Greg Boone

Category: Blog

  • The personal is always political

    A best friend of mine recently came out as trans. I’ve known several trans people in my life but she is definitely the closest.

    It wasn’t my first reaction but as the news sat with me I was taken back to a recent trip to Colorado Springs. We were passing through on our way from the Great Sand Dunes (beautiful) and stopped for a day hike at the Garden of the Gods (also beautiful). It was soon after the Obama Administration directed all public schools to allow transgender access to restrooms and order that will almost certainly be applied unevenly across the 13,506 school districts in the united states.

    I was on my way out of the extremely crowded bathroom when one of the men waiting in line remarked on the female custodial staff cleaning the place. The man next to him said she must be trans because she’s in the men’s room. The cleaning woman said “hey, that’s offensive,” but not for the reason I was hoping. The men then made a joke about sexual assault that really wasn’t worth remembering because the thing is, it wasn’t a joke, it was a belief statement.

    The joke, and all jokes like it, are premised on the idea that there’s One Way to be a human assigned by the sex you’re born with. Anybody who claims to deviate from that One Way is either making it up, or a predator. The only way to make a joke like that is to actually believe it.

    To me, this is a good example of why people are always wrong when they say they want to keep personal issues out of politics. The personal is always political. We live in a society that has more or less operated on a regime of segregating people for more than a hundred years. As Shannon Keating writes in Buzzfeed, we, white cis men, have gotten really good at coming up with reasons to isolate others from any space we deem within our sphere.

    Decades before the “men in dresses will attack vulnerable ladies” ruse would be used to justify anti-trans bathroom discrimination, insinuations that racially desegregating public restrooms would harm white women proved a formidable barrier to achieving civil rights for black Americans. Today’s bugbear of the queer sexual deviant is directly preceded by the profoundly racist assumption, popularized after World War II, that black men would prey on white women should racial parity be established in public restrooms.

    Before that it was workplaces and public libraries segregating women into their own realm so as not to be too distracting to the men trying to do “serious” reading. It was “protecting” women from “the threat of dirt and disease.” Since WWII it has been a range of different takes on the same themes: Women (and I’m going to specify white women) have weaker bodies that need to be protected from unsubstantiated threats in public restrooms. These so-called threats are always based on perceptions of weakness or danger among a marginalized population.

    Those perceptions come from an unwillingness to understand the humanity of these individuals. They persist because we allow them to.

    A large part of why I left my last job was because derogatory comments about trans people were allowed in the workplace. When I complained, nothing changed. My team, 10 white men, one woman, and one person of color, was told to “keep it classy,” and I fear if the message had been anything other than that, more people would have complained about politically correctness taking over the workplace.

    It’s not politically correct to think that Anchorman is an unacceptable standard for workplace decorum in the 21st Century. It’s not politically correct to ask that your public places be welcoming to all. It’s not politically correct to say that if anybody hired to work for your company should be comfortable doing that work without repressing their humanity. It’s not politically correct to say that my friend is the same wonderful person I’ve always known. It’s not politically correct to say she should have the same freedom we all have to use the bathroom in peace. It’s not politically correct to insist we treat her with the dignity and respect with which she was afforded before she came out. It’s simply correct.

    I’m extremely happy for my friend despite being certain she and her family will encounter people like those deplorable humans in the Garden of the Gods bathroom. I’m happy she has committed to fully expressing and performing herself. She has invested the time and emotional energy to deeply understand her humanity, her gender, and her identity.

    It gives me hope, in a world with seemingly little of it sometimes, that she was able to find the resources she has to begin transitioning and performing her whole person. Hope that my generation will raise our children to appreciate the diversity in their world in ways that affirm the dignity of those who currently face real discrimination and persistent threats from all corners of life.

  • On whiteness in tech

    I’m a white, cis, hetero male and I work in tech — sorta. That puts me in a pretty established majority. Last year men accounted for 70% of all employees at Twitter. White folks were 59%. 67% of Facebookers are men. 52% are white. 93% are straight. I don’t know what those numbers are where I work and for complicated bureaucratic reasons I don’t fully understand, it might be a while before I do. That said, 18F is the most diverse team I’ve ever worked on but we are far from perfect.

    This week, Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that it’s diversity hasn’t improved because there aren’t enough qualified people in “the pipeline.” What makes the news that came out of Facebook this week upsetting is that while we have not given up trying to build a diverse team, it appears one of the largest tech companies has. A statement like this is not only false, it’s dangerous. It’s a sign to all the companies smaller than them that this myth is an acceptable reason to give up.

    This is bigger than Facebook. It’s part of a societal problem where minorities are forced, by people in power, to prove themselves worthy of the benefit of the doubt. If you need proof this is the case in tech hiring, read some of the stories being shared by people under the hashtag, #FBNoExcuses. Many of them are mutli-tweet stories and I encourage you to read through all of them.

