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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the Publish Press podcast. I'm Steve Burge from Publish Press, and we make publishing plugins for WordPress.
Dan Knauss:I'm Dan Knaus. I'm a solution architect with Multidots, an enterprise WordPress agency that works with all kinds
Steve Burge:of publishers and other clients who are running WordPress to publish content and get business done. So we talk about publishing with WordPress on this podcast. And we have a really interesting guest today who focuses on government. Now he's been a journalist. He's been in technology, and he tries to combine a lot of the skills he's taken from those careers and applies it to government websites in particular, making them more useful, making them more efficient, making them more helpful for citizens.
Steve Burge:And, Dan, when we were brainstorming potential guests and you were the one who suggested Luke as a guest, what is it about Luke that really interests you?
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I've been aware of Luke for a long time because many roles in another lifetime, another another place. I I was very involved with this similar things. I think I used some of Luke's work for building websites for political elected officials in my city for political campaigns and was very interested in data journalism, citizen journalism, advocacy, open data, municipal data that was coming out. Luke has kind of been a part of that for a much longer period.
Dan Knauss:And it was really interesting to check back in and see what's going on nowadays. Things have changed. AI in play now all the way from pre us older folks, kind of pre internet RSS days, all the way up to now using AI with the same purpose though of civic technology, opening government, making more accessible to people who serve and work in in those roles and the public.
Steve Burge:Awesome. But, yeah, this conversation goes all the way from, like, feed burner and almost the very early days of the Internet all the way up to AI. But Luke's philosophy of being useful and trying to make government better for citizens has has been the through line through throughout all that work. So welcome, guys. Let's hear from Luke.
Steve Burge:Hey, Luke. Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Luke Fretwell:Thank you for having me.
Steve Burge:Welcome, welcome. So Luke, I always do some research before someone comes on. I don't wanna be one of those podcast hosts that realizes someone is on podcast and suddenly tries to figure out some questions to ask. So I got for those of you who are watching on YouTube, I've got all my research here, and I've never had as much research on someone as for you. Like, the number of things you've done, you've been involved with it is is long.
Steve Burge:It take dozens of projects. But you were an original WordPress developer back in the day. Right?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I early WordPress theming. Yeah. Official theme. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Like, you you developed a theme that was specifically for local governments to use WordPress. Right? GovPress?
Luke Fretwell:Yep. We called it GovPress. We initially it was kind of I think it was like gov w p or something. I can't remember. But, you know, there were sort of the rules around how you could name a theme.
Luke Fretwell:So we ended up going with gov press. Yeah. And just really wanted to build a theme that was simple and responsive at the time. I don't know if we're using the word responsive, but really sort of the fluid design and 100% and, you know, using percentage based fonts and widths and really something that government could easily use to plug in on the front end that was really simple and not sort of, you know, overly complex with carousels and motion and things like that.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I used it on a couple of Milwaukee County and city political sites, elected officials
Luke Fretwell:and campaigns.
Dan Knauss:Yeah, I
Luke Fretwell:didn't remember That's great to hear.
Dan Knauss:Later connected with with you and didn't make that connection until later.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. Well, it's funny. At its heyday, you know, we've obviously like, we've kind of moved away. We have moved away from it and we've archived it on the GitHub. But, you know, at its heyday, there were thousands.
Luke Fretwell:I'm I'm sure there were not just government, but there were thousands of active installations of it, which was, you know, it's always fun when you're building something and then, you know, especially open source and there's a good adoption. So, it was it was fun to see that adoption and really kind of opened me up to the power of, you know, open communities, open source and how you can scale, you know, your impact through technology.
Steve Burge:So which of those interests came first for you? Were you into WordPress, into technology, into software, or into the government side of things, into making government better into focusing on civic action?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I feel like my origin story starts in college as, you know, the managing editor and then the editor in chief of this college newspaper. I went to a school called, you know, George Mason University outside of DC, and studied government and politics and international relations. But I wasn't like the greatest college student, and it just didn't gel with kind of how I learn or how I, you know, intellectually or, you know, get excited. But I knew that I had to get a college degree.
Luke Fretwell:Right? So stuck it out. But we didn't have a journalism department. And so anybody could kinda show up and, you know, get assigned something. It was very meritocracy based.
Luke Fretwell:You know, if you came and wrote an article, it got into the newspaper if you did whatever. So I became the managing editor and then the editor, and I was able to kind of blend sort of writing journalism with, you know, design. I was really interested in the designing of the paper and photography. You know, we had the dark room back in the day. I'd go into the dark room with them.
