Episode 2: Disinformation and civic tech, with Cyd Harrell

SYNOPSIS

Dan and Rachel talk with Cyd Harrell about the challenges of providing information to citizens that is accurate and accessible, even when it needs to be official and formal. Rachel discusses the Accuracy as a lens for evaluating information ecosystems. Dan explains the lens Accountability.

EPISODE CONTENTS

Stories of Disinformation

Dan describes misinformation from the Bush administration that provided the impetus for the US invasion of Iraq

• The Iraq Invasion 20 Years Later (Mother Jones)
• Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq (Mother Jones)
• The Other "Big Lie" and Our Democratic Fragility (Harvard Kennedy School)

Rachel describes how the US National Park Rangers handle messaging guidelines from the Trump administration

Interview with Cyd Harrell

• Cyd's book, A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide

Lenses

Accuracy

It turns out accuracy is a spectrum, and sometimes information is "accurate enough" for the purposes of the people using it. At the same time, some domains require information that is precise, even when that isn't required by all users.

• How does the system define and uphold an acceptable threshold for accuracy? 
• How does the system ensure information is precise? 

Accountable

When information is held accountable, it is subjected to outside critique and validation. Perfectly closed systems prevent information from being scrutinized. But also, systems that appear open can be compromised.

• How does the system encourage sources to be accountable for their contributions? 
• How does the system enable outside criticism and give it equal weight to the original contributions?

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Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Tech is a little bit lost, and a lot of good people are questioning whether there's a way to do tech that furthers societal good that is kind of pro-social.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Dan 0:26

Hello, my name is Dan Brown, and you are here again with another episode of Unchecked, and I'm here with Rachel Price. Rachel, how are you doing? I'm okay. That's as good as it gets. You know what? We have chosen probably not the happiest topic to cover in this podcast.

Rachel 0:45

Not necessarily the happiest, but definitely one of the most pervasive.

Dan 0:51

There's a lot going on. Who are we talking to later?

Rachel 0:54

Today we're talking to Sid Harrell, who is an expert in civic tech.

Dan 0:58

Obviously a very important domain in which disinformation plays a big role. We have a couple stories per usual.

Rachel 1:06

Dan, I understand you have a story today from history, which we've decided history is what, before I was born? Is that what we decided? Anyway, Dan, what story did you bring today?

Dan 1:22

From the Dark Ages, also known as the second Bush administration, there's something that looms large in my imagination. And when I first started thinking about disinformation, I thought about this image in my head, and that is of Colin Powell, at the time the Secretary of State, sitting and testifying and holding up a vial of some kind of substance. And so because that looms large in my imagination, I connected very closely with disinformation because it's sort of since become clear that the whole campaign leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was built on a structure of lies. I wanted to dig into that. I found this great Mother Jones uh article, we'll link it in the notes, about the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And uh the invasion happened in March 2003. 9-11 happened in 2001. I was 28 years old. My wife and I had been relatively recently married about three or four years, and we were just sort of embarking on adulthood, embarking on this new life, and this kind of tragic, horrible event happened, and it really felt like the world was going to come together and think about geopolitics in a new way after this horrible tragedy that hit fairly close to home. We're living in Washington, D.C., and I'm from Lower Manhattan. So all of these things were sort of looming large, and then this invasion happened and seemed to sort of take any goodwill that might have come from that and really made it fall apart. So I wanted to go back and remember exactly what were those events leading up to it. And by then, by that March 2003, the administration had been pushing this story that Saddam Hussein was building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that he had nuclear weapon capabilities or was not far from nuclear weapon capabilities, and that Iraq was in league with al-Qaeda, the group behind the 9-11 attacks. And it turns out that both of those things were complete lies, total lies. They use that as an impetus for war, for this invasion, cost thousands of American lives and a hundred thousand Iraqi lives. I mean, just one of the worst tragedies, all built on this house of cards. A lot of folks, it's taken them a while, but have since admitted that the whole invasion was a mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no reliable connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. What they have not admitted is that they were lying to the American people. What they have not admitted is that all of these things were lies. Instead, they've said they were dealing with faulty intelligence. But that in and of itself is a lie as well. It's become fairly clear, and it was clear at the time that the intelligence community actually indicated that the things that the Bush administration were saying was not well supported by the intelligence. The equipment that they had acquired for nuclear capabilities could not be used to build nuclear weapons. There was this potential meeting between someone from Iraq and someone from Al-Qaeda, but there was not really a whole lot of evidence to support that that meeting actually happened. And this disinformation campaign, which really started in the summer of 2002, tried to focus on this false narrative and really did not give a lot of exposure to the more correct viewpoint to the truth. They continued to try and push the link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. They pushed the narrative that Iraq was developing these nuclear weapons. Maybe the biggest lie they they told was that they believed their own lies. The Mother Jones article has this great conclusion. They say, yet Bush defenders and other commentators have insisted there was no deliberate effort to con the public. They point out that Bush and his national security team felt the threat was real. They felt the threat was real. And they believed Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al-Qaeda. They believed these things. No amount of intelligence or data that they got suggested otherwise. On key fronts, the article goes on, they were convinced that they knew better than the available intelligence. It's really interesting to me that this narrative still exists and that there's really just no way for us to confirm or deny one way or the other whether they were just believing their own lies or they knew that they were lies. I like these stories because they kind of inject these sort of nuances in our understanding of what disinformation is.