    I first learned of the article and hashtag when I noticed a tweet from Kaya Thomas, a Code2040 Fellow, who wrote a moving and powerful piece about her experience trying to find a job as a Dartmouth student graduating soon with a degree in computer science. Most salient:

    I thought about all the work I’ve put into to get to where I am today and wondered will it even matter when I start my job search in a few months. According to most tech companies, if I can’t pass an algorithmic challenge or if I’m not a “culture fit” I don’t belong.

    Look up Thomas, on Twitter or her website, and you’ll see she has a resume any recruiter should find impressive, especially for someone who hasn’t yet graduated. Yet:

    There’s really no excuse for behavior like this. I don’t have a computer science degree and my first job in the US was as a software developer. It wasn’t anything like the kind of work being done at Apple, but I was writing the code that powered most of the CFPB’s website — I was one of their contractors. I went into that interview not having a clue what to expect and assuming I wouldn’t get the job because I had so little real programming experience. I’m thankful for the experience but definitely felt like a fraud at times.

    Beyond tech, we see this kind of behavior when the press seemingly justifies the killing of a black man because he had been pulled over a lot or because of the firearm he was legally permitted to carry. When Jamar Clark was killed by Minneapolis police, people who look like me accused me of defending a domestic abuser for saying it was wrong to execute him. Domestic abuse is a terrible thing but it doesn’t not make one eligible for the death penalty, particularly in a state where the death penalty was abolished in 1911.

    We also see it when people who look like me complain about political correctness or get away with micro-aggressive behavior. People who look like me get to walk through life fairly comfortably. People who look like me can say the most heinous, incendiary things and get nominated to run for president. When there’s even a whif of sharing that comfortability, people who look like me get incense. They see it as a personal attack, taking away their freedom of speech.

    What this twisted sect of society that I happen to share some genetic traits with don’t know, and refuse to believe, is the every day lived experiences of minority populations. They refuse to believe that Muslim women in the U.S. are called “ISIS” in public. They refuse to believe that the reason Philando Castile was pulled over so much was more likely because he was black than because he was a bad driver. They refuse to believe that when we say “hey guys” people who don’t identify as “guys” might feel excluded by that language.

    Though I try hard not to, I’m sure that I do the same things men are notorious for in the workplace and in society. Interrupting, offering up the same idea as a non-male co-worker and claiming it as mine, being dismissive of the contributions of my colleagues. I try not to, but I’m sure it happens. I also try to recognize it when it happens and apologize for it when I do. I’m fortunate enough to work at a place with a strong code of conduct, and only hope that our efforts to build a culture where that behavior can be called out have been successful. It’s not enough to try, it’s not enough to apologize; we have to consciously correct ourselves. We have to be different, be better, and change our default settings to make sure everyone can come to work without fear and know their contributions will be appreciated equally by their peers.

    I can’t imagine giving up on that. Shame on Facebook for being OK with this disturbing status quo.

  • Content design and education

    A couple friends of mine work as teachers here in Denver (by the way, we made it to Denver!) and we recently started talking about design in education. One friend told me he proposed some design standards for his fellow teachers. The problem he was trying to solve was relatively simple: Each teacher makes a Moodle site for each class, the designs of those pages vary wildly and result in a mostly confusing education experience for students.

    I’m not a teacher (anymore), but my friend’s school-wide standards idea got me thinking: We do a lot of this kind of thing at 18F. What are some ways our approach to solving design problems might apply in education?

    The problem of design

    Slate’s Dan Kois recently articulated one version of this problem on Slate’s “Mom and Dad are Fighting” podcast. Kois described a “parenting fail” (around the 3:50 mark). His kid missed an assignment because the due date was not in the learning management system but in Google Classroom (and this was, apparently, not obvious). He fired off an angry missive to the teacher. On the show he said his initial reaction was:

    What the fuck is Google Classroom? … [And] why have we gone from homework in one fucking place my kid doesn’t remember to look at to contradictory instructions in two fucking places my kid doesn’t remember to look at?

    Kois admits taking out his frustration on the teacher was wrong — hence the fail.

    In all likelihood part of the problem is that the first system was either a garbage fire of user experience (for the teacher, too, no doubt) or didn’t provide the teacher enough flexibility to organize the assignments. Or both. Needing a more robust platform, they turned to Google Classroom. None of that is the teacher’s fault, but is there something the teacher, or the school, could do to prevent confusion like that? Here are a few steps to take to build learner-centered class webpages.

    1. Talk to students.

    Start with understanding what the students need. Find an opportunity to watch students navigate their daily homework routine and think aloud while they do it. Pay attention to what they’re saying, where they’re making mistakes and strategies they use to correct them. You might even record them. Then design the page for your students.

    This is a classic format for usability studies, and even asking five students can lead to insights that improve the experience for all.

    2. Adopt school- or district-wide standards

    Consistency across common elements like link color, typography, buttons, and information architecture can save a student time and energy by instantly recognizing them across each of their classes. That’s time and energy they now have for being successful. Consistency across the district means less re-learning when they move schools. Plus it makes it easier for teachers new and old to develop new classes without repeating these routine decisions.

