[Themaintainers] Danah Boyd on Fixing Tech in Government

[Varun Adibhatla (ARGO)]

Hello all!

Hope you are well and enjoying the holidays.  Any good maintenance stories:
holiday edition?

Happy 2021 to everyone here!
The current narrative on 2020 takes the form of a massive dumpster fire but
in hindsight, I think for those of us who were fortunate to have not
significantly lost our health or wealth, it may prove to be the beginning
of when we changed our collective paradigms towards maintenance and mutual
aid.

Thought I'd share this piece on "fixing" Government
<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-federal-government-needs-vp-engineering-cto-danah-boyd/>Tech
by Danah Boyd @ Microsoft Research.  I was particularly amused by this
passage:

*"If Silicon Valley waltzes into the federal government in January with its
“I’ve got a submarine for that” mindset thinking that it can sprinkle tech
fairy dust all over the agencies, we’re screwed."*


That paints quite the "Innovation Delusion" picture
<https://giphy.com/explore/salt-bae>, no :)

The article calls for more of a hands-on approach to repairing Gov tech vs
a more symbolic and aspirational masthead for tech in government. The
article focuses on 3 themes:

   - *The Tar Pits of Broken Tech Procurement* maintains a status quo that
   re-affirms structural inequalities. I'm sure some of you have had direct
   experience with this! I certainly have and it is not friendly to small
   organizations not aware of the Procurement Speak. I'm sure applying for
   Grants has some of the same Jargon and procedural tar pits. I'm sure some
   of it is necessary but definitely needs some amount of de-tarring


   - *Tech Work within Government* is fundamentally different from Tech
   work in the Valley and career paths should reflect this difference. I've
   never worked inside the Federal Government (until recently I was not even
   eligible). This seems right. Tech work in Government is less "move fast
   break things" and naturally lends to the maintenance / stewardship credo


   - The focus on communications was interesting, I thought. Too often, in
   large bureaucratic organizations, necessary maintenance work suffers from a
   general lack of coordination and communication and Danah appears to be
   calling for someone who can maneuver through the vast underbelly of
   government and avoid kafkaesque exhaustion. (*The flames of Q-Anon are
   in large part fanned by an opaque government black box)*

I would think that containing the looming clouds of obsolescence and hole-y
security practices are also important to a credo of fixing things.

As someone who makes deliberate efforts to view the world through a lens of
leaks, cracks, and holes, I found myself rooting for Danah when she writes
this:

*"The issue at play isn’t the lack of tech-forward vision. It’s the lack of
organizational, human capital, and communications infrastructure that’s
necessary for a complex “must-reach-everyone” organization to
transform. Rather than coming in with hubris and focusing on grand vision,
we need a new administration who is willing to dive deep and understand the
cracks in the infrastructure that make a tech-forward agenda impossible."*
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