My meandering interview in Asterisk Magazine

SNAP procedural denials! Bentham and Hegel! PEIS! What more can one ask for?!

Hello dear readers!

I have been remiss in my posts here lately — blame the 6-month old! she is much cuter than you collectively are! — but sending out a quick one today linking to a recent interview I was invited to do by Asterisk Magazine.

And I actually think it came out alright! I’d say I only sound moderately quirky, so it did have that positive tempering effect.

Here is an excerpt (or immediately read the whole thing here):

A: Okay, we’re getting distracted. California. Big complicated, baroque, system with all these county-by-county differences. I’ve looked at the GetCalFresh application. It’s very simple. So how do you handle the back end of that? Because this very simple 10-minute application then has to get to an office in Alpine and an office in Kern and an office in LA, and presumably they all need different things. 

D: That’s actually one of the things that we had an underappreciated insight into. The approach we took to that is that, literally, when you came and filled out an application on our website, it would open up a web browser to the existing online application for that county and fill out the application as if it were a user taking the information you gave us. 

We didn’t need to do some hard system integration that would potentially take years to develop — we were just using the system as it existed. Another big advantage was that we had to do a lot of built-in data validation because we could not submit anything that was going to fail the county application. We discovered some weird edge cases by doing this. 

For example, we found that there were certain very small, weird zip codes that technically were absolutely in a certain county, but you could not submit in that county. And that led to bug reports, which led to that getting resolved. So that was how we sent it. 

Then we worked with each county to figure out how they wanted to receive documents. Some wanted to receive them from the same online system. Some preferred their own document system — Fresno County had built a really excellent document upload system in-house. I always like the phrase “start where you are.” We started where there was minimal need for any institutional actor to change anything about their process. 

I’ve also worked in government since then, both at the state and federal level. That was primarily on unemployment insurance. And I think it’s kind of an underrated pattern: A lot of times when you want to build a new front end for these programs, it becomes this multiyear, massive project where you’re replacing everything all at once. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of potential in just taking the interfaces you have today, building better ones on top of them, and then using those existing ones as the point of integration. It’s a pattern that I would like to see used more. I think it’s very promising. 

Continue on and read the whole thing at Asterisk’s web site!

Things I hope to write on soon:

• The big Missouri SNAP lawsuit finding in favor of clients unable to access interviews (and what it means nationally)

• Information complicatedness and complexity, how they differ, and why maybe it’s time to finally turn off the server running Benefits.gov

  
  (For instance, if you are a SNAP nerd, just look at this… yikes…)