Congress Goes Digital & Demo Night 2022

Greetings Civic Hackers!

I was excited to read that the U.S. House of Representatives is going to get an infusion of tech talent. They are creating a digital service division to help them modernize how they work with the American people. We have been thinking more about how Civic Tech can work with the legislative branch, and just kicked off our own legislative testimony project.

A couple notes on demo night tentatively scheduled for February 22, 2022. CIC has informed us that they are requiring attendees to be fully boosted (three shots) to attend on site, and masks will be required except when eating or drinking. We will likely hold capacity to about 50% of Venture Cafe’s capacity to allow for distancing. We will also be live-streaming on YouTube for folks who wish to watch from home. I will be sharing an RSVP link for those that wish to attend next week.

What we’re reading:

• Lessons Learned from Colorado Exposure Notifications Metrics shared some interesting insights from Colorado’s exposure notification app.
• Protocol has a good summary of Biden’s new customer experience executive order that touches on the challenges of digitizing government.
• A software bug kept thousands of inmates in prison beyond their release date. Hard to read this one without feeling outraged.

Matt & The Code for Boston Team

Jobs

City of Boston: Chief Information Officer

The City of Boston seeks to hire a Chief Information Officer (CIO) to serve on the Mayor’s Cabinet and lead the Department of Innovation and Technology and its work to create our city’s connected and equitable future.

The Chief Information Officer is the City’s most senior IT leader. The CIO is responsible for overseeing technology and advising on technology policy across an array of departments. The CIO’s focus is to improve government operations and positively impact quality of life for Boston residents through the development and implementation of thoughtful technology policies, platforms, products, infrastructure, and services.

Boston’s CIO manages the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT.) That Department provides and maintains mission-critical technologies for the City’s more than 18,000 employees and the hundreds of thousands of constituents they serve. With approximately 150 employees and an annual budget of approximately $50M, DoIT delivers an effective foundation of technology that serves more than 40 departments and millions of direct constituent interactions. Boston is considered a global leader in municipal technology, and the City’s next CIO will be expected to build on this foundation.

Project Updates

Clean Slate

• Mass Recreational Consumer Council website work.
• Testing framework updates
• New API pull request.

Police Data Trust

• Tapped out of backend tasks
• Doing some testing before decide how to move forward
• Work on connecting front to the backend
• Working on getting public site up

Mattapan Mapping

• Working on a Hasura/GraphQL backend
• Design and content updates.

Legislative Testimony

• Back end data work from legislature data API
• Front-end and design work.