33 Maine Ballot
We are joined by User Experience Designer [Shannon McHarg](https://twitter.com/EfficientIxD) and Content Strategist [Ryan Johnson](https://twitter.com/forestglenroad), who both work at the [Office of Natural Resources Revenue](https://twitter.com/DOIONRR), an agency within the [United States Department of the Interior](https://twitter.com/Interior). We'll talk about an open source project they both contribute to called [Maine Ballot](https://maineballot.org/).<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Maine Ballot](https://maineballot.org/)<br>- [Don't Make Me Think](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited)<br>- [UK Digital Service](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service)<br>- [Digital Transformation at Scale](https://www.andrewgreenway.com/book)<br>- [How to Make Sense of Any Mess](http://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/)<br>- [Natural Resources Revenue Data](https://revenuedata.doi.gov/)<br>- [Heydon Pickering](http://www.heydonworks.com/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
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- shutdown 0.011
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- content 0.009
- github 0.009
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Transcript
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 has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. Welcome back to another episode of Civic Tech Chat. If you've enjoyed our programming so far, don't forget to head on over to your podcast app to give us a five star review. Doing so helps us reach a bigger community of folks and helps empower us to keep this thing going. This time, we're joined by user experience designer, Shannon McHarg, and content strategist, Ryan Johnson. Both of these folks are part of the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior. We'll talk a bit about their involvement with an open source project they both contribute to called Main Ballot. With all that said, let's go ahead and get this thing started. Shannon, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. To get us started here, could each of you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do?
Shannon, would would you like to get us started? Yep. So both of us work for the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which is an agency within the US Department of the Interior that tracks revenue brought in from natural resources like oil and gas, extraction of federal land. We worked on the open data website that they have, and I'm the user experience designer at that site, and I'm based in Maine. My name is Shannon McGurk.
And I'm Ryan Johnson. I'm the content strategist at the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, as Shannon mentioned, in the US Department of the Interior, And I live in Portland, Oregon.
One of the things we like to ask about from time to time on this program is this idea of personal why. You know, what it is that drives one to get out of the bed each morning to do what they do. Can each of you share with us what that personal why is for you? Ryan, would you like to go ahead and start us off?
Sure. Yeah. Well, so for me, a well functioning government and broad civic engagement are critical to a healthy democracy. So I've devoted a large portion of my career, especially lately to trying to improve government content delivery. And especially now, we need as many talented and dedicated people doing this kind of work in this sector, where it's not driven by profit motive, but rather motivated by building trust and civic unity and caring for our fellow humans, our communities, and the environment, propping up our democratic institutions, taking care of the most vulnerable neighbors that we have, and so on. So to that end, I volunteered with AmeriCorps in the past, worked in conservation education in academia, and worked in local and federal government now. And I volunteer time to other civic and government projects when I came.
And for me, I I work for the government because I wanna do work that matters and also to do it at scale, which is in the government, you have the ability to do things at scale. You know, current currently, the site we work on, it provides transparency to natural resource revenue, which helps people like journalists and others working, for the government and natural resource sectors to understand the impact of the extraction extraction that's happening so that we're able to provide that information so that they can make changes that matter. I also work with my local code for America Brigade Open Maine because I want to work on things that impact people around Maine and make their lives better.
Could each of you tell us a little bit about the career path you've you've been on so far with with your life journey? Shannon, could you tell us a little bit about it first? Yep. So I basically I went to,
Bentley University for undergrad and got a degree in management and graduated in a year when there was no jobs for entry level people. And so I ended up staying another year for grad school and got a master's degree in human factors and information design, which is basically a degree in user experience. I learned a lot about how humans think and process information and how to observe their behavior to improve experience and services. Then I worked for H and R Block for about a decade, and then I did, freelance work for companies like L. L. Bean and an agency that worked with a lot of startups. And then I ended up with my current job in the federal government.
Yeah. And so for me, my undergraduate degree was in philosophy. So it's been a bit of a winding road, since the early two thousands for me to get to get here. But during that time, I was also, developing websites in a freelance manner for, different small businesses and nonprofits. And then went to the graduate school for GIS, geographic information science in this case, in 2013, which kinda helped launch, my my civic tech work, or at least in that that sector. And so and then I mentioned I was also in AmeriCorps, clear back in 2006, kinda dating myself now. But that that community is really great. Civil servants that volunteer a year. And in my case, it was for, salmon recovery and watershed restoration work. So I did a little bit of that, watershed education and whatnot in the context of, trying to encourage and promote STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines for k 12 schools. So I did that before joining local government and then now in the federal government.