    The National Parks have a common standard that lets people instantly recognize and trust park resources, rangers, and informational materials no matter which park they’re at. The same could be done for schools or even districts. Resources like WebAIM and content guides (shameless plug) can help ensure your standards are accessible to all students. Make sure to test these standards with real students, while you’re making them, too.

    3. Design for the student

    Travis Grandy, a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at UMass, recently wrote about ways to improve his syllabus after realizing many of his students weren’t reading it. Grandy’s tips are great and the same basic concepts could apply to a course website or any document given to a student. He redesigned his syllabus because:

    Even with a thorough … syllabus, I still had to respond to the same student questions over and over again, and … I felt my course needed a larger narrative that unified learning outcomes with course requirements, and expectations about the day-to-day work students do in my class.

    After redesigning, he recommends periodically re-checking the designs every once in a while.

    Your class speaks for itself

    Again, I’m not a teacher, but like any artifact, your course website is an expression of your course goals and an expression of you. These are a few tools you can use to figure out how to balance those interests. Kois loves his kid’s school, he says so on his podcast. His frustration rose out of uncertainty over whether his kid was as successful as they could be. It was probably a great assignment, well designed and supported by the teacher’s expertise. Why risk students not being able to complete it properly?

  • The delinquency forbearance

    I have fortunately been able to make on-time repayments for my federal student loans every month since they went into repayment. So, I was only a little confused when I got a letter in the mail from my loan servicer telling me that a “delinquency forbearance” had been placed on my loans.

    It turns out that it is standard practice to put a customer’s loans into forbearance when they request a change in repayment terms. When I called this morning to ask what the forbearance was all about I was told they do this in order to “keep the account current,” while the change is processed.

    Here’s the problem with that. To a borrower, a forbearance might seem like an innocuous month off from paying your loans. Extra money in your pocket for a month is always good, and you changed your repayment presumably to get a lower rate so on the surface it seems like a good deal. It is, until you look up what it actually is and what happens during a forbearance period.

    Not a deferment

    There are two ways of delaying payment on student loans: deferment and forbearance. deferments are used to pause repayments for really specific reasons when it doesn’t make sense for you to be repaying your loans. For example, if you go back to school you can request a deferment on your existing loans. You can request one for up to three years if you are experiencing prolonged unemployment. One awesome part of deferments is that depending on your loan, the government might pay your interest for you. That means if you end up unemployed for three years after you graduate, you can stop payment on your loans and not worry about interest piling up and capitalizing.

    A forbearance is much different.

    With forbearance, you may be able to stop making payments or reduce your monthly payment for up to 12 months. Interest will continue to accrue on your subsidized and unsubsidized loans (including all PLUS loans). – studentaid.ed.gov

    That last sentence is key, and according to the letter I got, not only does it accrue, but if you don’t pay it during the forbearance period, it capitalizes. Let’s say, like the average med student, you have $166,000 in student loan debt after you graduate (your principle) and you ask and are granted forbearance for a year right as your repayment begins. At 7.5% interest, your loan will earn $34.10 in interest every day during that period for a total of $12,446.50 for the year. And if you don’t pay it before the end of the year, it will capitalize – added to the $166,000 principle. So now your post-graduation debt is $178,446.50. This means once you go back into repayment, your payments might be higher than you planned.

    Even if the forbearance period is shorter than a year, it could still be long enough to accrue enough interest to cancel out a monthly payment you already made. When a loan servicer signs its customers up for an automatic forbearance to “keep the account current” while they process repayment requests, they’re signing us up for a whole lot more than a month off of paying our loans.

    On top of all that, the interest rate award for enrolling in autopay is suspended during forbearance, so you will be earning interest at a slightly-higher-than-normal rate. It’s like rubbing salt in the wound.

    Borrower’s have rights

    According to the Department of Education’s materials, the borrower must request a forbearance or deferral. The “automatic” in an automatic forbearance means the servicer is obligated to grant it if the borrow meets the requirements. And that’s the way it should be. If a borrower cannot make payments, these are good options, but that’s a decision the borrower needs to make. A loan servicer should never be able to impose a damaging financial decision on a borrower, and they certainly shouldn’t penalize those who are making good on their payments.

    As for the servicer’s need to keep the account “current,” if stopping payment for a month is truly necessary in order to apply a new payment plan, it should be a deferment, not a forbearance. Having a variety of payment plans is valuable because it gives us options that can meet our current financial needs. Since other methods of adjusting loans aren’t available to federal student loans – refinancing, discharging, etc. – it’s vital that these options be useful and not harmful to borrowers. Penalizing borrowers with capitalized interest is no way to reinforce these as good options.

    Here’s the thing. Student loans are the worst and the system is incredibly opaque. There’s no consumer choice in the matter: I’m stuck with the servicer ED assigned to me. I have no idea if my monthly payment is going back to the Department of Education, my university, or simply lining the coffers of the the servicing company executives. The autopay system is such a disaster that for the first nine months of repayment I went into my account every day to make sure my payment was scheduled, went through, and the next month’s was queued up properly. Sometimes I even double paid accidentally. In a system so thoroughly stacked against the borrower, we don’t need more opportunities to fail.

