Combination of keynotes, fireside chats, and panel discussions

• Welcoming remarks
  Amanda Renteria, Chief Executive Officer, Code for America
• Why states care more about customer experience than ever before
  Amaya Capellán, Chief Information Officer, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
  Tonya Webster, NYS Chief Customer Experience Officer, Office of Governor Kathy Hochul – NYS Executive Chamber
  Tarek Tomes, State of Minnesota Chief Information Officer and Minnesota IT Services Commissioner, State of Minnesota or Minnesota IT Services
  Christan Johnson, Director of State Partnerships, Tech Talent Project
• Breaking barriers by building accessible digital services
  Cassie Winters, Policy Analyst/Digital Accessibility Policy Lead, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President of the United States
• Exploring AI insights across civic tech
  Justin Brown, Chief Executive Officer, Former OK Secretary of Human Services, Center for Public Sector AI
  Traci Walker, Executive Director, Digital Services Coalition (DSC)
  Jonathan Porat, State Chief Technology Officer, State of California
  Sanmi Koyejo, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
  Andreen Soley, Director, Public Interest Technology, New America
• The need to drive uptake of government services through human-centered marketing and communication
  Katie Fiore, Director, Communication + Engagement Lab, State of New Jersey Office of Innovation
• Unraveling the threads of algorithmic influence: A fireside chat with Dr. Safiya Noble
  Dr. Safiya Noble, Professor and Author, Algorithms of Oppression
  Khari Johnson, Tech Reporter, CalMatters

• Code for America Innovator Awards

Do you have a customer experience-related question or project that could use a second pair of eyes? Are you working to improve a government service, website, or process? We’ve got you covered! Our team of qualitative researchers, data scientists, designers, and client success advocates are eager to help. Walk in, sign up, and enjoy a 15-minute session with Code for America’s talented experience team members.

Government services work best for people when they're involved in their design, but not all participatory processes are created equally. What does the practice of deep, authentic participation actually look like in a digital services environment, and how do we evolve our research processes towards this end? In this interactive session, three members of Coforma’s research leadership team will introduce a selection of road-tested principles for integrating culturally-inclusive, community-based participatory research to drive and hone the creation of digital technologies and services. Drawing on the collective wisdom in the room, attendees will have opportunities throughout the session to identify and discuss concrete ways they both do and could apply these principles to their current project environments. The session will culminate in a collection of the resources, experiences, and ideas shared by the group, which will be distributed to session attendees after the conference as a living document.

People Power + Community

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw soaring demand for GetCalFresh, our digital application assister for California's version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). With more applications came more client requests for help, and with a small client success team at the time, Code for America needed a solution that could ensure all clients received responses in a timely manner. We built a chatbot that could handle common, simple client questions and direct them to relevant resources. Considering the sensitive nature of our clients' needs, we developed an empathetic, human-centered chatbot. Join us as we share lessons learned as we iterated on the chatbot with careful large language model implementation.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

In an ideal world, legislation comes after deep exploration of needs and circumstances. In reality, this is often not possible for a variety of reasons. Last winter, the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration (BHA) was faced with an upcoming legislative mandate to establish a tool for providers to track and report their care capacity. The BHA contracted Bloom Works to conduct user-centered research to inform the best way toward legislative compliance. This research revealed that capacity tracking alone may not actually be what was most needed at the present moment, and had the potential to damage already fraught relationships in the behavioral health space. But the legislative mandate persisted, with many stakeholders hanging their hopes on the proposed tool. This session will discuss how the team navigated well-intentioned legislation that was found to be at odds with user needs, ultimately landing on a solution that balanced user needs with legislative requirements.

Policy + Administration

Come hear an interesting story about how we're changing things for almost 100,000 students in Florida. We'll highlight the strategic collaboration between the Pinellas County School District and Fearless. We're shedding light on a journey that began as a technical project but has gone far beyond software. We'll explain how we connected and redirected more than 100 computer programs. And show you how we stopped doing things by hand, made sure everyone could use good data easily, and kept everything running smoothly. All of this is making school better for students, parents, teachers, and school staff.