Is there any media, whether it's a podcast, book, YouTube video, or some other such thing that you consider to be a notable point of either inspiration or knowledge gathering within each of y'all's practices. Shannon, would you like to start us off with that one?
So Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think was one of the first UX books I read, and it made me wanna get into the field. It was a lot of information that seemed like common sense that that the people should be doing when working on digital products.
Yeah. No. The folks at the government digital service in The UK have had a huge influence for me on on on how I approach my work. Some of their early members of that team have launched, like, a new agency. They released a book recently called Digital Transformation at Scale, which is an excellent resource for people working in government or other large organizations too. I'm also a big fan of Abby Covert's book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which, among other things, distinguishes between information and content in a really important way that changed how I think about content design, and information architecture. And finally, I follow Hayden Pickering's work for accessibility guidance. He's ardent, irreverent, and hilarious, which makes his books and talks both informative and entertaining.
Great. Thank you both for sharing those bits of your story and a bit about what drives and inspires you. I think we can go ahead and hop on over to our main topic, this Ballot Maine project that both of you have been pretty heavily involved in, I hear.
Could, one of you give the elevator pitch of a sort for what Ballot Maine is and what it's about? Yep. So Main Ballot is a website that helps voters in the state of Maine to understand the questions what the questions on the ballot mean and gives them the information they need to make an important decision. Awesome. And I I see you all have, put together a team of contributors along the way. What what is the team composition been like for for the project as as it's kinda gone along its life? So it started out as just me. So I figured if I had to do the research to be able to fill out my own ballot, it might be helpful for others to use the information I was finding. California had done a similar site, and I initially reached out to the people who created that site to see, if it was in a format that could be copied, but it wasn't. So then I reached out to a lawyer friend to see if I needed to worry about any sort of liability by, you know, providing information for, voting. And so he wrote the disclaimer text that I have on there. And then so the first year I relied, it was me throwing it up there, like, two weeks before the election. So didn't have a lot of, feedback on it until I posted it on Facebook and friends started asking questions, and then I was able to refine, the content based off of that. In the second year, I had a friend who has the opposite political views for me want to get involved. So now she pokes holes in all the content and make sure that we're rounding it out. And then last year, I got open maintenance involved, so that it could be a project that, like, people who are new coming into the brigade, that don't know how to code or anything can immediately start contributing on. They can be writing content. They don't have to have a lot of technical skills. And because, like, last year, we had five questions, which was a lot, and I didn't have a lot of time to update it myself. So it was a great way to start getting more people involved and having more of a review process so that more holes are being poked in the content. And now it's open source, which we'll talk a little bit about later, but it's now become an official OpenMain project because they require, sites to be open source. So it's one of the imbecoses behind moving it, to be open source, and now it can be maintained. Even if I decide to stop working on it, it's fully pulled into the main organization.
Awesome. That sounds great. It it's also nice to hear that it managed to successfully make that transition to, becoming an open source project. And, Ryan,
where along the story did you end up getting to hop on a project, and what's the story there? Yeah. So even before so, I guess we'll get to the government shutdown in a minute. But before the government shutdown happened, Shannon had been talking about wanting to migrate this this website that she was working on from Squarespace to, something open source. And at the time, the open data site that we were working on in the federal government was built in Jekyll and, all of the code base was in was open in in, GitHub repository. And so I thought it might be really useful to work on to do two things at once. Basically, to to, help Shannon migrate that project to Jekyll, which is a static site generator, open source tied very closely to the GitHub, sort of ecosystem and, deploy it, for free using GitHub pages. Because at the time, I think Shannon was paying something like $200 a year for the Squarespace service. The code base was was closed. So we I thought it might be a good way for us to work on something great. I was inspired by what she had put together so far for main ballot. I thought it was a really great project that provided very concise and and very clear and well structured ballot question content for for voters. So I guess we'll maybe get to this in a minute, but, the the shutdown ended up government shutdown ended up providing a context in which we could actually work together on it. We're on opposite coasts, so we we usually spend the morning co working on our on our, federal government work, while we're both in our working hours. And then, so we we didn't have a lot of time in that context to work to to migrate this site. So, perhaps the only good thing about the government shutdown is it gave us an opportunity to do so.
