https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/how-to-make-a-great-government-website
A: This relates to another thing I’ve been thinking about, which is that when you start to read about civic technology, it very, very quickly becomes clear that things that look like they are tech problems are actually about institutional culture, or about policy, or about regulatory requirements.
I’m curious why these issues so often come up in the context of tech, or are interesting to people whose background is in tech or who are drawn to technical solutions for them.
D: In Political Economy of Industrial Societies, we read all the classical theories of political economy. And we also read Hegel. So let me give you the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis.
There’s this starting point thesis: Tech can solve these government problems, right? There’s healthcare.gov and the call to bring techies into government, blah, blah, blah.
Then there’s the antithesis, where all these people say, well, no, it’s institutional problems. It’s legal problems. It’s political problems. I think either is sort of an extreme distortion of reality. I see a lot of more oblique levers that technology can pull in this area. For example, I mentioned measuring how many people succeeded at getting benefits. If you just had a paper application for benefits, you would never be able to actually measure how many people started versus how many people finished. Technology makes that pretty trivially measurable. It’s not a totalizing resolution of all problems, but it’s an incredible difference from paper, where we have no ability to measure this at all.