Tara Dawson McGuinness

My spouse thought that this book disingenuously ignored that often powerful government officials don’t want government to work better, but I didn’t think so; as it said, every system is really good at doing what it was actually designed to do, and often enough that is to suppress complaint and enrich consultants. What should people do if they in good faith want government to deliver services that people need with the help of technology? Perhaps surprisingly, their answer is first to spend a lot of time asking the recipients and the ground-level workers delivering the services what they need, and then use the technology available to make that as simple as possible. The most powerful anecdote involves having lawmakers try to fill out the complicated forms for getting public assistance in Michigan while sitting in a hallway filled with recorded noise from an actual public assistance office. When they couldn’t come close to doing it, they had to admit that there was a problem.… (mais)