Luke Fretwell:And and then there's the print, you know, like we would be up late and I would always drive to the printer with the paper and they would give it to the printer and then go to go home and go to bed and wake up and you'd see students reading the newspaper. So, really, sort of this idea of publishing and product, you know, the newspaper as a product and publishing, you know, that my origin story around kind of where, you know, I evolved with sort of WordPress and blogging and even kind of civics started with working at the college newspaper. And then
Steve Burge:Did the George Mason newspaper have a online edition?
Luke Fretwell:Not at that time. We didn't. There was no this was you know, I'm old enough to be pre pre Internet in college. I think we had, like, email addresses or they gave them to us, and I don't know if anybody really used them because it wasn't really a thing. But yeah, it was, you know, really really to the night back in the nineties.
Dan Knauss:I was Xeroxing zines.
Steve Burge:We made
Dan Knauss:when we wanted to make a publication, but yeah, I worked on a print magazine in school and some all print. Yeah. Going to driving, taking like word processor, early desktop publishing, take the disc to the printer and the or for our illegal underground publications going to North Carolina state and using their big Xerox machines. Then as soon as I graduated 1995, then it was like a switch flipped and learned all this new web stuff.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. It's about the same time. Right? Like really like the internet started happening. And then I started teaching myself to code because I realized, wow, you can post some publish something to the Internet and it's you can do it immediately and it's free and you just bypass so much.
Luke Fretwell:So I started teaching myself to code when I grew up, you know, outside of DC and decided that I needed to be where technology was because I wasn't smart enough or, you know, good enough to be a journalist a real journalist. And just decided to You
Steve Burge:have quite a publishing record for someone that claims they're not meant to be a journalist.
Luke Fretwell:Well, you know, when you're a blogger, right, you can get away with not being a real journalist. You know, think But but, yeah, I mean, I I really like to write and I definitely moving to the Bay Area, you know, I really got more entrenched into sort of technology, which I never and never would have imagined that I would be doing technology when I was in college. And then, you know, that's how I kind of found WordPress. But yeah, I mean, and that's what kind of really empowered me to see if it, know, mentioned just really kind of pick up from the journalism aspect, and it allowed me to kind of be more prolific because, you know, WordPress was at that time was such an easy tool for me to just build and publish.
Dan Knauss:How did you make that move from personal publishing to helping municipalities, kind of civic publishing, government systems?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I think with WordPress, right, like friend of mine set that up for me and showed me how to do the theming. And I had been, you know, in the Bay Area doing kind of user research, user experience work, and doing a lot of front end design. And just because I was very much into kind of Jacob Nielsen and the whole movement around, you know, making websites simple and and having an appreciation for words on web pages, both in kind of navigation elements, button elements, but also kind of copy.
Steve Burge:This would be the era of Steve Krug. Yeah.
Luke Fretwell:Steve Krug, don't make me think.
Dan Knauss:Don't make
Luke Fretwell:me think. Right? Yeah. You're bringing back all the memories. And so I just started theming, and then I themed, you know, when I started I, you know, created GovFresh, which maybe we can talk about, but I started blogging about the intersection of technology and government at a certain point and realized, you know, I was asking for help on the theming.
Luke Fretwell:And finally, I was shown here's how you can change the theme that you have. And as soon as I learned how to change the theme, the light bulbs went off, and I really started thinking, wow, you've got WordPress, which is a simple content management system that anybody can use to publish to the Internet. And then you have this theme over here that you can create a visual layer for, and it can be whatever you want. And then I started thinking about, well, how awesome would it be if government had a simple web theme that they could use for free and use this free content management system? And then you'd have to figure out kind of the hosting for it.
Luke Fretwell:But two big components of kind of price or cost for a website goes down significantly. And that's when we started I started working with Devon Price and building GovPress for, you know, a gov a WordPress theme for government.
Steve Burge:So you started as a journalist and moved out to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Oakland area.
Luke Fretwell:Berkeley Berkeley and San Francisco. I'm in the in the Bay Area. Yeah. So
Steve Burge:So you had the journalism blogging background, and then you added on the technology skills. How did the how did the the government piece of it come together for you?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, you know, at that time, right, like, Obama became president and the first thing he did when he came into office was he created the open government directive, which essentially opened up the doors to, you know, a culture of open. Right? And folks who are in open source, you know, kind of get it, but it's really the, you know, transparency, collaboration, transparency and engagement, right? We're kind of the foundations.
Luke Fretwell:And, you know, everybody in open source knows those things. They're inherent into the psyche of anybody who is an open source zealot. And with the open source or the open government directive, you know, open data, open source became, you know, very much key topics and emphasis for the Obama administration. And I just thought, wow, this is a really cool opportunity to sort of go back to my quote roots in having grown up near DC and studied government and politics, but also, you know, moving to the Bay Area and understanding technology, even to some degree, a little bit more granular by working on this theme or building, you know, kind of my my theme for GovFresh, which eventually like helped me connect the dots on GovPress and thinking, here's open source, here's this move towards open source, you know, a a theme for government would be really great.