Rachel 6:05

Yeah. I wrote down a list of words that stood out to me: mistruth, lie, hype, narrative, falsehood, con, exaggeration, deception. The ones that are really interesting to me in there are narrative and hype. And I think what this story is making me sit with is, first of all, like semantically, there's slight differences between all these words, but hype and narrative especially implies a context, like a weaving together of information. Some of that information might be factual, some of it may not, but this weaving together of information to explain a situation or reach a certain conclusion. And I don't know quite what to do with this yet, but it's kind of coming back to this idea of miss and disinformation being a verb and not a noun. And there's movement, there's weaving happening, there's context. It's a road being traveled, not just a thing left to look at.

Dan 7:06

One of the things I want to do at some point is try and tease out the distinction between hype and disinformation. Because it's really interesting that you picked up on that. And I think you're trying to do the same thing that I was trying to do when I was reading this stuff, which is like, okay, I get this. They built up this network of lies over the course of a year, six months really, and use that as an impetus to commit essentially war crimes. Where's the information ecosystem? Like, what can I point to here as an information architect to help me understand what are the components at play that allow things like hype to proliferate? This reminded me so much of the 1918 flu, where the media, the mainstream media, was simply repeating the things that were said. They were carrying and amplifying the lies that were coming from the Bush administration and not a lot from these other sources that were out there and that were part of the government. There's evidence that the media suppressed counterfactual information, and it's clear the media did not take a critical eye to the hype that the Bush administration was putting out. I found this other article from the Harvard Kennedy School. It just sort of puts everything into context, and I really like this. They said that quote unquote big lie, the one about the Iraq war, also wounded American democracy itself by exposing deformities in our political system that have since metastasized. The manipulative mendacity of our political leaders, the failures of the media system to inform Americans and foster public debate on the critical issue of the day, widespread public belief in manufactured delusions, a government that fails to respond to popular will, and deep inequities in who benefits and who suffers. There's so many places where this story can start, but it does feel like when we look at the big lie that we're dealing with today, there's so many similarities to the big lie that we were dealing with 25 years ago. All right, so why don't you bring us to the present? Tell us a more modern story of disinformation.

Rachel 9:22

Okay, so jumping to recent times, we're going to talk about everyone's favorite federal employees.

Dan 9:29

Librarians?

Rachel 9:30

No, okay. Everyone's second favorite federal employees, the National Park Service. In mid-March, ProPublica reported that National Park Service staff have received talking points ordering them to describe layoffs as quote, workforce management actions. So uh instead of using normal human English to let visitors know why they can't have clean bathrooms, uh, NPS staff are basically being asked to, in my opinion, mask the truth a little bit behind corporate jargon. From the article, a series of emails sent late last month to frontline staff at parks across the country provided Rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word fired and not blame closures on staffing levels. I went through the article and I made a list of some other words, some other jargon that staff had been given according to this reporting. Attrition, workforce management actions. We heard that one, prioritizing fiscal responsibility, staffing to meet the evolving needs of our visitors. And finally, they have a line that they're to ensure, quote, memorable and meaningful experiences for all.

Dan 10:49

When I go to Yosemite, I really want to look around and just think, wow, they are really prioritizing fiscal responsibility.

Rachel 10:56

And the evolving needs of me. If asked directly why park services are limited, uh, I guess rangers have been instructed to say, quote, we are not able to address park or program level impacts at this time, which I'm pretty sure just translates to I'm not allowed to talk about it. And apparently, here's the highlight of this story for me. One ranger told reporters, quote, some employees have delivered the statements in an exaggerated monotone to convey to visitors they are towing the company line, but there's more to the story. So I read this article and I thought, is this misinformation? The reason I'm bringing it here is because these rangers are not being asked to lie, it seems like. But it is certainly deceptive. And I would say it's kind of propaganda when you're feeding me ambiguous words to use in place of concrete words. That smells fishy to me. The other reason I brought it here is here we have this example of park employees finding ways around this. Some by outright violating the guidance. Some parks have actually put in their social media posts, like, hey, we're not staffing this because we have staffing cuts. And some employees are doing it much more subtly, right? By using a particular tone of voice to deliver the required verbiage. I can imagine a situation in which you post a sign that is written in comic sans that also conveys the bizarre nature of this. And I just want to say, like, bless the park rangers and the other staff always. But specifically in this case, you know, they're an actual live communication channel between visitors and the bureaucracy or the government, I guess. And they are stuck in this real pickle with this guidance, right? We can see real-time battles against misinformation happening here. Looking at this, you know, when we talk about information ecosystems and channels, I jump right to like, oh, a channel is like social media or a website or whatever. And in this case, the park rangers and other employees are channels of information, as are other employees and other agencies. And that in hindsight, of course they are. But uh this really brought that home for me.

