Mikey Dickerson
Administrator of The United States Digital Service. A Startup at The White House
Discussion
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
I’m Mikey Dickerson, Administrator of the U.S. Digital Service at The White House, which turned 2 last week. At the U.S. Digital Service we’re applying best practices in design and technology to improve our government’s most important citizen-facing services. I’m looking forward to answering your questions about USDS, our work, and how you can get involved.
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neeharika sinha
@neeeharika · Google, Threadchannel
Hello Mikey! I am really curious to know what a typical day looks for you. I am sure at the Government level there are so many projects to undertake how do you priortize your efforts? Are there opportunities for local entrepreneurs to work with United States Digital Service?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@neeeharika Hi .. For me, a normal work day is meetings and more meetings. I spend a lot of time with our teams, helping manage projects, both with respect to technical direction and working with our agency partners to make sure everyone is working together well. There's also a lot of coordination and policy discussion inside the White House to be done every day. I am usually scheduled from about 9am to 7 pm, and after that there's usually an after-work activity of some kind, Shake Shack if I am lucky.
You are right that there are many more projects than we can take on. We do our best to prioritize them using these criteria: (1) what will do the greatest good for the greatest number of people that need it the most, (2) where will we be most effective, and (3) what potential exists to reuse the technical solution in other places in the government.
The way to work in USDS right now is as an individual. We are always in need of good designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. If you would like to work with your state or local government, you should look up Code for America, which runs very similar projects and "brigades" at the local level.
Nat Welch
@icco · Software Reconnaissance Engineer
One of the common complaints I hear about the USDS is their slow hiring process. People want to participate, but actually getting involved takes a long time (> six months). What is the cause of this? Do you feel USDS has been able to grow at the speed you've needed it to, or are you frustrated as well?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@icco Over 6 months was a fair criticism in 2014, when we got an overwhelming initial surge of thousands of applications and had no people to process them. We've worked very hard since then to build a whole talent team with monitoring and metrics. I'm pretty certain that the time from application to first contact today is less than a month for most people, and it's about a month from the time a hire decision is made to your start date. We found that pushing to go any shorter didn't make much difference, since most candidates want at least that much time to get their lives in order. So I'd encourage anybody that might have tried in 2014, and timed out, to consider getting back in touch.
Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
What's a major project at the USDS that you're currently working on that you are really excited about?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@tomstocklein There's a few .. One that is very visible and therefore easy to talk about is vets.gov. This is a place where you can find several important veteran services that we have helped to modernize and bring online, organized into a unified and simplified experience.
The Veterans' Healthcare Application (how you apply to receive medical care from the VA) is one of those services. The old version was used by less than 10% of applicants, because for most of them, it was impossible. It was a "fillable PDF" that only worked in an old version of IE and Acrobat Reader. The new one is bringing in a lot more people. We did a post on this too:
https://medium.com/the-u-s-digit...
Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
What apps are on your home screen?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@tomstocklein Starting from top left: Google News and Weather. "Days Left Widget." Google Keep. Clock. Authenticator. WhatsApp. Camera. Chrome. Signal. Phone.
Ben Butler
@benbauerbutler · GIS Analyst
Hi Mikey, I've been following your story and the work you are doing at USDS for a while now. Very inspiring stuff! I work for the US Forest Service on a wildfire research and development tech transfer team here in Boise, ID. We are plagued by paralyzing (at times) technology challenges and an inability to "Keep up with the Jones'" in the private sector. What advice would you have for someone trying to enact change in government outside the "Beltway"?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@benbauerbutler Thanks for what you are doing. Here's a couple of comments that fit in this margin: Good progress is usually within reach if you stay tightly focused on delivering an effective and usable service that serves your customers' real needs. I wouldn't worry about trying to "keep up" with tech fashions for their own sake. Walk through any Silicon Valley tech giant's office and you'll see plenty of people writing in vi in a terminal window, and that's fine.
Our "Digital Services Playbook" at https://playbook.cio.gov was designed to be helpful to people in your situation. The TechFAR Hub likewise. A community of like-minded people, maybe a Code for America brigade, might be nearby too.
Vinay Khosla
@vinay123 · Co-founder Zenyx.com. Builder. Investor.
Hi. On the USDS website it shows only one UX person. Given the inevitable complexities of Government and its agencies, would it be better to focus on great UX to engage the public and simplify some of the complexities of Government policy and operations?
Thanks.
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@vinay123 Certainly design and user research are critical to everything we do. The people profiled on the web site are just a sampling. We have a series of "meet the team" posts on Medium, and if you read back through a few, you'll find more members of our design community.:
https://medium.com/the-u-s-digit...
Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
If you were to host a special dinner and could invite five people (still alive), who'd you pick and why?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@tomstocklein I don't have a list of heroes at my fingertips, but off the top of my head, here's some people I would think would be interesting to have at dinner: Bill Watterson (wrote Calvin and Hobbes). Randall Munroe (writes xkcd). Anthony Downs (wrote some early organizational theory and sociology books that we have found invaluable). Mickey Dickerson (I don't know who that guy is but I'm always hearing about him). Then, as with all such events, I would need Joni or Sarah or both, who are part of USDS and help fill in for me when I run out of nice words.
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Mikey thanks for joining! What's been the most surprising thing about working at the USDS?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@ems_hodge So many possible answers .. Let's go with, I thought we were creating a team of 10 or 15 or something. Then we got far more support from the President and from Congress than anyone ever dreamed, and today we are around 200.
SC
@s_carroll_
What responsibility, if at all, does the USDS have in pushing innovation within the government? Not only from a technical aspect, but also in procurement?
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Mikey Dickerson
@mikeyd · Administrator, U.S. Digital Service
@s_carroll_ Our model of small empowered teams works best when it is focused on results, rather than process. But we know that "small empowered teams" will never be able to reach more than a few percent of the $86 billion in IT projects the government does every year. Most of the solution will always have to be the existing agency teams and their private sector partners.
To help the large-scale efforts as best we can, USDS also has a team focused on making procurement more flexible and effective. If you want to know more about it, the TechFAR Hub (a joint effort of USDS and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy) is a place to start: https://techfarhub.cio.gov/