I suppose you can say I have great timing.

My foray into civic tech happened just a few months before a once-in-a-lifetime (I hope) pandemic closed down nearly all businesses, and impacted everyone’s daily life.

Before, the work that was ahead of us felt important and essential but the time scale felt manageable. We would fix permits in this city, we would standardize internal processes, we would grow sf.gov, and we would do all of these things… when the right time arose.

Those were the before times.

Very rapidly, over a couple of weeks, that time scale shifted. Time expanded and collapsed, or so it felt. We had to do everything immediately.

One of the benefits of having a team used to Agile ways of working and centered upon a mission instead of a product is that you can quickly adapt.

For the purpose of documentation, I’m going to list the things that we got done as a direct result of the pandemic:

• Launched Workers and Families First, a City paid sick leave program
• Launched MVP of electronic permits
• Launched SF Shines
• Launched numerous Resiliency Funds
• Launched Small Business Mini-Grants
• Launched online application for Accessory Dwelling Units
• Launched online application for Prop H
• Developed sf.gov into the standard for health guidelines and pandemic response information
• Continued upgrades to affordable housing site
• Launched Shared Spaces

This was just the public-facing work.

In order for us to deliver this work in a timely fashion, we also had to do the following:

• Standardize internal tooling to support rapid prototyping and launch
• Carry out user testing and research on all the services we launched
• Make sure all services were human-translated and available in all major San Francisco languages (English, Chinese, Filipino and Spanish)
• Build a translations microservice to effectively pull in human-translations into the new services we were launching
• Making sure our services work for all types of digital access (many San Francisco residents from certain demographics use mobile phones exclusively for web access)
• Helping City partners collaborate with each other

There’s more to say on these topics, but let’s just say that getting into civic technology work as part of local government during a once-in-a-lifetime event was something else! Hopefully, I’ll have more lessons to share from these experiences very soon.