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Hello, I'm going to talk today about how to use your superpowers to transform people's lives.
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First, let me introduce myself: Hola! My name is Alberto, I'm an engineer.
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I work with the U.S. Digital Service and I'm originally from Puerto Rico, so my thoughts tend to come out in Spanglish.
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You may be asking, or probably you're asking yourself: why are we actually talking about this?
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Let's give a spoiler: we're going to talk about government.
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This is healthcare.gov. This screenshot is from just a week ago.
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Open enrollment season is up, and you can go there and enroll for healthcare benefits.
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But it wasn't always like this. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, the Centers for Medicare was tasked to develop a new website so citizens could enroll for benefits.
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Government officials did it the way they knew how: they established a big contract, invested millions of dollars, and began gathering requirements for months.
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They built something, and fast forward to October 2013, open enrollment season started and users ran to the website, which ultimately crashed; the system was down.
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This is how the website looked for a while: "The system is down. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."
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A group of technologists from the private sector was called to help. They temporarily moved to Washington, or more like Maryland, and started working on stabilizing the website.
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It was probably Conway's Law at its finest. If you haven't heard of Conway's Law, it basically states that organizations tend to design systems that replicate their own communication structures.
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So they got people in the same room, started breaking down their communication barriers, and implemented some monitoring tools that were absolutely necessary. They ultimately got the website up, and citizens were able to access healthcare benefits.
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Healthcare.gov has actually become the modern poster child of government failure. Fast forward to 2014, part of that rescue team from health.gov founded the U.S. Digital Service.
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Their mission was simple: they wanted to recruit top designers, engineers, product managers, policy experts, and bureaucracy hackers or, as we like to call them, "fixers."
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They aimed to have them join for a tour of duty ranging from six months to four years, and anything in between, to work with the nation's civil servants and untangle the most critical government services.
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So today, this is where I work: the U.S. Digital Service, a team of nerds across the federal government, using design and technology to deliver better services to the American people.
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But let’s go back to that healthcare conversation we were having. Why does this matter? What's the deal with a website?
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It's not about the tech; the issue isn’t the technology itself—it’s about the impact on people's lives.
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Some stats from the health conference this year: Over the past 20 years, U.S. drug spending has increased by 330 percent, health expenditures have increased by 208 percent, and total U.S. specialty drugs are predicted to account for 55 percent of spending by 2020.
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Insulin prices have seen a list-price increase of more than 350 percent between 2002 and 2016, and medical costs are a prime contributor to two out of three bankruptcies in the United States.
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This indicates that that website could make the difference between life and death. In other words, that website was critical because people are the mission.
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For the past five years, the U.S. Digital Service has been working across multiple agencies in the federal government. For instance, we have a team at the Veterans Affairs (VA) working with veterans to provide them access to their benefits.
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We also have a team at the Health and Human Services Department, where I work today, transforming the delivery of care by modernizing the Medicare infrastructure and providing beneficiaries access to their data.
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We have a team working to improve the path toward citizenship for new Americans and helping asylum seekers at the Department of Homeland Security.
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Furthermore, we have a team at the Department of Defense (DoD) improving the lives of military families, and we also had a team at the Small Business Administration (SBA) helping economically disadvantaged small business owners.
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This is what I want to talk about today. I was part of the team that was sent to the Small Business Administration; I was the second engineer to join.
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We worked there for more than two and a half years, transforming the experience for economically disadvantaged businesses.
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To give you a sense of the SBA's mission, it reads: to maintain and strengthen the nation’s economy by enabling the establishment and viability of small businesses and by assisting in the economic recovery of communities following disasters.
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The Small Business Administration has a bunch of programs, some aligned with government contracting and business development that fulfill this mission. The federal government awards contracts totaling billions of dollars every year, and they want to open this process up to small businesses, especially those owned by underrepresented groups.
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The SBA sets goals for agencies to award a fixed percentage of their contracts to those small businesses, which not only helps them grow economically but also allows them to develop their businesses through education, partnerships, and mentorship.
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To gauge the impact: in 2018, the federal government awarded $120.8 billion to small businesses, which represented only 25 percent of all contract money awarded by the federal government. This was an increase of $15 billion compared to the previous fiscal year.
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So what are these programs I’ve been talking about? You can visit sba.gov for details. In a nutshell, if you or someone you know is starting a business and fall into categories like being a woman, a service disabled veteran, or an economically disadvantaged minority, the federal government will prefer to contract with you.
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SBA's role is to help you achieve sales and ensure that government agencies follow this practice.
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One of those programs is the HUBZone Program, which stands for Historically Underutilized Business Zones. Its purpose is to promote job growth, capital investment, and economic development in economically distressed areas.
