18 Journey to Civic Tech with Cyrus Sethna
For this episode we talk to [Cyrus Sethna](https://twitter.com/c_sethna) about their journey into civic tech. Cyrus works in the [United States Digital Service](https://www.usds.gov/) and is an avid member of [Code for DC](https://codefordc.org/). We delve into that story, truths he's discovered along the way, and we learn about something called 'The National Day of Civic Crafting.' You won't want to miss this one.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [ChiHackNight](https://chihacknight.org/)<br>- [Chicago Python Users Group](http://www.chipy.org/l)<br>- [Federalist](https://federalist.18f.gov/)<br>- [Code for DC](https://codefordc.org/)<br>- [Cryptoparty @ Code for DC](https://cryptopartydc.github.io/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
Top Keywords
- civic 0.015
- civic tech 0.009
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- national civic 0.006
- code 0.006
- cryptoparty 0.006
- government 0.006
- work 0.006
- blockchain 0.005
- time 0.005
- digital 0.004
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. It's time for another episode of Civic Tech Chat. For this one, we'll be joined by longtime friend of the podcast, Cyrus Sethna. He's a current United States Digital Services member, and he'll be telling us a bit about his journey into the civic tech movement. We'll also talk a bit about some truths he's found along the way, and we'll even get into a bit about the National Day of Civic Crafting. You'll definitely wanna hear about that, and I have no doubt that you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Now before we get into the interview, I do have an ask of you. If you've enjoyed the program so far, please head on over to the Apple Podcasts app and give us a five star review. Doing so gives us a broader reach, which helps us produce high quality content. So with all of that said, let's begin. Cyrus, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come join us and talk a bit about your civic tech journey and some of your work that you've got going on currently. Could you start by reintroducing yourself? I know you're a bit of a returning guest, but for those who haven't listened to the early episodes, could you reintroduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? Sure. Hi. So first of all, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. I'm Cyrus Seffna.
I am a communications lead for the United States Digital Service. The Digital Service is a start up at the White House founded under president Barack Obama, in 2014 to fix healthcare.gov when it went down. So currently, we're about a 180 folks. A 100 or more of us have joined since the last election, and we continue to do our really important nonpartisan work of bringing modern technology to the federal government.
That's fantastic. And I know one of the reasons that I wanted to have you come in return on the program is you yourself have a pretty interesting story for how you found civic tech and how you ended up becoming a part of the movement. Could we talk a little bit about, like, what your story is with that journey? Like, how did you end up there?
So my Civic Technology journey, I think begins at a very young age. When I was a kid growing up, I was privileged to have a mother who is a software engineer and a father who is a a lawyer, an attorney. And both of my parents took ample time to share their trades with me. I remember growing up every summer, doing things like going to cyber camp and, having LAN parties with my friends and, you know, trying to find a sanctioned security vulnerabilities on a, high school network, things like that. And I also remember, you know, being encouraged to participate in the debate team in our high school and, go to protests and write to my, elected officials about problems that I was experiencing or seeing in our society. So I think both of my parents really encouraged, me to to learn skills, in technology and in civics. Right? And get growing older, it became clear that I would have to choose. Right? You know, five, six, seven years ago, civic technology was not yet a real thing. And so going to college, I had to had to choose. Was I going to be a computer scientist or was I going to pursue policy? And, the impact and ability to scale, ideas and actions that benefit many, many people, I think existed at that time only through a policy route. So I chose to study political science in college and, got my start, you know, working in in in politics. I worked for a senator for a few years and joined the Peace Corps, took spent some time at GSA and found my way to The US digital service that way. But I think at some point, two years ago in Chicago, when I was living there, I met a colleague through the Peace Corps network, Ethan Heppner. At the time, Ethan was working for eighteen f, and Ethan took me to my first ever civic technology event. It was called Shy Hack Night. And Shy Hack Night was like a dream come true. It was like a LAN party, but civic technology focused. And civic technology at the time was a brand new concept for me. Like, people who are passionate about technology, who are involved in, you know, the latest and greatest of tech, but bringing those skills to to public service, to modernizing technology in the government, to building tools that help people access benefits, to streamlining how, people can engage with each other on the Internet. Right? Like there are there are so many possibilities when you combine these two things. And only recently has it started to become a a real thing. So from that moment, from that time that I went to Shai Hagenet, I think I was instantly hooked on on this idea, this movement. This this is always who I've been. Right? I've always wanted to use technology to make a social impact. And now with now there are thousands of other people across the world that
that think that we can do this too, and that's really exciting to me. Now hearing you describe that that discovery moment, through I believe you you said it was Ethan that introduced you to. Yeah. It it sounds like it's a real moment for you. So I would be curious to hear about about, like, that first time you were there. What was that experience like? Like, what kind of things were you feeling? What was it like to experience that like, I'm home kind of moment that it seems you're describing?