  • A journey to the UP

    This post is about a trip we took to the UP from Northern Wisconsin.

    Tips:

    1. Day passes for Michigan State Parks are good for unlimited parking in any park for 24 hours. We managed to see 3 in one trip: Gogebic, Porcupine Mountains, and Bond Falls.
    2. There are two campgrounds on the southwest side of Lake Gogebic, the state and the county park. If you have a tent, go to the state park.

    The trip

    In early October back we decided to visit Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, also known as the UP (pronounced ‘yoop’). If you don’t know: Michigan is made up of two peninsulas and the two are connected by the Mackinac Bridge (or, “the bridge”). The upper peninsula is a little larger than Maryland and is about 30% of Michigan’s total size. It is said only trolls live below the bridge. At about 311 thousand residents the UP is technically large enough to become a state, and indeed statehood movements have been around about as long as Michigan has been a state. It even has a state fair – Michigan’s only. For what it’s worth, it would be the third state with representation in Congress with a population smaller than Washington, D.C.

    Gogebic

    Sun streaks through the trees on the Gogebic hiking trail.

    Living in Vilas County we are just a short journey from the border with the UP. The nearest route into the UP is at Land O’ Lakes, WI, and the second is Presque Isle. On our way in from DC we passed through Escanaba but this time we headed north. Our first stop was Lake Gogebic, about an hour from here by way of Presque Isle.

    We arrived about two hours before sunset and camped at Lake Gogebic State Park the first night. We decided to hike before we pitched the tent and, though it meant pitching it at sunset, meant we got to walk the short hiking trail at the park.

    I woke up at sunrise over the opposite side of the lake. Gogebic is a massive body of water located in the heart of the almost-million acre Ottawa National forest and spans 14 miles north to south and 2.5 miles east to west. The water was still with that beautiful appearance of glass I love about lakes in the early morning. The Hungarians call this effect “tükörsima:” As smooth as the surface of a mirror. I really don’t know of a single word in English that captures that appearance.

    Sunrise over Lake Gogebic

    The Porkies

    The next morning we planned to go home but instead packed up the tent and went north on Highway 64 to the Porcupine Mountains State Park, on the south shore of Lake Superior. We had just enough time to get there and hike along the Lake of the Clouds (the overlook hike was captured for Google Street View).

    Greg and Danielle on the Lake of the Clouds hike.

    Lake of the Clouds was amazing. A long lake situated between two ridges in the Porkies. As you walk along the north ridge, you follow the lakeshore from several hundred feet high. At some points you walk right along the cliff face and at others you are immersed in lush, old growth forest. The hike we did was about 2.5 miles out and back, but connected to other trails that could take you hundreds of miles deep into the heart of this impressive expanse of public land.

    Bond Falls

    We drove along the shore on the way back, opting for the slightly longer route along highway 45. For lunch we stopped in a cafe in Ontonagon before heading south to Paulding where we managed to sneak in a hike to Bond Falls before returning to Wisconsin. Unfortunately it was not dark enough to see the legendary light.

    My aunt and uncle have a great story about a family vacation they took to the UP where everybody in the car was hungry and they were lost, trying to find their cabin. When they stopped to ask where the nearest McDonalds was, they were told “probably about 90 miles that way.” Depending on where they’re located the towns seem to be mining, shipping, or agriculture communities. But though the towns are few and far between comes a tremendous amount of public land. About a third of the peninsula is protected making it a dream destination for the particularly outdoorsy. With famous places like the Pictured Rocks, Sleeping Bear Dunes, and Sault Ste. Marie, places like Bond Falls, the Porkies or Gogebic might often go overlooked. If you have time to take the journey leisurely, though, little places like these are well worth the trip.

  • Leaflet and Stamen on the blog

    I changed the tagline of my blog to “Nomad public servant, learning out loud” when we moved out of DC. In addition to writing about the different places we’ve visited, I also end up writing a lot of these posts from places other than where we live. So over Thanksgiving weekend I decided it was time I learned how to do some mapping work. The last time I tried to map something, it was about six years ago, in Google Maps, and I had no idea what I was doing.

    I ended up with a giant, hand-crafted JSON file that got loaded to create markers for the map. It was also completely separate from any real data. It was just a big list of places and descriptions. While it looked cool, it also only loaded on Firefox (puzzlingly) and all other browsers got a blank beige placeholder.

    I also tried to link location data to blog posts in WordPress once upon a time. I think if I did either of those again I’d probably do them differently, and it would probably look more like how I did it with this blog.

    How it works

    Each blog post has a loc field in the frontmatter. This post has loc: st-germain. Then I created an include to create a map placeholder and a Liquid filter that cross-references that value against a file at _data/locations.yml to get the latitude and longitude. The location data is added to the dataset on the div. It looks like this:

    Then I have some really simple javascript that picks up the dataset and produces a map. There’s also a page showing all the locations as markers. For that piece I added a JSON dump of the _data/locations.yml into a script tag and load it with JSON.parse(document.getElementById('map-data').innerHTML);, then iterate over the values.

