03 / CIVIC DATA
Five years researching the technical and human systems behind civic data—from data ingress and open-data workflows through platform strategy, delivery, and acquisition.
Open-data work is a chain of technical and human decisions. I studied the full journey closely enough to help the team reason about the system: where data originated, how it entered the platform, what failed, how people recovered, and what trustworthy publication required downstream.
Contextual inquiry, workflow reconstruction, scenario replay, iterative synthesis, and constant comparison helped move from individual observations toward an explanatory model—without stripping away the organizational conditions that gave each behavior meaning.
Interviews and advisory programs revealed intent. Usability work exposed interaction breakdowns. Analytics, coded NPS, and support patterns tested prevalence. System models and engineering evidence identified the constraints underneath the visible experience.
I worked directly with product management and engineering to turn the model into flows, error states, architecture questions, design spikes, prototypes, and an MBI. The research did not end at recommendation; it stayed active while the team determined what the platform could reliably ship.
The broader Socrata for Homelessness proposal explored how services, resources, data and accountable roles could support a whole public program. Read the historical proposal story and explore Inclusive Intake →
The resulting error-correction workflow let people repair problems during ingress and helped establish the path toward the backend that powered Socrata’s open-data platform for the following five years.
Socrata had a valuable family of products for publishing, exploring, analyzing, and communicating public data. But customers experienced the seams between those products, while the organization needed stronger shared ways to learn, plan, and deliver across them. The challenge was larger than improving individual screens: make the portfolio more coherent while building a research and design practice capable of guiding it.
I worked across data publishing, shaping and modeling, administration, mobile navigation, tenancy, visualization, and big-data initiatives. My grounded-theory practice treated interpretation as situated and iterative: contextual research and scenario replays built the model, while customer advisory work, Socrata Connect sessions, usability studies, product analytics, coded NPS, and product user groups tested its reach and exposed contradictions.
Land Use (Lu) was an example atom. Its “atomic number” represented departments; groups represented verticals and periods represented segments. The original cost-per-1,000-citizens field was posed as a question, not an established measure.
Treat product coherence and organizational capability as the same design problem. I helped establish a portfolio-wide Product User Group (PUG), Voice of Customer (VoC) program, Customer Advisory Board (CAB), recurring usability and research studies, NPS and analytics review, and shared planning rituals. Together, those programs carried evidence across teams and kept planning centered on what government teams needed to accomplish—not the boundaries between Socrata applications.
Illustrative annual cadence
Monthly: research touchpoint → synthesis → share with product teams.
Quarterly: review evidence → align priorities → plan the next cycle.
Monthly: research touchpoint → synthesis → share with product teams.
Quarterly: review evidence → align priorities → plan the next cycle.
Monthly: research touchpoint → synthesis → share with product teams.
Quarterly: review evidence → align priorities → plan the next cycle.
Monthly: research touchpoint → synthesis → share with product teams.
Quarterly: review evidence → align priorities → plan the next cycle.
Product User Group · Voice of Customer · Customer Advisory Board · Usability and contextual research · Analytics and NPS
This reconstruction illustrates the program cadence. Exact monthly assignments and participants are not established by the available evidence; it is not a record of completed sessions.
I operated as a player-coach: leading designers and researchers while staying close to consequential product work. For the 2018 MVP launch, I embedded with the Ingress product and engineering team, researching the path from source data through import, validation, error correction, shaping, and publication. Architecture maps, scenario tests, design spikes, and working prototypes let us examine system boundaries and failure modes together—then translate evidence into an intentional minimum business increment.
GETTING DATA INTO THE PLATFORM
The work helped bring Connected Government Cloud to market and created a more connected story for the Socrata portfolio. After Tyler Technologies acquired Socrata, integrating workflows became a major UX undertaking: we modeled the work already happening across Tyler products, translated Socrata’s product logic for new colleagues, and used those models to shape shared product, research, and design capabilities. That foundation carried into Tyler Forge, cross-division product vision, and the emerging Tyler Data & Insights suite.
Many of the disciplines I still carry as a designer and manager were formed here—working in person, making ideas physical, and using rooms, walls, cards, and conversation to build shared understanding. I also learned how strongly context shapes a role inside a startup. My work changed as Socrata moved from Series C growth, through acquisition, and out the other side: from designing products, to building a practice, to helping an integrated portfolio move together.
I wanted to make Socrata useful for a whole public program, not just for publishing its datasets. Homelessness became the focus because the work crossed departments, jurisdictions and nonprofit organizations, while the person seeking help still had to navigate the gaps.
I developed the platform concept and proposed how those pieces could work together. The starting point was a person’s journey toward stable housing, then the services, resources and decisions needed to support that journey. I connected data preparation and reporting to program plans, goals, performance measures and accountable roles across agencies and service providers.
My ambition included a clear boundary between protected operational information and what could responsibly be shared with the public. Reports would help explain what was happening; program plans and regular reviews would connect that evidence to decisions. The recovered “Homeless - From Crisis to Connected” document preserves a substantial part of that program-level thinking.
Inclusive Intake made one related piece concrete. Working with Richard Neely, I created wireframes for shared intake and referrals, pitched the concept at a hackathon and handed over the files. The seven-slide proposal remains a finished portfolio artifact.
The broader work reached a formal platform pitch, but it did not become the complete tool I wanted to build. Common Ground is my present-day independent exploration of that ambition. Its new designs and prototypes belong to a separate chapter, clearly distinguished from what the historical work produced.
This account combines historical proposals and my retrospective recollection. It does not establish deployment, adoption, validation or housing outcomes. The original Inclusive Intake presentation date remains unverified.
