Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology

Power to the Public is a timely resource on how governments and non-profits can interact with technology while taking into account the public interest. It is important to name any new field to enable a conversation around it. In this case, the authors name Public Interest Technology (PIT) and define it as ‘the application of design, data, and delivery to advance the public interest and promote the public good in the digital age’ (ix). The book is both a manifesto for the field and a resource with valuable suggested readings, names of non-profit organizations, fellowship programs, and more. The authors narrate meaningful stories of how the government and non-profit organizations are trying to catch up with an increasingly complex and technological world. The two authors are affiliated with New America Foundation, a think tank dedicated to civic engagement and advancing the PIT agenda. Tara Dawson McGuiness teaches public policy at Georgetown University, and prior to working at New America, led federal teams within the Obama administration, working with non-profits in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore. Hana Schank is the founder and editor of a publication called ‘The Commons’ on government innovation and was previously director of Product and UX Research, Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security. They supplement this wealth of experience with extensive research and in-depth interviews related to case studies spanning issues from homelessness to managing pandemics to provide insights on how ‘public problem solving really works’. (xvii)

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first four chapters describe examples of PIT activities, mainly in the United States, highlighting the effective and novel ways the field is expanding. The last three chapters recount the evolution of PIT, its definition, how different institutions operationalize it, and the successes and failures of various PIT projects. The authors support the reinvention of the US government and non-profits through capacity building and even transformation of PIT activities to ensure problems are solved with the public’s interest in mind. The authors describe three elements of PIT to serve people better and solve problems at their root: design informed by human needs; real-time data; and how the technology is delivered. Three principles guide PIT: First, the government is central to solving the world’s most complex problems. Second, people working at various levels of government need to be engaged by being given incentives, and by restructuring current. Third, technology can play a critical role in solving government problems, but it is not a solution by itself.

Chapters one through four recounts the complicated PIT trajectories undertaken by the government at various levels from federal to city, using the evolution of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) software as a key example. In the two decades following its inception during the George W. Bush administration, ELIS has faced numerous challenges. The authors specify that the biggest pitfall was trying to modernize the USCIS system through a technological fix without appropriate leadership; the 3Ds of data, design, delivery; and a user-focused approach. Neither the initial design of ELIS nor subsequent ELIS 2 focused on the root problem of centralizing the immigration process and speeding it up. The software designers failed to work directly with the civil servants dealing with the public clientele, and as a result, did not tailor a technology accessible to their respective needs. Today ELIS is functional, with a technology director and an entire research and development team that prototypes and tests concepts first before rolling them out. However, the frustration with this process continues to be palpable for everyone involved, not just the poorly served end-users but also the bureaucrats. The authors observe that harmonizing the PIT space of design, data and delivery would solve the root problem.

The challenges of data, design, and delivery also exist at the city level. There is often a lack of useful and targeted data, such as the number of homeless people in a given city. However, the authors emphasize that data alone is not always sufficient, as they illustrate with the case of the two million Michiganders who need access to healthcare and food assistance. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) knows how many people need assistance, but the program that offers health services and food stamps is not designed to provide these vulnerable populations access to the program’s benefits. Finding the appropriate delivery methods is not easy. Creating an application on a smartphone, often the go-to technology is useless if one fails to understand the context and needs of end-users with care and empathy. As recounted in another chapter, the Vermont Health Access project began to prototype a small online Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) pilot to gather documents and incrementally grow the program. This experimental and iterative process proved successful in rolling out an automated SNAP program. Sometimes it is not even necessary to roll out a material technology, as was the case with a foster program in Rhode Island. That state’s Department of Children, Youth, Families (DCYF) piloted a program to support future foster parents. DCYF hosted a holistic ‘recruitment weekend’ to accelerate the procedures, whereby hundreds of backlogged families came to one space to process their papers for fostering, enabling them to become licensed quickly.

The authors suggest that PIT should deploy a user-centered approach that is tested, improved, and monitored to ensure that the services and technologies offered genuinely serve the people. They also emphasize the need to have strong communication between policy designers and policy implementers; training and hiring more public-interest technologists can fill this gap. For example, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act unintentionally supported companies with big lobbying efforts, such as aerospace giant Boeing, because the federal administrative system is currently designed to facilitate their access rather than the access of average families. In countries like Germany and Denmark, the opposite is true. There, money is easily appropriated and delivered to those who need it most, especially during emergencies like the current pandemic. As they illustrate with a few successful case studies, the authors emphasize that successful PIT projects are targeted and address public interest needs. For example, Rockford, Illinois’s strategy to eliminate homelessness did not take the typical route of passing legislation to get funds for shelters or criminalizing loitering. Instead, they gathered data to understand homelessness in a more nuanced way and tailored interventions appropriately. One of the data gathering results showed that veteran homeless people do not have access to bus fares, allowing them to reach their mental health appointments or meet their social worker. Therefore, just providing free bus passes began lowering the rate of veteran homelessness. Eventually, the city mapped out all the various needs of differentiated homeless populations to create a strategic city-wide plan that was user-centered.

