The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. My opinions do not reflect those of my employers or professional partners.
The Public Tech Pledge
A couple years ago, I was talking to a senior judge in a populous Southern state that was in the middle of migrating a legacy case management system to a major court CMS provider. Her county court was second in line to switch to the new system. When talking with the vendor, she told them to copy what they did in the first county, and just change the court name, address, and phone number. Everything else, from workflows to forms, was identical.
The vendor said no. They would start again—from scratch.
In many ways, stories like this let us know that the real beneficiary in govtech isn’t the agency or the public, but the vendor itself. In this backwards world, we’ve lost the plot, which is why I’m excited to share Nava’s Public Tech Pledge. It’s a concrete step to refocus what is important in government technology, which is making government better.
“Technology built with public dollars should strengthen government’s ability to serve the public,” said Nava’s initial post about the pledge, “not create greater dependence on any one vendor or proprietary system.”
For years, I’ve been looking to Nava’s work to inform my own. It is a govtech consultancy and developer that got its start salvaging Healthcare.gov. From that moment forward, it’s worked with public agencies around the U.S. Its approach is modern, responsive, and not rent seeking, making it unlike so many govtech vendors. While Nava is a vendor itself, it put forward a vision of how private sector incentives can align with government function and more just public outcomes.
Signing this pledge matters. It turns the principles our sector debates in the abstract into solid commitments. It tells each other and our government partners exactly what future we're building, and that we intend to build it together. And it creates a visible network of organizations ready to share what works, spread best practices faster, and achieve more together than any of us could alone.
The Five Tenets
The pledge includes five tenets that affect government generally and the justice system specifically. While they may just read as best practices or good intentions for software developers, they are also public values. The failure to meet these goals has put closed, proprietary systems into our open, democratic government. Under the current regime, this harms the public, distorts public policy, and wastes government money.
1. The right to your data: Government should be able to access, control, and move its own data and code.
And yet we see time and again, they don’t. While organizations like Recidiviz and Measures for Justice have been trying to improve data quality, access, and use in the justice system, there are so many more instances where this is simply not the reality, especially when it comes to codebase. Courts across the U.S. experience incredible wait times to simply have the copy updated on their website, because it has to go through the vendor’s backlogged ticketing system. Other changes can take literal years. This leads to outdated, broken websites, which can compound the challenges a self-represented person can face going through an eviction or child custody dispute. A world where government can access its own data and code is a more efficient and responsive one—in other words: it’s more democratic.
2. The right to interoperability: Government systems should work together through open standards and APIs, making it easier to connect services and evolve technology over time.
For those that have been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Brittle, undocumented APIs are the norm in the justice sector, and, in particular, the courts. Nationally, the lack of basic interoperability has hobbled the use of even the most basic technologies, like text message reminders. Research shows that text reminders increase court appearance rates and reduce bench warrants and defaults—outcomes that spare people arrests, fines, and cascading legal trouble across criminal and civil dockets. In an interoperable system, text message reminders would be ubiquitous. But even with financial support and political will, reminders are the exception, not the rule. Why? A bad API means a closed environment and a captured user. That is the perverse incentive at the heart of the interoperability problem: bad APIs are good business for the established players.
3. The right to portability: Agencies should be able to change technology partners without having to rebuild everything from scratch. No single company should be impossible to replace.
Portability in software is a key way to reduce costs and keep systems modern. However, the switching costs for software can be astronomical for government, both monetarily and in staff time burnt. We see this in the courts, public safety, and corrections, among others. Those high switching costs contribute to lock-in and entropy, benefiting the vendor while hurting agency function and the public access.
4. The right to reuse: When appropriate, technology built with public dollars should be discoverable and available for other agencies and teams to adapt and reuse rather than requiring government to solve the same problems over and over again.
This is the story of the senior judge in that populous Southern state. Same state, same contract, same vendor, yet they had to go through another expensive customer discovery and development process, as if they were establishing the first instance of that CMS in the state. It is a horrendous waste of government resources driven by the vendors, not the government.
5. The right to competition: Government technology should create opportunities for multiple vendors, including smaller companies, to compete, contribute, and build on existing technology.
The Federal Trade Commission, the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, and state Attorneys General all have a role to play in ensuring a fair market for justice technology. There have been a few successful attempts over the years to punish bad behavior, but the justice technology sector is replete with duopolies and monopolies. As I called for in my American Bar Foundation research, getting to better justice technology isn’t just about the technologists, it’s about enforcing the legal regime that allows technologists to compete in a fair marketplace.
Build Tech that Lifts Government
Through custom integrations, non-portable data formats, and contractual terms that penalize migration competition is squelched and justice is denied.
If this status quo doesn’t sit right with you, then join me in signing this pledge. A coalition of developers making these products, government leaders writing these contracts, and legal enforcers keeping the playing field level have the potential to turn these tenets into five concrete commitments toward better technology and ultimately better government.
News
AI in the judiciary—the Shenzhen practice. (Shenzhen Courts) (h/t Katherine Alteneder)
Machine translation and AI-generated language services: Not “Good Enough” for justice. (Management Information Exchange Journal) (h/t Samira Nazem)
Court tosses sentence after AI video of victim “forgiving” his killer is played. (New York Times)
What AI benchmarks actually measure: Adapting convergent and discriminant validity in 56 benchmarks. (arXiv)
Embarrassing breach at the FBI fuels fears of harm to its employees. (New York Times)
Hackers reveal how Flock cameras really track cars and people. (Ars Technica)
Florida police don’t know who owns 11 Flock cameras. (Ars Technica)
From civic tech to DOGE: The role of tech movements in the American administrative state. (Public Administration)
Governments need their own AI safety evaluators. (Rest of World)
Events
The A2J Network Conference will be in Cincinnati October 21-22. (A2JN)
When being data-driven feels out of reach is October 26. (emP) (h/t Jason Melchi)
eCourts is in Las Vegas December 7-9. (NCSC)
Jobs & Opportunities
Anthropic is accepting economic futures research applications. (A)
Arnold Ventures is looking to fill multiple roles. (AV)
[New] The Brennan Center for Justice has multiple openings. (BCJ)
The Center for Democracy and Technology has academic externships. (CDT)
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative needs a counsel for AI and tech. (CZI)
[New] Go From Here is hiring for multiple roles. (GFH)
The University of Chicago Crime Lab has multiple openings. (UCCL)
Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and NextLadder Ventures launched the navigation tech initiative. (DRK) (h/t Keith Porcaro)
[New] Nextladder is hiring a product lead. (NL)
[New] Northeastern is hiring professors focused on AI governance. (NEU) (h/t Matthew Burnett)
OpenMinded has multiple openings. (OM)
[New] The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office needs a analytics engineer. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)
Recidiviz has multiple openings. (R)
Renaissance Philanthropy is hiring for multiple roles. (RP)