Service Design + Delivery

One of the most efficient ways to quickly build useful solutions for government is with low-code and no-code tools. They are inexpensive, and only require an understanding of your workflow and a willingness to learn. Many of them look a lot like spreadsheets! U.S. Digital Response partners have learned to extend their projects on their own and even build their own tools. It doesn’t take a background in technology, just subject matter expertise, a workflow that you need to automate, and willingness to learn. USDR government partners will talk about their experience with low-code tools, and then will work with participants to build a low-code tool, even if they think they’re not “technical.” Optional: Bring your laptop to participate in the hands-on portion of this session. An online guide will also be available if you'd like to observe and try the exercise after the session.

Service Design + Delivery

A strong data culture is a necessary foundation for building a digital age that works for all. Being a data-informed or data-driven agency starts with data culture. The State of Connecticut’s evaluation and impact team has been knitting together a data culture through capacity-building workshops for state service colleagues. By engaging data people across state government, focused initially on our American Rescue Plan Act funded projects, this team is building a foundation for a digital age where evidence and evaluation matter. Data capacity building is necessary for all general government and social sector work. In this workshop, the Connecticut evaluation and impact team will share their experience building a data culture and strengthening data literacy. Participants can expect to learn about strategies for creating learning agendas, auditing their existing data, establishing strong data governance, preparing for data storytelling, and strategizing around continuous quality improvement of their data and processes.

Policy + Administration

From generating real-time translations of public meetings to predicting traffic patterns for improved bus routes, AI tools have the potential to make government services more responsive, effective, and accessible to all. Learn more about how cities are engaging their communities, colleagues, and other cross-governmental stakeholders around this important policy area. This session will serve as a dynamic forum for discussion about the opportunities and risks of local government AI use, and serve as an example of how local governments can work towards more collaborative and participatory policy-making. 

Emerging Technology + Innovation

Multiple short-form presentations grouped together into a single session

• The Resilient Families Hub: A new federal initiative to harness the lessons of direct cash
  Pete Subkoviak, Executive Director, The Resilient Families Hub, Administration for Children and Families
• Unlocking opportunity for incarcerated learners
  Jessica Hicklin, CTO, Unlocked Labs
• Human-centered design is for everyone
  Colin Panetta, Director of UX/UI, Last Call Media
• Vote.gov and the executive order to promote access to voting
  Patty Costello, PhD, Principal User Experience Researcher, Bixal
• Applying AI to public correspondence
  Aditya Maheshwari, Data Scientist, Government of Canada
  
• How to improve software when you don’t build software
  Michael Drummond, Director for Permitting and Innovation, White House Council on Environmental Quality
• Rebuilding weather.gov for when every word and every minute matters
  Shad Keene, Office of Dissemination Cloud Program Manager, National Weather Service

Everyone in civic tech is asking how to deliver equity—we’re here to help. The equity delivery team at the U.S. Digital Service is assembling a suite of tools civic technologists can use to generate equitable processes and outcomes for the American public. In this session, we’ll preview the USDS Equity Toolkit, walk through how to apply these tools across an agile product lifecycle, and lead a collaborative exercise using the Toolkit to help you identify high-impact ways of building equity through your own public sector projects.

Service Design + Delivery

Last year, Shelby County, TN decided to try a new approach to address the ongoing challenge of youth who have become disconnected from education and employment opportunities. Working with Code for America and local community-based organizations, they oversaw a project where 12 local young adults researched the experiences of disconnected youth (ages 16 to 24) and recommended ways to reach them. In this session, team members from Shelby County, the Memphis community, and Code for America will share the ins-and-outs of setting up and running this type of community-led government collaboration to empower the people most impacted by a problem to help design solutions.

