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One of the funnier things about coaching high school sports is the ‘senior day’, where we fete seniors who are playing their last regular season match. In actual team sports, senior night has a bit more pomp and circumstance since there are fans actually watching and announcers and such alike.
In high school tennis, where fans are scant, senior day really ends up being for parents, the players themselves and their peers who have been through adventures with them. As a coach, it’s been funny seeing more tight-knit teams I’ve coached, forstall senior day as long as possible, since it’s the first real sign that things are about to be over.
This has been my approach to writing a blog post about the demise of 18F, but rather than do another retrospective, I’d rather focus a bit more thinking aloud about my own professional journey, what I feel like I can do, what I’d like to be doing and how positioning yourself.
For a while, the pathway to developing a voice was relatively simple. Build a following on twitter, use conference platforms and do good work. In the demise of Twitter, rise of newsletters, and everyone’s eyeballs being focused in a lot of other places, it’s a lot more difficult for people trying to build an audience to garner one. I’ve noticed a lot of people in local spaces trying to broaden their reach and struggling because networks like Bluesky aren’t really made for this sort of thing. Even starting a newsletter isn’t going to necessarily broaden your reach, because you’ll spend more time promoting your work than actually doing it.
Thankfully, I don’t really feel any need to do these things. I do however, struggle a bit with how to position my work for people who don’t know anything about it. Service design has always been a bit niche, but the broader “design leadership” space feels to me like someone telegraphing, “I can’t do design, so I lead it.” The other conundrum for me is having spent so much time working on public sector engagements, I’m now faced with trying to consider reimagining my work in the context of building products.
Do I understand these spaces? Yes, one of the nice things about staying connected to the community — including speaking around the world and leading workshops — is understanding the acute needs of building products. I’ve done this in the public sector, it’s just for different motivations, stakeholder challenges and considerations. Frankly, I like solving public sector problem at scale, but there’s not yet a space beyond advisory roles for technologist who prefer leading teams and executing versus exclusively policy work. With AI continually making its incursion into state and local governments, it’s going to be crucial to have people who can translate and contextualize this change, as well as lead the delivery of services without selling out all the people under our trust in the process.
I really want to use the last few weeks to connect folks, to do my own connecting and think about how to make intentional steps towards whatever is next. There are lots of possibilities, but I’m trying to be thoughtful about where to move, how to do it and ensuring I’m able to roll up my sleeves while making an impact.
I rebuilt the Design For The Public 24 archive, because I’d taken it offline after the conference.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with this “newfound free time” that I’ve found myself with, besides looking for a job or plotting projects. I’ve done some office hours, I’ve talked to folks about roles, and engaged with the folks from my team who I’m keenly interested in helping find new places to work too.
I’m picking up projects that have been on my list for a bit, including some longer-term writing things, and meetup with folks who I’ve been meaning to talk to.
Still, this whole “administrative leave” period left me feeling like I could do something meaningful in this short-term period that would let me engage with the community, perhaps help others, and still do some lasting good.
I think I’ve figured out a project that might yield some of that and I’ll announce it very soon. Maybe there won’t be any interest, but I’ve done an experiential design project every year for the past few years and see this newest idea as an extension of that.
Having felt the need to reflect on my own complicated feelings about the “civic tech” experiment over the last decade, I’ve been reflecting on this the past few months in these posts.
Drafted while listening to Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye (1969)