Steve Burge:Can you tell us more about GovFresh? How did it what was it? How did it combine the skills you'd been building up?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. So, you know, the original origin story of GovFresh is I can't remember what the you know, I'm a huge RSS fan. And I don't know, Google had a service. It wasn't Feedly. Maybe it was a Feed Reader.
Luke Fretwell:Google Reader? Google Reader. I can't remember what. I feel like it was Feed something. Feed something.
Luke Fretwell:I can't remember, but it was an RSS feed. And what we did was we created created pages in WordPress for
Steve Burge:Yeah. They they had Google Reader, which would input, and then they purchased FeedBurner, was it?
Luke Fretwell:FeedBurner. That's what it was.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. All the effects, you could do a newsletter off of it. You could modify. You could, you know, transform the RSS output. There was Yahoo Pipes.
Dan Knauss:You could do quite a So
Luke Fretwell:what I did was I had a a WordPress site, govfresh.com. So the idea was so I think with with FeedBurner, what I did was I started setting pages for, the White House, And I would pull in like the YouTube feed, the RSS feed, the Twitter feed, and I would be able to just like look and see like, here's what the is coming directly from the White House. And I did it for like the CIA, the NSA, you know, all of the federal agencies. And then I started thinking, man, it'd be cool to like, you know, Dan, as you say, pipe it into a website. So, you know, like and syndicate it, kind of like, you know, an API and have my own interface.
Luke Fretwell:So I did that and I was using that as like sort of a branded feed reader and was thinking of a name, I thought, well, you know, every time I refresh the page, there's a new update. So I just looked up GovFresh as a URL, and it was available and I bought it. And then as I started seeing how bad, you know, going to the websites through the links, seeing how bad government websites were, I just thought, man, this is like there's a total disconnect between the technology and the products that are being built in the Bay Area and what's happening in DC. And so then I just converted GovFresh into a blog and started writing about what I thought. You started to
Steve Burge:get really interested in all of these bad websites that have been coming through your RSS feeds, these all these websites that are hard to navigate, maybe maybe overdesigned Yeah. Not very not very citizen friendly?
Dan Knauss:Well, especially in smaller municipalities, even, you know, even fairly big ones up to, you know, metro of a million people. Definitely where I was in the Midwest. Yeah. They either overspend on really bad proprietary systems and don't know what to ask for and are terrible clients. There was kind of that era of it was all very new too.
Dan Knauss:So is that what led you then into kind of the consulting or would you say that's what you did with Proud City?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I think with like so with we built GovPress, you know, and really saw the growth of that. And then, you know, I think, like, I met up with Kevin, Jeff, and Alex who were the cofounders of Proud City, And they had been working, they were very much in the Drupal community, and they were Drupal services firm. And we met at actually a DrupalCon. And we all just kind of started talking about sort of, you know, as I mentioned, right, there was this content management, this open source content management systems that were out there, Drupal, WordPress, you mentioned Joomla.
Luke Fretwell:And then there's the front end problem. Right? There's a simple design that's not that doesn't suck. Right? What was the was websites that sucked.
Luke Fretwell:There was used to be like a a blog that would feature, you know, but it was just really like an a simple elegant web website theme. But the problem was that there wasn't the hosting component. So government couldn't quote just sort of, you know, flip a switch and get going. And then the four so the four of us just started talking about, well, how do we create SaaS, you know, software as a service that brought all those three things together and made it really easy for government, really easy and cost effective for them to, you know, leverage these open source technologies with a layer of kind of, you know, delivering a, you know, government service or public service that addressed everyone's needs. You know, now with accessibility, you know, security, and really do it in a way that's cost effective and scales.
Luke Fretwell:We launched Proud City, was powered, you know, and we can talk about it if you'd like, but it was we leveraged the WordPress platform to build it.
Steve Burge:Also, it's a custom WordPress base that was used to to host all these government sites.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
Dan Knauss:Sorry. Yeah. I was just curious that when you talk about scale, like, there there's so many different sizes in in the the budget, the amount the the number of constituents, you know, the the configuration of of municipal bodies. Did was it a one size fits all or something you could you could actually scale to different I I I think I yeah. I recall you had a pricing based on population.
Luke Fretwell:Mhmm.
Dan Knauss:And is that still the case? Yeah.
Luke Fretwell:So there's a pricing, it's population based. There was a minimum. But we really wanted to, you know, kind of scale it. And we wanted the goal was to make pricing transparent. You know, there's several reasons why government has bad websites.
