Category: rants

Innovate or Be Mildly Embarrassed

Tesla #strideby #collaborateDC #igdc
Tesla on display at the Collaborate conference in Washington, DC.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
– Peter Drucker

Dr. David Bray, Chief Information Officer, Federal Communications Commission, mentioned this quote in “Innovate or Die,” a panel discussion on governmental innovation at Collaborate. His point was the leaders must do more than just develop a grand vision for their organization – they must build an innovative culture if it is to survive. That means encouraging mistakes, providing support for risk-takers and fostering a belief that innovation is everyone’s job.

Collaborate was billed as “Where Innovators in Entrepreneurship, Government, and Technology Converge.” It was two days filled with keynote speakers, panel discussions and workshops at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, DC. These events always remind me of SXSW – there’s weird furniture, space-trip lounge music and freebies galore. But what’s great about this free exchange of ideas is the sense of optimism that, yes, we can change everything, even the federal government.

However, the debacles of the past few years, from the Iraq war to Obamacare, has revealed that government is broken. It just doesn’t do things very well anymore. Why?

It comes down to culture. The panelists at “Innovate or Die” all had great ideas, some of which they’d been able to implement in their agencies. But it’s been a long slog.

The reason for the resistance is that there’s no “or die” part of the equation. There’s no “or anything” for governmental innovation. “Innovate or Be Mildly Embarrassed” would be a more accurate panel description. That the FCC has streamlined paperwork is wonderful – but other government agencies haven’t, without punishment. No one dies. No one is punished. In fact, Obamacare website developer CGI Federal, “the poster child for government failure” was just awarded a new contract by the IRS.

Who’s on the other end of the “or die” end of the equation? You and me, as the recent Metro fire demonstrates. Their organizational culture expresses nothing but contempt for passengers. Our safety comes second to the jobs program that is the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

I’m a cog in the vast federal bureaucracy, a contractor tasked with helping the feds out with communication. I recently had to obtain approval for an all-hands message. This meant printing out the message, putting it in a red folder (no other color, please), printing a routing slip and then walking the folder around from office to office to get senior execs to read the memo and initial it. Nothing about this 19th Century process struck anyone as unusual or exceptional. That’s the power of culture.

How do you change culture? “Forced retirement” is the answer you hear from a lot of younger feds. They’d love to see a lot of their older coworkers out the door. And I think they’re right.

But it’s also changing the incentive structure. If you want government to be innovative and responsive to citizen needs, then you need to reward and encourage innovators. That means money, promotions and accolades. It also means that we, the people, need to demand governmental reform. You get the culture you encourage. If you want innovation, reward it.

Metro and the Culture of Organizational Indifference

Silver Spring Transit Center, doomed to never open?
The empty Silver Spring Transit Center. Total cost: $125 million. And rising.

Every morning, I walk by the empty shell of the Silver Spring Transit Center. It was supposed to be a glorified bus shelter, where people could transfer from one bus to another. Construction began in 2008. Six years and $125 million later and it’s still not open.

Why? Because it’s unsafe. The concrete in the structure has started to crack and crumble. Who is responsible? Montgomery County blames the contractors; the contractors blame the subcontractors; the subcontractors say they just followed the Montgomery County specs; and so on. It’s a perfect circle of blamelessness, where no one is at fault.

On Monday, there was a fire in Metro, the subway system for Washington, DC. Smoke is not uncommon in the aging system.

I ride the Metro every day and can’t imagine a more nightmarish scenario than being trapped in a train car as it filled with smoke. People waited as the train operator assured them that help was on the way. They waited patiently for 45-60 minutes, in a tunnel, as smoke overwhelmed them. One person died; 83 others were sent to the hospital.

At the time, I tweeted:

Why won’t anything change? The people who manage, operate and oversee Metro have no incentive to change. General Manager Richard Sarles is retiring with a generous pension. Senior Metro executives will receive bonuses. The rich provisions of union contracts will continue to be honored. The Board of Directors will meet and chat. No one will be fired and everyone will find someone else to blame for this tragedy.

