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How to make a great government website

Do lots of user research, travel to every county in California, iterate constantly, and troubleshoot on Reddit. And maybe take Political Economy of Industrial Societies 100.

Pamela Herd, an academic, alongside Don Moynihan, has done some great work on administrative burdens — if I’m not mistaken, part of how she got really interested in this research area was she was helping a family member or friend apply for disability or something like that. If you think of the far north, like Mendocino County, there are implications even for what online service delivery actually means, because for a lot of people, that’s their primary channel of contacting an agency or accessing benefits. I actually quit my job at one point, moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because it was affordable to live, and brought myself back up to speed on modern programming, and then built a bunch of stuff in the civic arena.

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