Dan 13:16

I'm glad you pointed them out as part of the ecosystem. And that's not to not to dehumanize them, right? Humans are a crucial part of the state.

Rachel 13:22

This is to humanize the ecosystem. Quite the opposite.

Dan 13:25

Right. And the thing that the the mainstream media wasn't able to do in my story about the Iraq invasion, right? They weren't able to offer critique. The park rangers are able to offer kind of a critique of the official word just by not following it or by using a monotone. That's amazing. They're doing more work than the mainstream media has done. Rachel, that was a great story. It brings us right into our conversation with Sid on civic tech. Today, Rachel and I have the privilege of talking to Sid Harrell. Sid is the author of the Civic Technologists Practice Guide. Sid, thank you so much for joining us.

Rachel 14:15

My pleasure. It's great to see you both. Sid, can you tell us a little bit about what role does information play in your life or your job? Give us a little clue as to why you might be here.

SPEAKER_03 14:29

Information is a lot of my job on so many different levels, but um I work in government technology. So this is an interesting time to be talking about reliable information here in the spring of 2025. I have worked in the past for the federal government and for the state court system of California. And I currently work at my city, which is San Francisco. So one of the biggest things that government does is put out reliable information about all kinds of subjects, from the right way to pay your taxes in a very, you know, routine sense, or the best route to escape an incoming hurricane in a much more dire and real-time sense. People look to government when something is going on or when they need to find out how to do something. And so figuring out how to deliver correct, accessible, clear information to the public that you serve is an enormous part of what anybody working in government does. And in government technology, we're trying to do that online.

Rachel 15:31

And when we're doing that online, what kind of channels is the government using for that?

SPEAKER_03 15:36

To their credit, a lot of governments try to meet the public where they are and use any channel that the public is using. So they might be using all kinds of social media. Typically, most governments have a website. Maybe individual government agencies have their own websites for reference. In a real-time situation, they might be trying to use Facebook channels, Twitter channels, blue sky channels now. Governments are pretty responsive to changes in the ecosystem. You know, I should mention the traditional ones too. The mayor might stand up and give a press conference to the local news that might be carried on television. Things might go out via newspapers.

Rachel 16:12

You've mentioned two channels that caught my attention in particular. Local news and Twitter X. I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter. So this leads me to my next question. What happens when the channels break?

SPEAKER_03 16:27

I am not as knowledgeable about local news, but I was working in my current job when Twitter started to degrade as a reliable source of information, or some might say be taken down. It was fascinating to be there when the demise of verification started to happen. When Twitter verification became a paid service after the company was acquired back in the fall of 2023, initially there was just sort of consternation because verified government accounts, verified accounts for prominent people had been a piece of the ecosystem that people didn't really question. Pretty quickly, old Twitter had decided that an account from a local government was going to be verified. And what that did was protect it from impersonation. So that if you had an account that had a government name and had a check mark, you knew that that was reliable information. And the algorithm, in fact, would prioritize those accounts if there was some kind of real-time event happening. In San Francisco, we're always thinking about a weather event or an earthquake, unfortunately, a shooting, you know. So when that stopped happening, what does that mean? And we have to stay there because people expect us to be there initially as a response. And then when you started to see those accounts not get the priority, and I think it was within a week or two that we started to see impersonating government accounts. So all of a sudden, you've got two accounts without any verification marker that are claiming to be the mayor of your city or the governor of your state or the emergency department. So potential to pay an exorbitant rate. So there's a sort of you can verify your organization for$1,000 a month for any public sector organization. That was wild.

Rachel 18:10

Yeah, are you sitting there thinking, like, do we even make the case for budget for this? I mean, that feels like such a wild request.

SPEAKER_03 18:18

We absolutely discussed it. I think there were some people, and I I talked to people across a wide variety of governments, so I'm not just talking about the one where I work. Some people who are like, well, we're going to have to because we have to have this channel. But then you start seeing streams get really polluted on that particular ecosystem. So we had governments, you know, looking towards can we establish a presence on Mastodon? Are there enough people there to make it worth it? Now there seems to be some movement towards Blue Sky. So there's actually quite a few, even without verification from the platform. There are official government accounts on Blue Sky, and you can verify to a URL on Blue Sky. So you can verify back to your.gov URL if you have one, which tells somebody that you're official.

Rachel 19:03

We're talking a lot about the verified check mark on Twitter and X and the implications of being verified and having a verified check mark. Like that to me is a signal of reliability, a signal of maybe authority or something like that. Are there other signals that government entities tend to use?

SPEAKER_03 19:21

So there are, and some, you know, a lot of them are vulnerable, right? So a seal, right? Which that used to be an object that, you know, you only had it and could press it onto a document if you had the physical seal. We often use the presence of a seal on our website to convey officialness. That's pretty easy to spoof if you want to. One of the other things we've been worrying about is deep fakes because, you know, the presence of a known official at an event or speaking in their own voice is something that also helps people know that information is reliable. Setting can also be faked to a degree, but your congressperson is usually giving an interview in the halls of Congress, not somebody else. Right.