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Companies need to comply with two main requirements: first, their principal office must be located in one of these economically distressed areas, and second, they need to hire at least 35 percent of their employees from those areas.
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The idea is to drive dollars into the economy and help grow those underserved areas. So, let me show you visually how it looks like: these colored polygons represent HUBZone areas.
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For instance, here’s a map of Tennessee and some of the surrounding states. As you can see, there are many HUBZone areas across the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Big portions of certain states qualify as HUBZones.
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At this point, you might be asking how these areas are identified. The Small Business Administration uses geographic and statistical data from multiple government agencies, looking for socioeconomic indicators like income, poverty, and unemployment rates to determine if an area qualifies as a HUBZone.
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They aggregate this data at what the Census calls the county and census track levels.
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The SBA also identifies areas such as Indian lands, difficult developmental areas, locations near military bases, and regions hit by natural disasters to classify them as additional HUBZones.
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These datasets get updated multiple times a year at different intervals depending on each source. Again, the goal is to drive economic activity into those areas.
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However, when we joined the SBA, we found that the existing tools were outdated and ineffective. This outdated system was essentially a relic, a remnant of MapQuest, that the SBA was using until 2017.”
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If we were to use two words to describe it, the team would agree to call it "SatMap." This became our mascot for the 500 error page on the new map.
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It was pretty bad. It had zero documentation, lacked version control, had no APIs or web services, and wasn’t mobile-friendly. It took forever to load.
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It was built using a proprietary geographic information system and a strange technology in the backend, with very limited data export capabilities. Some features even required a companion desktop client that users had to install.
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Someone might wonder why we didn’t just ditch that and get new data, but we started digging deeper and found a collection of CDs.
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There was a binder full of CDs containing archived HUBZone data—for all the years it existed—but the CDs were in proprietary format. We couldn’t tell which CDs were missing, and not all of them were labeled.
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So, if this is what it looked like, how did the system even work? A human would burn a CD-ROM containing some data in a proper format. That CD would have to get mailed out, hopefully received within a day or two to an SBA analyst who would manually test it.
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The process included deploying the CD’s data within the data center and not in the cloud, often leading to long delays. This could take up to six months for a data update.
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However, some of these HUBZone areas could expire, meaning by the time the data was published, it was often already outdated. There was a crazy roller coaster of challenges we had to tackle.
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The basic infrastructure the agency needed wasn’t there, and government partners were uncertain how to fix it, lacking any better solutions. There were many more issues to untangle before resolving the HUBZone map.
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How did this set up work for small businesses, though? In short, it didn’t. HUBZone small business owners faced serious challenges.
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With outdated maps, they had to make business decisions regarding new locations and hiring, but they were working with inaccurate data, which could negatively impact their businesses.
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For example, one business owner moved his main office to a completely new location because his HUBZone was expiring, only to discover the new place wouldn't qualify either. If small businesses didn’t remain compliant with the program, they risked losing their contracts.
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This process translated to increased overhead for small businesses, leading to extra paperwork and the need to track their own records to ensure they were HUBZone compliant.
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Conditions could indeed make it arduous to grow a business. But we set out to fix this and modernize it.
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Let me share how we did it and the concepts that mattered during the process. This is the new HUBZone map.
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Kudos to Tyler Briscoe, who was one of the core engineers working on this with amazing design and front-end skills. I’m proud of the work we accomplished.
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This initiative wasn’t about the tech; rather, it laid the groundwork for many things we implemented at the Small Business Administration to assist other economically disadvantaged programs.
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We built it on Ruby on Rails, using Ruby extensively to modernize all aspects of the HUBZone program. We helped the agency determine what services they needed to subscribe to versus what they needed to build and maintain.
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This meant we had to hack the traditional procurement processes at the SBA. Let me take you through our journey, starting with our map.
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You would enter an address. We decided that the SBA should not build their own geocoding infrastructure, so we adopted Google services.
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After entering the address, you would see the location and its coordinates, along with your HUBZone qualification.
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The sidebar was one of the most complex features to develop. It involved simplifying a lot of complicated policies and complexities of the program to make it understandable for users.
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This required thoughtful research and constant feedback with our users, as well as restructuring the HUBZone data to provide the right information to business owners.
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We also had to engage in a significant amount of policy 'hacking' to ensure our implementation accurately reflected the regulatory requirements.
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We created visual elements that displayed all relevant information. Geocoding is not perfect, and we recognized that even big companies have not perfected it.
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In some rural areas, geocoding remains a challenge, such as in Puerto Rico. We implemented a reverse geocoding mechanism, allowing SBA analysts to get approximate addresses for compliance checks.
