gov-tech-reading-list

Government and technology reading list

Reading suggestions for folks in the civic tech and public interest technogy spaces.

This crowdsourced list originated with a Twitter thread and follow up on some private email and Slack channels. Feel free to create a PR and suggest changes.

The “government” links tend to be US-centric but I would be happy to see that change!

No effort has been made to rank or categorize, other than by medium.

The GitHub Pages version of this list may be easier to bookmark.

Video

• The danger of a single story with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (English transcript)
• You Only Code as Well as You Listen with Sydette Harry
• Ethics and Power: Understanding the Role of Shame in UX Research with Vivianne Castillo

Books

• A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
• Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
• Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean
• Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
• Administrative Burden by Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan
• Seeing Like A State by James Scott
• The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations by Sidney Dekker
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler
• Field Guide: Equity-Centered Community Design by Creative Reaction Lab
• A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide by Cyd Harrell (includes extensive reading list at the end)
• Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team by Marina Nitza and Nick Sinai
• Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang
• The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
• Bureaucracy by James Wilson
• Infotopia by Cass Sunstein
• Change of State by Sandra Braman
• Privacy In Context by Helen Nissenbaum
• Truth Decay by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich
• The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
• Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows
• Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill
• Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• Good Services: How to Design Services that Work by Lou Downe
• Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock
• Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
• Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed
• The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato
• The Government Fix by Sara Hudson and Hana Schank
• The Fix by Jonathan Tepperman
• Hiring Engineers by Marianne Bellotti
• Kill It With Fire by Marianne Bellotti
• Logic 11: Care by Christa Hartsock, et al.
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
• Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart by John O’Duinn
• Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change by Jane Fountain
• Smart Citizens, Smarter State by Beth Simone Noveck
• Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony Townsend
• The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford
• Power to the Public by Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank
• Democracy Reinvented by Hollie Russon Gilman

Articles

• Inside Bureaucracy by Anthony Downs
• More Than Code from Tech for Social Justice Project
• The Behavioural Insights Team Annual Report 2017-18
• Next-Generation Engagement Platforms, and They Are Useful Right Now by Matt Stempeck
• Digital Government: Research and Practice
• So you want to reform democracy by Joshua Tauberer
• Inside the Clubcard Panopticon: Why Dominic Cummings’ Seeing Room Might Not See All That Much by Rachel Coldicutt
• Transitioning from private to public sector: Lessons learned from those who experienced it by Dana Chisnell

Government Publications

• State of Federal Information Technology (2017) by USG CIO Council
• Social and Behavioral Sciences Team Annual Report (2015) from USG National Science and Technology Council
• Social and Behavioral Sciences Team Annual Report (2016) from USG National Science and Technology Council
• Boiling Frogs from GCHQ (UK)
• 18F Open Source Policy from 18F
• USG Federal Source Code Policy (2016) from USG OMB
• The encasement strategy by 18F
• De-risking technology by 18F
• Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns by Gov.UK
• HealthCare.gov: Case Study of CMS Management of the Federal Marketplace

Other Lists

• Reading list on digital gov via OpenEugene
• Crowdlaw for Congress
• Decolonizing Civic Tech
• Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age

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