Rachel 19:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Um, and your known local reporters, right, know who those people are. And so you're relying on them to know that, yes, this is the actual commissioner that I am speaking with.

Rachel 20:10

And then in the digital realm, too, I think we talked previously about the.gov domain. Yes. Thank you. The power we feel that has.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

It didn't seem like it 20 years ago, but now when we do studies of the public and how they understand whether a site is really a government site and really belongs to them, that.gov is really important. They may be annoyed with the information that's there because let's face it, we're not perfect, but they recognize that they are at the actual site that is a government entity, and therefore they should be able to rely on the information there. Fascinating thing with what's going on at the federal level right now, where there are people doing what I would certainly call making information on a bunch of those dot gov sites less reliable.

Dan 20:53

I feel like part of the authority of the government comes from, to some extent, its opacity, right? And maybe it's not opacity in terms of the information, but opacity in terms of the people. The fact that they're nameless bureaucrats, it feels like there's less agenda involved. But as soon as it becomes about the celebrity of personality, then you can't help but think that there's agenda. Does that sound right?

SPEAKER_03 21:22

I think it can. I mean, I is it the faceless bureaucracy nature, or is it the kind of, you know, in a metaphor, the white marble nature?

Rachel 21:29

I'm thinking about the difference between status and authority. I don't even know if authority is the right word, but like status and institutionality. Right. Which seem to be getting confused these days. One you can purchase, one you earn.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

I've thought a lot about how to convey officiality online over the last dozen years when I've been working almost exclusively with governments.gov.uk came out of the gate with this like really excellent solution for the UK that works incredibly well. And trying to figure out an American officiality. In the online space, especially because our federal government is not integrated nearly as tightly with our other levels of government as things are in a different system in the UK, is fascinatingly challenging. There is now a US web design system, so you have a pretty common look across a bunch of federal sites. Other sites can use that, but you know, the government of California or San Francisco may or may not want to look exactly like the federal government. Local governments are things that people invest in in a different way. They have a lot more touch points with the public. People interact with them more commonly, they feel more part of a local civic sphere that you participate in in one way or another, along with local arts institutions, and that's quite different. So there's not one system of officiality. There are some common elements like those seals. We are all getting pushed to move onto a.gov domain if we're not there. And a lot of American governments were not on a.gov initially for reasons that are maybe too complicated to go into.

Rachel 23:00

As information architects, we think a lot about information signals. And I sometimes think those signals are so subtle that only a subset of the population picks up on them. Do you need to know a signal is there in order to understand it? You know, like have some of our signals become implicit or disappeared?

SPEAKER_03 23:19

It is interesting. I mean, officiality and formality used to be really tightly coupled in the 20th century. And so people at first struggled to design websites that brought the formality of a court document, let's say, onto the web. And that doesn't entirely work. And so, how to decouple officiality and formality, how to manage the idea that seals are actually super inaccessible in terms of being really hard to read and having this tiny type around these little circles that appear up in the corner, but they're pretty important. Uh, when my team at San Francisco did some research about this a year or so ago, the seal in the.gov domain were the things that people looked for. And a lot of the search engines prioritize information from.gov domains if it is about a government topic. Good thing, but uh challenging if for some reason your government hasn't been on a.gov domain. And I don't know how it persists into the next wave of search or how that shows up when we're not presenting links with URLs and we're presenting answers written out maybe by an LLM. Um, that removes a lot of signals in a way that is fascinating.

Rachel 24:29

Or how do we pass along signals to different channels? I could see in visual channels, we've talked about the setting. That's right. That is a signal that gets passed along in visual channels. I'm sitting here thinking, like, why am I so uncomfortable thinking that government announcements come via X? You mentioned like decoupling formality and officiality. That really struck something for me because maybe it's my personality or something. I'm like, no, no, no, I want officiality and formality. Like, I think of those things as being not one, but like two.

SPEAKER_03 25:04

That's the thing that grown-ups do.

Rachel 25:05

I consider social media to be informal.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Fair.

Rachel 25:08

And I think, oh, that's why I'm uncomfortable. It's that formality piece.

SPEAKER_03 25:11

Right. But one of the things that's interesting is that formal communication is hard for a lot of people to understand.

Rachel 25:16

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

So that informal communication, that meeting people where they are is really valuable, and how to meld that with the official, reliable, safe messages that we're supposed to get from the government that tells us that there was an earthquake and this is where the center is, and this is what we should look out for, and a day later tells us this is where we can get help. All those things are really important to understand, both in language that you know anybody can understand to be really accessible to the public.

Rachel 25:45

Yes. And I think I'm also bundling like archival quality in with formality or something where I'm like, maybe it's not the informal language that freaks me out, but the fact that it's on a privately owned platform.

