Thread by @allafarce

I tend to be very skeptical of tool primacy/platform thinking, but I've come to the conclusion that a very specific toolset would be useful in government:

a rapid prototyping tech stack, pre-cleared for security, that allows for build-to-learn service design experiments

Let me explain: I believe very much in the whole lean startup idea of "the most learning comes from serving 10 users with a real thing"

And this is an area where the govt bottleneck is not deep systems stuff (eg org behavior) but literally no whitelisted prototyping tools.

What would this look like:
- PaaS style hosting meeting security standards (eg @clouddotgov from @18f)
- Prototyping tools that minimally-technical users can configure to create full user flows (eg @usds us-forms kit) — think Typeform, Twilio Studio kind of stuff

Importantly I do *NOT* believe these platform components would or should be the large scale service infrastructure.

The goal here is a little neutral zone where 1% of a public program's users can be put in and where rapid experimentation, hypothesis testing can occur.

Of course there's also a whole host of institutional/policy components to this that would support such rapid experimentation in a public service context (blanket waiver authority/default allowance of rule bending under a certain scale of users, multidisciplinary team)

But the big problem this would seek to solve is something like:

"yes, we want to try text messaging, but because it takes us 6 months to get a change via our vendor change request process, we have to decide everything up front"

This also *further* solves a problem/constraint I tend to see currently in government-internal digital service teams:

When they have authority to apply design methods like paper prototyping, but not actually run real transactions with real users (maximal learning)

This suite/stack of green-lighted prototyping tools could totally be done in an open source way; many of those things exist, it's a composition and hosting problem.

BUT key is we'd need to be that it's NOT for scaled services: those have (rightfully) different constraints.

Really good question. It'd probably be looking for the users where most constraints are already removed, but this stack is the pain point.

E.g., a govt with a digital service team and leadership buy-in, but stuck in "secure deployment checklist" hell

https://twitter.com/bensheldon/status/1068180576597725184

This is actually a really good point. GDS kinda has this, except the "platforms" really are not suitable for prototyping in my limited experience. That's a different thing.

https://twitter.com/sophiedennis/status/1068184722591879168