51456746-disability-visibility){ - [So you want to reform democracy](https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597) ##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
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Transcript
Hello, folks. This is Ryan Cook, your host, welcoming you to another episode of Civic Tech Chat. This one marks 70 episodes over nearly four years. We're gonna hit that anniversary here on the eighteenth. And in celebration of that, decided to go back into the archives and rerelease one of our episodes that covers a topic that I think is salient to this day. We're gonna venture back to 10/21/2020 when we released an episode covering the civic technologist practice guide, a book written by Sid Harrell. I think what you'll find is that there's a really interesting conversation up ahead about many things that folks in the civic tech field are thinking about. So enough about that. Let's go ahead and hop right in. Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology
Chat. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? Absolutely. I'm Sid Harrell, and, I'm an independent civic design consultant. Right now, my main gig is with the California court system. But I have worked at Code for America and at eighteen f and also with the Center for Civic Design, basically helping different governments make better technology for their constituents, whoever those constituents might be.
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. Well, for one thing, it's interesting.
And, I've never found technology for technology's sake as interesting as technology in the service of people. So for me, the idea that I could get up and use some of these cool skills that I gained over my first ten or fifteen years of career and actually potentially use them to make our society a bit better for people is incredibly motivating. I think I really came to this right about when I was turning 40. And, that's a time when you kind of reassess. It's like, oh, you know, it's been fun improving laptop configurators and video games and and all that kind of stuff like I did at my last cool user research job. But I wonder if there's something I can do that would, you know, without requiring me to retrain, let me really contribute something.
Is there any media, whether it's podcast, something print, video, or some other such thing that you would recommend to folks out there in our audience?
Tell me actually about your audience. Are they engineers, designers across disciplines?
Yeah. We have a general smattering of folks across the practices, also folks in, like, the program space as well. Terrific. It's a pretty pretty representative group in civic tech. One of my favorite articles,
in fact, I used to make every Code for America fellow read this, is called Spreading Slow Ideas and it's by Atul Gawande from the New Yorker a few years back. It's available online. And it is about, the process of really making any significant change. And I love it because he compares a couple of medical innovations from the late nineteenth century. So one was anesthesia and one was asepsis. One of them was adopted almost immediately worldwide after it was pioneered. And the next one took fifty, sixty years. And he looks at what the differences between why one seems so compelling to adopt. And if you are working with a slow idea, like say governments should better meet their constituents with their technology, how you can make it easier for the adoption. And and he ends up, it won't be a spoiler because you should read it anyway, but kind of saying, in some ways, a friendly person next to you encouraging you to do the right thing without judgment over time is the most powerful thing that we have. And so when I think about, you know, civic tech modes where, tech people who have good skills go in and sit down and sit next to and learn from career folks and institutions. You have a very powerful nexus there for bringing them forward. So that's probably one favorite article. There are quite a few books listed. I really recommend anyone in this area do some reading about accessibility and about anti racism. They're both significant issues in government at all levels. So, a couple of favorites. There's a really good book, and I'm gonna page through my book for a second to get the name right. It's by Regina Gilbert, Inclusive Design for a Digital World. That is fantastic. And, there's also a set of stories, edited by Alice Wong. It's called Disability Visibility. That's really new. That's just first person narratives from people who have lived with various disabilities and how their encounters with the world go. And I think it's really, really instructive to think about that stuff. There are a bunch of cautions for civic tech too, and perhaps the most fun one for anyone, I think especially engineers, is an essay called So You Want to Reform Democracy. It's by Josh Tarver from 2014 or 2015, t a u b e r e r. And if you look it up, it's a great sort of check on all of us.
And for folks that are wanting to, embark on this excellent reading list we've gotten, I'm gonna go ahead and gather those when I listen to this later and throw them in the episode description. So fret not as you're listening to this. Switching gears a little bit, I'd like to, obviously, we wanna talk about about your book, a, civic technologist practice guide. I I'd be curious to hear what was your why for wanting to write a book like that?