SPEAKER_03 25:58

So much of this is fascinating. So I've worked in both executive branch organizations and in the judicial branch. And formality is actually an enormous part of what's important about courts. Like there are speech acts that take place in a courtroom that become real. And it's as has a ceremonial aspect as well as a practical aspect. And in that setting, the formality is much harder to give up, but it's also really intimidating. And so when I worked there, I worked on reliable information for people who don't have lawyers. And the uh entire system is really designed for everybody to have a knowledgeable, trained representative who acts for them within the system. Those people are less available and more expensive than they have been at almost any time in history. And so, for lots of routine legal matters, getting a divorce, changing your custody arrangement, taking guardianship of a child, or some really urgent ones, like you need to file a restraining order, people often don't have lawyers. In fact, I think the statistic is that about 80% of California civil cases, at least one side isn't represented. So, to the extent that it's really important to preserve the formal steps of court because the legitimacy comes from that formality and the seriousness of what's happening, they also need to reach people who do not have experience or not trained in those ritual behaviors and those ways of writing and those ways of speaking. Because those people need to act within the system and also need to not clog up the system by making 500 mistakes that then cause their case to be sent back over and over.

Rachel 27:41

Yeah, so it sounds like there's this balance needed to put together information that is accurate and accessible. I'm getting the impression that in this judicial setting, accuracy and accessibility can feel at odds with each other.

SPEAKER_03 27:58

That's very accurate. I worked at the courts for four years with a project partner named Jack Maddins, and one of the earliest difficult discussions we had was about whether we could tell somebody about how long a divorce might be expected to take, whether we could put that information on a website, which seems totally fine if you're used to private sector work, right? Can we just tell people this is gonna take, you know, between six months and three years for most people? And people freaked out. And I'm enough of a user researcher still to know that when people freak out, I need to pause and I need to understand what's going on. And in putting it together, I realized people kept talking about, well, it's it might not be accurate. We might tell somebody something wrong. And we kept saying, but right now they don't have any information, and so they guess and they guess a month. And that's not even possible. Like it has to be at least six months by law. So what's happening right now is people are guessing and getting the wrong information. Can we give them approximate information to help them get closer? And the idea of approximate information was really, really uncomfortable for people trained in the legal system. And we've sort of figured out over time that accuracy is sort of one of the shining values held up, right? If you work in the law, being accurate in any statements to the court or to the judge is incredibly important to your professional life and reputation.

Rachel 29:24

And is accuracy like a binary, you either are accurate or you're not, or is it a spectrum?

SPEAKER_03 29:30

What's tricky about it is it's almost an adversarial value in the end, because you're talking about you want to make an accurate statement. That is one that your law professor or a judge or an opposing attorney can't poke holes in. So what people try to go for is precise and comprehensive, which tends to mean long and complex because it has to cover all the eventualities. And so when you deliver long and complex, precise, comprehensive information to a regular person who really just wants to get out of a marriage or who's needing to have their partner not come home to the house because the partner hurt the kid yesterday, which are the stakes of things in court, they can't process that precise, comprehensive information with all its ifs and ands. And so we started talking about what if the definition of accuracy was that somebody would take away an accurate impression? And how can we achieve that? I mean, I would say this took us close to six months of having these conversations to get to this point where they agreed that somebody reading this online needed to take away an accurate impression and we needed to do what we needed to do to make that the case. There was still a little bit of nervousness that at some point, you know, some attorney could come along and end up on the other side of something that one of our self-representing people had filed and poke holes in something that they had said because it hadn't been precise and comprehensive enough. But it was really fascinating to me that the value of accuracy could have multiple meanings. I'd never thought about that. I thought it was kind of an absolute.

Rachel 31:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

So it was really interesting to negotiate that with our partners at the court.

Rachel 31:08

What is the mindset behind Civic Tech?

SPEAKER_03 31:11

That's such an interesting question. You know, there are positives and negatives to it, but the mindset behind civic tech is that our interfaces to government should be as good as our interfaces to other institutions in our lives, whether we interact with commercial entities or whether we interact with arts institutions or restaurants or schools or anything like that. And I think in the beginning the idea was that that means they should be really similar to our interfaces to those other types of bodies. I think now we think more that they should be as good as refined, but different, because our relationship to government is fundamentally different from our relationship to entities that we pay or that we have a commercial exchange with. So usually the mindset of a person going into it is I'm not very happy with the way that my labor is being used to do something kind of trivial for profit or to further the goals of growth for an organization that doesn't mean a lot to me. I'd like to use these cool skills, whether they're design or tech, to do something for my community. And sometimes with a, you know, this modernization spin, why isn't government interface as good as another interface I know? Or why can't government just offer me a single national website to get a COVID vaccine?

Rachel 32:39

Why can't you just the most loaded question we all face every day in the world?

SPEAKER_03 32:43

It's a huge one in civic tech. And I feel like the people who stay in it are the people who engage it earnestly. And you start to look at why can't we just? And then you start to figure out and see what you can do about those factors and figure out what's really possible.

Dan 32:58

And sometimes the reasons for why can't you just are good reasons, but they are not meaningful to regular everyday citizens.

