I wish I could end this with a heroic call-to-action. “Are you with me? Do YOU want to fix our broken government?? Click here to donate now!!” But I can’t. My fellowship year clarified more problems than solutions. Instead, I’ll offer a question: How can we build empathetic government services?
Well, first things first: User needs. An empathetic service would ground itself in the concrete needs of concrete people. It’s not about innovation, big data, government-as-a-platform, transparency, crowd-funding, open data, or civic tech. It’s about people. Learning to prioritize people and their needs will be a long slog. It’s the kind of change that happens slowly, one person at a time. But we should start.