It's funny. It came about, during a coffee conversation with a friend sort of pre holidays last year, and I was sort of, you know, lamenting to my friend that I didn't know what my next, sort of leadership opportunity might be. And she told me, this was Erica Hall of Mule Design, if you know her. She told me about something that she was working on and just starting to think about in terms of recontextualizing design education and trying to kind of come up with what grounding documents for the design field in the rest of the twenty first century should look like. And I realized civic tech really needs grounding documents. We don't have very many things that you can find and almost none that you can hold in your hand that say, Hey, here's the basics. Or, you know, here's one perspective on how we practice. And here's another perspective on how we practice. And you as someone entering the field can take a look at them both and say, oh, I really kind of align with this one, or I align with that one. And I felt like given my history and seniority in the field, I was in a good position to pull some threads together and write something like that. And so I decided that it would be, short, and I got home. I actually had written outline in the taxi cab on the way home from this drinks meeting on GEDox mobile because that's what everybody uses. Right? And when I when I made it home, I told my husband. I was like, I figured it out. I figured out what book I wanna write, and here it is. And he said, Oh yeah, you should definitely write that. But you know what? You better get it done before the election in November. And I said, Oh God, you're right. Because I think that, if we get a new administration at the federal level, we're gonna see a rush of people into civic technology. And there'll be more need than ever for this kind of onboarding and grounding document. If we don't get a new administration, my guess is we're still gonna see a smaller rush into state level and municipal level civic technology where people who wanna serve their communities may or may not be comfortable working at the federal level or indeed may wanna resist what's going on at the federal level might go into those pieces, those layers of government.
That's a that's a really good point about the election. I, that that that wasn't really a front of my mind. And, yeah, that that's true. I suppose, like, depending on the results, we probably will see some amount of rush to to one of those levels. That that's really interesting.
Yeah. And so I had a use case that, you know, someone who already knows the field a little bit could hand it to someone who reaches out to them because I get a few of these every week, and you probably get some too. It's like, oh, the civic tech thing you're doing sounds interesting. How do I get started? So I had two use cases. One for us practitioners to feel seen and maybe sort of get some common vocabulary around the things that we talk about and have a fairly strong perspective so that somebody could write another one from a different perspective. And there could be that, okay, where do I align question for all of us. But also for it to be something that when that person reaches out, you can say, here, go read this, and then we can talk after that.
Hopping a bit into what what what you've written in the book, and and I do have to comment that I I rather enjoyed reading over it. It's I found myself seeing some things from my own experiences and they're going like, oh, yeah. One one of those that, has actually come up some a few times in this podcast is one of the things you mentioned in the second chapter, which is the idea that one of the compelling things about the practice of civic technology is having to embrace the constraint that you're seeking to serve everyone. Yep. Can you talk a bit about that for folks?
Yeah. So I think it can be easy when you are prototyping something in a private sector context to say, like, hey. We're we're not gonna worry about accessibility. We're not gonna worry about languages. You know? We're just or, you know, maybe even we're not gonna worry about, people who don't have access to a desktop computer. But there's an interesting thing with civic stuff where we don't really have an alternative to go to a different government that's in competition that might offer better service. So if I want a business permit for a business in San Francisco, I have to get it from the state of California and the city of San Francisco. I can't just go up the road and get one, you know, from somebody who has a better package. And I guess that's technically not always true. You can incorporate your corporation in Delaware to save on taxes, and there's a few hacks like that. But, you know, if I need to sign up for a summer parks program for my kid, I gotta do it in this town. And that just kinda gives you a little picture of the breadth of government services that we're talking about too. But so when something is a monopoly, you start to have an obligation to serve everyone. And this is also a democracy. And that means that we are all little owners of a piece of this. So, really, everybody that is your user is one of your owners. And it's a little switch to think about, you know, would it be okay for one of the owners not to be able to use my product when I built it? Not really. So there's just sort of no justification and a strong imperative, you know, on both sides. Right? There there there's no reasonable excuse for saying, when you know, we're not gonna worry about Spanish speakers. There are not a lot of states where that makes any sense anymore. And then, you know, you have realities like about 15 to 20% of Americans have a primary Internet access through their mobile device. And so that means if you put out something that isn't mobile capable, you're excluding a significant chunk of your user base, and it's more than likely to be people who could most benefit from government service. So it really doesn't make sense. So here you are in this situation where it's pretty clear that building for everyone is gonna be a mandate. And so really taking the sort of agile you know, we start with a scooter and we get to a car, or we start with a cupcake. Maybe that's a preferred analogy now. Right? Like, we we prototype our decorations on a cupcake, and we move up to the multilayer cake. We want it to be a cupcake that includes those pieces, and then we can add on maybe some of the fancier features and so forth. And it kinda forces you to be more of an agile practitioner if, you know, aside from the justice aspects, it's just interesting from a practice perspective.