SPEAKER_03 33:07

That's right. People talk about government procurement being difficult. So it's it's very hard for the government to buy something. Signing up for a software as a service product as part of a government agency can take months. And that is because we have procurement rules that were aimed at buying pencils or cars where you have to get bids and you have to go with the lowest bidder, and they're also aimed at avoiding patronage. So fairness means I'm not awarding a contract to my cronies. But the way that that plays into the checks that have to be done in the procurement process makes it take a really long time, makes software have to often be specified up front instead of developed in an agile way.

Rachel 33:49

Does tech need civic tech as much as government needs civic tech?

SPEAKER_03 33:54

I have actually been thinking about this a lot, and I would almost say that tech needs civic tech more than government needs civic tech. Government needs to interact with the public and it knows it does, and you know, there are reasons why government is canonically not as good at tech, and why there haven't been many tech people of our age or millennial age going into government. But one thing I see out in the world right now is that tech is a little bit lost, and a lot of good people are questioning whether there's a way to do tech that furthers societal good that is kind of pro-social. I remember probably 10 years ago that Danielle Leong had this great blog called Consensual Tech. What could a technology that is supportive, consensual, that treats people with respect, that respects people's agency? Civic tech is exploring that a lot more than private sector tech right now. And so I think it is in its practical branch, in its academic branch, really important for technology right now.

Dan 35:02

I've been highlighting some of the keywords that you've been bringing up, Sid, like accuracy, precise, comprehensive, formality, officiality. And what I appreciate about them is that they're good values. And as information architects, I love those things. But I'm also cognizant that in this day and age, let's divide the world into good information and bad information. The best information has all of those things, but bad information doesn't need any of them. So it's much harder to create good information. One of the things that as designers we're interested in is hypotheses that we can test. So I'm sort of curious what we can do to make it more difficult to let bad information in.

SPEAKER_03 35:55

I think some of it has to be institutional support, especially in the preventing bad information. Those signals like the SEAL or the.gov or whatever the 22nd century version of that is going to be, those need to be there. Um, I think that good information requires good institutions. I think that projects like the Center for Public Digital Infrastructure that Ethan Zuckerman has been building out at UMass Amherst are really interesting for that. What does digital infrastructure look like that supports this? I don't know the answer. I do tend towards a hypothesis that the ability to merge an official clarity and signals with an informality that meets the 21st century public where it is is the key. We interact in the 21st century with centuries-old institutions via devices that last a few months. And that puts you in multiple different pace layers, right, in trying to square this circle. But that is my hypothesis, is really finding our way to where people are, giving them calm, simple statements, finding a digital design language that is different but as refined as the private sector for-profit digital design language, those are the things that we need to do.

Dan 37:17

I have such a good example of official but informal. Oh. That is my favorite piece of civic tech that I participate in. Oh, I love this. Where I live is not a municipality. The county government is like the closest thing to a municipality. And if trash collection is delayed for any reason, I get a text message. And I always feel tremendously proud when I don't put my trash out because I know it's delayed and all my neighbors put their trash out.

SPEAKER_03 37:49

Well, you know, I bet you feel cared for too by just a text message.

Dan 37:54

I do. And you know what else? So my trash collection's on Wednesday, but if Monday's a holiday, it gets slid to Thursday and it gets slid a lot because they're federal holidays. And I'm proud that the county observes all these federal holidays and gives the sanitation workers the day off.

SPEAKER_03 38:13

So this is an incredible example, Dan, because it's a little thing, but it encapsulates a lot. It's giving you a feeling of belonging, not just to your county, but to the federal government that has these holidays. It's telling you that you're cared for, it's telling you that you can take an action to preserve the civic sphere by putting your trash out at the right time. And it's all in the space of a plain text SMS.

Rachel 38:36

Uh, I moved away from Minneapolis 13 years ago. For 13 years, I choose to still receive text messages when there's a snow emergency in Minneapolis so that I know to move my car. Because I feel like such a part of the Minneapolis community forever, and I can't give up that touch point.

SPEAKER_03 38:56

I love that. Those little touch points are what I'm talking about with informality and officiality. Now that would be easy to spoof. Yes. You get bad text all the time, and the the degradation of the text ecosystem is one of the fascinating things about this moment. But I'm so glad you told that story, Dan, because it's exactly the kind of thing that excites civic technologists.

Rachel 39:22

Sid, thank you so much. This was a delight. We're so glad you could join us today.

SPEAKER_03 39:28

Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Rachel 39:37

What an incredible interview with Sid. What are you left thinking about?

Dan 39:41

It is so hard to remember a time when we thought of the government as a source of reliable information. And the amount of information that we count on the government to provide us, things like metrics on the economy and energy consumption, health information, information about education, information about the weather, all of these things come from the US government. And for my entire life until this moment, we had no reason to doubt the information coming out of it. What I found really interesting about talking to Sid was this distinction between the government as a producer of information and the government as a channel by which we get information and how they've made a choice to focus on the former, creating a set of reliable information and relying on the press and other channels to get that information out there.