The attitude of this elite class of public sector professionals reminds me of Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby, after they ran someone over in another transit-related tragedy:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Except no one will clean up this mess. Fires, derailments and other safety hazards in Metro will continue and get worse.

Nothing will change at Metro until we make individuals accountable. That means firing everyone associated with Monday’s fire, including:

  • The Train Operator.
  • The Station Manager.
  • The Manager in Charge of Track Maintenance.
  • The Manager of Operations Control Center.

This should be done – at a minimum. It would be a small step to demonstrate that Metro takes this seriously.

Metro does not need to wait for the NTSB investigation to do this. Someone died in the system that they manage. There needs to be an immediate consequence for this tragedy.

Metro will say, “But we can’t fire anyone – they’re in a union.” Then the union should be abolished. Passenger safety is more important than organized labor. You cannot institute individual accountability with a labor union controlling hiring, firing and work rules.

Train arrives in Silver Spring #igdc #wmata
A train arrives in Silver Spring

Over the next few months, the familiar cycle of blame will set in. Metro will say that the accident is because the Board didn’t give them enough money; the Board will say that they did all they could; union will blame management; management will blame union; Metro will blame passengers; and on and on as everyone remains in their jobs. It will be business as usual – unless we demand better.

Washington is supposedly the land of the “best and the brightest.” And we have no want for resources – we literally print money in this city. If Metro is The Great Society Subway, then the failure to make it safe for riders is an indictment of the entire idea of big government.  Walter Olson at the Cato Institute nails it:

If the cream of the nation’s political class, living within a 50 mile radius in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C., cannot arrange to obtain competence from their elected local officials in delivering a public service that’s vital to their daily work lives, what does that tell us about their pretensions to improve through federal action the delivery of local government services – fire and police, water supply and schooling, road maintenance and, yes, transit itself – in the rest of the country?

Big government and other large organizations need to be made accountable. That means punishing people. To break the cycle of organizational indifference, then we have to ensure that there are real penalties for screwing up.

Metro must be reformed. Our lives depend on it.

 

Coffeeneuring 7: Sex and the City and Cappuccino

Illy Caffe
Illy at the Renaissance Dupont Hotel in Washington, DC.

Coffeeneuring 7: Illy
Date: November 16, 2014
Distance: 6 miles

It was chilly on the last day of coffeeneuring (where you bike to seven different coffee shops over seven weeks).

Coffeeneuring is always a learning experience for me. You learn things about yourself – like how I don’t have the patience for hipster coffee. And about biking in the city, like how much design matters when it comes to safe cycletracks.

For my final coffeeneuring experience, I went to Illy in Washington, DC. I was on my “real bike” too – my Specialized Sirrus. It was a gray-skied day and I planned on going on a long ride.

Me bike, Meiwah
Me bike, Meiwah.

But a cold wind blew right through my fleece. I was chilled so cut my trip short. Coffeeneuring lesson learned: when it’s cold, you always need one more layer.

I’m a fan of Illy because it’s about as non-hipster as it comes. Located in the lobby of a downtown hotel, Illy is a chain out of Italy. They make a beautiful cappuccino with a minimum of fuss for just $3.15. It’s the best deal in the city. And it’s made quickly, by sweet West African women without a weird beard or nose piercing in sight.

Cappuccino for grand #coffeeneuring finale
A perfect cappuccino.

There was a line of people who had come in to get out of the chilly day. But, within just a couple of minutes, I had my cappuccino and was ensconced in the early-2000s era lobby of the Renaissance Hotel.

With its mod furniture and piped-in lounge music, the Renaissance is an attempt at cool from another era. There are no distressed menu boards. Nothing is made out of hemp. You don’t have a table salvaged from a demolished building. Instead, the slick surfaces and high-tech feel of the lobby make it look like a set from Sex and the City. Lean back and you can imagine Samantha drinking Cosmos and talking dot-coms.

No fixie-riding hipster with a Civil War-era beard would be caught dead in such an establishment; it would be like going for drinks with your mom’s friends.

It’s the antithesis of hipster; I love it.

But don’t tell anyone, OK?

