Citizens Are Product Stakeholders

Over the past several years, many problems have started to bubble up at the federal level due to design flaws with our system of government. Some issues were on full display the last couple months, culminating in challenges within Congress, protests on the streets, and, ultimately, chaos and riots at the Capitol. After so many years of living within this same system, we are almost trained to immediately discount its flaws - these bugs in the system - and accept their inclusion as a cost of doing business. We give up rights in exchange for convenience and feelings of safety. We ignore the fact that only a small percentage of our requirements are being met. We don't have to though.

The truth is the citizen experience we are receiving is not very good in relation to the cost, particularly when you consider that the average person is investing 20-40% (sometimes less, sometimes more) of their income to build the product. Let’s be honest. The ROI is horrible. We need to figure out ways to build this more efficiently. We need to increase our standards - our acceptance criteria - for signing off on new features that are being developed and released. We need to demand more from our representatives - those we pay to manage the build of the product - the Citizen Product Owners - linking their incentives to the quality of the product they deliver. We are all stakeholders for this product - our community. We are shareholders with what should be an equal vote for hiring the product managers or owners that lead the build. We will get whatever product we are willing to accept.

We point to reasons why the flaws exist as excuses for not making changes, while failing to acknowledge that those reasons were just product requirements provided by previous stakeholders, and this solution — our system of government — was simply an interpretation of those requirements given the knowledge of only a handful of men — probably the least diverse group imaginable — from a handful of states — not even all the states at the time — with an understanding of technologies and capabilities that was limited to what was available for consideration in the late 1700s. That does not mean we cannot still meet those requirements while changing the way we operate, should they even be requirements from stakeholders today. When technologies are created to improve operations, we need to retrofit protocols, operating models, and organizational structures to maximize the utility and impact of the updated system components. We need to use technology to create a better system - a system that optimizes freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. The system is meant to be agile and ever evolving rather than static and stuck in the past. It is meant to serve us that are living today, not those who died many years ago.

Below are just a few issues that are currently surfacing at the federal level. These surface cracks are the sign of major issues with our foundation. We need to start looking carefully at the root causes. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and I will dive into each of these problem areas — and more — in future articles.

• Federal laws are inconsistently applied and enforced within sub-communities
• Citizen or voter records are out-of-date
• Citizen or voter IDs are maintained in many databases and have been widely exposed to hackers
• Voters in shared federal elections are participating under different sets of rules and standards
• Votes in shared federal elections are weighted differently for various citizens, thereby diluting their value
• Different technologies and systems, which are not transparent, compatible, or trusted by the public, are being used to manage a shared federal election
• Rules are created that are not equally applied to all citizens, leading to a constant influx of new rules to fill gaps, thereby creating confusion and chaos
• Policies and laws are severely lacking around technology, leaving the rights of citizens unprotected
• Program, project, and policy inceptions and implementations are slow, costly, and often unsuccessful because all involved parties are working in silos rather than operating in unison towards a common vision
• Incentives for elected representatives are misaligned with the needs of citizens
• Our census is costly, inefficient, and likely inaccurate because it only requests unnecessary data points that people are uncomfortable sharing due to their use for segmentation and discrimination
• Shareholders - voters - hold different levels of stock in the community, and only those with the highest amount of money are having their voices heard

How can we start to address these problems? We can start by accounting for the same requirements that our founding fathers had when initiating this system of government, verifying whether they are still requirements, acknowledging and agreeing on the aforementioned issues (and others), gathering new requirements, and then re-architecting this democratic system of government to use trusted, modern technologies that automate operations, re-align incentives around the needs of the citizen, spread out shares, and deliver highly personalized citizen experiences with elite services at a fraction of the cost.

In a series of follow-on articles, we will dive into Government as a Service (GaaS) and then start examining new frameworks for building an open source citizen engagement system, including an operating model for hiring and managing Citizen Product Owners & Officers (CPOs).