Rachel 40:43

One of the things that I'm wondering is is there more transparency now? And that's why we can see the garbage or both, and there's also more garbage.

Dan 40:59

Yeah. I have a slightly different perspective on this because of where I live. I know people and I know neighbors who worked in these agencies, and I've worked with people who work in these agencies. And so I think for me it's not so much the garbage, it's the elimination of the people who are generating this information, which suggests to me that if we do see any information that's coming out, I can't trust it as much because I know about all the reductions in force that are happening.

Rachel 41:36

Yeah. There's so many parts and mechanics to this, right? Like the government as producer of kind of raw data. And then there are the editorial actors who ostensibly verify or improve the quality of that data and give it context and turn it into information and knowledge. And question it.

Dan 41:57

Yes. All of the stories that you and I have come up with so far have involved a certain amount of complicity from the free press where they don't question the data that's coming from the government when the government has some other agenda. So, besides those things, what what did you get out of this? What was your kind of big takeaway?

Rachel 42:15

I cannot stop thinking about disambiguating formality from officiality. What's blowing my mind is that it's never occurred to me to disambiguate those things. And there's something about my mental model of institutions or government that assumes formality is a requirement of officiality.

Dan 42:41

I think you're on to something, and it didn't occur to me until you started talking about it, but there may be for those people, the younger generations who grew up with the internet, which I think started to show cracks in the value of formality.

Rachel 43:00

Yeah.

Dan 43:00

Right. Or or helped us kind of be a little bit more informal. I think the folks who grew up with that, like my kids, maybe don't necessarily think of formality and officiality, you know, in the same like as two sides of the same coin, like I do.

Rachel 43:16

You know, my my gut reaction is well, if you want something official, like of course it has to be formal. How can you take it seriously? And then Sid pointed out, formality is really inaccessible.

Dan 43:29

Yeah.

Rachel 43:30

A lot of folks have a hard time understanding information when it's presented in this really formal language and structure and channel. And that's so fair. There's an inclusion and accessibility point to be made about opting out of formality in official communications. And the text message story is a really good one, right? Like a text message, not formal. Right. But it's still, you know, in my case with the the It's no emergency, right? It's an official announcement that you better move your car or we're gonna cover it in eight feet of snow or tow it or both.

Dan 44:10

There may be bureaucracy, but it is uh in in that case very much hidden from you, or hidden just enough. So, Rachel, what lenses have you been thinking about?

Rachel 44:23

I have two lenses. I'm gonna name both of them, and you're gonna tell me which one you want to actually hear about. The first lens is persistence, and the second lens is accuracy.

Dan 44:36

Those are both really good. And Sid talked about both of those. Let's talk about accuracy.

Rachel 44:42

Okay, so accuracy is kind of how does the system define and uphold an acceptable threshold for accuracy? The reason I'm intrigued by this lens is because before talking to Sid, if you had asked me what accuracy is, I would have told you it's kind of a binary, a thing is accurate or it's not accurate. After talking to Sid, I'm realizing that this depends on context. Accuracy may be a spectrum rather than a binary. And different thresholds may be deemed acceptable for different contexts. So this lens is really asking like, how does the system ensure information is precise and comprehensive? But the thing I want to come back to here is like this idea of a threshold for accuracy. Now, different use cases require different levels of accuracy. I also think this ties to my discomfort with informality, and we'll get to that. So Sid was talking about this interesting example where her team was pushing for less formal language on communications about how to get a divorce in the state of California. And the legal representatives involved were saying, you know, the formal communication is more accurate. We can only communicate information that's accurate. And I'm putting words in Sid's mouth, but it was the conversation was kind of like, okay, but like what's accurate enough? How can we communicate this in a more accessible, less formal way and be accurate enough to satisfy all the parties? And that really opened my eyes to this idea that different use cases might have different requirements for accuracy, and it's not just an on or off situation.

Dan 46:26

This reminds me of the that old UI design principle, progressive disclosure.

Rachel 46:32

Yeah.

Dan 46:33

But instead of sort of gradually revealing more and more information, we are giving users an opportunity to get just enough accuracy for whatever they need in that moment, and then allowing them to progressively disclose additional levels of detail as they need it.

Rachel 46:54

Do you think this is something that a good teacher does? And I don't mean like someone who's like a licensed educator, although them too. When you come to your colleague who's an expert in airtable, me. I've never done that. And you're like, okay, I just have this thing I need to do. Like, is this possible? The more helpful person is probably going to start with, you know, a mildly accurate answer of like, should you even pursue this? And then get into the details of what you really need to know in order to make it happen. And maybe a less helpful person will say, it depends, and then just start talking about all of the details and like the deeply accurate answer. So maybe this accuracy thing is almost a form of scaffolding. Yes. And you know, I'm thinking of an example where this isn't always working very well today. And I would say generative AI answers on search tools, they don't clearly signal the accuracy and the scaffolding going on. I think that if you knew undoubtedly that the answer you were getting from an LLM, you know, Google or Bing or whoever else is doing it, if you knew without a doubt that you were just getting the first level of scaffolding, the like roughly accurate, but you're definitely going to need more information before you move on, answer, then that would be okay. But in my opinion, because you're not getting clear signals of the precision of the information or the comprehensiveness of the information and like where on that spectrum you are, then you don't know how much further you need to dig to feel confident about the information and to move on with your life. Right. If I'm thinking about like why this lens matters, I think in theory, you want to make sure the system is properly communicating not only how accurate is the information, but almost like what level of the scaffolding are you at here? Like, I'm just giving you a rough answer. You're gonna want to dig in. Or here is the complete, absolute, comprehensive, final answer with every detail you need to know and everything in between.