People Power + Community

With artificial intelligence technologies already being used in government, our role is to make sure they are used responsibly, ethically, and in the right places. There are lots of frameworks which outline the principles of ethical AI, but these are often theoretical, leaving those working in and with government without practical lessons to apply to their own work. In this session, we will work through actionable principles for using AI in government in an ethical way, using a hands-on, scenario-based approach.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has launched a unique pilot to discover how its workforce can benefit from using generative AI. While the focus on generative AI is often on chatbots and AI-powered applications, it is essential to also understand where our employees see opportunities to apply these tools in their day-to-day work. The pilot gives a limited number of employees across a range of job functions access to ChatGPT Enterprise. This presentation will focus on the initial results from the first phase of the pilot with employees in the Office of Administration. We will also discuss the pilot justification, governance, implementation, and future steps.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

In civic tech, teams often grapple with how to do—and who should do—research. Cue calls to “democratize” research: to better serve the public by making research more accessible and involving people with various backgrounds. This talk will explore the challenges and questions around democratization. We’ll ask what research is and how it differs from feedback or community engagement, talk about who gets to participate in research, and how, and discuss the unique skills researchers bring to projects and the risks involved in opening up research to a range of people. This session is a call to think carefully about how we democratize research. How can we expand the number and types of people involved in research, while ensuring research delivers actionable and careful insights? How can we collaboratively leverage unique skill sets and lived experiences in research without causing risks to organizations?

People Power + Community

AI and its relationship to government technology has been a hot topic among public interest technologists recently, and the field is starting to dive into how we might explore its use responsibly. Benefits Data Trust and Nava Public Benefit Corporation are partnering on a pilot that leverages both predictive and generative AI models to provide customized recommendations that guide likely eligible clients through the public benefits and human services identification and application process—essentially serving as a benefits eligibility and informational and referral expert in their pocket. Join speakers from Benefits Data Trust, Nava, and Cornell University for a candid conversation about what they’re learning, including ethical questions that arise when using AI in the safety net context.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

While advancements in civic technology and human-centered innovations have helped local governments deliver better results, progress in public procurement is very uneven. Many local governments are still using opaque, compliance-driven, sometimes even paper-based systems and outdated technology, leading to major inefficiencies, ongoing frustration, and worse outcomes for the public. Increasingly, however, government innovators are seeking digital, user-friendly, integrated procurement systems that enable better decision-making. In this session, you will hear from three government heroes who are using the superpower of procurement data and digitization to align their cities' spending and services with their values and visions of more equitable communities.  In this session hosted by Open Contracting Partnership, learn how local governments are improving procurement data, building and integrating procurement products with budget, payment, and vendor registration platforms, and aligning policies and processes for better government decision-making and spending.

Policy + Administration

Product management is a growing discipline in government tech—and it operates differently from how it works in the private sector. But what about across different levels of government? In this panel, product practitioners from different levels of government representing various missions and solution types will share insights and approaches from the world of product management in government digital services and products. We'll cover topics like: Which product management concepts translate from private to public—and which don't? What product management competencies are unique to government? What does product management look like at the local, state, and federal levels? Where do we go next with product management in government, and how can we use it effectively to manage a changing tech landscape?

Service Design + Delivery

Join us for a session with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), General Services Administration (GSA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to learn about challenges and opportunities in overseeing digital experience for the federal government. OMB’s recent policy memorandum M-23-22 sets a bold vision for a simple, seamless, and secure digital government. But with nearly two billion monthly website visits, operated by hundreds of agencies and subagencies, how can the government assess progress towards this vision? This session discusses how data-based oversight can help drive lasting change for a digital-first public experience.