Luke Fretwell:But, you know, one of them is just sort of the procurement process, and we wanted to just kind of make pricing transparent so that it was easy for them to kind of understand and and even buy. And that's why we did it did it, you know, at at a per resident price because it was easy for us to create a pricing, you know, you have a 100,000 people, it's this much money. As far as like scale within the communities, you know, we had there were there were there were cities that were hundreds of people, 500 person city. And I think the largest to date is 300 something thousand Santa Ana in California. There may be a county that is bigger, but, know, it goes from 300,000 to, you know, less than a thousand population cities.
Steve Burge:That's really interesting. I've never heard of a pricing model quite like that before, basing the pricing on the number of people who live near where the website is serving.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, it just solved a lot of problems for us in thinking about, you know, the tiers and, you know, there's like there's obviously like some upgrades that happen that have pricing on it. But, you know, we just wanted to keep it as simple as possible. And it's great when you have like population as a, you know, a way to determine price, and it's just really easy. You pull the census data and put a number on it and multiply it, and that's the price.
Luke Fretwell:And like I said, we had a minimum, but, you know, you couldn't buy one for 5¢ a month. But, you know, it was it solved a lot of the problems around, you know, pricing things out. And I think it eliminated confusion for for government folks as well.
Dan Knauss:So how did you get clients then? Did it did it you have the network already and it just spread from there? Or how did you how did that take hold?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I think part of it was, you know, network and and knowing folks. And we, you know, we did some pilots and we would, you know, get we were successful with those. And then, you know, after a while, right, like government isn't competing with one another to the large degree, right? They want to help each other.
Luke Fretwell:You know, that community wants to help each other. I mean, cities are certainly, you know, competing for each other for certain things. But generally, right, like the staffs, you know, want to support each other. So, you know, a lot of our customers and that we we we acquired were word-of-mouth and just reference. And just being I think just being honest about the pricing and showing transparency and being honest that we weren't, you know, Dan, as you mentioned this, we weren't proprietary.
Luke Fretwell:You know, if you wanted the data and the code, like if we weren't doing our job and you wanted to take everything, the code, the data, you could do that. And I think, you know, the combination of like word-of-mouth and customers, you know, sharing it with their communities and the sort of ethos of open generally really address some of the fears that that governments have with vendors, website vendors back then and even today.
Steve Burge:How many have we had a
Dan Knauss:oh, sorry, Steve. How many did municipalities did you bring on to the Proud City platform? Yeah. There's a little over
Luke Fretwell:a 100, and those range from, you know, large city, mostly mid sized cities and smaller cities, I would say, you know, 50,000 and below. And then some counties and some county agencies.
Steve Burge:We've had more than one person who's come on the podcast, and they've had technically, we'd call them SaaS platforms, but it's more like hosted WordPress. One of the the big selling points for them too, they've been selling to to newspapers or magazines or to different audiences. But one of the big selling points was exactly that, that because we're built in WordPress, there's no vendor lock in. If you don't like us, you could take your side off the platform and go and host it somewhere else.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. Yep. And the other other aspects of, you know, why we made the business decision to choose WordPress. And, you know, those the other three guys were Drupal developers. They had been doing this for, you know, five, a minimum five years.
Luke Fretwell:So, they were pretty entrenched into the Drupal ecosystem. And, you know, one of the challenges, so those are procurement challenging government, but or procurement causes problems for, you know, a technology adoption, modern technology adoption, but also sort of training. You know, there's just not the skill set. And we felt like if I was going to train, you know, my mom, who, you know, is not computer savvy, what would I want to train them on to onboard them to a content management system? Is it Joomla?
Luke Fretwell:Is it Drupal? Is it WordPress? And the answer was yes to WordPress. So, this is such an intuitive thing. And a lot of people, we found a lot of people are like, oh, I use WordPress for my, you know, XYZ, you know, website or blog at home or whatever.
Luke Fretwell:So, you know, that was a you know, the simplicity of the onboarding, the training part was really important for bringing, you know, for in the sales process.
Steve Burge:So you spent years selling into government of all sizes. Is it a is it a tough market to be in? Is it tough to make sales? Is it tough to navigate the procurement process? Or counterintuitively, is it actually quite a quite a good and interesting market to be in?
Luke Fretwell:Well, it's good and interesting in that, you know, if you care about kind of serving, you know, government and if you generally care about civics and you're a technologist, it's good because when you do get a government customer and you have sort of open ethos, it's exciting because you're truly empowering that municipality to leverage resources in other ways that they can now that they now have because they're using, you know, open source and knowing that the technical debt and the data, you know, rights are being protected. So, you know, you can wake up in the morning and feel good that you're actually doing good. The procurement part and the sales part of government, you know, it just varies. Every, you know, municipality, you know, there's just such a different approach. You know, some people have RFPs where they're like, you know, we need resumes for Dan, Luke and Steve and we need to know like what they're going to do, what their projects are.