Yeah. So before I met Ethan, I think the only people that really understood how I felt about this were you, and my good friend, Tom Dooner, who who is now the, technical evangelist on the brigade network team at Code for America. And going to a room, Shy Hack Night is a very well attended event in the heart of Downtown Chicago. Definitely check them out. They, I think regularly host, you know, upwards of fifty, sixty people at, at a half night. And being in a room full of, quirky and nerdy, but very passionate and smart and driven people was inspiring. I guess if I had to summarize it in two words, it'd be holy shit. I can't believe this is this is real. You know what? I I was forward, right? I I I think that there's no other way of describing it. It was just I was so excited that I found my people.
And I think you may have just kind of come up with, like, the bumper sticker for Shai Hackney out there just like Holy shit. Holy shit. Sarah Sethna.
Shy Hacknight. Hey. You know?
There it is right there. That's that's that's the new promo material. But, yeah, it definitely sounds like that was, like, a a clear moment for you. So then after you found Shy Hacknight and I also have to say that I'm grateful to you because after you found Shy Hacknight, you eventually then told me about Shy Hacknight. And then I got to discover and go through some of those very same experiences which was phenomenal. So after you found Shy found Shy Hacknight though, like, what what happened next? Like, what was the your next step towards like, you're now a professional ostensibly
in in in civic tech. Like, you're being paid to do it right? Who who thought that was a good idea?
But like, where where what was it? What was that like journey between, hey, I'm a I'm I I've discovered my two interests are here to, like, now, like, this is my my my profession. Like, what what what happened in between there?
Yeah. So I had been working for the government at that time for about five years. Right? And it literally every step of the way, I was wildly in love with the mission of what was happening, but woefully dismayed by the inability to use technology effectively. Right? And in some places, I had been empowered. Like, during my work in the senate, I had been empowered by great leaders, great mentors to use my technology skills to streamline how things work. Right? We didn't change the world there but we did things like we made a unified, constituent tracker. So when people would call the senate and, connect with people looking for services, say, job and family services for example, we were able to create a a electronic case file for those individuals and track the progress of their quest for benefits across multiple offices, multiple points of of contact, multiple interactions. Right? There was a a one stop shop where a case worker could go and look for those touch points. Right? And see quickly and easily what was going on without the frustrating experience of having to re explain from the beginning every single time you talk to a different person. Right? So some places enabled me to, I guess, to do that but other places, and the place that I had been working when I found Trihackinite, was not are are not like that, right? And many places are, I think, in the government crippled by fear. They believe they're scared of technology. There's this lack of of technical skills and understanding, in many places. And so the fear is, you know, if we do this, maybe something will break, maybe it won't work. Things are more or less going just fine for us now like why why fix it if it isn't broken? But I think that it is broken in many ways. Right? And so knowing that civic tech was a real thing and that there are many people committed to the idea of, making a meaningful difference, right, in in in the state of the civic technology ecosystem, I was inspired to go and try and and do things like that at my job. Right? Obviously, participating in projects, voluntary projects at TrihackKnight, but try to roll those things over into into GSA, which I had some limited success doing. Right? But I ran into this problem, mostly this problem of not having, the air cover that I needed to make higher level decisions about technology and, implement meaningful solutions. And so, that led me to just spending a lot more of my time volunteering as a civic technologist, starting Open Uptown, Chicago's first and only Code for America Brigade, with you and continue to build my skills. That way, I got involved with an organization called Chippy, Chicago Python user group. They have probably the best free technology, educational program in The United States called the Chippy Mentorship Program. I worked one on one with a senior software engineer, Chris Forsman, who, worked with me directly on three projects. We built an API together. We built a couple of other microservices. We built a a a piece of software that automated, large part of my job at GSA. So, couple of goofy projects, and all with the civic civic focus. Right? So there were, I guess, a a few things that I did to, really, like, dig into some technical skills to kind of understand modern technology a bit more, and then I continued to try to hack the bureaucracy in my day job. And all of those things led me to the US Digital Service.
