Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom's January swearing-in is still more than a month away, but his 2013 book about technology — published when cloud was still relatively new, Lyft was about a year old, and open data was viewed with some trepidation — offers several clues as to what the new administration may do on technology.
The work in question, written with author Lisa Dickey, is Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, an examination of how technology was and can be brought to bear on a litany of state and local public-sector issues, from legacy to transparency, open data to equity and empowerment.
While the Newsom administration’s exact attitude toward technology, modernization and public-private partnership remains to be seen, the then-lieutenant governor argued in support of collaborating with citizens and business; using tech to help residents and bureaucrats each do what they do best; and wielding data and information to further reinvent government. Among the takeaways:
• Newsom, a businessman before he went into politics, wasn’t shy about circling in the private sector. In 2004, his first year as San Francisco mayor, he worked with Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, to stand up an in-cloud online presence for Project Homeless Connect, the then-new nonprofit that uses collaborations among city agencies, business and the community to help the homeless. By 2013, the organization’s success had reduced the impact of homelessness on San Francisco's resources and sparked at least 260 similar efforts.
• Open data is “the right thing to do,” Newsom wrote, but he also realized governments “will always err on the side of releasing the minimum amount of data they can get away with.” Newsom saw open data as a way for government to win the public’s confidence. Citing the example of Keyhole’s Earth Viewer, now Google Earth; and Accuweather, enabled by the Reagan-era federal availability of satellite data, he highlighted the “thousands of jobs created” and pointed out: “We paid for that data with our tax dollars.”
• Along with something of a historic reluctance around open data, Newsom quotes Vivek Kundra — the first federal CIO and now COO for social media management startup Sprinklr — on government’s lack of “talent to manage contracts” as a buyer; and the overall absence of a “Darwinian pressure to innovate.” He also takes aim at “breaking the old boys’ network,” a reference to procurement, which he terms “expensive, time consuming and often corrupt.”
• Innovation isn’t always shiny things; sometimes it’s about using existing tech in a different way, the incoming governor writes, a process sparked by collaboration. But, he notes, government “is paralyzed by a fear of failure” and of risk-taking. Conversely, Newsom writes, some tech companies won’t make a hire who “can’t point to at least one great failure.”
“... we do need to take some of the elements of entrepreneurialism — being nimble, networked, innovative, and willing to take risks and make mistakes — and incorporate them into government.”