Coffeeneuring #6: Popsicles and Political Power

Pleasant Pops
Pleasant Pops in Adams Morgan.
Coffeeneuring 6: Pleasant Pops
Date: November 9, 2014
Distance: 15 miles

Until the recent return of the polar vortex, Indian Summer was in full effect in Washington, DC. The delightful mild autumn days were ideal for coffeeneuring (where you bike to seven different coffee shops over seven weeks). It was the kind of weather where you never wanted to go inside, especially with winter looming.

But one can only bike so much. After a while, you have to stop for coffee. For my sixth coffeeneuring adventure, I went to Pleasant Pops in Adams Morgan.

A few years ago, someone told me that gourmet popsicles would be the next food trend to overtake the city. Hah! Only in New York, I thought. Washingtonians aren’t foolish enough to pay $5 for a popsicle. I was wrong. Make it quirky, organic and expensive and people in this city will wait in line to buy it. The upper limit for what DC residents will pay for luxury goods has yet to be discovered.

I did not get a Pineapple Basil or Mexican Chocolate popsicle. Instead, I got a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie (which was delicious and home-made).

I sat outside at a picnic table and tried to finish Lone Star, a history of Texas. Next to me, a couple of women engaged in a humble-brag conversation about their careers. On a Sunday afternoon.

I could understand a chat about finding a job – that’s an important concern. Everyone needs to work. But rapid-fire exposition on the fabulosity of one’s white collar work? I’m sure everyone is very impressed that you met the Deputy Undersecretary but I’m sitting here trying to read my Kindle.

Hot chocolate pops

Which is why (controversy alert) I welcomed the shellacking the Democrats received. This city and its $5 popsicles has grown too important in the life of the nation. The American dream should not be to come to Washington and work to influence transportation policy. The American dream should be about writing a novel, starting a company or inventing something new. It should be about creating value, not just skimming off some of the taxpayer dollars that slosh into this city.

Washington should be boring. Government work, while important, cannot be the focus of the nation if we are to survive. Government is possible only due to the economic dynamism of the rest of the country. The ambitious should not aspire to come here.

Washington should be where bureaucrats (like me) quietly read books in outdoor cafes. So, go west, young man. Or light out to Texas. But don’t come here.

Coffeeneuring #5: A Tale of Two Cycletracks

A Starbucks like every Starbucks in the world.
A Starbucks like every other Starbucks in the world.

Coffeeneuring 5: Starbucks
Date: November 3, 2014
Distance: Ten miles

Why do you go to Starbucks? You go because you know exactly what you’ll get. From the logo on the cups to the layout of the bathroom, a Starbucks in San Diego is just like a Starbucks in New York. You can travel across the breadth of this nation (and around the world) and you can count on Starbucks to deliver the same coffee experience, no matter the location. This ability to deliver uniformity is a uniquely American talent.

Why can’t our genius for standardization be applied to bike lanes?

The thought occurred to me as I was at a Starbucks. Combining coffeeneuring with errandonnee, I was on my way to the Apple store in Georgetown. After taking the 15th St Cycletrack and and the M Street Cycletrack, I stopped at Starbucks for coffee. I went there because I knew what I would get.

15th st Cycletrack
The well-designed 15th St Cycletrack, where bikes and cars are kept carefully apart.

But biking around DC, you never know what you’ll get. This city’s bike infrastructure is a wildly chaotic mess that changes by the day.

The DC Department of Transportation (DDOT) started out so well. The first cycletrack, on 15th Street, is perfectly designed. Bikes are protected from traffic by a line of parked cars. Lanes are marked, signage is good and it’s clear to everyone how the protected bike lane works, thanks to the efforts of reforming Mayor Fenty and DDOT Director Gabe Klein.

In contrast, the M Street Cycletrack was compromised from the start, by Mayor Gray, who sold out to the politically-connected Metropolitan AME Church. There would be no bike lane in front of the 1500 block of M Street, so that they could double-park cars all over street.

Careful!
This is insane. The M Street Cycletrack leads you into a spot to get broadsided by a car.