Very cool. And, I'm definitely happy you you did that shout out to Chippy as well, the Chicago Users Python Group. That is a fantastic organization that, those of you listening, if you're around that area and you're interested in, learning some tech skills, I would suggest giving them a look. It's a fantastic group. And it it And one thing I'd be curious about with your experience with that is it sounds like there's like a lot of things you took from these tech involvement activities that you then kind of then used in the job you had at the time. Are there any things that, from your experience in those jobs that have kind of stayed with you as you know and are more involved in like a civic tech job? Are there any of those like government things that you now use as tools now? I guess on the opposite side of that connection.
Yeah. So I was talking to the the Civic Digital Fellows actually a couple weeks ago. You're you have an episode about them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, you know, how do you how do you work in Civic Tech? Right? And the I think that the true answer to that question and and the one that I hopefully gave at the time was you don't have to work in civic tech to to civic tech. Right? I think that's a really important thing to bear in mind. The civic tech is a mindset. It's an attitude. It's a philosophy. And if you can internalize and embody those principles and beliefs, you know, design with users not for them. Hire and empower great people. Right? Find the truth and tell the truth. Those are some of the US Digital Services core values. And I don't think you have to work for the US Digital Service to embody those things.
That is a really good point. And I also like the fact that you've used civic tech as a verb as well. Like, you don't you don't have to work for you don't have to work in civic tech to civic tech. That's a nice little catchphrase. Alright. Well, that's a new one then.
I should write that one down.
So I gather now, now in in your work with the US Digital Service, you're now located in DC. Is that correct? Yeah. That's right. So, like, what, what what is your civic tech involvement like now? Is it is it just USDS? Do you have other activities going on? Tell us a bit about the civic tech life of Cyrus these days. That's a great question. Thanks for asking about my life.
What do I do? Let's see here. Let's do a few things. So since I can't be directly involved on the ground with Open Uptown or ShaiHackNine anymore, here in Washington, I am involved with the leadership team of Code for DC which is Washington DC's Code for America Brigade. I work with a team of wonderful people. Our co captains, Kate and Lizzie are, phenomenal human beings and, many other members of the leadership team are, have been doing a tremendous job for years in in running code for DC. So I'm pretty new to that that scene. My, I guess, biggest effort there is running a learning group called CryptoParty. CryptoParty is a localized version of the larger movement. CryptoParty, is a digital security awareness, organization that's not really an organization. It's sort of like a it's a Wiki on the Internet and it's a bunch of sort of ad hoc, piece by piece events that happen around the world. At DC CryptoParty, the goal is to welcome folks who may be new to Code four DC to the space, right, and give people, I guess, first of all, a, an easily accessible project to get involved with on their first day if they're not sure if they're gonna come back or don't necessarily know about the other things that are, you know, more more consistent projects with products at Codeford DC, they can always come to CryptoParty. The the the intention of CryptoParty is to provide a accessible, like, all levels experience for people who are interested in or concerned about information security in the digital age. So the idea is not to be super technical or, something that is only accessible to, you know, your traditional, CISO types. Instead, it is to, you know, meet people where they are and present general ideas. So at our last, event, for example, we talked about off the record messaging, encrypted messaging protocols in general, and laid out some specific tools. So we talked about, like, signal, for example, and how signal works, WhatsApp, what is end to end encryption. And we also talked about some more complex things like key base and, public key, private key authentication and those kinds of things. Right? And so, you know, a community member who comes with their smartphone as their primary, device and way of communicating and accessing the Internet is going to be, you know, more readily more ready to access, things like signal for example, and they are going to be able to install a Linux distribution and set up PGP on their computer. Right? So the idea is to present a range of tools and let our attendees define, you know, which things work best for their situation as opposed to dictating, like, hey. These are, like, the best tools. Like, everyone needs to download them and use them now. Right? I I think that's a pretty ineffective way of talking about digital security and a big reason why, people associate security and encryption with, like, a, cumbersome or difficult or inaccessible, you know, concept that that isn't for normal people. No. It is in fact for normal people, and that's what we're trying to highlight at CryptoParty.
I think that's a really keen point. There does tend to be this idea that, hey. If I wanna implement security practices, it's almost always going to result in some onerous set of tasks I have to do in it to get there. Really, your example of, like, PGP encryption usage, especially with, like, using with, like, email is probably a great example of that. That is likely above and beyond, like, what most people are going to be willing to invest time into figuring out. So I do like the fact that you go after perhaps thing, technologies and things that people can do that meets them where they're at as you put it, but perhaps a lot in the way of like that UX or that user experience is there to where like it, they won't want to avoid using it. Now, you mentioned, like, a lot of this ends up being around kind of that, idea of educating folks on, like, how crypto as a set of technologies can be useful to them in their daily lives. Like, what are some of those, like, best practices that you strive to have people do?
