Ask HN: How would you go about building a startup government? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you go about building a startup government?

3 pointsDracophoenix4 comments

I've noticed a bit of fanfare these days for gov-/citizen-tech. However, a rarely mentioned obstacle (outside present company) regarding work for or on behalf currently established governments are how they are hobbled by mountains of bureaucratic cruft, making such ventures attempts at turd-polishing. Rather than surmounting the insurmountable, applying gov-/citizen-tech to building a competing startup government (or even a grander market of such governments) seems to be a more efficacious solution.

With all this said, what is a good angle/approach to implementing such a startup? What are similar examples you know of that worked in the past, or at the have a working theory behind their construction?

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Government entities do start up, relative frequently. Every time a new school district opens, or a new library opens, for example. While the scale is clearly quite different, the basics of handling your governing documents (bureaucracy) are the same.

As an example, my town of about 400 does everything a government needs to, with a handful of people meeting once or twice a month, a website, some email addresses, a few Google docs, and a physical town hall to meet in and hold elections. Don't get me wrong, the people who run the town do put in work, but it is far more simple than the state or federal level.

Before you try to build some new solution, I'd research such simple governments and figure out what the minimum needed to operate really is, and where the limit will be as the size scales. Because while the few large government entities are the most obvious and talked about there are literally tens of thousands of small government entities to look at to fully understand the differences of scale in governments.

Look at: Small towns, Library Districts, School Districts, Sanitation Districts, even HOAs.

It’s not insurmoutable: look at Government Digital Service’s approach:

1. Gain the ability to veto digital projects above a certain value as being too big to be able to be realistically completed on-time and on-budget.

2. Take on some of the legal risk, enabling you to reduce the amount of red tape and allow smaller agencies with fewer lawyers to enage.

3. Build a bidding marketplace for smaller, better defined projects that are able to be tackled by smaller agencies and startups.

More info at https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/

Startups, if successful, grow into bigger companies. But why do you think bigger tech(or non-tech) companies are not entangled in bureaucracy?

A government is far bigger and complex than any big company. So there will be more slowdown compared to big companies.

One example of successful public-private partnership is India's "Digital India" initiative where the government was able to churn out platforms like Aadhaar, Unified Payment Interface and RuPay, with other platforms on the way for digital commerce for MSMEs.

I would start with: what problem are you trying to solve?

Do governments share your belief that the problem you want to solve is an actual problem they believe needs solving? Democratic governments have elements of serving the people, all of the people, and limiting factors (like using certain technology) can be restrictive.

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