If every public service in every jurisdiction is rebuilt in isolation, we will end up with the same walled-garden problem that plagued the first generation of private-sector SaaS. This post is an open letter to other digital-government teams: let’s not. What interoperability looks like A resident who moves between jurisdictions should be able to port […]
Ninety days ago we launched automatic SLA refunds: when we miss a service commitment, your fee is credited automatically, with no form to fill. Here’s what happened. The numbers What the misses had in common Of the 498 misses, 71% came from three business-licensing flows with complex inter-agency dependencies. That’s the unsurprising part. The surprising […]
The average municipal tax form is written at a post-graduate reading level. The average resident reads at a year-10 reading level. That gap is not a small problem — it is the problem. What plain language actually means Plain-language rewriting is not dumbing down content. It is increasing the fidelity between what a person reads […]
Our Civic Assistant has now had ten million conversations. In most of them, it routes, explains, or drafts — all low-stakes. But in a growing share, it sits between a resident and an outcome that matters. This post is about the rules that govern those moments. The problem with confident AI in public service An […]
Today we’re opening the doors on New Institution — a fully digital, AI-powered public service rebuild that has been in the making for four years. If you’re reading this, you are among the first 1.2 million residents to hold accounts, and the first to hold us accountable to the published service-level agreements. Why rebuild from […]