HACKER Q&A
📣 thephyber

What is your vision for the best high tech government experience?


I am occasionally pleasantly surprised at the occasional government experience (ease of renewing vehicle license), but generally dealing with the government is slow, requires old technology (like printed forms or a telephone), requires lots of repetitive actions (identification, sending contact info, tree traversal, separate payment processing per department, etc) and I am aware that lots of different departments have requirements/forms that could be unified for those who seek more benefits.

If there were no policy or budget/talent limitations, what is your vision for the best possible experience as a resident/citizen with national, state/provincial and locality governments?

I am looking for ideas around using things like QR codes, SMS, notifications, natural language processing, reviews and suggestions, one-click licensing/permitting, etc to make the experience of interacting with the government far more efficient and pleasant.

  👤 jamieweb Accepted Answer ✓
* Improved access to the democratic process, e.g. allowing testimonials in formats other than attending a town hall in-person

* Improved version control and auditability of all Government documents - the authoritative source of all bills/legislation should be a markdown file in a public Git repository with each contributor accurately recorded, rather than a hard-to-find PDF on an obscure website

* Mandatory open-sourcing of code that is funded by taxpayers, in-line with what https://publiccode.eu are campaigning for

* Competitive salaries for technical IT staff - the IT requirements of Governments are so complex and diverse, yet they have the lowest-paid IT staff working on them

👤 TomMarius
Not interacting with it at all, except for receiving notifications about stuff I need to know (not do, there shouldn't be anything to do).
👤 alexmingoia
Before venturing into this space I suggest reading Joshua Tauberer (founder of GovTrack): https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...
👤 eucryphia
I'm a late-Boomer, milquetoast-Libertarian, in the Classical Liberal faction.

In my country our state has a 'one stop shop' website that handles most routine state government licencing payments.

This is much better than say 10 years ago when it was a multitude of separate mailed paper bills.

I can log in and see where my car licence and registration is due, a lot of other potential Govt. services (most of the welfare services I don't use) my fishing licence (funds cover policing of regulations and community projects to conserve fish habitats).

The car rego is linked to my car service shop so when I get an annual safety check my old car requires it's automatically sent through. This used to be a painful process 20 years ago, queuing up at the motor registry that used to close at lunchtime so the staff could have lunch.

It's not the ideal Libertarian tradeoff, but much better than what it used to be and a lot cheaper for the Government to run. They actually dropped registration charges a while back, with a refund! Virtue signalling maybe, but it's the kind I like.