Page 37 - FCW, January/February 2021

A COVID-INSPIRED
CIVIC TECH MOVEMENT
When the pandemic exposed weaknesses in state and local IT systems, a new organization of volunteer technologists stepped in to help. Their success offers hope for the future of citizen services.
BY NATALIE ALMS
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pan- demic, millions of Americans began losing their jobs. In Kansas, traffic to the state’s website for unemployment ben- efits applications surged by 5,000%. The site was unable to handle the increase, and users experienced slow response times and crashes, which added to their frustration and delayed the delivery of benefits.
The former secretary of labor for Kansas, Delia Garcia, offered this assessment in April 2020: The state’s IT system, a delivery mecha- nism for critical services, was a patchwork “held together [with] what seems like Band- Aids.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare IT shortcomings at state and local governments across the country, several technologists responded by creating a nonprofit group called U.S. Digital Response (USDR) to help agencies and nonprofit organizations meet the increased demand for digital services.
Within weeks of its creation, thousands of technologists had signed up to work for the organization on a pro bono basis, said CEO and Co-Founder Raylene Yung, whose career includes positions at the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, Stripe and Facebook.
At the request of Kansas officials, USDR sent technologists to help troubleshoot the unemployment insurance system. Like many other states, Kansas’ system is decades old and relies on the Cobol coding language, which is considered antiquated by today’s standards.
The volunteers worked with Kansas govern- ment employees to diagnose the issues that were keeping the mainframe-based system from accommodating higher volumes of traffic, said Alyssa Levitz, a USDR lead. To solve the problem, the team helped implement a content delivery network, which reduced wait times and unblocked the site within days.
It was one of the group’s first projects relat- ed to unemployment insurance systems. USDR also worked with Kansas in other capacities from April until early June. That month, Garcia resigned over issues related to duplicate unem- ployment payments made to some recipients, which caused some people’s bank accounts to be overdrawn when the Department of Labor reversed the payments.
Nevertheless, a press representative for USDR said the organization considers its work in Kansas to be a success because the team was able to help quickly resolve the ini- tial problem.
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