The idea is to share general best practices as you mentioned. So some really low hanging fruit ideas are, you know, what are your passwords? Not tell us your passwords right now, but but maybe you should change your passwords. You know? Here are some general guidelines for how to make a good password. Do you know about a password manager? You probably shouldn't use the same password for everything. Here is why you might not wanna do that. Do you know about two factor authentication? Here are some ideas for two factor authentication. Here are some services that that can use two factor authentication. You know, you can set it up with a text message if that's if that's where you're at. You can use an authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Authy if that's where you're at. You could use a hardware authenticator like a YubiKey if that's where you're at. You know? And so we we we try to present different options for different people, and getting somebody comfortable and confident in logging in with, Google passwords and a a text message two factor authenticator is way better than having someone use their copy paste eight character, you know, dictionary word password that, has already been leaked on the Internet multiple times in other data breaches. Right? So the idea is to help people not to preach to people, I guess. Right? It's to, like, welcome people in and answer questions and be legitimately concerned about, helping people succeed.
In your involvement with Code for DC, I I imagine you maybe also had some exposure to some of the, like, National Day of Civic Hacking events that were going on recently. I know that was like a big push throughout the Code for America network to do that. Did you yourself get involved in any of those activities? And if so, like, what what did Code for DC have going on? Oh, we sure did get involved.
So Code for DC had a very interesting take on the National Day of Civic Hacking. We held a, I guess, a sister event, a part of part of the National Day of Civic Hacking umbrella, but it was called the National Day of Civic Crafting. And the focus was on tactical and tactile urbanism. The idea that you can hack your environment, using everyday objects. So, you know, the the metro station could be more beautiful. Sure. It could be. Let's draw with sidewalk chalk, some hopscotch, and, you know, beautiful artwork outside the exit. Maybe that would inspire, WMATA to paint some murals or install some public artwork, nearby the metro. Right? You don't like the fact that there aren't bike lanes in on your street. Maybe you can put some cones down with bicycles on them that encourage cars to be aware of bikes in your area. That might be illegal, so I'm not necessarily encouraging you to do that. Check the laws of your municipality wherever you are ever thinking of doing that. So just some ideas. Right? At the National Day of Civic Crafting, we also encourage people to come and do hardware prototyping with Legos. We had a Raspberry Pi and Arduino that we connected to apples and made a piano with using the, conductivity of your skin through the fruit. Right? That was that was pretty cool. We called it Apple Music. Uh-huh. We did a community mapping project, but you didn't need to know, you know, any kind of GIS stuff. You just needed to come and and draw on a piece of paper on the wall. We projected a map of DC and we asked people, hey, draw your community map. Like, mark the things on this sheet that you care about in your community. Mark the cool spots to go. Mark the hidden gems that other people might not know about. Right? We made we mixed essential oils and we brewed weird teas and we made funny signs out of moss. We had a parade. We invited, the, Funkbike DC, which is a guy who built this amazing, like, bike trailer thing with a huge speakers on it, that he tows around for protests and rallies and takes out to Burning Man every year. And he came and, rode his bicycle around with us and playing really loud funk music while we carried our, you know, technology forward, community forward, peace and love signs around the block. Right? So that was that was pretty cool. And I think that it was noteworthy because in Code for America, oftentimes, people have the perception like, I'm not a coder. I'm not a technologist. I'm not a programmer. I don't know anything about that stuff, that world. I don't have a place at the table there. And the National Day of Civic Craft in fact demonstrated the opposite. That no matter what you're interested in, no matter what you care about, we can all there was a knitting thing there. You know, like, we can all come together around something and we can do it for something that we care about. You don't have to be a technologist to be welcome at Code for DC. You don't have to be technologist to be welcome at in code for America. And so that I think was particularly, impactful and drew a lot of people who told me directly and specifically like, hey. I've heard of DC Code for DC for a long time. I've been following these meetups for a long time, and this is the first time that I thought I could come out and do something useful. And it was an opportunity to engage with those people about all the rest of our projects and our regular project nights and, you know, hopefully,
they'll remember that. Well, that sounds like a fantastic way to have that first touch point with someone who maybe thinks that, like, it's not for them, like you were describing. Before we dig into that anymore, I I have to ask about something you mentioned there at the end. Sure. What what was the knitting thing? Oh,
So a really cool local artist is making a display about suicide prevention. And she is weaving a or knitting, I guess. It's not weaving. She's knitting, like a three-dimensional art installation that uses some specific colors, and patterns to spell out a message in Morse code encouraging people to seek support services, and also to raise awareness among people who maybe don't need to seek those support services, but just
rate like, letting people know that this is out there and this is something that you should share with people should you should you come across a need for it. So it it sounds like there's there's, like, quite a wide array of different sorts of activities going on there. Everything from the the the knitting art installation we're talking about, to possibility of like sidewalk chalking, to music, to even that mapping exercise which I also find interesting because it's the sort of like data collection exercise that often If if like your only exposure is just like, hey I work in tech forever. You don't necessarily think about that as like an avenue for data collection. It's usually the focus is on like automated ways to go about it but like what you really came to is like you now have all of this like local knowledge about the neighborhood and like where our sponsor that people care about and that's also interesting. But to get to an actual question here, what sort of process did you go through like find these things? Like how was code four d c coming with these activities?