Luke Fretwell:They've been and, you know, there's just these kind of old school specifications that are just sort of, you know, copied from, you know, a Google search and, you know, repasted from the nineties. And so, you know, people just don't know like what they don't know, so they just kind of take whatever's out there. So, you get these rigid RFPs that don't apply today for service models, but they especially don't apply for software, right? Like if you were going to get Google Work and you put out an RFP, you wouldn't say, well, I need Sergei's resume, you know, right? Like it just doesn't work that way.
Luke Fretwell:And we were more software focused. So, you know, those elements made it kind of a challenge, but it ranged, you know. Some of it was, you do an RFP and you go through sort of an interview process, which we tried to stay away from, to one guy called called us on the phone driving home from City Hall saying he was on the website and or on our website and got the pricing before he left and called us and said, can you take my credit card? Right? Like it just ranged.
Luke Fretwell:The range was So, it's just kind of But generally, right, like procurement is selling to government is a challenge because, you know, when we talk about things like vendor lock in or data rights or open source and saving money, a lot of that is lost on them. So, you know, that's a challenge is sort of the educating folks on, you know, why this stuff is important. But also the reality, right? Like especially now if you look at the government website vendors, the top tier vendors that have and when I say top tier, I mean by customer, not by necessarily by actually being a good product. You know, they're all owned by private equity and there's an incentive there.
Luke Fretwell:There's all proprietary. And there's a model there to keep those governments on their, quote, platforms by any means necessary. So it's a challenge. It's a real challenge.
Steve Burge:But it can't be too bad because you're still in the same sector now. Right? You moved on from from Proud City.
Luke Fretwell:Mhmm.
Steve Burge:Yeah. And you're still launching products aimed at government, aimed at making their website better. Right?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, it's the, you know, it's the sort of innovator's dilemma, right? You want to, you know, keep building something new, and then there's challenges around that, right? Like creating new products and new startups and new ideas, right? You just never know are they gonna work.
Luke Fretwell:So, you know, you really have to have support of other folks and also just sort of be comfortable with uncertainty. But yeah, now I'm working with two ideas. One is ScanGov and the other one is ChatCivic, which is, you know, ScanGov sort of scans a website and gives feedback on where it stands from accessibility, content, security, performance, you know, is it AI friendly and some other kind of what we call indicators. And then ChatCivic is really sort of thinking about how can government provide an AI chatbot to its community that makes it easier to find the information behind the bad websites and municipal code, you know, and any of those resources in a way that kind of meets the moment of, you know, where we are with Claude and Chad GPT and things like that. But both very early stage, you know, experiments.
Steve Burge:So Luke, can you take us through ScanGov? Mhmm. Basically, you're looking to rank government websites according to certain criteria whether they're whether they're accessible. Well, you take me through it. What what's the purpose of ScanGov?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. So ScanGov, the idea was so, you know, my my my oldest son, Elias, who's now 17, I think he was 14 when the pandemic was. And he's always been inclined towards computers and kind of coding and he was bored. So I started, you know, I explained to him what APIs were and he started pulling data, creating, you know, an interface and we built a COVID dashboard that kind of showed he pulled API data from census and CDC and was showing, here's the population of the state and here's the percentage of people that have been vaccinated, and we would run that daily. And there were some other kind of cards that showed different metrics.
Luke Fretwell:So, we've kind of always kind of like since then, we've sort of hacked away together at different things. And then at some point we, you know, started talking about I can't remember how I got on this. I think I was just like annoyed that like USAJobs didn't have an OpenGraph image that showed up on job postings in LinkedIn. It was just text. And I just thought, wow, it'd be great if USA Jobs had an open graph image.
Luke Fretwell:So, when I posted on LinkedIn, you could see like USA Jobs and it would brand it, it would give more visibility to the job, the job posting, and increase the click rate, right, the interest in it. And a simple thing like that, right, could impact, you know, applications or interest. So, then I started talking with Elias about, you know, wouldn't it be cool to scan the metadata, you know, from the header, the HTML header in government websites and just sort of grade them based on whether they have certain things. So, we started with like robots and sitemap and OpenGraph and really just sort of grading on those things. And it was really shocking because, you know, you think like, wow, this is kind of it was like page title and some of the basics even that they didn't have, you know, that are outside of like OpenGraph, just old school kind of meta data.
Luke Fretwell:And we started grading them and it was just kind of fascinating to see. And then we started ranking, adding a ranking and a map to it for the states and the cities and we'll be doing counties soon. But it caught people's attention because it was really like, wow, this is interesting. A public sort of dashboard of where folks stand. And I think like with I think civic hacking, the important thing of civic hacking is to sort of rage against the machine, but do it in a way that is civil constructive and help educate.