Policy + Administration

The current NYC.gov experience was built 10 years ago and is modeled around the structure of government rather than residents’ needs. The NYC Digital Service team has been redesigning NYC.gov to move from an agency-first platform to one that serves New Yorkers first. We've done this by starting from user research in the community, going to New Yorkers and community organizations to understand their pain points. We prioritized iterative design to create a new strategy that satisfies both residents and agency officials. This session will review our team’s process of user research and data analysis to create a user-centric design for New Yorkers, as well as how others can do the same in their communities.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

Digital services teams rely on the contributions of partner government teams who do not have tech backgrounds to make their product a success. How can we best support, train, and collaborate with these partners as they build their own digital skills? Training government workers on technology shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be part of how we plan to move government forward in the digital world. In this talk, we will focus on how two digital services teams are working to train and upskill government partners so we can build successful platforms, and why technologists can’t do this work alone.

People Power + Community

Join this deep dive into the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies, focusing on the Paperwork Reduction Act's (PRA) impact on user research in federal agencies. While the PRA aims to ease the public burden, it inadvertently becomes a roadblock to understanding and serving the public effectively. Drawing from real-world challenges faced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and showcasing the CMS Customer Experience and PRA Playbook as a groundbreaking case study, this talk will illustrate how design thinking can bridge the gap between policy compliance and meaningful user engagement. Join us to explore innovative solutions that empower agencies to co-design with policy experts. Learn practical lessons applicable to breaking down barriers in nuanced policy landscapes across diverse government organizations. It's time to revolutionize government services by harmonizing policy and user-centric approaches!

Policy + Administration

Social Security provides financial stability to our nation’s people, administering retirement, disability, survivor, and family benefits, and enrolling individuals in Medicare. Faced with over 78,000 webpages and low customer success ratings on the website, SSA.gov needed a transformation to meet the needs of the modern public. In this session, we look forward to sharing an interactive story of how the SSA.gov redesign team took a small-but-mighty approach to rapidly transform the site into a task-based interface, utilizing plain language, and mobile-first and user-centered design. Learn our agile approach to transforming verbose legacy pages into U.S. Web Design System-inspired apps and task pages, and how we prioritized human-centered design, plain language, Spanish-language accessibility—along with mobile-friendly design to encourage self-service options and provide clarity on programs, policies, and business processes.

Service Design + Delivery

Combination of keynotes, fireside chats, and panel discussions

• Leading the way forward
  Lynn Overmann, Executive Director, Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, Georgetown University
  Hillary Hartley, Chief Executive Officer, U.S. Digital Response
  Amanda Renteria, Chief Executive Officer, Code for America  
• Ethical civic tech in the AI era
  Robin Carnahan, Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, U.S. General Services Administration
  Scott Johnston, Chief Product Officer, Code for America 
• How cities around the world are scaling digital transformation
  Arna Saevarsdottir, The City of Reykjavik, Service and Digital Transformation Manager
  Santiago Amador, Bogotá Iteam Director, Public Innovation Lab of the city of Bogotá
  Mai-Ling Garcia, Digital Director, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, Johns Hopkins University
  Hashim Mteuzi, Senior Program Director, Local Initiatives, Code for America
• Automating access: Better government services for all
  Alia Toran-Burrell, Program Director, Clear My Record, Code for America
  Colleen Burns, Senior Program Director, Safety Net, Code for America
  Tracey Patterson, Chief Program Officer, Code for America
• Procurement for the people
  Michael Owh, Director, County of Los Angeles Internal Services Department
• Public benefits for the public benefit — Fulfilling the promise together
  Rachel Korberg, Executive Director, Families and Workers Fund
  Amanda Renteria, Chief Executive Officer, Code for America
  Porschia Davis, Director of Strategic Partnerships, mRelief
  Jilma Meneses, Secretary, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services
  Tyonka Perkins Rimawi, Program Director, Families & Workers Fund
  Caira Woods, Deputy Director, U.S. Economic Mobility & Opportunity , The Gates Foundation
• Making tax filing free and easy with Direct File
  Merici Vinton, Direct File Deputy Service Owner, U.S. Digital Service
  Bridget Roberts, Chief, Direct File, Internal Revenue Service
  Courtney O'Reilly, Senior Program Manager, Tax Benefits, Code for America
  Rae Pilarski, Associate Program Director, GetYourRefund, Code for America
• Closing remarks
  Amanda Renteria, Chief Executive Officer, Code for America

Do you have a customer experience-related question or project that could use a second pair of eyes? Are you working to improve a government service, website, or process? We’ve got you covered! Our team of qualitative researchers, data scientists, designers, and client success advocates are eager to help. Walk in, sign up, and enjoy a 15-minute session with Code for America’s talented experience team members.