Heading west, it gets worse, as the cycletrack weaves in and out of bollards and parked cars. It leads you into traffic and cars merge into the track, blindly, as they attempt to turn right. This poor design has made it worse for cyclists and drivers. M Street before the cycletrack was safer.

Later in the week, as I returned to the Apple store, I discovered something even more dangerous than the M Street Cycletrack – the M Street Cycletrack at night. Navigating the serpentine cycletrack in the dark, as cars nip at your wheels is an experience only for the most daring of urban cyclists. Hope you have good health insurance.

look out!
Cyclists go left, cars go right, everyone meets in the middle. Bad, dangerous design by DDOT.

Why can’t DC have cycletracks with the consistency of Starbucks? Why are they all chaotically different and hopelessly compromised? Why are they so poorly designed and so obviously unsafe?

This is a country that gave the world Apple and Google – we know and appreciate good design. We can create uniform cycletrack experiences, no matter the environment. And a good design already exists, on 15th Street. Take that template and apply it across the city. Give us safe cycletracks, DDOT.

Photographers Not Working as Photographers

I don’t like fall. To me, it means shorter days and colder temps, both of which I hate. But it’s diminishing daylight that really gets to me. As sunset creeps toward 5 PM, it’s like the whole world is coming to an end.

The season has one redeeming feature: changing leaves. In the mid-Atlantic, the green slowly fades into yellows, oranges and reds over the course of more than a month. The trees have just begun to change colors in downtown Silver Spring:

Changing seasons

I took this photo on my lunch hour, with my iPhone 5. But I thought the picture was too busy and didn’t like the trash can on the left. The branch extending across the top of the photograph was what interested me most. I thought it would make a good Instagram shot.

I cropped it in Instagram, then used the enhance button and applied the Walden filter to give it a desaturated look – like a faded photo found in an attic. I liked the creamy blankness of the sky. Lastly, I turned down the shadows to bring in a little more color in the leaves and to increase the contrast between the branch and the leaves. Here’s the final result:

Looking a little like fall in downtown Silver Spring #igdc #dtss

All this took about five minutes, back in my cubicle at work. I added it to a few Flickr groups and a couple days later I saw my photo on Capital Weather Gang, used to illustrate the arrival of fall in DC. And it was the second photo of mine that they used this week.

I work for a government agency but don’t shoot for them – they don’t have staff photographers, a photo library, a photo budget or photo editors despite the fact that we need photos all the time for web pages, brochures and social media. Instead, as a contractor, I write, edit, go to meetings and toil away in bureaucratic obscurity for the agency.

I’m far from alone in this situation. If you check out local blogs or art gallery shows, you will find the work of talented photographers, nearly all of whom have jobs with the federal government or corporate organizations. They’re photographers not employed as photographers. Instead, they’re system admins or technical editors or even senior management.

We live in a visual age but organizations large and small devote few resources to photography. Think what a company could do if it engaged, organized and compensated their own unofficial staff photographers. After all, who could tell the story of your business better than the people who work there?

Like the legions of photographers in other jobs, I’m going to continue to take photos, because I enjoy it. Photography gets me through the seasons, like the dying fall, and it might just deliver me to a future in which photography is recognized for its storytelling potential.

Can sex sell Silver Spring apartments?

I Instagrammed this ad for a The Point at Silver Spring because it seemed so ridiculous. Silver Spring is not sexy. It’s where women in tennis shoes get on trains for downtown DC and where lanyard-wearing feds shuffle off to NOAA.

I know – I work there. The biggest claim to fame Silver Spring has is its failed transit center, a hundred million dollars of crumbling concrete destined to demolition. Compared to the rest of the DC area, highlights are few – except for the $5 gyros, which are awesome.

On my Instagram account, a couple of people commented on the photo. Their profile pics looked familiar… turns out, they’re the people pictured in the ad. They’re actors who were hired for a swingles-style photo shoot to promote the new high-rise.

Social media is a strange world that connects disparate people instantly, just through a casual photo taken on a Metro platform.