And, speaking of the government shutdown, we we are indeed going to, kinda dig into that story a little more with this this next question. As you mentioned, like, a lot of this involvement seemed to happen during the government shutdown early this year, moving to those tools that you mentioned, you know, Jekyll, GitHub Pages. I I will be curious, like, how did the government shutdown serve as a mechanism for for bringing, you two together for this?
Yeah. So it gave us a lot of free time to actually start working on it. We've done a little bit beforehand where we had started picking out a template and whatnot, but it really gave us the time to sit down and do the work. As one of the side motives I think Ryan started to relate to it but didn't get to is that, we wanted to teach me how to code because we have one developer on our worksite. And so we're always looking for ways to augment that. It's our biggest bottleneck. So it was a great way to use the time during the shutdown to since we weren't allowed to work on our regular site, to still, like, learn skills that we could use and to do this project that we wanted to do for, OpenMain and get it such that, everyone in in that organization could be contributing to it.
And it's it's interesting. You actually don't have as much free time during shutdowns as you might think because the longer they go on, the more you have to look into things like applying for unemployment. And that can involve all sorts of requirements like meeting with an advisor, looking for and applying for jobs even though you already have one, managing paperwork. But with the remaining time, I mean, I was eager to to find productive projects that that I could work on with the remaining time. And Shannon's project is such an inspiring one that and and for all the other reasons that that we mentioned, it was just a really, great way to kind of not only get something productive done, but distract help distract or deflect from some of the anxieties that that I had at least as a furloughed employee during that time. So doing something productive, doing something meaningful, distracting from what turned out to be the longest government shutdown in US history.
Right. There's only so much binge watching you can do before you start going crazy.
That that is very true. So as mentioned, the two kind of, I guess, primary technologies that y'all end up using during this time is a a Jekyll and GitHub Pages. And I guess then the kind of the bits that support the the those ecosystems. Could, y'all talk a little bit about the the thinking that went be behind those, those choices?
Sure. Yeah. And it's it's kind of ironic that while we were building this in Jekyll, we were actually migrating, the code base for our federal government site from Jekyll to Gatsby JS, which is a different static site generator using React, for a lot of reasons that we don't have time to to go into here. But one of the many challenges with shutdowns is you have basically, you have no idea how long they'll last. So we we pulled down a template as Shannon alluded alluded to, in Jekyll. The reason we chose Jekyll and GitHub Pages was that we could host it, pretty easily and for free with GitHub Pages. So Jekyll, basically derived from the same team that initially built GitHub. So there was a a kind of continuity of the of the of the technology there that was really attractive to setting something up quickly because we didn't know how long the shutdown was gonna last. There are a lot of Jekyll starters and themes that you can pull down to to get a head start. So we made use of, a Jekyll theme to get it started and then basically customize that. So the the motivation I mean, there are a lot of tools to do this now. I mean, I don't I don't I guess we don't need to, like, sponsor an individual, technology or company or what have you, but there's certainly a lot of ways to if you're just doing static site generation. And then also, I mean, there's this concept of Jamstack, which I think is JavaScript APIs and and markup where you can host for free with a lot of different tools and technologies. I had built sites previously in Jekyll and GitHub Pages. So for me, it was kind of just a straightforward way to support Shannon, in with this project. But then to, right, having GitHub being an open source code repository was attractive for all the reasons that we mentioned earlier by, it being an open main project and, allowing others to to clone it down and and build their own site too.
And and how would you describe the, the product development process as I imagine migrating from Squarespace to something like this is a that's a pretty significant change. So can we talk a little bit about the the process behind how y'all went about that?
