Week 8: Three Degrees of Separation
I thought our guest speaker today, David Eaves from the Kennedy School, was excellent.
A particularly thought provoking idea from the end of our session was whether Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have had the same success in his civil rights pursuits with the advanced surveillance capabilities of today’s FBI. Thinking about this in a more modern context, while it is indeed true that advanced surveillance capabilities (both online and otherwise) have allowed the government/FBI to track dissenters, the same advances in technology have also further facilitated dissent. During the Arab Spring, Twitter quickly mobilized large numbers of protestors, leading to far more efficient organization than phones or word of mouth conversations would have allowed in Dr. King’s time. We have also seen online hacking itself and release of hacked data as a form of dissent against various governments – a type of protestation not possible without the internet.
I also want to touch on Eaves’ idea that empathy is integral to success in the civic tech world, as empathy allows an implementer to better understand the needs of a user to ensure that the user experience is as excellent as possible. Empathy seems to be an important skill not just in this field but in many, so I’d be curious to hear more of Eaves’ thoughts on how we better teach empathy (and if it can even be taught in a classroom setting) as we train future policy makers.
One additional thought from the readings – one of the problems with Healthcare.gov was the management structure of the group that ran the project, which brings us back to the integral issue of management structures in technology teams. In my post in Week 1, I touched on this issue with how management style may have positively affected the products created by the original ARPANET team, so it’s especially interesting to see this idea re-emerge later in the semester.
tcui
November 5, 2016 @ 12:47 am
Love how you connected the management structure back to your post from week 1. Went back to read it and found it really interesting how many parallels there are between ARPANET days and present time!
Jim Waldo
November 9, 2016 @ 1:44 am
I think you will find that the question of management is central to lots of technical discussions (I talk about it a bit in my post for last week). Sometimes the best management is the least management, if you have the right people to begin with (one of the best managers I ever had said that his only job was to hire the right people; after that it was just keeping things out of their way).
As for teaching empathy, I thought it was interesting that David said he learned empathy by teaching negotiation– although I would bet that he was good at negotiation because he already had empathy. These sorts of “soft” skills may better be thought of as “essential” skills, no matter what your role.