Time To Expand How We Define The Public Sector

• Tags:: Blog Post Complete
• Notes
  • Outline
    • Intro
      • Story about me figuring out where my taxes go
        • https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/taxes.page
        • https://usafacts.org/annual-publications/2019/government-10-k/
      • Thesis: We typically define government vs citizen sectors of our economy as “Public” and “Private”. These terms are not only outdated, but also mislead us into pigeon-holing us into what solutions are possible.
    • Talk about how we define these terms traditionally
      • Talk about why we use these terms
      • These definitions are fundamentally broken
      • Talk about why they are broken
        • "Public" companies make this even more confusing
    • Give 1 counterexamples of each
      • Private instances of "public"
        • Story about AWS GovCloud vs Commercial
          • https://www.fedramp.gov/
          • CJIS
          • High Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide (DoD SRG)
          • https://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/govcloud-differences.html
      • Public instances of "private"
        • Really lean into the idea of how the internet shapes the definition drastically
        • Open source
    • Talk about why it matters
      • Public/private gives a connotation of accessible
      • Limits the scope of our problem solving
      • Some stats of Social good happening
      • Could tie in Impact Investing? Crowd Sourcing?
    • Need to expect these from not government
      • I'd argue that the world needs to be more public. The solutions here do not need to be limited to government and voting
  • One problem with this article is that I haven't made it up the content triangle yet - meaning I haven't bounced the idea of others yet
    • I could offset this by posting a very early draft for feedback!
    • Tweet about it first!
      • Random Thought Instead of public vs. private sector, I'm going to start calling it government vs. commercial sector
      • Random Thought When your scope is the earth, every government is considered the private sector
  • Brainstorm feedback
  • Timeline
    • First Draft
    • Finish Draft and Share
    • Drill down on Michael Koutsoubis's comment here and rewrite
    • Edit
    • Publish
• Draft 1: Content {{word-count}}
  • I used to live in New York City, one of the more demanding places to live in the U.S. from a tax perspective. Outside of being in a really high federal tax bracket, which to be able to even afford a NYC apartment I have to be in, New York also has one of the highest state and city income tax rates.
  • This in of itself doesn't bother me too much since living in New York was a voluntary choice I made for the convenience of living in one of the most well connected cities in the country. What did bother me however was the inaccessibility of knowing what exactly what I was paying for.
  • At a high level, I understand that I'm paying towards the MTA, police, parks, and other local services. But unlike other services I pay for, I get no itemized receipt outlining the line items my income is supporting. Even after an hour or two of researching I am able to only discern a slightly less vague sense of where my money is going this year. Meanwhile, the evolution of the internet and other software services is making elements of the traditionally named private sector more accessible than ever before.
  • The combination of these two trends means it's time to reevaluate what we consider to be the public vs. private sectors.
  • Traditional Definitions
  • If you search in Google for the definition of the public sector, you are met with the following clarification:
  • > the part of an economy that is controlled by the government
  • Similarly, if you search for the definition of the private sector, you are met with its antonym:
  • > the part of the national economy that is not under direct government control.
  • Both of these definitions map pretty closely to how we colloquially use the terms every day, from the media to in person conversations. But, these definitions are fundamentally broken.
  • When we think of public vs. private outside the context of institutions, they revolve around an idea of accessibility. If I post an article that is publicly available through my site, it's because it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Similarly, when I keep private data such as my email password to myself, it is inaccessible to anyone but me. The spectrum of how private to public an institution is should then come down to accessibility, not by who's in control of said institution.
  • We should then redefine the public and private sectors themselves to actually be called the "government sector" and the "citizen sector", to denote who actually is in control. The problem with strictly mapping one-to-one government as public and citizen as private is that it gives an impression of how accessible these services are that is very often inaccurate.
  • Inaccessible Government
  • Assuming all government services to be part of the "public" sector assumes that they are all accessible. As I alluded to in my introduction, there is a sizable portion of what the government does that is either hard to find and summarize, or just not at all available. Simply having information retrievable from a static .gov webpage is not enough. If I as a citizen need to spend several hours just to get an informed picture of how my money is being spent, then that has a comparable cost of paying some private company to summarize some other form of data for me. The spectrum of accessibility is not simply about reducing financial cost, it's about reducing all forms of cost to retrieve information since one could easily convert time into money.
  • To give another example of the government engaging in inaccessible behavior, let's talk about AWS. Let's say you are building cloud services that have to deal with any form of sensitive government data like Criminal Justice Services (CJIS). There are a number of regulations the U.S. government has in place in an effort to protect this data, so much so that Amazon needed to roll out separate dedicated regions to comply with these regulations called AWS GovCloud. Since these is essentially a forked version of AWS' standard suite of services, altered to comply with regulation, there are several features available in the commercial regions that take longer or are simply unavailable in the GovCloud regions. The question of whether these regulations actually make sense and are necessary for securing this data is irrelevant. The end result is that building any service related to government data is now of higher cost and therefore less accessible.
  • In an effort to make more of the federal government's services available, they have started open sourcing the software though https://code.gov/. However, scrolling through most of the federal departments one could realize that the majority of them are still out of compliance with their own relatively low standards for open sourcing their code. For many agencies, software that pertains to national security is allowed to remain close source. Putting aside the security benefits of having open source software, that requirement pushes back on the idea that government services should be assumed to be public.
  • Accessible Citizen
  • The definition of private sector spawned from the idea that because the services are owned by private citizens, they can be made inaccessible to the rest of the public at any point. There's also the idea that because it's citizen owned, no one else in the public could influence the decisions made by the service. An idea which, for anyone who's ever started a small business and had to grow by bringing value to their customers, is silly on the face of it.
