Kavi Harshawat is a user experience researcher and designer, and was formerly a Code for America fellow. This summer, he spent time in McAllen, Texas, during the beginning of the family separation crisis at the border.   A father and his two boys wait, exhausted and anxious. They are in a space no bigger than

Jeremiah Lindemann is a Public Interest Technology Fellow at New America, where he runs the Opioid Mapping Initiative, a coalition of local government task forces devising new strategies to combat the opioid epidemic.   The term “crisis” is often used to refer to something huge––national or even global in scale. A “crisis” is a wave

Baltimore has been tackling a major crisis in their city for years— infant mortality, and the disparity in survival rates between white and black babies. The Commons’ Emma Coleman spoke with Rebecca Dineen, the Baltimore City Health Department’s Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, about how they have been able to

Vivian Graubard and Ron Gorodetzky are both former members of the U.S. Digital Service who worked together on a discovery sprint for the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) redesign in November 2015. While their story is from a few years back, the signs of disaster they saw in the project are red flags

Maria Filippelli is the Public Interest Technology 2020 Census Fellow, sitting at the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights. For the past few months, she has been working with national, state, and local organizations to bridge the technology divide that exists with the new online census option.   If you know one thing about

Anthony Lyons is the City Manager for Gainesville, Florida, where he is leading the local government through an effort to become more citizen-centered by focusing on user experience.   When Gainesville began this citizen-centered redesign, the first focus was on making it easier to start a business in the city, hence the creation of the

Michelle Thong is a service designer, storyteller and facilitator. As Digital Services Lead for the City of San Jose, she’s leading the introduction of user-centered, iterative approaches to help her fellow public servants deliver better services to San Jose’s 1 million residents and 60,000 businesses.   “Where do we start?” This is the question staring

In January of 2018, the New York City Service Design Studio launched “Designing for Opportunity,” a competition to select the next city department to work with the Studio on a design project. The Commons’ Emma Coleman visited the Studio to learn more.   “We had to go through a special procurement process just for these,”

Do digital media outlets have political bias, and can they manipulate how we vote and see elections because of it? We asked Dipayan Ghosh, Ph.D, the Pozen Fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was a technology and economic policy advisor in the Obama White House and served as a privacy

On August 22, 2018, the Ithaca Times, a small newspaper in upstate New York, printed a voter registration form on the cover of the paper. The Commons’ Emma Coleman looked into how this happened, and how other local papers can take on the task of keeping their readership civically engaged. As autumn sweeps into Ithaca,