The authors are optimistic; they highlight the need to focus PIT in the USA at the different government levels, federal, state, and city, and suggest a way forward. They acknowledge the importance of looking back at PIT’s history, how it was conceived, and its origins in public interest law, as not to fall into the same pitfalls. This expansion means going beyond adding technology solutions into government and non-profit projects. They suggest rethinking systems, creating new jobs for data scientists and technology designers in government, training civil servants in PIT, prototyping ideas, creating accelerator programs, establishing networks of technologists, civil servants, and policymakers, as well as advancing a new generation of academics. One of the networks currently expanding among universities is the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT_UN) that is supported through the collaboration of New America and the Ford Foundation.

The authors remind us that the work is slow, requiring a long, iterative process of understanding the pulse of the public. This type of process is important to mobilize the public, as is illustrated in the (largely European) context of responsible innovation (RI): going slow is central to the rule of law and gives time to promote more realistic and sincere societal engagement, ethical deliberation, diversity and openness (Steen 2021). PIT requires leaders who are connected to those they serve. PIT work happens from the ground up through dedicated social servants, but also top-down with a public sector that is inclusive and diverse. For the growth of PIT, partnerships are needed, sometimes with the private sector that is more nimble and can collect and navigate useful data. However, the authors emphasize that data alone only provides the ‘what;’ therefore, for data to be targeted and end-user friendly, it needs to be coupled with the ‘why,’ and deciphering this work takes time and relationship building.

The book ends with recommendations on how to grow the PIT field. The authors suggest to dissect the current problems, apply the appropriate treatment and then test whether the treatment works, and keep repeating. This iterative process is a sound methodology – especially with the suggestions in the chapter about storytelling, curating leaders, and rebranding government – but it may not be enough. The authors suggest that stories need to be told, especially the successes of tedious and under-reported achievements in government. They encourage us to nurture leaders from government, the private sector, and non-profits who spearhead public interest projects and allocate more resources to them. They believe a rebranding of government could attract more university students, and more funding, emphasizing that in the 1950s, government jobs were seen as the secure jobs of the future. Finally, they highlight the need to ensure more just spaces that tackle and challenge the current discriminatory space.

The book offers an excellent overview of the status quo of the public sector and how it integrates technology in its operation, but there are a few shortcomings. Firstly, the book lacks an analysis of how new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are impacting public life. For example, there are no case studies of how the government is tackling current issues of managing breaches with big data or overcoming fake news or understanding the ethics and politics of releasing genetically modified organisms such as mosquitoes. Secondly, future thinking is missing. The book would have been a good opportunity to emphasize anticipatory governance (AG) and its elements of foresight, engagement, and integration (Guston 2014a; Barben et al. 2008). Scholars in AG, a field that predates RI and PIT (Conley and York 2020), highlight how anticipatory governance mechanisms enable decision makers to think ahead of time about the likely impacts of technologies so they do not dictate our future world (Brundage and Guston 2019; Fisher 2020a; Nordmann 2014). Thirdly, while the government indeed needs to rethink its public engagement and facilitate open-access mechanisms (Stilgoe, Lock, and Wilsdon 2014), standard rebranding efforts might not be sufficient. Government should include more deliberative democracy (Conley and York 2020) and incorporate concepts of anticipatory governance (Barben et al. 2008; Guston 2014; Fisher 2020b), while ensuring all players don’t fall unwittingly into lock-in mechanisms (Nordmann 2014). Fourth, the authors appear to suggest a primordial and unchanging public, where the goal of decision-makers is to deliver unmet needs. While such a linear formulation may be convenient, and it is how the government has traditionally operated, it nonetheless obscures necessary reflexivity in decision makers to enable them to consider how their own priorities, values and positionalities allow them to define ‘root problems’ in a particular way. Moreover, such a static configuration of the public prevents consideration of the two-way dialog and mutual transformation that may occur between decision-makers and publics, as the publics also amend their needs based on what is available (Stilgoe, Lock, and Wilsdon 2014). Finally, the authors could have emphasized mechanisms of making government more just and suggested paths forward for tackling discrimination.

The book is a good starting point and overview of the field of PIT, specifically as it relates to how government works in the USA. But future versions and related books might want to look through a wider lens at how technology impacts the public interest and how to incorporate a more anticipatory approach while focusing on social justice issues through two-way dialogues. In short, how do we ensure that the technologies of the future use data, design, and delivery that is not only ethical, just, and inclusive, but also anticipatory and reflexive?