    What I used

    I used Jekyll’s data directory to keep the location data. I could probably geocode these values, too, and that would take the manual work out of figuring out where these places are, but I decided since there’s only a handful right now it was easier to look them up.

    Leaflet powers the map itself based on OpenStreetMap data. It’s pretty straightforward to configure and comes with some smart defaults. I used Stamen’s Toner Lite tiles for the base layer. I wanted to go with the Terrain tiles but lack of international coverage mean I couldn’t map some of the places without some exta work. Regardless, it’s really great that Stamen offer these excellent tiles for free, and that Leaflet is open source. The only trick with loading the tiles was figuring out how to do it over HTTPS, after some googling, I ended up adding the tile layer like this:

    var Toner = L.tileLayer('https://stamen-tiles-{s}.a.ssl.fastly.net/toner-lite/{z}/{x}/{y}.{
  ext}', {
    attribution: 'Map tiles by <a href="http://stamen.com">Stamen Design</a>,
   under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0">CC BY 3.0</a>.
   Data by <a href="http://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a>, under <a
   href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">ODbL</a>.',
    minZoom: 0,
    maxZoom: 20,
    ext: 'png'
});

    Figuring things out from there was pretty easy thanks to Leaflet’s clear documentation. I also used underscore but not as much as planned and could probably rewrite the JS to work without the extra dependency.

    What’s next?

    I hope to keep finding things to map in the blog. Sometimes I write about places after we visit and there are a few places we visited this year that I haven’t written about yet. Hopefully I can do the writing and find a way to capture those locations on the main map. Maybe with a different color marker? Maybe with route lines leading from where the post was written to where the post is about? It was a lot of fun figuring this out and I’m excited to learn more about what leaflet can do.

  • Jamar

    On November 16, 2015 Minneapolis became the latest city to witness a black person shot dead by police. His name was Jamar Clark, he was 24 years old and unarmed.

    The shooting sparked a protest that ultimately shut down I-94 for a short stretch. I wrote on Facebook the morning after that I was proud of my friends in Minneapolis who stood up for justice that night. While it turns out I didn’t know anybody on I-94 that night, I remain proud of every Minneapolitan who has gone to one of those protests, donated to a legal defense fund, or in any way stood up for justice in their community.

    A black lives matter protest in Minneapolis
    Photo: Fibonacci Blue

    It’s easy to look at that protest and say: “That’s dangerous,” or “think of the people who didn’t get home on time,” or speculate about what might have happened because a small stretch of I-94 was shut down for a couple hours. It’s easy to feel inconvenienced by traffic jams.

    If that traffic jam were caused by people holding signs that said “Traffic Jams Matter” and they weren’t protesting abysmal road conditions, I might agree with folks who criticized the protesters. But those signs didn’t read “Traffic Jams Matter,” they read “Black Lives Matter,” and the brave souls camping at the 4th Precinct every night aren’t holding signs that read “Entrances to Buildings Matter,” their’s, too, read “Black Lives Matter.”

    Just the basic fact that a member of the public was killed by their government should cause alarm. Police killing people should be rare, even rarer should be questions about whether the killing was necessary. But at 873 people shot dead by police this year, it’s anything but rare.

    So far a plurality (45%) of those 873 were people of color (a majority if you include the 63 where race of the victim was “unknown”). 30 were unarmed and black. At least 72 were shot dead by police in November – nearly 2.5 per day. There have been 11 since November 16 when Jamar Clark was shot dead in a Minneapolis house. The accounts of these shootings are a depressing read because either the person killed was horrifically violent or because they might have been innocent.

    It’s easy to cherry pick the most heinous stories out of the list of nearly 900. It’s harder for anybody who wasn’t there to know whether the shooting was justified. I think most people can agree that shooting a suspect dead should be the solution of last resort.

    Jamar Clark got into a “physical altercation” with police but was unarmed and witnesses say he was not resisting arrest. Some accounts say he was in handcuffs. The NAACP said he was murdered “execution style.”

    Police say he disarmed an officer. Even if that’s true it is difficult for me to imagine how ending his life was the only option available to the officers.

    Situations like these always provoke a lot of questions in my head: If he truly disarmed an officer, are police officers not trained in disarming suspects? If they are, why didn’t they? Otherwise, why aren’t they? Did he need to be shot in the head to neutralize the threat? If the police shot him in the leg would he still be alive? Would he get due process and a fair trial? The last question we will never get an answer to because, like so many others, Jamar Clark is dead. And dead people can’t answer questions.

    Police are supposed to protect and serve the public. The police in this case appeared to be protecting and serving the paramedic on site and the person who needed medical attention but once they killed Jamar Clark, they were also protecting and serving prejudices embedded in our criminal justice system. Prejudices that manifest themselves in the form of disproportionate numbers of black people being incarcerated. While nationally the incarceration rate is an already-too-high 732 per 100,000 residents, the rate among blacks is 2,207 per 100,000 the rate climbs to nearly 9% for black people around my age. Among Latinos it’s nearly 1,000 per 100,000. Add them together, you get nearly 3,173 per 100,000 black or Latino residents of the United States of America behind bars. Among whites, it’s 380 per 100,000.