Yeah. Sure. So, well, I'll let Shannon describe it too. But basically, we Shannon transitioned all of the content into markdown files. So they were static, structured markdown files. And then that was really the the most kind of, I think, time intensive part of the process, which is migrating the content. But once you do that, then you can basically hook on any template you want around those markdown files to loop through them and generate whatever pages you want based on their, front matter, their, base basically, their metadata, their taxonomies. So that's kind of what we did. Shannon, structured all the markdown files such that, you know, they recorded which election it was in the front matter, metadata, and, basically, the main themes of each ballot question. And so then, I was able to hook onto that to kinda build the the structure around that. So for instance, like, the home page will generate all of the ballot questions. Here we call them ballot measures, so I just have to try to correct myself for the way they're referred to in name. But so we can loop through all of the the ballot questions and then generate the pages based on individual elections or individual whether or not the ballot measure passed or what have you. So a lot of the work, was basically Shannon building the content structure, which is during my day job, something I usually am tasked with. So that that was refreshing. And then I kind of went through and built the sort of conditional logic to drive the the page generation.
Yeah. And a lot of it because we had an existing site. So a lot of it was, like, using that as the design initially, and plus there were some things that Squarespace wouldn't let me do that I knew I wanted to do. So it was kinda using those as requirements too. And then, like, I had to like, there were some hurdles, like, with the images that we had for every ballot question that ended up being I had paid for them, but they were tied to my Squarespace account. So I couldn't use them on the new site, so I went and found new open source versions of the images. And then we had to figure out how to get in into OpenMain's organization in GitHub and moving the domain and all of that kind of, logistical stuff in the background as well. It's part of the migration.
Shannon, I believe I heard there that you also wound up structuring the content files in, like, a specific way in order to make it easier to to use them
on the site? Yeah. So, like, there's some things that are now they're includes in Jekyll that now we don't have to redo on every page. Should we just say, like, there's a section of the page that says, like, yes means and no means. Like, that's an includes. We don't have to relay that at every page. We just need to put the text that goes with that for that particular, ballot question, things like that that make it easier to update.
And speaking of information, a site like this, I imagine, has to come up with a a pretty significant amount of content. And with the goal being to inform voters during a cycle, I imagine that's quite a process because you have to be both timely, current, and accurate. Yeah. I would imagine that a lot of time and skill is needed to draft that sort of content that is, again, not only accurate, but is also as probably as neutral as is reasonable. Could you talk about, maybe, like, patterns of behavior that you use to kinda put that together?
It's usually I end up kind of watching out for our secretary of state will put out a voter guide. It's like this really long PDF with lots of legalese in it. And I use that, like, to know what the questions are in the first place. And then I go to Ballotpedia and pull look at their content and see what makes sense and then kind of put it into the template that we've got and, figure out what's missing, for the pieces of information that are there. I mean, initially, it started with me putting content into an actual prototype and getting feedback from a couple of people before I built it in Squarespace. And then it was reviewing editing pages after they were built in square Squarespace. And then last year, with the number of questions that we had, in the addition of the main volunteers, we started doing it in Google Docs. So we got all the content nailed down, and then we put it into the, site. And we used, Slack to chat to review a lot and edit a lot of the content. This year, now that we have GitHub, there were no questions for June, which we usually have one or two for June elections. So we haven't been able to test it yet. And just in the last week, we got one for November. So it's not a lot of content right now, but we'll be able to use it to kind of flush out the process in GitHub. Hopefully, we can do things like pull requests to be to, like, put it into the live site and review it before we post it live. It's kind of a pilot project in the use of GitHub for opening because a lot of peep we have a lot of non coders in our brigade. And so it's we're trying to figure out how to best use GitHub, as as an organization, and this is kind of a good pilot project for that as well.
So what what sort of review process have you used in in the past then for new content? I think you talked about some of that being, like, Google Drive driven Yeah. Versus, like, what do you want the what do you want that to look like then in in the future?
In the future, I think it would be somebody would take on the task of drafting the initial content for it or maybe different sections on the page. Because on the page, we have, what what the the gist of the question, the full text of the question, what yes means, what no means, where the money went. Now there's tell me more section that's a little bit more fleshed out than just the gist, and, like, who supports it as far as, like, organizations who've given money for the question. And so, like, it could be broken out into those sections. Like, a person takes a section or, a whole question depending on who who's involved and how involved they wanna be, and then having, you know, at least, like, maybe two people review it, before it goes live.