The City of Seattle piloted a new way to deliver a food voucher program to families with low income using an open-source product called CiviForm. The pilot surfaced unanticipated barriers experienced by the very people it was intended to help. In collaboration with Google.org and Exygy, and using agile product management, the City removed barriers and established a process for ongoing community-driven improvements. The session will cover tactics of agile product management and will emphasize the importance of building for and with community partners. Attendees will come away with a simple product management toolkit to respond to community needs.

Service Design + Delivery

Designers spend too much time during projects winning over naysayers and answering the challenges of devil's advocates. Developing a design brief at the beginning of a project that clearly identifies the problem you're solving, how you know it's a problem, and who stands to benefit from solving it will cut the work of convincing critics in half. This interactive workshop will guide participants through the process of developing their own design brief. Participants will learn how to use qualitative and quantitative data to validate their problem statement and write a design question that invites a variety of targeted solutions.

Service Design + Delivery

It’s almost voting season. Come learn about Sonoma County, CA’s pathway to creating a digital workflow for vote-by-mail registration, and the process of developing and integrating cloud security assessments into workflows. This session will walk through the process of developing the vote-by-mail digital workflow, and how to take on developing a workflow for a process under scrutiny. We will be diving into best practices for developing a workflow, including a session from the Sonoma County Security Officer on the process of creating a cloud security assessment and how to apply that assessment to a workflow tool.

People Power + Community

Open source software is a critical component in government IT systems, and yet the federal government has not always been a full participant in the open source community. This gap results in less transparency in government programs, increased security risk, and a lack of trust in both directions. It's time for government to strengthen its engagement with the community that enables modern software development. In this panel, you will hear from government employees leading the charge to update open source policies, secure the ecosystem, and rebuild that trust. Panelists will share their successes, their challenges, and how you can help.

Policy + Administration

We are two state government administrators and one national partner who are leading the efforts to build digitally native paid leave systems in the states. There are 14 programs like these in the U.S., and we believe that government is at its best when it collaborates. By partnering, we’re lowering our individual risk as implementers and raising the ceiling of what’s possible. We found each other across state lines and are working together because we have a shared vision of how government services should be delivered in the digital age. We have some early wins. We have even bigger ambitions. In this session, we will share stories from our journey to find solutions across state lines to deliver public policies in the digital age.

Policy + Administration

Multiple short-form presentations grouped together into a single session:

• Preserving the human touch: Maintaining a human-centric application and selection process in the age of generative AI
  Yuyang Zhong, Program Manager, Coding it Forward
• Experimenting for equity
  Ryan Hatch, Senior Product Manager, Code for America
• Adopting a service design mindset for content success
  Britt Brouse, Senior Content Designer, Coforma
• To dashboard or not to dashboard: Lessons in transparency learned in Connecticut (that apply everywhere)
  Augusta Irechukwu, Research Analyst, State of Connecticut
• Simplified access: Seattle's journey to enhance language access with technology
  Peggy Liao, Language Access Program and Policy Specialist, City of Seattle
• The role of public technology in disaster recovery: An account from the Maui wildfires
  Trey Gordner, Product Fellow, U.S. Digital Corps

The platforms powering Boston’s 311 system desperately needed to be replaced. It would be a massive undertaking, impacting dozens of technologies, hundreds of city employees, and thousands of city residents. Though daunting, this effort also presented a once-in-a-decade opportunity to improve every aspect of service delivery in Boston—from resident touch points, to departmental workflows, to performance reporting, and more. But these ambitions required a new approach. Technologists, analysts, UX specialists, and service design experts would need to work with residents and departmental staff to find enduring solutions to difficult problems. This project required deliberate and novel approaches to procurement, budgeting, staffing, and stakeholder management. It’s an exciting time for service delivery in Boston—come hear about it and see what tips you can take home to your city!