And sorry to disappoint you but the sexy singles in the ad don’t live at The Point. Your neighbors will probably be middle-aged government employees working at NIH. You won’t be invited over for champagne by fitness models in evening wear.

You’ll be there. But  she won’t for an apartment cannot give you a different life.

Don’t Bike on H Street

G St night biking
Biking west on G St NE after the WABA happy hour. Note the contraflow bike lane on the left.

Do not bike on H Street NE under any circumstances! That was the consensus opinion at the Washington Area Bicyclists Association (WABA) summer happy hour at Vendetta on H Street. Everyone present seemed to have a story of injury and woe.

The reason? Streetcar tracks, which are dangerous to cyclists and impossible to avoid on H Street. There’s a small gap between rail and pavement that’s the perfect size to ensnare a bike tire.

I speak from experience. Two summers ago, I was cruising down H Street, in between the tracks. I had heard of the danger but thought I was being safe – I knew I needed to cross the tracks at a right angle to avoid peril. What I didn’t count on was the tracks veering off to the right as they approached Hopscotch Bridge. The front tire of my Specialized Sirrus got caught in the gap between track and pavement and I flew sideways off the bike, scraping along the pavement for ten feet or so. The tracks left me a bloody mess, with road rash all along my right side.

To add insult to injury, the streetcar isn’t even running yet. The tracks have been there for more than two years. But not a single passenger has been delivered. All the tracks have done is upend cyclists.

So, don’t bike down H Street! Take G or I instead. They’re pleasant neighborhood streets and free of the streetcar menace.

The Cynic’s Guide to Government Contracting

There’s an interesting post by Ben Balter on why government doesn’t use open source. It’s a good read, in which Balter presents all the reasons why government doesn’t use open-source software for its web sites, from the demand for enterprise solutions to a desire to avoid transparency (really).

Why is government so bad at building web sites? Why do they frequently build nonfunctional monstrosities like healthcare.gov, with its price of $840 million (and growing)?

Because there is no Web Department in government. There is no Web Development Corps of dedicated usability specialists, designers and editors. There is no government-wide web strategy.

Instead, government web sites are built ad hoc, created by individual agencies with wildly varying degrees of competence. Some are good. Others look straight out of the 90s. There is no standard design nor is there a standard platform. Instead, every agency builds what they want, with only a cursory nod toward the needs of the public.

These web sites are largely built by contractors, with names that sound vaguely Greek, like Synergos, or sound high-tech, like Advanced TechnoData Inc (ATDI, for short). These companies exist solely to win government contracts. They’re experts at it, and form and reform, based upon government requirements. If there’s a contract that asks for a small, disadvantaged business with a transgendered Intuit at the helm, then that company will come into being.

In their protean stage, these companies are little more than a sign on an office door and a web site filled with stock photos of happy tech workers. To succeed, they have to win contracts. For that, they have specialists in responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs). These specialists are expert at analyzing RFPs and then parroting back the requirements in the most convoluted and voluminous manner possible. These responses go back to government, which analyzes them, and then selects the lowest bidder.

Congratulations – your company has won an RFP. You promised you’d build a web site. Now you have to hire the people to do the work. Why don’t you have them on staff? Because you have no money to pay anyone until you win a contract. So, you go out and hire them – quickly. You want them on site and billing, so that you can get your money.

But it’s hard to get good help, especially when it comes to developers. You do the best you can, optimizing for speed and price over skills and experience. Better to get a cheap developer today then spend six months trying to woo top talent.

You created a beautiful Gantt chart, one with different colors for every week of the web development process – and it’s all gone to hell. Recruiting takes longer than anticipated – people have families, other jobs and they can’t start immediately, as much as you want them too. And just getting them into a government building is a chore – you need a person just handling the paperwork. Getting your staff computers and software from unresponsive government IT departments takes even longer.

Along the way, you decide on a Content Management System (CMS). Maybe you were strongly encouraged by the government CIO. He goes to big conferences sponsored by big software companies, ones that he hopes to join. He has a preferred CMS.

So, you ask your developers, “Can this CMS do what we want?” Of course they say yes – what else are they going to say? Their jobs depend on it.