And then the folks that would end up reviewing it, is it folks that are are there with you, like, at like, at the Open Name project? Would is that accurate? Yeah. Yeah. So I also noticed that in the, the ReadMe for for the for the repo that's up now, that it seems to prompt one to want to fork the project. And it looks like the aim of that is to encourage folks to set up ballots, ballot sites for other locations. If there's a listener out there that is listening to you describe this site and they're like, yeah. Like, I could I could fork this and maybe I could use this where I'm at. How should they go about getting started with
that? Yeah. So opening up the code base and sharing it in a GitHub repository, as we mentioned, was a huge motivation for the work from the beginning. And our assumption being also that, Chapman's motivation because as as she alluded to, like, you have to you I mean, to be an engaged citizen with your with your elections, you have to understand these these ballot issues for yourself. And we figured, well, there are probably other people in other states who who wanna do this too. They're gonna do the research anyway and and maybe they could, you know, clone down this this GitHub repository and sort of launch their own site in their own state. So part part of that, I mean, we were at Code for America. The the summit this year, kind of well, we were there in our capacities of interior employees, but we were able to share a little bit of with the other brigades about, and I'm not actually a part of a brigade, so, I might I might have to join the Portland one here, to see if we can get an iteration of this site for, for Oregon. But, yeah. So we we wrote some comprehensive documentation to try to help others, like, step by step, clone the repository, get a local instantiation of the repository, serve Jekyll locally, work on their own site, and then, push it up to their to their own state repository. So we did I mean, obviously, a hallmark of any good open source project is is comprehensive documentation. So we wanted to make sure that, and especially as Shanna mentioned, you know, it's not there are a lot of civically engaged people that don't necessarily know coding particularly well. So we wanted to make sure that we gave some guidance for people to, be able to set this up from scratch with no prior knowledge of, Jekyll necessarily or, any, specific coding knowledge. We also tried to build the code. I mean, it I'm I'm sure it could be improved. That's the other thing. We would certainly welcome people to go into the code base and and contribute if they if they think that we could be doing something better in that code base for sure. But we did try to do and Shannon mentioned it earlier. Jekyll has this, functionality, called includes, which are basically little partial pieces of code that that, you can include in a page with the repeating elements. So she mentioned the yes means and no means. Yeah. It's a little table, HTML table that we all the repeating elements we plug in. And then in the in the metadata, we just basically change the content based on which ballot question that content is showing up for. So we did try to do these repeating instances, abstract those out into something common to the whole site, and then we were able to kind of reduce the burden of having to do manual coding on every single page by by doing that. So we included documentation about that too. So yeah. I mean, the hope is that, that people basically with, I mean, they'll need Ruby and Jekyll, and then a git GitHub account, but that hopefully, they can pull down the the code base and, launch their own their own ballot site.
So I suppose this this is Shannon. This might be more question for you, being in Maine. But, you know, since you you kinda have your nose in in the content of all of these these questions, I imagine, per a pretty considerable amount of time. Is there one that's come up along the way that you thought, like, wow. That's maybe this is, like, the most interesting question I've seen on the ballot in the short time. If so, could you share a little bit about that? Yeah. The most interesting was ranked choice voting,
which is something that we implemented, I guess, just in the last years when we finally got implemented. We had to actually do it twice on the ballots because our governor, like, overruled it. But it allows us for I think it's anything except for governor and president, but, like, for our, congress, for the house and senate, and state house and senate. And, actually, the primaries for governor are also ranked choice where we get to choose or, like, rank all of the candidates so that it allows, prevents spoiler effect. And so that question was super interesting, and and it was also interesting from a content perspective because we did it twice. So then, like, when we had it come up again, I said, okay. Well, this is if you think you saw this before, go back and look at the other one. It's pretty much the same thing.
Oh, that that does sound like a really interesting one. As far as I know, there aren't really a lot of states that have hopped into the ranked choice wagon yet. So it's pretty cool to hear that y'all have experimented with that. Yeah. Speaking of of of, like, ballot questions and whatnot, have have y'all had any, feedback along the ways from, like, folks, that have used it as far as, like, to try to inform their vote? And, if so, like, what what kinds of things are are you hearing?
