Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, we examine the shoddy state of government IT, and how it's slowly being dragged into the future by a public that demands change. Join us this afternoon at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific) for a live discussion on the topic with article author Jon Brodkin and his expert guest; your comments and questions are welcome.

Government IT departments have a mostly deserved reputation for being behind the times. While private companies keep giving customers new and better ways to buy products and learn about their services, government agencies have generally made it difficult for residents to interact with them via the Internet.

But this is slowly changing, with agencies from the local level to the federal level focusing on fixing broken websites and building new tools for Americans to get what they need from the government.

In Detroit, Michigan, the city government released a mobile app that lets people report problems from illegal dumping sites and abandoned vehicles to potholes and water main breaks, resulting in about 10,000 problems being fixed in six months. In Oakland, California, the city government unveiled a website that makes it far easier to access public records, and it plans to help other cities make similar improvements.

In Washington, DC, the Federal Communications Commission overhauled an ancient IT infrastructure and designed a website that makes it easier for residents to file complaints against cable companies and telcos.

While there’s still a long way to go, these changes are steadily making it more convenient to access public services.

“I don’t know who to call”

Confusing websites and poor communication with the public have long made it difficult for taxpayers to connect with their government. When Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was running for his current office in 2013, “he heard time and time again from folks, ‘I don't know who to call in City Hall to get something done,’” Detroit CIO Beth Niblock told Ars.

“Improve Detroit,” a smartphone app launched in April this year using technology from SeeClickFix, has helped Detroiters find out how to get things done. In its first six months of availability, 10,000 complaints were resolved in an average of nine days, “a vast improvement from when problems often languished for years,” the city said in an announcement this month.

City of Detroit

City of Detroit

City of Detroit

City of Detroit

Improve Detroit was used to get “more than 3,000 illegal dumping sites cleaned up; 2,092 potholes repaired; 991 complaints resolved related to running water in an abandoned structure; 565 abandoned vehicles removed; 506 water main breaks taken care of; [and] 277 traffic signal issues fixed,” Detroit said.

Reports get “routed to the correct department and then the teams in the field who are doing the repair can log in and see what the issue is,” Niblock said.

Detroit has suffered major economic problems, resulting in the city filing for bankruptcy in 2013. But the settlement that let Detroit exit bankruptcy allowed for a “significant investment in technology,” Niblock said.

Besides making Improve Detroit, the city overhauled its website to work better on mobile devices, as 60 percent of people who visit do so from phones or tablets. There’s also a bus app for iPhone and Android.

“The #1 reason people come to the City of Detroit website is for the bus schedule, and they're coming from mobile phones,” Niblock said. “We needed to make sure folks could get to it and see it and it's a good, readable experience.”

Since not everyone can afford a mobile Internet plan, Detroit also has a “TextMyBus” application that lets people send a text message to find out when the next bus will arrive. (TextMyBus was built for Detroit by a nonprofit called Code for America, which makes open source technology that improves government services.)

Other IT projects in Detroit include a new website to put public records online, a mobile app that lets residents pay for parking, and a police app that lets residents get crime updates and submit anonymous crime tips to police.

“We've got about $100 million worth of IT projects that we're going to be doing,” Niblock said. “A lot of them are internal, replacing the financial management system, our HR system. We're putting in body cameras on police officers.”

Detroit is also planning to put permitting and licensing systems online to make it easier to get things like building permits and pet licenses.

When asked what her dream project would be, Niblock said she wants to do more to close the “digital divide” that leaves poor people with less access to technology. That could include making Wi-Fi available on city buses, she said.

“At every turn we're trying to put everything we can online,” with a focus on mobile, “so any Detroiter can interact with the government at any way,” she said.

To the cloud!

At the Federal Communications Commission, technology was getting in the way of improving technology. Despite regulating the Internet service provider industry, the FCC had a website that was difficult to use for anyone who wanted to file a complaint or search for documents.

When CIO David Bray arrived at the commission in 2013, the FCC had 207 systems—one system being a set of servers and applications—and was spending more than 85 percent of its budget maintaining them, he told Ars. The average age of each system was more than 10 years old, with some being nearly two decades old, Bray said.

With the FCC spending nearly all of its resources keeping ancient systems running, there was very little money left to improve the parts of the commission that are visible to the public.

The FCC released a popular speed test app last year, and in January of this year it revamped the complaint site, which frustrated customers have used to pressure cable companies into issuing refunds. And that was just the beginning. Over Labor Day weekend, the FCC took major parts of its website offline for several days while it moved pretty much all of its servers out of headquarters and to a commercial service provider.

In the process, the FCC consolidated from 207 systems to 104, retiring a lot of old servers—including two Sun E25Ks that were 11 years old and literally weighed one ton each.

With the server lift in the rear view mirror, Bray said the FCC should be able to get its maintenance costs down below 50 percent of its overall IT budget. In addition to hosting its physical servers with a commercial provider, the FCC is making extensive use of virtual servers through the Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.

Using cloud-based servers, the FCC will be able to scale resources up and down as needed. This will prevent repeats of what happened in July 2014, when the FCC’s 18-year-old Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) crashed just before the initial deadline for the public to file net neutrality comments. The net neutrality proceeding alone attracted four million public comments over several months, and the FCC’s system couldn't handle the influx.

The FCC is testing a beta site, including a very early version of the new commenting system. The present-day ECFS site wasn't migrated to Amazon, because the code is so old it needs to be rewritten to take advantage of the cloud, Bray said. But the beta site is hosted on Amazon and will replace the old one when it's ready.





Now that the FCC has performed its major back-end improvements, its work is more about refining the website to “make sure users can find the content in ways they expect and want to have,” Bray said.

Bray said the FCC will be overhauling its licensing in 2016. Right now, there are six different code bases for the various licensing systems used for everything from ham radios to satellites. Bray wants to move them all to a common cloud platform, while allowing each system to have unique processes.

"The challenge with licensing is there are so many different processes for licenses, and you don't want to treat the process for a ham radio license the same as a satellite license," he said.

Other federal agencies haven't moved to cloud-based systems very quickly, so the FCC didn't have many examples to look to when it began its projects. "We were coming up with the playbook as we did it," Bray said.

Now, other federal agencies are asking the FCC for advice, Bray said, a request he’s happy to oblige despite his packed schedule: “Sometimes I stay really late at work."

Listing image by Flickr user: Bob Micai