Shirky Discusses Potential of Web-based Government Services

A month after the Obama administration launched a fault-ridden website for healthcare services, technology and politics expert Clay Shirky spoke at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics about the internet’s capacity for “civic value.” Shirky pointed out errors in the planning and implementation of HealthCare.gov that show how the government could better manage its online services.

At the event, moderated by current IOP Fellow Ginny Hunt on Tuesday night, Shirky said that the site, like any major technological project, should have been launched slowly and in iterations. Obama’s team released the entire site on Oct. 1 to limit the political opposition that would have accompanied each release. By launching the site all at once despite multiple glitches, however, the team actually provided more fodder for criticism.

Shirky said that when problems arose, the team should have amended its original plan to launch the entire site on the set date.

“The question that anyone who launches a large tech product faces, is ‘When is reality allowed to trump planning?’” Shirky said. “In Washington, the answer is usually, ‘Never.’”

Rather than adopting the attitude “Failure is not an option,” website developers must consider potential failures periodically. Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, said that he often tells his students to stop in the middle of a project and anticipate potential failures in a “pre-mortem” evaluation.

“It’s astonishing what they already know,” said Shirky. “Technological disasters don’t surprise anyone on the inside—people knew what was going to go wrong with HealthCare.gov.”

Shirky, who described himself as “perversely optimistic” about the future of technology, also pointed out some positive implications of the website’s launch.

“In an environment of hyper-partisanship, no one said that using the web was a bad idea in the first place,” Shirky pointed out. “The marker we have just passed is that now [the Internet] is not just a normal, but a good and stable way to deliver complicated services to the American people. “

At the forum, Shirky predicted that federal and state governments will continue to use the internet and new media to implement policy and communicate with the public.

“Interactions with the passport agency, the DMV, etc., are all heading in that direction, and we’re now starting to see real service delivery, entitlements and so forth, heading in that direction as well,” said Shirky in an interview with The Crimson after the event.

Tuesday’s forum was the first in a two-part series on social innovation which will conclude with a Nov. 21 panel discussion on the “Social Impact Economy.”