Dan 48:58

I just want to say out loud, you and I are collecting lots of different lenses as we listen to these conversations and brainstorm about it.

Rachel 49:06

I'm looking at our air table now. We've done two episodes and we have 26, 27 lenses.

Dan 49:11

Now, you know, that's just first drafts. So I do think we need to like normalize. But yes, these conversations already have led us to digging up new ways of looking at the work that we do. I think what we should do is in the show notes kind of put all four of these lenses that we're mentioning.

Rachel 49:29

Yeah.

Dan 49:29

Right. And we're only talking about two of them. So the two that I got excited about, one I called interface, and the other I called accountability. Which one of these would you like me to talk about and why is it accountability? It could be either one. It could be other one.

Rachel 49:47

I wanted accountability.

Dan 49:49

And I'll be honest with you, I I don't know that this one came directly out of our conversation with Sid, though it's definitely related to that. I was thinking more about the story that I told earlier about the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq and how there's been no accountability for the information that people put out there, that the Bush administration put out there as a rationale for going to war, for committing war crimes. Even here we are two decades plus later, I find that frustrating and saddening. And I think, what can I do as an information architect? Maybe not much, but what I can do is start to look at even the small information systems that I get to have a little bit of influence on and ask myself, how does the system that I'm designing compel participants to be accountable for their contributions and actions? It's a really easy question to ask. But as we've seen in social media, it is very, very, very hard to answer this question in a productive way. On the one hand, you know, we sort of can compel people to use their real identities when they're posting stuff, and then we get into the definition of what a real identity is, and that opens up sort of lots of complicated things. We can create mechanisms for other people to respond to not only respond, but see what you've actually done, see what you've done, and then other people can hold an author accountable on social media by blocking them or what have you, reporting them. But my sense of it is that all of this stuff has been added after the fact and that a system had not been designed from the outset to ensure a level of accountability. It's also easy to look at a story like the weapons of mass destruction and wonder what role the media needed to play there. And in that information ecosystem, the media really did need to play the role of holding the folks who were putting out this information more accountable than they did.

Rachel 52:09

Thinking about accountability, I want to get a really concrete example so I can think about this. And immediately I'm thinking about open source communities and how accountability and transparency seems pretty foundational, like a foundational value to those communities. And I'm thinking about how GitHub is structured, right? And how you can see all the projects someone has contributed to. You can see their code releases, you can actually see the changes that they have proposed and who accepted or rejected those and who merged them and when those changes were merged. Like there's so much accountability and transparency happening there. So I'm thinking concretely about how there are choices you can make in the foundational architecture of a system that honor accountability and transparency. And we do see some examples where that's clearly kind of a defining feature.

Dan 53:04

And it it may not have been GitHub's intent to make people accountable. That's true. I do think we can say that transparency is necessary for accountability. That seems a straight line that we can we can draw. And what I think we can safely say is that many other social systems online did not prioritize transparency, and we are seeing the consequences of those actions.

Rachel 53:32

What's the difference between transparency and accountability? Is accountability meaning you like you pay for your actions?

Dan 53:39

I guess on my worst day, that's what I think. Yeah. Like if you say things that are wrong and then become harmful, you should face consequences.

Rachel 53:51

And who gets to decide what is wrong? And who gets to decide what those consequences are?

Dan 53:56

Yes, that is a reasonable question. Let's just say it's out of the scope of this conversation. What I will say though is just like the lens of accuracy compels us to ask what is an acceptable threshold, the lens of accountability compels us to ask within the scope of our information ecosystem, what are reasonable consequences? I've done a lot of work in safety in games, in like online games. And there are very punitive things that you can do in an online game space, like ban someone forever or for a certain period of time. And they're real questions, you know, is that a meaningful way of enforcing accountability for your actions?

Rachel 54:45

I'm banning myself from the internet for now.

Dan 54:49

We're on a Friday today, so maybe, maybe a weekend internet ban worthwhile. Rachel, that was great. We are interested in talking to experts on different domains and potentially the use of disinformation in those domains. If you have anyone in mind or you think you are someone who has something to say about disinformation, we would love to talk to you. Drop us a line.

SPEAKER_00 55:23

Curious Squid helps organizations like yours untangle complex information architecture and user experience challenges. Visit us at curious squid.com.