Something you touched upon that resonated with me is the importance of shared language. You tell an anecdote about your time at Code for America where there wasn't a shared understanding of what the word lightweight meant in context. And I I I rather enjoy that story. Could you talk about that a bit and how folks might try to take a lesson from that and effect and effectively communicate?
Absolutely. So the story that Brian's talking about was, when we got hung up for two or three weeks working with Citi partners, because we were really excited to propose a lightweight solution. And we meant lightweight in the sense of not requiring a lot of maintenance and not a lot of extra code and not overdeveloped. And they heard lightweight as in not robust, not ready for prime time and not serious. And neither of us questioned that very basic term. And so we were stuck on approval of our proposal and we could not get out of this loop for something like two weeks. It's hilarious in hindsight. It was kind of a nightmare at the time. We were really scared that we had somehow messed something up. And one of the pieces I talk about in the book, I think, is a section called your jargon and my jargon, where we all have a jargon. We all have a a lingo or a slang that goes with the type of work that we wanna do. And sometimes that's a really well developed set of words that, are important for describing concepts that are specific to a field, but so does everybody else. And being open to the reality that you're gonna need to create a shared team vocabulary when you're working in a cross disciplinary way and taking some steps to actually do that. So, usually, I often just create a team vocabulary sheet and set a norm that asking about words is always a good idea. And if you think you might be using one of those words, bracket it. You won't always know. Like with lightweight, we just missed it completely. I've never missed that one again, but I've missed other ones. I marched into the courts my first day, and, you know, when they asked me to introduce myself, I talked about all of my government tech experience. And they said, why are you telling us about this? We're not the government. Why are you telling us about this? And I sort of had this, you know, taken aback but all of your email addresses are dot gov and we're in a government building and this is a third branch of government. And so, no, we're not the government. We're the courts. What it turns out, which actually makes a lot of sense, is that various governments are often a party to a case before the court. So if a city is in a lawsuit or a state is in a lawsuit, it's sort of the government, and they while the courts are a branch of government, they wanna make it really clear that they're not identified with executive branch agencies or legislative agencies that might be parties in a case. And so, again, I ran into this this what seemed like a strange misunderstanding of language. You know? Like, I had just lost track of what that word meant, but I hadn't. I just needed to understand my partner's situation.
That's a it's definitely a thing where it's, like, from the from the outside. Like, yeah, the courts are part of the the government. But your your, your mention of, like, it being kind of a core part of their identity that they have to have that distance to be fair. You know? Nice. Wow. Yeah.
Fairness and impartiality, which by the way has been fascinating to work with us design values during the time I've been at the court because we think we want a really opinionated design value. But that impartiality is a key value of the court and of court proceedings. And so how to design for impartiality has been this huge question that we've been dealing with for a couple years.
Another story that that that you told in the book that stuck out to me was one about a person named Angela, a person that you'd interacted with that, in your words, was a person who knew everyone. You mentioned them in a section where I believe you were talking about the importance of folks that are, like, mid tenured staff that are well connected.
