This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Jennifer Pahlka: Centrality of Civic Technology" created on January 16, 2015. It features Jennifer Pahlka discussing the importance of integrating digital capabilities into government functions, reflecting on the failure of healthcare.gov and the need for government officials to understand technology as they do economics or ideology.
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Because government has not thought about the digital as a core part of what it does for far too long, and we're paying the cost of it. When healthcare.gov shipped and failed on October 1, it was probably a couple days afterwards when I was getting my head around what that meant, I thought back to a blog post that my colleague Tom Steinberg in the UK had published. And this is back in February 2012. He had written a post memorializing a colleague of his who had died five years earlier, who was a genius and a polymath and could have done anything in the world with his skills, but had chosen to use his talents on essentially civic technology. My society is kind of like the code for America of the uk, and he wanted people to understand what that meant so that his passing, you know, that his life still had meaning to the community around him. And when Tom was writing about it, he said what Chris fundamentally had right, was the understanding that you can no longer run a country properly if the elites don't understand technology in the way that they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda. And his analysis and predictions about what would happen if elites could, couldn't learn were savage and depressingly accurate. He wrote that in 2012, before healthcare.gov failed and before we all realized that if we passed immigration reform, it too would probably fail on implementation because of our systems, because we have thought for so long that the people who should go into government are lawyers and economists, essentially, we must have a native digital capability in order to govern. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I do think we all have a duty to explain this to others. It's not just technology, right? What good governance and a good society look like is now inextricably linked to an understanding of the digital. And I think that is a burden that your generation bears to explain that and to bring that into this one institution that is designed to serve not some of us, but all of us. So another way of saying this is not just that government can work for the people, but that government can work, but only if we make it so.