Luke Fretwell:So we've built an educational component in like, you don't have X, Y, Z. This is what it is. This is why it's important. It's a form of scandalism.
Dan Knauss:That's what it came
Luke Fretwell:to be called when journalists do it. Yeah. And so when we published it and some of the industry press, the gov tech industry press covered it, We actually got calls from or DM, I got DMs on LinkedIn from chief digital officers and federal agencies thanking us because it helped them know what they didn't know. And they were chief digital officers, right? I just ran the scan on my personal website and got fresh, and it picked up things I didn't know.
Luke Fretwell:And I've been doing internet for, you know, thirty years. And so, really, like I think the way that we released it, it wasn't just a, you know, name and shame. It was there was an educational component, so people could kind of understand. So, the tone wasn't as toxic. It was much more productive and constructive.
Luke Fretwell:And then, you know, we just so it's just sort of helped people. We opened up, you know, the GitHub repo. So, it's all open source. But we also let people do an issue request to update their data when they made changes. And, you know, folks started doing it.
Luke Fretwell:It's less so now, but, you know, when we first published it, there were states and federal agencies that made changes based on that and would submit an issue. You can look in the repo under the data update filter and see there were some, you know, pretty significant state governments and federal agencies that made changes based on that work. It felt like a great civic hacking project, and then it got us started thinking deeper about, well, is there a commercial aspect to this? And I've been working with Aaron Hans who I worked with at on a California Alpha project with basically is now it was the precursor to the California what's now the California Office of Data and Innovation. But the Alpha Project was kind of a test to show the state how digital service a digital service team could work in the open and agile and user centered.
Luke Fretwell:And so Aaron and I met and we just kind of started talking like, hey, this service, right? You've got like all of these different scanning programs out there, accessibility, security. But, you know, we just thought, wouldn't it be nice to have something that was very simple and intuitive that, you know, played off of what ScanGov, what we call now call Project ScanGov is doing with kind of report cards and educating folks on how to remediate those things. And that's what we're
Steve Burge:working on. This is such a fascinating project. I got like three probably questions fast observations after I know it sounds like Dan's got a couple too.
Dan Knauss:He said, just curious for what the thirty year view on on this. I was very invested in a very specific kind of municipality and data journalism and journalism and on a lot of levels and and civic hacking and just hacking. And there seemed to be a moment for that. And it was like a decade, ten, fifteen years ago. Was there a waning?
Dan Knauss:And if so, why? And does it does it have its moment again? Is something coming coming back? You said you're an r big fan of RSS. I'm helping organize WordCamp Canada later this year.
Dan Knauss:I'd love to have you up. Dave Weiner just announced as our keynote. So Nice. Wrote the RSS spec and Yeah. Know, right with you there on on the importance of of open APIs and and civic hacking.
Dan Knauss:But, yeah, that's that's from another era or or is it? Is there a where where do you see things now and where they could go? Yeah. I mean,
Luke Fretwell:I think like, you know, so my idea, like the, you know, beginning of civic tech, and this is in my context, is like, you know, during the early Obama years, maybe a little before that, you know, folks started hacking and there was sort of the Web two point zero movement and then Tim O'Reilly did the Gov two point movement. So, kind of OpenGov, Web two point zero really ushered in this sort of and also like open source really just kind of coming to its own. And I think like GitHub, you know, these sort of public Git tools where people could see things in a non nerdy way really ushered in this moment, that moment of kind of civic meets technology. And, you know, we're riding the wave. Obama did the directive and we were everything was moving.
Luke Fretwell:And then, you know, to your question, Dan, I think that like when healthcare.gov happened, it sort of put a stop to that because the emphasis became digital service and agile and product delivery. And then what you saw was a lot of recruitment from, you know, big tech into this that weren't versed in open culture. They were versed in building products. So then you saw this kind of shift from the open culture to product and product delivery and digital service. And it didn't, you know, there was some of like, we're, you know, kind of open or whatever.
Luke Fretwell:Wasn't like an emphasis on that. And then I think, you know, because of the pressure of healthcare.gov and then everybody else was like, well, we don't want to be that, you know, we don't want to be the next healthcare.gov. It was a move towards product ownership, product delivery, agile, and the open component started to go away. And I think like moving forward, right? I mean, politically, technology, you know, like anybody who's going to predict what's going to happen tomorrow, you know, good luck.
Luke Fretwell:But I think that, you know, we're starting to see kind of blue sky and some of this Web three, you know, to some degree. Well, I think, you know, open source is really starting to grow. I mean, we're talking about open source AI, you know, everybody has a different definition of that. But we're starting to see open source become part of the vernacular in a way that it hasn't been before, right? And it's becoming more acceptable.