    When we live in a society in which people with black skin are unfairly targeted and mistreated by the criminal justice system and people should protest. When protesters tell Mayor Betsy Hodges that “we’re working on it,” isn’t enough, or scoff at her attempt to reword their questions for them, this is what they mean. We need leaders at every level of government and in every community who believe that this isn’t right.

    We need leaders who say “Black Lives Matter.” We need them to, when a black person is shot dead by police, say that taking the life of an individual takes life out of the community. We need them to say that 900 people shot dead by police in one year is unacceptable. It’s unbelievable to think we live in a country that violent, and unacceptable if we truly do.

    I’m proud of the Minneapolitans who this week said, “it doesn’t have to be this way,” or knows that this is about far more than releasing the tapes. This is about demanding justice for a young black person shot dead by police, and justice for a community wronged on a daily basis by the criminal justice system.

  • Service design in the schools

    My mother in-law was a PE and special ed teacher for about 30 years and during most of that time she was also a swimming coach in Sun Prairie, both within the school system and for local club teams. Since living in her house in Northern Wisconsin, I’ve been able to watch her process results after swim meets. She would typically come home from a meet with a bunch of paper and she was using a special computer to do something with all that paper, so I asked what that was. Boy, was the answer long and complicated.

    Dubuque, IA is about 2 hours from her house outside of Madison and we spent almost the entire trip talking about swim data. It turns out the problem involves two competing technologies, “Colorado” and “IST.” One set of software ran the touch pads used for timing swimmers and data passed to the other which ran the scoreboards after passing through a piece of software called Meet Manager. Adoption of that software is inconsistent and some teams apparently keep track by hand. On paper. In pools.

    Every weekend my mother in-law copied the meet results from her school’s copy of Meet Manager into an email she sent to a local newspaper reporter. I estimate she’s spending about three hours total pulling out these data to compose this weekly email.

    I asked more questions: Can you export the meet data? What format do you get? Are you able to open it in an application like Excel or is the file a jumble of mangled text? How do teams share information and keep track of standings? How do students keep track of own their stats? Why hasn’t anybody built a better system?

    The answers to these questions were encouraging, except for the last one. That answer was: “Because nobody cares.” High school swimming programs are small. The largest teams have a few dozen swimmers and a couple coaches and administration is largely decentralized and focused on more popular sports. While it’s not perfect, this system works and is mostly painless for the coaches, so the impact value might be low relative to available resources.

    “Works” is a bit of an overstatement. If you’re an athlete, the only people with a record of your progress is you and your coach. If something happens to the Meet Manager computer or the printed-off records, it could mean an entire season’s records are lost. For my mother in-law that means manually backing up the data on her old, personal, iMac. So even if it’s low impact relative to the size of the budgets, there are only upshots to keeping better records: The coaches get easier management, student access could be self service, and the district’s athletics program gets an accurate, accessible record of their entire history.

    Who’s going to build it?

    Here’s an idea: turn your school’s computer club or computer science courses into a service design program. Spend a week or two trying to figure out the problem. Use open source research and design methods to figure out together what the biggest solvable problem is, and spend the rest of the term building, testing, and iterating. At the end of each week the students present their progress, and at the end of the semester you have a working minimum viable product.

    A few weeks ago I tweeted:

    And the responses were mixed. CFPB’s Adam Scott has done something like this, but many who responded thought it was a good idea that might never come to pass.

    A lot of people are talking about teaching kids how to code. I don’t see a lot of people talking about teaching kids how to be on a design team and there’s a big difference.

  • College Scorecard: The value of data in higher ed

    A few weeks ago the Department of Education released a trove of data about colleges and universities around the country. The site itself does a pretty great job of showing some high level information about how much a school costs and a few statistics about retention, graduation rates, and financial success after leaving.

    Earlier this week NY Times columnist James Stewart wrote the latest hit piece on the project with a familiar refrain.

    While Scorecard adds potentially valuable information to the dizzying array that is already available, it suffers from many of the same flaws that afflict nearly every other college ranking system: There is no way to know what, if any, impact a particular college has on its graduates’ earnings, or life for that matter.

    That’s a fair critique. Other critics have called it “absurd,” and “a classic example of confusing causation and correlation.” But they’re missing the point.

    There probably is some desire for a tool that will give one clear answer about what school to attend. That’s probably what some of the commercial rankings, like US News and World Report, are trying to do, but that’s not what Scorecard or the CFPB’s Paying for College tool are about. As Stewart says, “pay, of course, says nothing about the relative quality of different colleges.”

    What’s valuable about the college scorecard is the magnitude and openness of data provided. This is a research tool, not a ranking system, and with greater access to research tools, students might be able to make better decisions as consumers.

