“The Tech is Easy. It’s Those Other Pieces”: How Civic Tech Collaborates with Government

• In Event: Nudges, Location and Communication: Reducing Administrative Burdens Inside and Outside Government

Abstract

This paper connects two themes in administrative burden literature. The first is the role of third parties in minimizing or increasing burdens. The second is to explore the ways that digital administrative burdens can be reduced. Governments rely extensively on private actors to build and manage the digital infrastructure through which public services are provided, which often results in dysfunctional technologies that leave burdens in place. In this paper, we explore the role of civic tech organizations as third party “builders” of that infrastructure. Civic tech organizations have a motivational goal that include burden reduction and user experience improvements. They can therefore provide an alternative political economy for tech infrastructure contracting, characterized by relational norms centered on shared policy and capacity goals. But to be successful, they have to be able to understand how to collaborate with the government. Using two case studies of both nonprofit and for-profit civic tech organizations, we identify common patterns of collaborative processes.

Drawing from 34 in-depth interviews with states, a tribal nation, county government officials, as well as civic tech staff, this paper analyzes two exploratory case studies of how government collaborates with civic tech to reduce administrative burden. In doing so, we make the following contributions. First, we conceptualize and describe civic tech as third-party builders of digital infrastructure in a way that reshapes administrative burdens. The civic tech community is a growing presence in the practice of government, but almost entirely overlooked in public administration scholarship. Second, the potential for technology to reduce – or often increase– burdens has been debated (Peeters 2023). We identify cases where technologists set out to and succeeded in reducing burdens and describe the management frameworks and tools they applied. Third, we offer evidence of an alternative political economy in technology contracting that reflects a relational contract model. While work on relational contracting generally focuses on nonprofit service providers, we add to this literature by showing that government collaboration with prosocial, goal-aligned technologists offer an alternative partnership model for service delivery that resolves widely observed problems of traditional contracting models. More specifically, it tests the feasibility of relying on a model of innovation that depends upon time-limited engagement with organizations motivated by a public service goal, rather than long-term relationships with for-profits that are profit driven. Fourth, for civic tech to succeed means understanding and engaging with government. We present a framework of what factors facilitated this collaboration, as well as challenge factors. Our findings suggest that civic tech collaborations with government benefit not just from shared goals, but also certain operational practices and an emphasis on building state capacity.

The relevance of this study is reflected in the fact that two of the other papers on the panel rest upon evaluations involving civic tech organizations (Linos et al. and Guo et al). Having a qualitative paper that provides a broader understanding of how those organizations function provides a complement to the quantiative analysis on the panel.

Authors

• Xiaoyang Xu
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Donald Moynihan, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author