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Ethan Marcotte, who is one of the most principled and thoughtful people I have ever known and also a dear friend, has resigned from his job at 18F after being asked to meet with shadowy gov-dismantlers. The whole post is worth reading.
https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/leaving-18f/
Apparently necessary: Do not be an asshole in my replies about something you’d didn’t even bother to read or understand, this is not Facebook.
@kissane The frustrating thing is 18F and other groups like it in Public Service were beginning to really move the tech needle. As a state agency CIO (and someone who might have a history of being an occasional heretic myself), I have had the honor of watching a growing group of motivated IT people push against a system that was crying for new and compassionate approaches to making government work better, only to now watch much of it getting systematically torn down.
It breaks my heart.
@NoRomBasic @kissane I've literally never heard of them before today. Seems like it was a sensible thing to have though - experts who were civil servants, helping government function!
18F was a key player in the creation of the IRS Direct File, along with so many others. They, along with similar groups have been establishing beachheads in Federal, State and Local goverments, bringing agile and "customer" focused UX approaches into Public Service, & generally showing that embedded IT can outperform (and undercost) the traditional outsourced model. They have been part of a quiet revolution in this space, and in no small part have kept this old man involved.
@NoRomBasic @Dss @kissane 18F and the USDS has had a booth at PyCon US every year that I've attended. Their people have always been interesting and delightful, and I've long respected them.
Seeing this breaks my heart.
@NoRomBasic
I used IRS Direct File this year, it was simple, clear, and fast.
I previously used paid online services to file federal and state (Massachusetts) income taxes. Beforehand, I had some concerns about how the state part would go; last year's service cost only $35 for both and I would happily pay that to avoid hassle if the state filing required a lot of duplicate effort. Thankfully, IRS Direct File had a hand-off process to my state's online service so that wasn't necessary.
@cwilcox808 @Dss @kissane I used Direct File both last year during the pilot and this year as well. The State part last year was a bit awkward, this year for CA at least, it was smoother. But the real joy was seeing this get developed with a true user-experience first, and Agile philosophy by in-house technology folks that understood the mission. Starting by building a simple, working stable system that covered a "many user" subset and then expanding into complex use cases.