So I think that I can't take any credit for coming up with those activities. That was, totally the work of my peers, my our co captains, our captain Emeritus, and Code four DC founder. They this was their their concept, their idea. I think that the the basis of the idea revolves around this this concept. It's not a new concept. I'm not the first person to say this, but as adults, we forget the value of playing with things. You know? Project nights and civic technology meetups are often extensions of work. Right? Extensions of people's day jobs. And the National Day of Civic Crafting was a reminder that, hey. This is supposed to be fun. Like, we're here to play. Technology coding is a puzzle. Right? Programming, technology, products, building things, prototyping, draw coming up with user ideas, drawing wireframes. All of that is is fun. It's it's no different. Well, maybe it's a little different from playing with LEGOs, but it's no different than playing with LEGOs. Right? As a, you know, when you hold toys in your hand, you don't have pressure to necessarily produce a product, but you're still stimulating and using those creative energies. Right? And so I think the National Day of Civic Crafting was a really great way to welcome and encourage people's creative, freedom and thought and expression.
Excellent. Now we we've talked a bit about how you got to where you are now. We've talked a bit about what you're doing outside of what pays the bills. Now one thing I would like to also talk about that, we mentioned a little bit in our conversation before we started this and you brought it up a little bit as like a principles thing of like Mhmm. The things that are behind USDS and that's that idea of like finding truth and telling truth. Yeah. So you've been working in in civic tech for, how long now? Well, yeah. Like as a job? Since February. So I'd be curious like are there any like little nuggets like observations that would kind of like fall under that thing of like things where you've sought out truth and like you have opinions about it. Like what what what do you how do you see the landscape of things from your current perspective?
Yeah. So great question. I think that there are a number I'm gonna start off by saying that there are a number of really, really awesome projects going on in the federal space. Our counterparts at h and f, my colleagues at the US Digital Service are doing phenomenal things that I think are really moving our government forward. Right? I do think that the federal government is a as a massive organism, if it's possible to to paint it with a broad brush, has a problem. I mentioned with fear. Right? The fear of messing shit up and then having to pay the consequences for it later. Right? There's this there's this terrible fear in government, of of oversight and getting called before congress and those kinds of things. Right? And there's also this other problem of of of bandwagoning, I guess, on the the trends of the day. Right? And and one of these trends of the day that particularly irks me at the moment is blockchain. Okay. So blockchain is popular. Many of you probably know it from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum or, what's the other what's another one? Litecoin? Dogecoin? Yeah. That's that's where I was going. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, these I'm gonna for lack of a better word, idiotic, fake Internet monies, that are based on this technology called blockchain. Right? So the idea of a decentralized distributed ledger is not inherently bad. I think that there are civic applications for the blockchain like, voting for example. We still have not resolved in this country the the paradigm of electronic voting. Right? Paper trail versus no paper trail. If we're not gonna have a paper trail, how do we ensure that there is a, immutable ledger Blockchain that prevents, you know, voter fraud essentially. Right? That make sure everyone's vote is counted and accounted for. So I don't wanna completely throw away the potential applications for Blockchain. Blockchain. However, I do think that things like the federal blockchain community are putting the cart well before the horse. The US federal government has 24,000 paper forms. Do we really need to be talking about Blockchain when we still have fax machines in our offices? You know, like, there's so many more things that we need to do to modernize technology just to bring it up to the the standard of the private industry. Right? Like things that are ubiquitous in, in consumer technology like APIs, for example, are still nascent in government at best. Right? And I think that, things like Blockchain, for example, are a huge distraction. Right? People are like, look, it's shiny. Let's go over there. But no. You know, like the the the work of public services is not always shiny. It's rarely glamorous and I think Blockchain be quick to cite, Estonia, right, and e government. And, yeah, they could do it. Right? It's there's there's a blockchain component to that project. And I would like to point out that Estonia is much smaller, and, not an anthropologist, but I'm going to presume that Estonia is also maybe less diverse, a bit more homogeneous than The United States. So there are a number of problems that I can think of with use cases and, edge users and things like that that probably, weren't as difficult in that circle in that situation. Right? And and Estonia also did a lot of work before they implemented the the e government initiative to digitize their government, to eliminate paper forms, to get things, you know, on the cloud, for example, that I think we still need to focus on in The United States before we can take blockchain seriously.