Service Design + Delivery

Lived experience expertise is as important as traditionally recognized forms of expertise. To build a new age where government digital services better serve all) we must center the expertise of users and would-be users—especially ones who most struggle to get access—because the true experts are people who lead through those challenges. Centering their expertise leads to better problem solving and helps realize the distinctive vision they have for themselves) their families) and their communities. Join this session to learn about different methods for centering this expertise and to hear from one lived experience expert involved in this work.

People Power + Community

There are many mistakes that organizations make when moving into AI. People recognize the value of incorporating chatbots to support their operations, employing fraud detection to enhance cybersecurity, or leveraging natural language processing techniques to categorize document libraries. We understand the potential, but to succeed in incorporating AI technologies, we must aim to have the right data delivered to the right users at the right time. We will guide attendees through a practical checklist that they can use to evaluate their data maturity. The goal of this checklist is to provide insights into the critical activities and tasks we need to implement and maintain before building solutions using emerging technologies.

Emerging Technology + Innovation

Join this workshop hosted by Utah’s customer experience team to discuss hidden barriers to positive change in government. We’re aware of tough, tangible hurdles like laws, budgets, and siloed organizations that can stifle improvement in our institutions. But what are the less-obvious, but equally powerful reasons our efforts might stall? Contribute to a moderated discussion of what’s stopping us, like assuming we need approval when we don’t, or thinking change is someone else’s job. We’ll leave with solutions to bust those invisible barriers back home.

Service Design + Delivery

The role of ‘Senior Advisor for Delivery’ was created in the Biden-Harris transition in 2021, with multiple senior experts in technology, human-centered design, data, and innovation deployed to federal agencies and White House Policy Councils. The hypothesis was that having digital experts actively at the table when policies are crafted and implemented would ensure more effective, less burdensome, and more seamless delivery of priority programs to the public, instead of merely as an afterthought. Three years in, three current and former Senior Advisors at the Domestic Policy Council, U.S. Digital Service, and Federal agencies, who worked on issues ranging from American Rescue Plan implementation to student debt relief will discuss more about their roles, what’s working, and where we can keep pushing to ensure implementation is considered at every step of policymaking and program administration.

Policy + Administration

Socially and linguistically congruent processes enable equitable service delivery, yet despite advancements, many with limited English proficiency are unable to access support. Human-centered design incorporating language, health, and disability justice facilitates barrier reduction. APHSA’s culturally responsive services and process innovation teams will discuss findings from focus groups with individuals having limited English proficiency, discussing learnings with personnel from Los Angeles County and Second Harvest Heartland. Panelists will highlight investment opportunities in policy, technology, and workforce training in improving accessibility for humanitarian arrivals, Indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities.

Service Design + Delivery

Language barriers prevent millions from accessing critical services. While AI translation holds promise, generic models often fail marginalized groups. This presentation will demonstrate how human-centered datasets enable effective, responsible machine learning and generative AI applications. Speakers from the New Jersey Department of Labor and U.S. Digital Response will discuss the roles of user research, content strategy, and generative AI in producing accurate, simple unemployment insurance translations in New Jersey, making it easier for Spanish speakers to access benefits while reducing administrative overhead. We’ll share challenges, solutions, and best practices for multilingual data collection, curation, and model training, along with our vision for empowering public servants with emerging technologies to advance language justice in social safety net programs. Attendees will take away strategies for ethical applications of AI, open collaboration, and designing digital services that truly serve everyone.

Emerging Technology + Innovation