  • The internet is radically changing how we should start thinking of the public sector. The advent of open source software is encouraging both large companies and upcoming developers to share more of their engineering progress with the world. Some notable examples include Facebook's React and Microsoft's TypeScript. Both projects are completely open source and receive hundreds of contributions from developers not in either company, but rather from the engineering "public". This is not to say that Facebook and Microsoft as a whole should be considered part of the public sector. But rather, they each offer several services where some of which should be considered public sector and others considered private.
  • There are several other forms of media that are forming this new public sector. Podcasts, blogging, youtube videos, and more are all various forms of content that are participating in this space. This overabundance of free content, all created by citizens, fights against the idea that citizen owned content should be considered the private sector.
  • Why Do These Definitions Matter?
  • Most of the major problems the U.S. faces today are those that affect the general public. Things like climate change, education, wealth inequality etc. Because the affected users of these problems are the general public, most solutions proposed for addressing said problems are part of the public sector.
  • But just because the solutions lie in the public sector, doesn’t mean they need to be part of the government sector. Divorcing these two definitions from each other will then allow us to expand the solution space of how we can address these problems.
  • We need to evolve how we think of the public sector to include both government and citizen sector services that are very accessible to the public. There are several non profits like New Story and Charity: Water doing incredible work by raising money from the public and using it to fund projects that benefit the public.
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  • The internet is radically changing how we should start thinking of the public sector.
  • When we think of the public sector, we think of a set of services that anyone in the country, state, city, etc should be able to access. This has traditionally been restricted to just the government since it used to be the only entity incentivized to optimize for equality of opportunity. The internet has made it such that entities traditionally in the private sector are now also incentivized to optimize for this idea.
  • Let’s dive into what types of entities are defining this new public sector.
  • The New Public Sector
  • The advent of open source software is encouraging both large companies and indie developers to share more of their engineering progress with the world. Some notable examples include Facebook's React and Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. Both projects are completely open source and receive hundreds of contributions from the engineering "public,” rather than any individual company.
  • These big tech companies are not offering these services out of the goodness of their heart. Their business is inherently incentivized to make their software readily accessible. For Facebook, this has allowed a whole ecosystem to develop React, the web framework that their app is built on. For Microsoft, it provides a platform for which they could easily integrate with their other paid services like Azure, funneling potential customers to their cloud offering.
  • 
  • Open source software is not the only domain where organizations have been incentivized to participate in this new public sector. Content creation has emerged as a viable profession. Many creatives are incentivized to put out their work for free, whether that is a podcast, Youtube video, music, etc., because it accelerates their ability to build an audience. Once they have an audience, services like Patreon, KickStarter, and Give Butter allow them to monetize their work while still making the vast majority of it accessible by anyone.
  • These funding models show another way in which the new public sector is expanding upon the old one. In the traditional government definition, services were not only offered to the public but also funded by the public via taxes. The new public sector is introducing new ways to fund public services. Instead of taxes, we could now fund public workers directly, start campaigns to crowdsource funds or rely on the wealthier members of the society to support that work. We are also only in the early days of this innovation. In the years to come, ESPecially with the introduction of decentralized cryptocurrencies, technology will revolutionize how projects can be publicly funded.
  • One final way of thinking about the public sector has to do with accountability. The government definition implements this accountability by providing the public the ability to vote out of office leaders who it believes are doing harm. Though we cannot explicitly vote out the members of the new public sector, the internet has brought on the same level of accountability through social media. In the same way that politicians risk losing votes by not adhering to a certain standard, companies and individuals risk losing funding. There is also now an Effective Altruism growing focused on using evidence to determine which organizations are providing the most social good. Technology continues to knock down the information hurdles so that we as the public could put our resources, whether it’s votes, time, or money, towards publicly motivated entities.
  • Equipped with this new way of thinking about the public sector, the question then becomes why does it matter? What does this now do for us? A new way of thinking about the public sector now gives us a new way of thinking about public sector problems.
  • Problems Facing The General Public
  • There are several problems facing the general public today. Just in the U.S., conversations circling climate change, education, and income inequality dominate public discourse. Because of the strict coupling between the public sector and government-controlled services, most of the solutions discussed around this space revolve around government policy that people debate implementing.
  • But we should expand what we consider to be the public sector and open it up to include all the entities that are incentivized to do work that affects the public good.
  • For example, New Story is not a government entity, yet they are doing unquestionable good for the public. They're a non-profit with the goal of building a world without global homelessness. They're funded through donations and partner with local companies to build homes in communities in need of them.
  • 
  • Charity: Water is a non-profit with a mission to bring clean drinking water to people who lack access to it. They too are funded through donations and partner with hundreds of local organizations in these countries to build sustainable drinking wells that could provide safe drinking water for years to come.
  • 
  • Both companies are prime examples of entities funded by the public, working with the public, and offering services for the public. Despite not being services that are controlled by the government, they should both be considered companies that are part of the new public sector for tackling problems that face the general public. This is exciting news for those of us that do care deeply about these sorts of problems. Our only recourse is no longer to vote for our favorite politician, hoping that they actually win the election and follow through on what they say they will. We are now empowered by the internet to tackle these problems directly through organizations already in the new public sector or through starting our own.
  • By evolving our definition of the public sector, we will be able to define our own impact on improving the well-being of the general public.
• Parking lot
  • This is not to say that Facebook and Microsoft as a whole should be considered part of the public sector. But rather, they each offer several services where some of which should be considered public sector and others considered private.