Yeah. I mean, so often it'll be, like, a very specific question about one of the questions, and it'll be, like, something that I've missed. And then I'll go research it and then put the answer into the, question. But then I did finally, during the shutdown, have time to do some research. During an open main meeting, we had people do usability testing on it. And so we haven't made any changes to the site yet because we haven't had any new content since then, but, like, we're gonna end up changing the order of some of the questions because of the what people thought was more important versus, other sections. So raising up particularly, like, where the money comes from and goes was a a one of particular interest to people. So we'll move that up the page.
Also then, is the, the ordering then based on, like, a a priority of of issues? Is that how that works? Or could you could you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So it's more like what's helpful,
in be making a decision about what to vote yes or no on a question. So, like, just moving the things that people thought were more important up the page so that they don't have to read through the whole page to get to what helped them answer the question.
Oh, okay. And then to make sure that that I understand, are we so are we talking about the hierarchy, like, within a question, like, how it's presented?
Oh, okay. Yeah. And then there's I we I added some information about, like, how bonds work, because my my dad in particular was, like, going on a rant about it one morning. He's like, I don't understand how bonds work. Oh, I was like, okay. I can put something together and put it on the website. And, you know, I got feedback from people on it and then then it became part of the website. So it's just kind of as people talk to me about it, when they know that I'm doing this website, then things kind of come out of the woodwork that would be useful. In fact, I think the bonds thing became, like a top level nav item. Right? Yeah. It did. Because we have so many bonds and mainly because of the way our budget works, we can't run a deficit. So anytime they need extra money, there has to be a bond question. We end up with a lot of them.
And whether it's within this project specifically or others, whether at OpenMaid or or Ryan, just maybe projects you've you've observed outside that context, are there any behaviors you've seen that, maybe brigades out in the network could try to replicate?
Yeah. So one thing about OpenMain is that we are a brigade for an entire state where most of the brigades are for a specific city where everyone is geographically close together. And so we only meet once a month where most brigades meet once a week. And so we do a lot of communication on Slack in between. And so we're constantly like, we have channels for every project and being able to work on things in between, which I think makes it more inclusive to people who can't necessarily come to meetings. Like, I was I have only been able to go to the meetings since January because it it was on a day of the week when I had other commitments. They changed the day of the week, so I finally been able to go to the meetings. But before that, I was completely participating online. So it opens it up to people who can't necessarily come physically to meetings.
Yeah. And I think, well, a couple things. I mean, the what what we did to open source this project, I think, is hopefully, a template or some kind of inspiration that that other brigades could use to, try to find, sort of similar civic engagement sites, that, or election, education sites that that could be converted to this format. Because one of the things that I was noticing when I was working on it is, how, you know, a lot of states deal with the same kinds of issues, and they have really similar similar ballot measures. And we were, for instance, in Oregon, I mean, we we have this concept of fusion voting that's been in the public discourse here for a long time, which is markedly different from, but sort of has a similar origin to rank choice. And so when I was reading about, means rank choice voting and, the content that Shannon had put together and resources, I was like, that's really interesting. I mean, I wonder if, you know, I wonder if that's something that would work really well for different states. So it's not just I mean, we're sharing the code base, but we're also sharing kind of the the, democratic activities of of of different states, and I think that can be very informative. But but, hopefully, I mean, you know, we I think the open sourcing a project like this is really about bringing comprehensive sort of engagement and democratic principles and openness and transparency to the whole process surrounding even the democratic institution of elections. So, yeah, hopefully, it's a a model that, you know, our our story can hope hopefully help inform, other brigades and whatnot, and other federal employees during their next government shutdown.
Oh, well, hopefully, there there isn't a next as much as maybe probability isn't with us on that wish. One thing that seems to have come up now a couple of times, both kind of maybe at the beginning and then I I heard Shannon mention this a little bit as well, is this idea that a lot of the collaboration, I guess, especially between you two being across the country from each other is done remotely or distributed in in nature. Could you talk a little bit about the each of you talk a little bit about, like, your experiences with this sort of distributed collaboration. Maybe, like, a little bit of, like, what what works well, maybe what doesn't. Yeah. So I've been working remotely since 2007.