Yes. What do those sort of relationships do for a project, and how should folks strive to foster them? So Angela was someone that I met on a project in DC, and she had a title like senior analyst or manager or something like that. And, she was someone who'd been at our kickoff but hadn't said a lot. But we happened to see her heading out of the building to lunch, and we said, oh, do you wanna come with us? We're going to get falafel. And we went to this little cafe, and we all bought our own lunch because you can't buy each other lunch in in DC culture and sat there and just said, oh, you know, what's really going on here? And it turned out that Angela, like many people who have been at a government agency ten or fifteen years and are friendly and interested in pursuing interests, related to tech or related to anything else and curious, had a strong connection with people both up and down the hierarchy. So she was someone that frontline staff could tell about their issues. She was someone executives could check-in with to see how things were actually going or to find out what the frontline staff's opinions were. So they might not actually talk to the frontline staff, but they could talk to Angela. She was in their building. She was wearing a suit. You know? She she felt comfortable. So do people all the way up and down the hierarchy. So after we had this lunch with Angela, we went back and sort of tried to email some more people. And late that afternoon, two people swung by our little workspace and said, oh, hey. Angela said we should talk to you. And on the following morning, four people showed up and said, oh, hi. Angela said we really should talk to you. And suddenly, everyone that we needed to speak with wanted to make time for us, because Angela had built this personal reputation that she was a terrific partner and colleague. And so given that she was knowledgeable and smart and well liked, if she said, oh, those weirdos from eighteen f in the little office, they're great. You should talk to them. Everything became easier.
There's a there's also a section where you talk about how folks can contribute. And one of the ideas in that section that stuck out to me is that you mentioned that while the work is not necessarily partisan, it is certainly political. What does that mean for you and, I guess, potentially for other folks in the space?
Yeah. I think it's really important. If you are trying to use technology to shift the way that organizations, institutions that are centuries old relate to their constituents, that is an act of politics inherently. You know, if you are trying to say that, your DMV should be more responsive and should benefit different people, that's absolutely an act of politics. My personal politics lean towards access and justice, and so we should make our institutions serve more people and make more people feel like they are really close members with stakes in our institutions. But that is in fact a political position. You know? There are coherent positions, although I don't like them, that would say something else. And so pretending that it isn't a political position doesn't actually help that much. And one of the reasons it doesn't help is because I can't necessarily achieve all of that through technology. So if the policies of the agency or entity that I'm working with are diametrically opposed to the thing I wanna achieve, I can't go fix it with technology. You know? If if, people have run into some trouble recently with unemployment insurance applications during the pandemic, many of them were designed, by states that wanted to sort of use fraud prevention as a proxy for having less people get unemployment benefits, which is a political position that is popular in some places. And so you can't kind of go and fix those systems with a technical tweak to make them more accessible, more welcoming. If the policy you know, if you have a really nice web front end, and then on the back end, this application that you've submitted is gonna get a really hard review that you haven't helped that much. And often if you kind of improve the surface of something in technology, if it happens to have any historical biases embedded in it, you can just reinforce the biases by making a nicer design, a faster performance and things like that. So and these are all fairly political questions about access and equity and so forth. And so the reason I said that that it's nonpartisan, it doesn't have to be partisan. I mean, you can, but it's always political is I think that it helps us to be conscious about it and to think about our own, you know, political desires.
As someone who's recently been spending a lot of cycles trying to level up policy skills, I was pretty happy to see a section of the book that was really, really focused on that as an important thing. Could you talk a bit about your view on how policy as a practice kinda fits in with the rest of the space?