Luke Fretwell:Mean, what people mean by it is like a whole another conversation. But there's a level of open source that is being accepted and not, oh, it's open source. Oh, you're using Drupal or WordPress. Oh, you're not secure. Right?
Luke Fretwell:Like how many times have you all heard that? And we're not hearing that as much. Right? It's not it's a concern just like proprietary. But I think with, you know, kind of what we're seeing with Blue Sky and the adoption of that and Mastodon to some degree, you know, with these web three principles that are coming aboard, it it's trending.
Luke Fretwell:It's not I wouldn't say it's, you know, happening immediately, but it's all starting to trend in a in a good way.
Steve Burge:So you have ScanGov, which is on GitHub, which you take pull requests for. It it's constructive. It's open source. Yeah. It it's making the web better.
Steve Burge:And the other project you're working on is AI for government as well. Is that right? Building chatbots for local governments. Can you tell us more about that? That seem just on the surface to be a little less open source, hackable,
Luke Fretwell:and so on. Yeah. I mean, it's very nascent. And so I'm working with Jake Rosren, who is kind of a data, you know, really smart data scientist. And we just started chatting about kind of LLMs and, you know, how how you could tap into what, know, what's called RAG, right?
Luke Fretwell:Like these sources that are specified to, you know, government websites and municipal code, and how you know, government websites are bad, right? But if you can get on a chatbot and you're familiar with it, and the chatbot actually returns a good result, you could solve your bad government website experience really easily. So, he just because he's really a smart guy, and knows how to put all of the technical components together, we just started playing around with what does it look like? What does it look like if you rag the website and the municipal code, and then start fine tuning? What does the government experience look like, the digital government experience look like?
Luke Fretwell:So, we've just been kind of MVP ing, you know, what that would look like. And there's kind of, we started to put a brand on it and have built it out a little bit more. So, it's still very nascent. But seeing the results that, you know, as I was giving Jake feedback on the response, the answers, and building out sort of principles and how do we make it where it has a civic focus. And there are principles and it's transparent in some ways, you know, incorporating that stuff in and seeing the responses and like now starting to tweak what's helpful to somebody on a response.
Luke Fretwell:It's kind of blowing my mind and help forcing me in a really good way to rethink sort of being precious about search engines and the web as we know it today, and really thinking about the government experience and using chat as a way to help people find the information and act on it so that they can move on and not have to deal with bad websites or just the bureaucracy. And I still think the web is important, right? We need sources of truth. We need links. We need URLs to provide sources of truth.
Luke Fretwell:We need structured data. We need good content. But it has helped me rethink what I think is going to be a big component of the the experience that people have with their governments.
Steve Burge:So the name of this is chatcivic.ai. Right? Yeah. And the idea is people can come there. They can type in, when is my trash delivery?
Steve Burge:Or what are the building codes in my area? And hopefully get a useful response.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. So we're gonna be what we're, you know, gonna start reaching out to municipalities to kind of help them set this up so that they you know, we will brag there. And and I I I don't know what I always forget what RAG stands for. Do y'all anybody can anybody help me
Dan Knauss:actually reminding myself of that yesterday.
Luke Fretwell:I guess one of those I don't remember. But the idea, right, is to
Dan Knauss:Yeah. Like DocSpot. Retrieval augmented generation.
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. So that's a nerd term for, you know, with with Chad GPT or Claude, right, you search and it searches the internet. And with something like Chad Civic, it says, we're not going to search the internet, we're going to search just official sources that you provide this tool. So, you know, the idea is is to let cities stand up their own chat that pulls those sources, but, you know, quote, thinks intelligently and returns an answer that is really helpful. And then government, you know, at least initially the idea is is the government can provide a snippet, a code snippet on their website.
Luke Fretwell:So there's a little button that says something like, you know, chat with us or get help that links to their particular, you know, chat GPT like service.
Steve Burge:If you don't mind me asking, how are you approaching this from an open way? Are you able to use one of the off the shelf AI services that everyone knows about? Or do you have some kind of open source alternative?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, this is so, you know, we're starting out with, I mean, you know, the MVP on this, right? The best way to do that is using one of the current tools. So, we're integrating in with OpenAI and the tools that they have. And what we're starting to think about is how do we be open?
Luke Fretwell:You know, how do what do we do? Like where do we start with this? And we wanted to get the MVP out, so that was the easiest way to do it. So now we've started to work on some principles. Here are AI principles.
Luke Fretwell:And then think about, you know, what are the prompts that we're using to test this? Publishing those and then starting to show, here are the responses that we are getting on our tests. And then so folks can see, okay, you know, they're actually, they've got principles and they're testing this. And here are the prompts. So, okay, they're using some really good prompts to test this.
