Ask HN: What is your vision for the best high tech government experience? | Hacker News Reader

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

6 pointsthephyber11 comments

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.

* 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

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).

Is this a serious answer (eg. from an anarcho-capitalist or you think the government should do much more so you have to do less) or a facetious answer? I realize that there's not a good likelihood that the government will likely change such that we (almost) never have to interact with it.

Given this assumption, are you willing to humor my scenario for the question?

It is meant seriously. I myself am more to the anarchist side of things, but the answer wasn't about that.

I think the government has most or all information it could possibly need - from my employer, school, doctor. I don't recall filling any form that was necessary, everything I've ever done with the government was a waste of time, because everything has already been in their system; thus my answer was mostly about making a proper computer system that does most if not all things automatically, asking for my time only when absolutely necessary.

Thanks for clarifying.

I don't think I agree that the government always has this info, but I do agree that where the info already exists, different silos of the same government should be able to access this data. In a sense this already exists (eg. DMV records tend to be reused for election + jury duty rolls, car insurance info is automatically submitted to DMV), but I think it should be far more streamlined.

I guess I had hoped for specific examples of where there are tasks which could be streamlined, but currently aren't.

I should've said I am European. The government knows more things here, and yet I have to fill tons of forms with the same info again and again.

Before venturing into this space I suggest reading Joshua Tauberer (founder of GovTrack): https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...

That's a good read. But I'm not interested in attempting to address any of those topics. I've already considered some of them and come to similar conclusions.

My hope was to put the pain of interfacing with current bureaucracies side-by-side with a better alternative. Then describing what design guidelines would help bureaucracies improve those features.

I actually don't want to do the work. The tech debt of all government employees working hard to maintain the status quo will always overpower my ability as a single developer to make change. I think there needs to be a marketing campaign to shame governments who have terrible interfaces, reduced friction for them to adopt better standards/guidelines, and citizens need to complain that they want the change prioritized.

Check out Code for America. You may already be aware of them. They're a non-profit aimed at addressing the tech gap in government and pushing for better tech solutions. They have fellowships and various positions in marketing and advocacy, not just coding.

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.

I think our (California) DMV has started replacing the most common workflows with internet options years ago and they are definitely improvements over the previous method (take time during business day to visit one of the few offices, wait in a long queue, deal with slow paper-based forms).

There are US initiatives (Code For America, US Digital Service, 18F, etc) which aim to make the government experience better for the user on an app-by-app basis, but I'm hoping to get a glimpse of what the entirety of government could be if there was a holistic approach to redesign the entire experience (from licensing+permitting to taxes to benefits to giving+incorporating feedback, etc).

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