Produced By: Industry
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How APIs can help WIC better meet staff and participants’ needs
WIC programs across the country are already adapting and evolving to meet their participants’ needs. An API standard, which allows agencies to plug digital tools into existing technology systems, would remove some of the key barriers to innovating and sharing technology tools between agencies.
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Rapidly Building Unemployment Services During the Pandemic
Nava partnered with the State of California’s Employment Development Department to build and deploy two digital services to assist Californians seeking unemployment benefits, in just three months.
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Procurement 
Make RFPs More Equitable
A Request For Proposals (RFP) is a document describing a project that needs an outside business to complete. Clear, concise RFPs are necessary to attract potential talent, in addition to making the process more equitable and efficient. This article provides several suggestions on improving an organization’s RFP.
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Human-Centered Design 
The CUTGroup Book: Civic User Testing Group as a New Model for UX Testing, Digital Skills Development, and Community Engagement in Civic Tech
The CUTGroup book explains how civic user testing (paying residents to test civic apps) can allow for more community engagement in civic tech. This book covers how to do UX testing, community engagement, and digital skills in one civic tech system.
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Human-Centered Design 
ideas42 Methodology
This article introduces ideas42, a non-profit behavioral research and design firm applying insights from behavioral sciences, including behavioral economics (BE), social psychology, and other disciplines, for social good. Their behavioral design methodology is human-centered, but it incorporates scientific insights and iterative testing, applying observations about how people choose and act from experimental academic research to inform qualitative research.
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A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide
This guide outlines the types of projects, partnerships, and people that civic technologists encounter, as well as the methods they can use to make lasting change.
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Human-Centered Design 
Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit
IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit lays out how and why human-centered design can impact the social sector.
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Human-Centered Design 
How to begin designing for diversity
In order to create for all, we have to employ processes that authentically engage misrepresented communities. People tend to think of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in terms of implicit bias workshops, employee resource groups, and hiring processes. These efforts are all important, but it is also necessary to focus on DEI as it relates to the creation of products, services, and content, and use a design-thinking approach to tackle these tricky issues.
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Reddit Is America’s Unofficial Unemployment Hotline
Thousands of Americans have begun frequenting the r/Unemployment subreddit to get help navigating state and federal unemployment systems.
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Human-Centered Design 
Making the Case for Human-Centered Design in Government
Human-centered design is a problem-solving method that puts people at the center of the problem and aims to design solutions that address the needs of the people. Embracing such design methods in government is imperative to finding solutions that work for the people.
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Procurement 
The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook
A playbook by AdHoc for agencies ready to replace enterprise software patterns with proven techniques from the world of commercial software. These plays can better equip teams with the practices that create resilient, flexible, and customer-friendly digital services.
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Procurement 
Why is it so hard to build government technology?
The pandemic has shown how difficult it can be for the US to succeed with major technology projects. Various leading design thinkers discuss strategies for building more efficient and effective government technology.