At A Glance
This Week’s Outlook — Robin Carnahan
Robin Carnahan is the former Missouri Secretary of State and formerly led 18F’s state and local practice within the General Services Administration. She is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation and is also leading Government Partnerships for USDR.
Helping Governments Reopen Safely with COVID Exit Strategy
Government leaders and the public need to understand how their state is doing in tackling COVID-19 in order to safely reopen. COVID Exit Strategy (CES) aggregates publicly available information to track a state’s progress toward reduction in COVID-19 symptoms and cases, health system readiness, and increased testing. It equips state leaders and those who can influence them with data on the measures that matter most. COVID Exit Strategy has been a collaborative effort with United States of Care, Duke-Margolis Health Policy Center, and Resolve to Save Lives. The public health and epidemiology expertise of this partnership has been essential in shaping the site. The development of COVID Exit Strategy is ongoing; volunteers are currently working to translate and clarify recently released guidance from the CDC on how states should interpret their criteria.
Project Spotlight
Recently completed projects that other state and local governments may benefit from by replicating or remixing.
Simplifying Workflows for Efficient Remote Processes
“Our community’s needs are continuing to evolve, but thanks to USDR’s help with streamlining our processes, we’ve got a great way to remotely serve the tasks of local government.”
– Garrett Brown, IT Systems Analyst with City of Napa
Government teams are continuing the shift to digital and remote workflows to help minimize the risk and spread of infection due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The City of Napa requested a short-term consultant proficient in VPN (virtual private network) networking to make sure remote workers could operate securely without stressing systems built for significantly fewer users. A USDR volunteer helped set up the Windows Virtual Desktop service, reviewed connectivity requirements and wrote a test plan to help establish consistency across the shared network. By configuring an Azure VPN, city employees were able to scale the environment to their needs and communicate directly and securely with each other in the cloud. The streamlined and secured systems helped the City of Napa respond to residents and deliver services more quickly and efficiently. USDR is working with other governments to shore up remote work processes, including digital document routing and approvals systems, and simple, off-the-shelf solutions for quick, continuous workflows.
Connecting Vulnerable Youth to Services and Support
Streetlives NYC, an NGO building technology to serve vulnerable communities in New York City, is developing a crowd-sourced tool to provide real-time peer- and provider-validated social service information to homeless youth in the NYC area during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool includes a directory of up-to-date services and hours of availability for places like shelters, food pantries, soup kitchens, showers, and more. But there were blockers to the tool’s launch including finishing app development and getting sufficient data about a myriad of services. USDR partnered with Streetlives NYC to accelerate their launch by helping with both engineering and project management to streamline the data collection process. Through its partnership with USDR and various other organizations, Streetlives NYC launched GoGetta on May 18. The project is all open-source, and can be implemented in other communities.
Getting ahead of the curve
Here are a few topics USDR teams are investigating in preparation for potential requests:
- Economic Recovery. Governments are seeking insights into the economic impact of COVID-19 based on geography and demographics in order to take necessary action to help revive the economy where it’s most needed. Top-of-mind tasks for governments include: supporting the creation of new businesses quickly, preventing housing loss and displacement, and targeting resources such as grants to help boost the economy. USDR is continuing to help create tools, like the SBA/Business Relief Program, to help jumpstart the economy.
- Testing Access. A key to safely and responsibly reopening society is adequate access to COVID-19 testing. Earlier this month, an Axios article indicated that 54 percent of all U.S. counties don’t have a testing site. Some cities and counties have implemented mobile drive-through testing sites, have set up testing enrollment services, or are creating public outreach campaigns about the importance of testing. In the meantime, many communities remain at-risk without the ability to test for the virus as states reopen. USDR is working with governments to help communicate test availability and implement free, accessible testing sites.