Yeah. It's incredibly important, and it's an entire academic field in itself. Right? Like, you can get a master's or a PhD in policy. And like many technologists, I don't know a lot about it. And it was really the one area that I did some more research on for the book that wasn't, you know, drawn from pretty close to my direct experience. So to put it broadly, policy is the ways and means that a government gets something done. And so it could include incentives, it could include disincentives, it could include, objectives like we would like to have more people taking advantage of the benefits that the government offers or taking advantage of services, or we would like to have less people taking advantage of services. We want more immigrants or we want less immigrants is a policy question. The one that I use as kind of a frame in my book because it's so quickly shifting in The United States is marijuana policy. As of the middle of the 90s, it was absolutely illegal everywhere and it is still illegal throughout The United States per federal law. But states have made policy changes on their own over the last twenty five years or so. So now we have this patchwork where, in, most of the West Coast in Colorado, marijuana is not only legal for medical use but legal for recreational use for adults. In very many states, there are medical use provisions. They require a more or less stringent evaluation process. And, one of the things that's happening in the states that have fully legalized is that civic technologists are trying to do the data work to expunge people's past marijuana convictions because it seems not fair that people should have this stuff on their record for something that is now in fact legal. But one of the points I make is you can only do that if you're in a state that has legalized. Like, I can't it doesn't make any sense to do the data work about expunging convictions if I am in a state where they still have, an illegalization policy. And in general, understanding the sort of long term policies and the policies of particular administrations will really help you figure out who you align with. And there's, I think some interesting questions always to be asked about, you know, what can you get done if you go to work with an administration that you don't align with. I worked, with the Trump you know, under the Trump administration, although I was a a career I was not a career. I was a a term federal employee, but I was not an appointed person who was part of the administration, during the Trump administration. So my personal politics don't align with Trump administration, But there's a lot of work in the administration of government that's done by career public servants that actually felt pretty aligned to me to work on. But just knowing what the policy priorities are can really help you see what's gonna be a good opportunity, what might be easy to move forward, what might be hard to move forward, what you might need to wait for another election to move forward.
That actually makes me think there's a there's a there I think believe there's a section in your book that you kinda specifically talk a bit about timing with with administrations where it's, like, when you're trying to decide, like, what to do as far as, like, how things align with an administration's priorities, whether it's, like, close to an election, do you think they're gonna win? It it sounds like maybe that relates to a little bit of what you're talking about.
So I think I talk about that in the section on seeking alliances and how you might think that the highest level executive that you could get some pull with might be the best person. But in fact, if that person is an elected leader or close to elected leadership and there's an election coming up, and it's an election that they are not certain to win. If you are closely aligned with them, whatever you did might get swept out by an incoming administration just because, they're gonna have different policy priorities. That's why there was competitive election. And sometimes they may just sweep out work that aligned with the policy priorities of the last administration. I do think one other important point about policy is that tech really shines in policy implementation. So meaning, going back to unemployment insurance or maybe the healthcare.gov failure, which you might remember from 2013, that we have this new health care policy that had been passed, you know, great trouble, and lots and lots of work had gone into it. But when a website failed to work, that policy almost went down the toilet because at the implementation level, could Americans actually sign up for insurance plans that were promised as part of that law? And so there's an enormous opportunity for tech people at all of that, sort of frontline implementation of a policy that has been decided. A lot of it can happen through technology in the twenty twenties.
And I think it was, like, the, the seventh chapter. You talk a bit about what the field looks like for folks that are entering at different stages of their careers. And one of the things you brought up that I think is really important, because it's something that I actually see at my own day job as the conversation happens over and over and over again is this question of do we have the infrastructure to mentor some someone that's coming in junior and, like, make sure they're actually getting something out of it for the experience. Could you talk a bit about, like, what makes for good infrastructure for for doing that sort of thing? I think the biggest thing that makes for good infrastructure is seniors with time
That can be really tough in public sector environments right now they tend to be understaffed and underfunded and so If you have seniors who need to be heads down a really significant portion of their time you can get a an environment where juniors just kind of get little tasks to do and don't get to see, you know more advanced practice and sometimes don't in a hierarchical environment may not senior may not want to expend the political will to bring another person along to a meeting and you know, It's just sort of like oh, I didn't learn that much So I think I even say in the book, you know, if you're just starting out you may want to contemplate going to a regular private sector tech company and doing some kind of other work in the local civic sphere where you are to start understanding that because for one thing you Probably would have a better salary which is something that you compound over time and for another thing you'll probably get better tech instruction now. There are a few organizations that are really working on this So, code for america for example and nava public benefit corporation both have these new apprenticeship programs that I think are probably really valuable and these where you find something like an intentionally designed apprenticeship program that's meant for a junior person within the civic sphere, that's probably a well designed program that is gonna help, help your practice and help your career.