    The New York Times, for example, found major gaps in male and female graduate earnings at prominent universities. They found that female MIT grads experience a $58,100 gap in earnings compared to males; “women who enrolled at Harvard are making as much as men who enrolled at Tufts.”

    A woman might rank MIT lower on her list with this knowledge. Or, maybe not. Despite the gap women from MIT still make more than grads from most of its competitors. Dismissing pay data misses the point that at some point every graduate, man or woman, privileged or not, has to pay for their education.

    It’s also been interesting to see and think about how other people use these data. Journalists have drawn some tremendous insights out of these data already. But what if a high school computer science class took on a project of figuring out which schools are a “best fit” for students from their area? Based purely on financial aid and income data you should be able to make a good guess at how much debt a Minneapolis public school graduate should have after attending nearby colleges and universities. Building a small application out of a public data API seems like the start of a good lesson.

    What about colleges? Scorecard’s diversity numbers tell a huge story. 25% of students at my alma matter receive a Pell Grant. 83% of the student body is white. My college has struggled to attract a more diverse student body, on just about every level, for a long time.

    If college deans of students can identify areas where minority students are being underserved, these data can expose where student resources maybe should be increased. Maybe MIT should strengthen their career services and do a better job preparing women for salary negotiations. Maybe the history and women studies programs should get more attention so more students can study the historical roots of this problem.

    All too often, though, students are bizarrely not considered a college’s primary user base. Presidents of universities typically listen to alumni and foundation donors over students about how the college is doing and what its priorities should be. With these data, though, a student body representative or college president could go to the board and say: We know that more than half of our graduates could be earning far more than they are, we need to increase student services, academic services, and design programs that put students first or we risk a donor base that can’t support us in the future.

    Colleges around the country are talking about data driven decision making. Often that turns into prioritizing support for academic programs based on enrollment. Or finding data about donors to inform where to move money. Maybe with these data plus all the data these schools are already generating and not sharing we can see smarter, more student-focused decisions.

  • Autumn in lake country

    The colors are starting to change on the trees already. Not everybody knows this but some pine trees drop their needles, too. In fact, according to my cursory research most do drop their needles somewhat regularly. Danielle has a great story from one of her college professors, a noted tree expert in Minnesota, who got a frantic call from someone who was worried her pine tree was dying because it dropped its needles. By the time he could get in touch to say that no, this is a normal thing white pines do almost every year, she had already cut it down.

    We’re basically in prime white pine territory and all the trees have a autumnal mix of green and brown needles. The biking and hiking trails are already beginning to accumulate needles and within a few weeks, I’m sure, they will be covered with that beautiful mix of brown, golden, red, and yellow.

    A white pine with its limbs stripped on one side

    My bike needs new brakes, not the pads but the actual cantilevers that squeeze the wheel. They’re supposed to pull evenly on both sides but the internals of the hardware on mine rusted through and it only pulls on the left side and I think it’s putting my wheel out of true. So in lieu of biking I’ve been trying to go for long walks every day. On Tuesday I took a familiar route to one I’ve been riding, along the bike trail that follows County C up toward Sayner. Only this time I took a left at the sign for the Plum Creek Public Fishing Grounds.

    I thought maybe there’d be a trail following the creek but if there was one I couldn’t find it. About half a mile after turning off of C the road turns dirt and stretches seemingly forever northward, uninhabited except for a large house tucked maybe a mile and a half down the road and some kind of machine shed in the backyard. Eventually Plum Creek Avenue turns east and meets back with the bike trail.

    A grove of birch trees

    I’m not the fastest biker but I normally ride this three mile stretch about 11 miles an hour faster than I walked it and it’s pretty incredible to take in this kind of nature when you’re moving more slowly. You notice things. Like how the white pines seem to turn color from the bottom up and from the outside in; the pine cones seem to emerge as the needles disappear. Like the yellow to green cascade produced when the sunset hits a stand of birch trees. Or the undergrowth visible beneath a stand of pines.

    Forests are such complex systems. After a long day of working for the government, arguably one of the more complex systems humans have ever created, it’s humbling and therapeutic to observe such a magnificent system living beyond our control. The forest will never stop – unless, of course, we stop it.

    This week I’m grateful for forests, public land, and conservation.

    Sunset on plum creek

  • One Year of 18F

    A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with some amazing public servants working for Minnesota’s Hennepin County government. I talked a little about 18F but most of our time was spent learning about the work they were doing for the public and taxpayers they served. One program that stuck out as particularly interesting was presented by someone from public works who showed the results of a program designed to help consumers make decisions based on whether businesses recycle, compost, or donate unused food to local shelters or farms. This project included an iconathon with the Noun Project “focused on developing badges of honor that reward local businesses for participating in recycling programs.”

    Why start a reflection on my first year at 18F with a story about local government? Because, much like the agencies we work with, this county has a crew of public servants doing great work for the people without something like 18F being involved. They are starting to create a “Center for Innovation and Excellence,” it will be interesting to watch that program develop.