So and and I think it works well when, you have the right tools. You know? I think we use things things like Slack and email. This for this one, actually, we used a lot of email because we weren't in our work Slack, and Ryan's not in the open main Slack. And messaging through GitHub or let's, you know, putting in commits and putting messages in. So GitHub allows a lot of asynchronous communication, and also using video chat helps a lot. This is actually the first job I've had, and I've been so in the last year or so, we've been doing a lot of Google Hangouts, with video. And it it does help a lot for you to feel more connected than when you're just on phone calls. So I think that type of thing does go a long way. And also just being, like, over communicating, I think, often helps too.
Yeah. Communication is absolutely critical. But also I'd say with the remote team, it's really important to, you know, respect people's time and that I mean, it's easy to forget that Shannon's three hours time difference for me. So I I think, like, in terms of our federal government work, I mean, I think the important parts there are basically, like, very clear communication, comprehensive communication, but also, I think a a really effective product manager is important. A product owner, who can kind of help coordinate and also like, for for Main Ballot, for instance, like, Shannon this was Shannon's project. And so, for me, it was like I was there in a supporting role, and that, you know, prevented any kind of cross motivational, dissonance or what have you. And I think, like, our our product manager, within the department of interior is really, really great at performing that role. And I think it's really important for not just a remote team, but it really helps set the priorities because you have very limited time to co work on things. And, you need to make the best use of that time. And if you're sort of fumbling around and you don't have a clear vision of where you're going, then then you it can be very unproductive, especially with remote teams, I think. In this case, I mean, we had more time than we normally have because of the shutdown. So we did have, video co working sessions. I relied on those because I really wanted to make sure that I was, anything any code that I was writing or any any structure that I was imposing on the project was going to be sustainable for Shannon in the future. It was gonna be a project that at some point I'm not going to be involved with probably because I'm not in Maine and I'm not part of the Open Maine group. So I wanted to make sure that all the decisions that we made, we kinda made together, in terms of the the larger kind of structural, components of the site.
Now as is, tradition with the Civic Tech Chat program, we like to leave some space here at the the tail end of the conversation to make sure that the guests have, time to give us, what they think our thoughts should be as we as we leave. Like, what that message should be or narrative or some other synonym for those things. So as we get to concluding thoughts here, what would concluding thoughts be for each of you? And then, whichever you is of you is ready first can can kinda jump in and start us, I suppose.
Alright. So working on this project during the shutdown allowed us to make good use of our unexpected free time. It's allowed the product to become a full fledged project, and we're able to expand our skill sets that we can then take back into our day jobs. And so if we end up with another shutdown, hopefully not, I recommend other government employees checking out whether there are projects available to work out, on with their local Code for America Brigades. You know? It's much more feasible to do than trying to do freelance work, you know, because with freelance work, they want you to know how long you're gonna be available. So with volunteer stuff, it's a little bit more flexible and can give you something to do with your time. If you wanna check out the site, it's mainmallet.org. And if you wanna check out the site we work on in our day jobs, it's revenuedata.doy.gov. And we have a blog that talks about our work there if you're interested in hearing more about how we work.
And I'd say, in conclusion, find find a team that is the kind of I mean, if you're interested in this work, try to go work for a team or with a team that would spend their government shutdown working on this kind of project. I mean, I I'm I'm thankful every day that I that I get to work with people like Shannon that would that would take their time during, a pretty unfortunate circumstance to do something productive for, for society and for their communities and, for their state in this case. So yeah. I mean, I that's not always the easiest thing to do, but, if you can find a team that is not just comprised of people that that are just there to pull down a paycheck, but actually are really interested in this work and motivated by transparency and and civic engagement and, and all the rest, then you're gonna be a lot better off because you'll be able to to be more productive and work on stuff that really matters. And so, yeah, I'm thankful for the team that I have and and glad that, we were we were both kind of hired through '18 f, which is a part of the General Services Administration in the federal government. And and that group too, because they worked on on this, Department of the Interior site before we did. That group too is just packed with people who are really, really interested in making a difference. And the kind of people that would probably use the government shutdown to work on on a civic engagement site. So find those teams, where you can you can work on what matters and that and that you have a team around you that, even even during their free time is working on stuff that's really important.
Well, I wanna thank you both for, again, taking the time out of your day to come beyond Civic Tech Chat. It's been a a fantastic conversation and one that, I imagine that not only I will have enjoyed, but the listeners as well. So again, thank you
both. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having us.
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