Another another topic you spend some time on is the engineering design product triad. Like many of our listeners out there, I have spent a lot of time thinking and working on trying to work better with folks across practices and, in particular, like, how we work to improve, like, how we gather consensus for decisions and things like that. What would you say are some key things the team can do to, like, best empower that collaboration between the practices?
So that's a great question, and I think what's interesting about it, in particular in the government context, is that that triad isn't very familiar within, career government staffing groups. So you might instead have there, someone with a title like a business systems analyst, who stands in maybe for a product person or a UX person a bit. And the engineer would be called an application developer or something like that. Usually, it's product that isn't present in design that might be hired out. There will often be some internal engineering capacity. And so if you have a sort of digital services team that contains these three familiar disciplines and you already have to do the work, as you say, to collaborate across and to, and then I think this is also difficult in government to really set shared goals and a shared understanding of what the user is, who the user is, what the priorities are, and, you know, what needs to go first. You're also faced with then working in someone who doesn't see themselves as part of one of those disciplines that we're already doing a bunch of work to harmonize for lack of better word. And I think we have often kind of leaned on things in our work with the courts, like a really simplified scope document that asks really plain language questions, like, what is it? Why are we making it? Who is it for? How will we know it's working? So that we kind of, you know, pull everybody out of their professional jargon like we were talking about earlier and create for all of us something that we can look at and say, yes. I'm signed on for that. And then we can start to do kind of collaborative practice. Okay. If we know that the most important thing, right now is to give people access to form filling instructions on the web, and we want breadth of access, then we can all start to work together to say, like, okay. Well, here's, you know, here's what I do, and here's how I can contribute to that. And do you wanna go first? And I need this thing from you, and all those kind of normal team conversations. But it's the setting of the shared understanding amongst the team across those three disciplines and a few extra. That really is the trick. And then I think those of us who are really familiar with agile practice and with mature technology organizations are inclined to give that space short shrift. Because we don't think about how much work has been done, you know, at a company like Airbnb or, you know, even something newer to refine what the point is and how we would know that we were doing better than last year or how we would know that we were doing worse than last year. And, you know, in those cases, it's often refined all the way down to metrics. But in a lot of government organizations, we don't have sort of the qualitative answers that you would develop metrics from yet. And so figuring out, you know one of the questions we recently posed to our leadership is, what role do you want digital services to play in accomplishing the mission of the judicial branch? And, you know, I think people know, but it hasn't been stated real explicitly, and that's kinda partly because of this program and IT divide and government or government not government, environments where, you know, talking about technology as a key part of the mission seems weird, but it's it's helped actually to think about it in that frame of what role do you want it to play? Do you want it to, you know, to be a convenient way to direct people to our physical services? Do you want it to meet someone where they are, whatever device they're using? Do you want people to be able to really accomplish a whole court process whatever without ever entering a building? That's a question then that executives who are not tech people can answer and figure out. And then, you know, you can think about it. I imagine based on that, even for the three little points that I named, you might make really different technology and design choices. But if everyone can understand the why and the how we'll know it's working, then, you can make them as a team.
Related to the harmony within team conversation we're having, I I also saw you mentioned this idea of that the the fact that you might get asked to do planning that's a bit more step by step than what you might expect in a, like, a typical, like, agile or lean shop. And you go on to say something I think is important that making the adjustments here is not about, like, losing some of your principles, but it's about trying to meet folks where they are. That's resonated with me because that we've been working with with a team that's kinda struggling with something like these same questions. In your view, how should folks approach this kind of situation?