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We identified different user personas for small business users, each with varying needs and expectations, in addition to the internal government users who relied on the tool.
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Creating simplicity involved calculating HUBZone expiration dates. There were overlapping layers of data with multiple expiration dates, which caused confusion.
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We needed to minimize the complexity—like letting users know the expiration date of one area doesn't affect their qualification.
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This tool proved effective for users in vulnerable communities, like those in disaster recovery areas that the HUBZone program aimed to aid.
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However, there are challenges when policymakers don't include technologists in the conversation, leading to miscommunication.
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For instance, there were redesignated counties affected by hurricanes that complicated HUBZone qualifications based on outdated policies.
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We put a lot of effort into writing in plain language and making our tool accessible. We conducted user tests with visually impaired users to ensure compliance and accessibility.
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Being a visual tool, we ensured it was friendly to color-blind users so that all individuals could engage with it.
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Our technical strategy was straightforward: we built a spatial data pipeline, utilizing Rake and many Ruby tools to facilitate our work.
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Rake was particularly useful for translating policies into data processing steps. Leveraging a geographic information system, we used PostgreSQL with PostGIS to process and render our geospatial data.
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Our goal remained to automate various processes within this pipeline while adhering to an API-first architecture.
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We recognized that we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel and focused on subscribing to the right commercial products while being intentional about the software we were building.
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We constantly evaluated the use cases, system interactions, and how other developers would engage with our tools.
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We wrapped everything into a single Rails app and adopted the U.S. Web Design System created by 18F, another government agency focused on accessibility.
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Slowly, we evolved our own design system, implementing numerous features for sharing HUBZone locations and even integrating Street View for SBA analysts conducting site visits.
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These analysts need to know the actual location of businesses, and sometimes their addresses don’t map correctly, so we incorporated Google’s Street View for virtual site visits.
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We migrated to the cloud, establishing a foundation for a site reliability engineering culture at the agency and developed infrastructure as code principles.
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We worked collaboratively with other teams, particularly the SBA.gov team, to standardize tools and improve the management of cloud instances.
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Finally, we created a framework at the agency to open-source software, which is part of code.gov, an initiative to promote collaboration and reuse of code within the federal government.
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We devised a process for other teams to adopt and begin open-sourcing their initiatives, which is evident in numerous projects shared by the SBA.
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To summarize, let me be clear: you can do this job. Government doesn’t need complex solutions filled with buzzwords; it needs flexible solutions designed with the user in mind.
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The government absolutely needs improved experiences, but ultimately, it’s about citizens who deserve these enhanced experiences; for some, it can mean the difference between life and death or the growth of their communities.
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Everyone using these services should be represented in the teams we work with, and we need more people to come and assist citizens.
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You might be wondering how you can get involved. One great place to start is Code for America.
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This non-profit organization began with a fellowship program sending technologists to local governments to work on open-source projects and has a network of brigades across the country.
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If there isn’t a brigade where you are, you can start one. This is a powerful way to impact your community because you understand your local issues better than anyone.
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I was fortunate to be part of the founding team in Puerto Rico, where we collaborated closely with the state government to combine their data portal with services that citizens were developing.
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Imagine Code for America but on an international scale—this is Code for All. It’s a collaborative network of organizations worldwide, including Code for America.
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You can collaborate with these civic technology initiatives wherever you are globally.
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If you're in the United States, consider joining the U.S. Digital Service, which offers a tour of duty that lasts from six months to four years.
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We need to represent the diversity of America, hiring from different regions including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
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We emphasize diversity in our hiring process. For example, 58% of our leadership team is female, and 44% of our staff self-identifies as female.
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Another key organization is 18F, part of the General Services Administration. They provide a consultancy service to help government agencies build modern software with user-centered designs.
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They’re remote-friendly, and if you’re interested, they’re currently looking for the next Director of Engineering.
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State and local initiatives are also emerging, like the Colorado Digital Service to transform digital services at the state level, encouraging collaboration across various states.
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Fellowship opportunities, like the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, are also available, allowing talented innovators to work alongside civil servants on crucial government issues.
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Some people are working to change the status quo in Congress, such as Tech Congress, which puts technologists directly into policy-making roles.
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Crucial changes are taking place right now in our nation, and if you want to influence future technology policy, consider participating in these initiatives.
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If you're still in school, Coding It Forward offers internship programs paired with government agencies, providing the chance to engage with pressing issues in federal agencies.
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This program is excellent for early-career individuals, so I highly recommend it.
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To wrap things up, if government were an object, we really need to 'monkey patch' it to make it work as intended. I hope you consider joining us in this mission. Thank you!
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You.
