"A question for the comments: If the equivalent of this speech were given in the US, who would give it?"
Did you see recent The Free Press piece on Joe Gebbia, co-founder of AirBnB, who is actually doing good work redesigning government websites and other user-interface problems?
In quiet contrast to Musk's DOGE belly flop, Gebbia figured out that he needed to appeal to Trump's appreciation of "hospitality" aesthetics and has been given free reign to fix (and make more pleasing) the experience of interacting with government. In many ways, he is your counterpart in this administration.
Jennifer, Bryce Fountain's DTS story landed hard for me.
I spent two decades in the Air Force. That system was already grinding people down when I left. The contractor beside him got reimbursed the next day because someone owned his problem. Nobody owned Bryce's.
That is a product failure. A real user. A broken experience. A system nobody is stewarding past the contract signature.
I now work with the State of Pennsylvania. The same pattern shows up at the state level. Vendors deliver. Contracts close. Users inherit whatever got built. The agency moves on. Nobody stays accountable for outcomes.
Waldo Jaquith's point about internal competence is exactly right. You need someone inside who owns the problem after the work is done. That person has to exist before the RFP goes out, not after the audit.
The job title tracker made me laugh, then wince. A title tells you what an organization believes the job is. "IT Specialist" says maintenance. It says keep-the-lights-on. It does not say user advocate. It does not say problem owner.
Your line about capacity being "the demonstrated ability to achieve policy goals" is going on my whiteboard. That is the clearest definition I have seen.
“I don’t have writer’s block — I just can’t seem to actually finish any of the 30 or so blog posts I’ve started.”
Claude 4.6 has sharply accelerated my writing. My pre-Claude process:
1. Begin draft
2. Immediately accumulate dozens of open loops: “how am I going to show that these two phenomena are the same underneath?”, “that passage sucks”, “Am I challenging the audience’s values too aggressively?”, “Oof, I used 7 em-dashes in one paragraph” and on and on ...
3. Pick one to work on, **but struggle to clear my mind of the others**, which often means that the large / important / structural issues take me longer to solve than my writing session, which means I make no progress in that session.
4. Leave the piece in draft for months. Or years. Resist picking it up because I fear the pointless slog.
New process:
1. (same)
2. (same)
3. Move one issue to a Claude exchange. Iterate until it is fixed. Because, first, I am only looking at that issue and, second, I can offload some of the pattern generation to Claude, I resolve many open loops in 1 (“which of these em-dashes should be removed?”) to 10 minutes (“Adopt the perspective of an open-minded reader with priors A, B, C. In linking my critique of B with weaknesses in C, do I risk losing you?”). A session becomes productive to the point that I keep writing until other commitments force me to stop.
4. Finish an ambitious piece, excitedly start the next.
The writing is mine. Claude is helping me realize what I want to produce, not writing for me.
I would vote for any candidate who gave such a speech. How refreshing it would be to have people in government who are actually interested in governance. I know there are some, but it’s painful to watch the federal government lurch from destruction to wasteful unseriousness and think about how fixing things is actually getting harder in some respects.
Finally, having been in a public sector union, Bagley and Gordon are spot on.
"A question for the comments: If the equivalent of this speech were given in the US, who would give it?"
Did you see recent The Free Press piece on Joe Gebbia, co-founder of AirBnB, who is actually doing good work redesigning government websites and other user-interface problems?
https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-gebbia-is-making-the-government
In quiet contrast to Musk's DOGE belly flop, Gebbia figured out that he needed to appeal to Trump's appreciation of "hospitality" aesthetics and has been given free reign to fix (and make more pleasing) the experience of interacting with government. In many ways, he is your counterpart in this administration.
Jennifer, Bryce Fountain's DTS story landed hard for me.
I spent two decades in the Air Force. That system was already grinding people down when I left. The contractor beside him got reimbursed the next day because someone owned his problem. Nobody owned Bryce's.
That is a product failure. A real user. A broken experience. A system nobody is stewarding past the contract signature.
I now work with the State of Pennsylvania. The same pattern shows up at the state level. Vendors deliver. Contracts close. Users inherit whatever got built. The agency moves on. Nobody stays accountable for outcomes.
Waldo Jaquith's point about internal competence is exactly right. You need someone inside who owns the problem after the work is done. That person has to exist before the RFP goes out, not after the audit.
The job title tracker made me laugh, then wince. A title tells you what an organization believes the job is. "IT Specialist" says maintenance. It says keep-the-lights-on. It does not say user advocate. It does not say problem owner.
Your line about capacity being "the demonstrated ability to achieve policy goals" is going on my whiteboard. That is the clearest definition I have seen.
Love this format!
I had seen some of these mentioned on LinkedIn but this is a great reminder to check them out, plus some of these I had not heard of.
“I don’t have writer’s block — I just can’t seem to actually finish any of the 30 or so blog posts I’ve started.”
Claude 4.6 has sharply accelerated my writing. My pre-Claude process:
1. Begin draft
2. Immediately accumulate dozens of open loops: “how am I going to show that these two phenomena are the same underneath?”, “that passage sucks”, “Am I challenging the audience’s values too aggressively?”, “Oof, I used 7 em-dashes in one paragraph” and on and on ...
3. Pick one to work on, **but struggle to clear my mind of the others**, which often means that the large / important / structural issues take me longer to solve than my writing session, which means I make no progress in that session.
4. Leave the piece in draft for months. Or years. Resist picking it up because I fear the pointless slog.
New process:
1. (same)
2. (same)
3. Move one issue to a Claude exchange. Iterate until it is fixed. Because, first, I am only looking at that issue and, second, I can offload some of the pattern generation to Claude, I resolve many open loops in 1 (“which of these em-dashes should be removed?”) to 10 minutes (“Adopt the perspective of an open-minded reader with priors A, B, C. In linking my critique of B with weaknesses in C, do I risk losing you?”). A session becomes productive to the point that I keep writing until other commitments force me to stop.
4. Finish an ambitious piece, excitedly start the next.
The writing is mine. Claude is helping me realize what I want to produce, not writing for me.
Yes please make this a regular feature!
I would vote for any candidate who gave such a speech. How refreshing it would be to have people in government who are actually interested in governance. I know there are some, but it’s painful to watch the federal government lurch from destruction to wasteful unseriousness and think about how fixing things is actually getting harder in some respects.
Finally, having been in a public sector union, Bagley and Gordon are spot on.