Public sector community
Public services that work for every citizen.
Citizen systems have to serve millions of people on every kind of device, in several languages, through procurement rules and legacy databases that cannot be switched off for a weekend.
Open to every member. Join now and help shape what it builds next.
What we work on
Four problems define this community’s work right now. Every sprint, review and essay here comes back to one of them.
Citizen service portals
One accessible front door for permits, registries and payments, built for low bandwidth.
Registries and data infrastructure
Records that agencies can share safely, with clear ownership and an audit trail.
Accessibility and inclusion
Services that work for people with disabilities, older phones and limited literacy.
Delivery inside government
Shipping working software through procurement, policy and change management.
Questions we are working through
No one has settled these yet. They come up in every sprint, and members argue them out in essays and reviews.
- How do you build a service that works for a citizen on a basic phone with no data bundle?
- How do agencies share records without building one database that becomes a target?
- How do you ship in small steps inside a fixed-price procurement contract?
Our impact
- System in Public sector we have built and shipped
- 1
Shipped in Public sector
- HudumaPublic Services · Kenya · 2022
A citizen service portal unifying permits, registries, and payments behind one accessible front door.
1.4M applications processed8 agencies onboarded
From the field
No essays here yet. Members write about what actually happens on the ground, and every essay is edited before it is published. Apply to write
Your first build
New members pick one of these for their first month. Each is small enough to finish and real enough to show an employer or an investor.
A USSD status lookup
Let citizens check the status of an application by USSD, with no smartphone or data needed.
- USSD
- APIs
- Accessibility
An accessibility audit
Audit a real public service portal against accessibility standards and write up the fixes in plain language.
- WCAG
- Testing
- Writing
A consent-based record share
Let a citizen approve one agency reading one record from another, with a full audit log.
- Auth
- Audit logs
- Data design
Words you will hear
New here? These come up in your first week. Plain meanings, no jargon.
- Digital public infrastructure
- Shared building blocks, such as ID, payments and data exchange, that many services build on.
- Interoperability
- Systems from different agencies being able to exchange and use each other's data.
- Procurement
- The formal process government uses to buy goods and services.
- Impact assessment
- A required review of privacy risks before a system that handles personal data goes live.
Who you will meet
- Engineers and architects on government systems
- Civil servants and policy people
- Civic technologists and researchers
- Vendors and integrators serving the public sector
How the community runs
- Every week
Build sprint
Bring a real problem from your work in the sector. Leave with progress, reviewed by people who have shipped the same thing.
- Every week
Office hours
Drop in with a model that will not converge, a regulator question or a hiring decision. Practitioners answer.
- Every month
Demo day
Members show working systems to the community, mentors and invited investors. Demos, not decks.
The team behind it
Lead the Public sector community
We are looking for experienced practitioners to lead this community: host one session a month, review members’ work and shape what it builds next.
Tell us about your workJoin the Public sector community
One payment of $15 makes you a member for life: every community, its sprints, reviews and events. No subscription.