You spend months in the planning stage. Wireframes are presented to rooms full of feds. Designs are revised endlessly. Everyone offers opinions but authority is elusive.

You move forward, months late. The build phase is a trainwreck. It’s where plans collide with reality. You find out you can’t put a button there and that the slideshow isn’t Sec. 508 compliant and that it’s not clear who’s going to write all this content anyway.

But the money is flowing. Your people, though they may be frustrated, are billing 40 hours a week. The COTR (Contracting Officers Technical Representative) is happy. His job is to make sure that the money is being spent. It’s a game where you don’t want to have any funds left at the end of the year.

Dog and pony shows are put on for senior management. You don’t show them the actual site (which doesn’t work) but you show mockups to people working on Blackberries.

Developers work late into the night hacking the thing together. It’s a big mess of ugly code, workarounds around workarounds, but it should hold up, provided you don’t get too many visitors.

You launch. It doesn’t suck. It works, kinda. You have a pizza party in the break room. The developers are surly, as if they hate the site, the process, you, everything. The feds hardly seem to notice their new site. And the public, well, their emails of complaint go into an unmonitored inbox.

While the web site may not be perfect, and it may be impossible to update (thanks to your CMS choice), the important thing is that the money was spent. It’s good enough for government work. The thought cheers you, as you pull into the driveway of your McMansion, paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Bikes and Bias: Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Washington Post

IMG_8399.jpg
Bike terrorists who deserve to be run over, according to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy.

There was a time when the media considered itself a fourth branch of government. They were the ones responsible for “keeping them honest” and “speaking truth to power.” Objective arbiters of the truth, journalists were an elite class charged with communicating the news to the rest of us.

No organization embodied this high-minded civic sentiment more than The Washington Post, the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, the paper that brought down a president.

Today, the Washington Post published a poorly-written, factually incorrect, hate-filled screed advocating violence against cyclists. The author was Courtland Milloy, a Washington Post columnist, who writes:

It’s a $500 fine for a motorist to hit a bicyclist in the District, but some behaviors are so egregious that some drivers might think it’s worth paying the fine.

Believe it or not, but this piece (with its factual errors, stereotyping and threats of violence) was reviewed and edited by editors at the Washington Post.

Several commentators (including me) had a tweet-exchange with one of them, asking how this could pass the Post’s supposedly rigorous standards. His reply:

You know what other views are widely held? Millions of people believe that Obama was born in Kenya. Others think 9/11 was an inside job. And a big chunk of the US population is certain that UFOs exist. But you don’t see their views in the Post. Why not?

Because the Post has editorial standards. They do not allow the beliefs of violent, racist crackpots on to their pages.

Unless you’re Courtland Milloy. He’s kept on staff because he’s supposedly the voice of black Washington – though he no longer lives in the city. Lacking a black perspective on the op-ed page, they pay him handsomely for the odd column, though his hate-filled rants would not be tolerated from a white writer. It’s patronizing liberalism at its worst, literally the soft bigotry of low expectations, and occurs despite the fact that there are plenty of talented black voices in this city.

Why not look for an African-American Ezra Klein rather than hanging on to this relic from the Marion Barry era?

Bikes have a way of revealing biases. For example, gentle-voiced Scott Simon of NPR, also hates and stereotypes cyclists. What other strange views does he hold? Are there other groups he thinks should be singled out for punishment? How do these biases influence what NPR covers?

Reporters say nasty things about cyclists because they can. Slurs against cyclists are acceptable while stereotyping other groups is not. Reporters give voice to this hate because there is no punishment for it. These biases exist and influence what stories get covered – and what stories don’t. Anti-cyclist hate is acceptable in the pages of the Post while the birthers are not.

The media is not objective. Do not believe what The Washington Post says. The Internet and Twitter provide wonderful real-time fact checking. We no longer have to blithely accept what our self-appointed guardians write, especially if they disgrace themselves by publishing hate-filled rants.

The media is not a fourth branch of government – the Internet has assumed that role. Read critically and make up your own mind.