I really think it's on us, the techies, the nerds, the ones who pride ourselves on adapting to new technologies and new situations all the time, to make adjustments. And so that might mean that we make a shiny PowerPoint deck about every sprint. Or, you know, we just write some things down that we might not write down in the same way if we had a really well curated Slack in a really mature organization. You know, maybe we'd have the GitHub pull request running into the Slack and everybody would know how the whole set of systems work. And we may not have access to that, and we may have people who are really used to a more presentation and document based way of working. And I certainly find that with attorneys that I work with these days. Like, they are incredibly comfortable and facile working with documents fast. Other things are not as much a part of their core workset. And so, like, we just put stuff in documents. And you can duplicate a lot of the things that, you know, that we think are important. But it is sort of, you know, if you just formalize it a bit, you know, turn something that you might do as a plain Google Doc into a Google Doc with really nice headers and then convert it to a Word document and send that as a memo and you're done. So one of the reasons I advocate doing this is that it's often not a whole lot of extra effort, and it goes a long way toward making people feel comfortable with what you're doing.
As you're right to point out in the book, the the work is hard and can often lead to burnout if one isn't careful. I believe you have a whole section of the book that's about this this this thing. To that end, like, what what sort of advice would you give to folks that are worried about or or struggling with being burnt out?
So if you're already struggling with being burnt out, find a break. You're going to need it. You don't want to get to the kind of burnout that your I don't want to go to work turns into I can't go to work. And that break can look like a lot of different things. I realize there's not much break for a lot of folks in a lot of situations during the pandemic. But if there's something you can find, if it's, you know, two hours a week to close the door of your room and read or turn off or turn on, your, you know, your media stuff, what whatever recharges you. Find some time to do it. If you can take a week, that's great. If you can take a couple days, that's better than nothing. If you're just thinking about looking out for burnout, one of the things that has really helped me at times, and I did get moderately burned out when I was chief of staff of eighteen f. It was a really tough period for the agency, and I think all of us on the leadership team struggled a bit, just with the with the the load and kind of the the consequences that might be out there in terms of agent, you know, agency shutdown and stuff were scary. So I kept a diary. I kept a weekly diary, and I also, ask my husband every now and then to look at it. And I think, you know, it's anyone you know who knows well. Just having some other person who can kind of take a look at you and say, are you doing okay? Do I see a red flag in you? Or do I see a yellow flag in you? Like, do I think you maybe need a couple days off, you know, with a book and your dog or or whatever your restorative thing is? And I think the other thing is none of us should do this alone. So I am really excited to see more civic tech community and more spaces for us to get together, because it's hard, and it's hard in some ways that are particular to it. And just having the ability to talk to somebody and say, oh, yeah. I totally had that thing happen too where, you know, I busted my butt and my whole team's butt for six months to get something approved. And then two months later, a new administration came in and shut down the whole thing, and I'm crushed. Having somebody around who understands that and can say, hey. Yeah. That that just absolutely sucks. Y'all really should write up what you've learned, though, in the process of making the proposal because that was a success, and somebody could use that. So we all need each other to do that.
Yeah. Tradition we have on civic tech chat is to make some space at the tail end of our conversation for concluding thoughts. So it'd be the the thoughts that you'd like the listeners to kinda leave this program within their brains as it were. So for you and this conversation that we had, what what is that?
I hope to meet you one day. All of you listeners of Civic Tech Chat, I hope to be part of your Civic Tech posse, and I hope that you will come into this work, or stay in this work with a really humble and open mindset. And I feel very sure that if you bring what is particularly you to it, you will make the field better. And, I like to think of the field as a fifty year project. Now I don't suppose it will be all done in fifty years, but it's a bit of a counter to thinking of it as a five year project where we could just do a few technology projects and then things will be better. So you might say this round of civic tech started sometime around 2008 when people started doing hackathons. So by 2058 or 2060, we wanna see public digital goods as good as the ones made by commercial entities and hopefully sooner. But it's a long project and so I wanna encourage you to when you feel ready, jump in. When you feel tired, pass the baton. And whatever you do, write about it, talk about it. Reach out to me, tell me about it. As hard as this work is, it's really fun and rewarding, and I hope to see you around.
Syd, again, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us on Civic Tech Chat for this conversation. I think folks will really get a lot out of what you had to say today. Thank you so much. It was absolutely my pleasure, Ryan. 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.
