Nava, a Startup That Wants to Fix the Government's Crappy Design

59 点作者 nkzednan将近 10 年前

9 条评论

spangry将近 10 年前

I'm a (non-US) federal public servant who worked for a small, and now defunct, agency with the mandate to embed 'user-centric' design principles in the creation of public services. At the time we were wound up, I concluded we had failed. Now I'm less sure. I still occasionally see instances where our work has influenced other public servants, so perhaps we've had some measure of longer-term success. You should carefully think about and define your metrics for 'success', both in the short and long term.All that aside, the key reason for poor design in government is this: lack of incentive. And no, the ballot box is not an effective incentive; very few voters will punish a government because their tax return form was poorly designed. Private companies possess this incentive: if your product is hard to use, people won't buy it and you'll go out of business. Government doesn't have this incentive: if people find your products hard to use, they'll use them or they'll (eventually) go to jail, won't get their welfare payment, won't receive a driver's licence etc.Outsourcing or privatising these kinds of services is not the answer: you're just substituting a public monopoly for a private one, which arguably leads to worse outcomes for citizens (and great ones for the private monopolist). This kind of action only makes sense if a competitive market will form after government gets out of the way. It's helpful to think of government services in this fashion: a service market that is dominated by a monopolist.So that's the problem you are attempting to solve: how do you get a monopolist with no profit incentive to design better products and services?

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mistermann将近 10 年前

> For example, the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs spent $1.3 billion on a program to build an electronic health-records database and abruptly stopped the project in 2013 after it failed to progress as planned. More staggering? In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures, meaning they didn't meet their budget, timeline, or user expectations.If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.> A lot of the work we did last year for retooling the Healthcare.gov application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. Instead of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the new Healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based on your replies.Jesus. You'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense required to design an application of this level of importance.> The newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring, but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?Obviously. You'd almost have to be trying to screw it up as bad as the original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.

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navahq将近 10 年前

Hi! We don't have a jobs page up yet, so I'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (Nava)Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full TimeWe're a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix. And it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government.Our revamped Healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate. We’re just getting started, and we’ve started Nava to help fix everything else. [0]People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1].That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that.Our team is 10 people (Stanford, Google, YC alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015.We’re looking for: - experienced full-stack engineers - experienced devops engineers - a product manager with a technical background - a hyper-resourceful operations personWe have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity (above market).If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com.*Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us.[1] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t.." rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t...</a>.

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Animats将近 10 年前

Fixing it too well may be incompatible with some personal liberties and privacy. A big problem is that the Government has no really solid way to authenticate you online. If it did, you'd need to provide far less info when signing up for something. Some of the Scandinavian countries work that way.Should the US? Should Government web sites work on the policy that you should never have to tell the Government something it already knows?

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stephenhuey将近 10 年前

I spoke to one of them on the phone recently and was very impressed! If I didn't have a couple of other compelling things occupying me right now I'd seriously consider joining their team in DC pronto. They are preparing to introduce more government clients to speedy iterations in clean modular application development and I'm eager to see them continue to impress.

datashovel将近 10 年前

I think the startup has good intentions, but I think is focusing on the wrong end of things. With good reason, though, as I don't imagine there's much money to be made in the areas that really require attention.My hypothesis is if we had competent (I mean most, not just some) elected officials in the first place, almost none of the chronic issues would exist to begin with. Voters need to be far more critical of who we put in office (all offices at national, state, and local levels).But how do we educate ourselves on them? We need people working to make raw, unfiltered data readily available to voters BEFORE they vote so we end up with a far more productive / capable government to begin with.

andrewfong将近 10 年前

I'd tolerate the terrible design if the core functionality just worked. Apparently, you're not allowed to make EDGAR filings on the SEC's website if it's a federal holiday. Go figure.

AndrewMock将近 10 年前

Poor government website design is due to every reason regarding the the demand side, not supply.See "IDIQ" contracts for more.

skrebbel将近 10 年前

I'm a bit confused. Are agencies startups too now?

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