Now do do you think that a lot of those efforts they're talking about, like, like, these prerequisites are do do you think enough of them are in progress? Or do you think that there there's a lot of work that's maybe like, the concept that we don't know what we don't know? Do you think there's a lot of that going on? Or do you think there's a pretty good idea of what has to happen out there? Yeah. So I think that my colleagues, the amazing engineers, designers, and product managers of the US Digital Service,
have a pretty good idea. They come from, you know, years of work in industry. They have a a wealth of knowledge of of what is possible and are also deeply embedded in our government and can see the state of things, right, as I just laid out. Maybe even more clearly since they're they're there. Right? And I'm just talking about it. I I think a couple of really awesome projects, I'd like to to cite, '18 f's Federalist. So Federalist is a platform that helps government agencies deploy, modern and compliant static websites. So, like, so many government websites are just shitty. Like, let's just let's be real about it. They suck. There's no better way of of saying that. And many of them are just static websites. So if you if you are listening to this and you work at a government agency that just has a static website, there's a tool called Federalist made by eighteen f that'll help you deploy deploy a a beautiful modern static website that complies with all of the requirements of the federal government, and it's there for you to use. So I definitely wanna, like, call that out. Getting getting modern websites up and running, to improve citizen interactions with the services that we're providing has got to be a top priority.
So you mentioned those, like, requirements and standards. Is some of that around, like, accessibility as well? Because I know that's one thing that drives me a little crazy if I if I find a government website and it doesn't say, like, work with a screen reader Mhmm. Or things of that nature. Is that something that's covered in that particular? So So five zero eight compliance is definitely a component of Federalist. And,
instead of spending, you know, months to make your product comply with those types of, requirements, it's baked into Federalist. Oh, that's awesome. Thought of from day one. Cool. Another project I'd like to cite is The US form service. We're collaborating US Digital Services is collaborating with, AT and F on this one as well. It's open source, so please feel free to take a look at the GitHub repo and, submit issues or pull requests as appropriate. It is an effort to standardize how we we as in the American people interact with those 24,000 government forms. So, a massive undertaking, but not one that is unsolvable. And our single digit number of staff could really use the help of the open source community on this one. Yeah. You mentioned that, project a little bit in our conversation before we started recording
and, I'm a fan of what what's going on there. Honestly, the, like, UX slash user slash all of the above problem of filling out forms whether it's public sector or not Mhmm. Is I think a problem that is way more difficult than I think we tend to give credit for. So the fact that there's like this collective effort to come up with something that is somewhat standard for us as a people is is pretty pretty awesome I would have to say. Yeah. I think they're doing a great job. Before Before we draw to a close here, first thank you so much for coming on. And as you all know, being an avid listener and former participant yourself as well and now current interviewee, you're aware that we close these episodes by allowing the guests to have kind of the last word. So for you and what we've been talking about today, like, what do you wanna leave our listeners with in the way of concluding thoughts?
Definitely register to vote. If you don't participate in your government, we can't hope to have any kind of impact in our society. So anyone that's interested in civic tech should be civically engaged. So please register to vote. Please participate actively in your elections, local elections, state elections, as well as federal elections. I think that, in order for our democracy, the fabric of our society to continue to work and for us to be able to civic tech in a meaningful way, we have to first be involved and engaged citizens. So please check out your county board of elections, website. Please register to vote, and please participate actively in all of your elections.
Cyrus, again, thank you for taking the time to come on. I know that what we've talked about today will be something that will be quite amazing for our audience to listen to. And, again, thank you. Thanks for having me. 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.