    I came to 18F after about a year and a half as a contractor at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). There I was lucky to work with a team of brilliant, talented designers and technologists who were all moving the agency forward with the American consumer in mind first. There was a certain imperialism to working as a contractor and I hoped that going to 18F would help me feel more mission-driven, and closer to the goal of making government that is responsive and accountable to the public. One thing I’ve really homed in on over the last year is service. We talk about service a lot at 18F. Maybe more than any single other thing, and not in terms of availability of an application or database “service” (though we do talk about that) but in terms of our roles as public servants.

    I think a lot about Pedagogy of the Opressed when I think about 18F. Not because the agencies we work for are oppressed in any sense, but for the lessons it contains for helping, listening, and teaching. We work in service to other agencies and to that end, we’re all in this public service game together. It’s rare that we come into a problem somebody hasn’t thought about before. It’s less rare, but still kind of rare, that we encounter one somebody doesn’t already have a solution for. The rarest of all: A problem nobody has tried to solve before. Like the teacher to Friere’s students, we have an opportunity for cooperation, collaboration, and unity when we start working with an agency. Find the people that already have insight and wisdom about their own situation, empower them, and help them realize their vision: The best work we do starts here.

    That mentality seeps into every decision we make. How do we help Interior design a program to get every 4th grader on national lands? We design it so that 4th graders can use it. How do we help people immigrate to the United States? We could build a wall. Or we could build the process around the needs, education, and goals of people trying to do it. How do we help build trust with the public interacting with government services? By providing an easy way for agencies to see how they meeting best practices like HTTPS on the web. Some of these are big projects, some smaller, but all of them help the agency we’re serving achieve their goals by engaging the public more directly and effectively.

    The truth of the matter is: The bright future is one where we don’t need 18F to do all that but as long as we do, we’re glad to be here serving.

  • Escanaba

    On August 6 we left DC. I’m still reflecting on my feelings about leaving Dream City (A.K.A. the Federal City; A.K.A Chocolate City; A.K.A. The American Rome; A.K.A. The District; A.K.A. New Columbia) and hope to solidify those soon. We didn’t leave because it was too expensive, or because we both “made it” and moved up and out, or because it was inevitable, or any of the other clichés about why people leave. While the cost of rent was a factor, the bittersweet exit from the city wasn’t driven by any of those things. In many ways, we felt like we were leaving just as we were falling in love with the place.

    Instead we left for adventure.

    Mackinac bridge: adventure begins up north

    That adventure will take us eventually to Denver but it began with a roadtrip that took us to beautiful Escanaba, MI. One of two cities on Little Bay de Noc and the third largest on Michgan’s Upper Peninsula (the U.P. or the Yoop). Escanaba is home to about 12 thousand Michiganders (sometimes known as Yoopers in the U.P.). The bay opens into Lake Michigan’s Green Bay and Door County, WI (the actual City of Green Bay is in the southernmost pocket of the eponymous bay). One fascinating thing about this great lake city was how calm the water was and how much land was visible looking straight out of the shore, another was its historic role in American industry and trade.

    panoramic view of lake michigan from escanaba

    The incredible thing about cities like Duluth or Two Harbors is how the lake stretches outward endlessly the way an ocean or a sea might. On Little Bay de Noc, though, that was true only when looking due south. The vastness of the lake was masked by the islands and opposite shore of this narrow bay. It turns out these physical features helped make it an important port on the Great Lakes. The harbor in Escanaba is deep enough to bring in the lakers that carried iron ore, copper, and lumber across the country. Those good were put on ships at Escanaba for the Union by railroad during the Civil War. And before more efficient shipping methods were invented, delicacies like seafood were imported through Escanaba and put on rail or truck into larger cities to the south. That navigation made possible in part by the Sand Point Lighthouse.

    Sand Point Lighthouse: It stood on rocky (or in this case sandy) shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free.

    Escanaba’s largest employer today is the sawmill operated by NewPage, a specialty paper company with operations in many states and while the town was sleepy there is always a feeling of opportunity I experience whenever I go to these Great Lake cities. Maybe it’s the nature: the massive body of water, towering forests and hilly landscape. Maybe it’s the mining, shipping, and industry that ties them together across miles of water. Even though they feel trapped in time, there’s something inspiring about what might be in store for the future. Like many of it’s peer cities, the population has been declining since the 70s and people migrated to bigger cities and warmer climates.

    Cities like this were built up around increasingly automated industries and access to waterways. It’s likely natural resource mining, processing, and shipping will always keep a small population employed, but is it possible the new so-called “knowledge economy” will help bring new industries into these northern cities? There’s an old theater in Escanaba perfect for an entrepreneur looking for a large space to build a co-working space and innovation lab – an excellent opportunity for public-private partnerships with the local school district and community college, as well as important civic hacking worth that might not otherwise get done. Are low property values and distributed workforces to the early 21st century what iron and copper were to the late 19th?

    Who knows, I could be just a city slicker millennial who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

    Sailboats headed south into Green Bay