Luke Fretwell:And here are the results. I think as we evolve, you know, we'll think about like what is the open source technology part of that looks, but we're so early with it that and you know, we're pulling from OpenAI that, you know, it's still kind of early on that. But my hope is is that, you know, we continue to start being more open on that front as well.
Dan Knauss:How do deal with potential political sensitivities of that? I can imagine things like, you know, you rag the municipal code or something. And, you know, is that really what it says about capacity for, you know, big landlords or and you when you find out even true things, there's hallucination possibilities. But what we always did that would cause trouble productively was actually sift through data, that way pre AI tools are actually watch zoning meetings, licensing meetings, or budget review committees that, you know, we're running out of local daily papers kind of declining. No one's covering this stuff.
Dan Knauss:You just pick out the right data, pull out the right numbers, the right quotes, and then boom, that goes to the big journalists or bloggers and you suddenly have moved the needle on some an expose is kind of the easiest way to do that. But there's always sensitivity. And that's what I found too, tends to make them wanna lock up a bit and be very concerned about what's coming out. Have you have you had to navigate that kind of thing or do you do you anticipate that?
Luke Fretwell:I mean, you know, I think that there's, you know, it's still really early. I mean, we're still very much MVP on kind of testing this idea. I mean, like I said, I'm really surprised and in a good way, the responses that we see when we're testing, you know, when we're doing the prompt, the test prompts. I think like, you know, for government, right, like it needs to start thinking about how can it be relevant. You know, they're already government and where technology is going is already kind of like going like like this, you know, and with AI, it's going to start to go like this and almost, you know, potentially could make people be more distrustful or, you know, ambivalent to democracy and government.
Luke Fretwell:So, needs to really start getting on top of this and understanding it, and even adopting it to some degree because the expectations that, you know, people can find information and act on it are going to only get higher. I mean, I have two kids. One of them is still old school with the way that he uses because he's kind of principled on, you know, searching and doing it kind of the old way. The other one is everything is chat GPT, you know, everything. I think that people are going to need to be, you know, they're going to need to think about this less politically and more how can it serve.
Luke Fretwell:And if you're building tools that have fine tuning and address some of the toxic stuff that people are gonna try to prompt it, you know, you're gonna be, it'll be okay. It's not gonna be perfect.
Steve Burge:Is there gonna be is there gonna be a need not just for the governments to be presenting the information accurately on their own websites, but also serving it up accurately? Because you talk about your kid, I've got a kid or two kids in the same situation. One of them rarely uses AI, one of them uses it all the time. Guaranteed, people like kids who are addicted to AI will be going to chat to you BT and asking, when's my trash delivery? What are the building codes in my neighborhood?
Steve Burge:So is it a case that you're going to be trying to provide interesting information from your chatbot, ChatCivic, but is there also perhaps an opportunity to try and accurately provide the data to all the big services to make sure they're not hallucinating the local trash delivery or hallucinating the building codes?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I think it's just I mean, I think that's the important that's what's important about a service like Chad Civic is really thinking about how can we make sure this is being presented truthfully. And as you're able to kind of refine sort of the, you know, the experience, you know, with like municipal code or, you know, whatever meeting minutes, meeting agendas, and you're able to kind of refine those, it's much easier to sort of layer that into another municipality because they have kind of similar operations. Whereas, you know, with kind of a Czech Civic or the Czech GPT or Claude, it may be harder because, you know, they're not, you know, fine tuning as well for those cases.
Steve Burge:Cool. So thanks so much for your time, Luke. We've we end every podcast with the same question. We're a publishing podcast, primarily WordPress, and an online publishing. Is there a a publisher or multiple publishers who you love to read at the moment?
Steve Burge:People who are doing great work, could be a newsletter, could be a blog. Is there someone who when you see a new post from them, immediately your eyes light up and you're excited to see their new work?
Luke Fretwell:Yeah. I mean, I think like, you know, I have two two of my friends are they have sub sack newsletters. One is Jessica McCloud. She's has a subset called Thoughtful Leaders. It's thought with full and the parentheses and leaders.
Luke Fretwell:And it's generally about sort of leadership, but there are a there's a very good mix of government civic focused themes around leadership, civic leadership and government leadership. You know, she's Jess has been kind of a rock star in kind of civic tech for a long time, was one of the founders of USDR and worked on data stuff and just been around and she's sort of working on kind of leadership in general. And it's a great, great newsletter. And the other one is, you know, Rebecca Woodbury has with the Department of Civic Things, her focus is content design and strategy. And it's that's also a really great newsletter.
Luke Fretwell:So both of those I think are, you know, they're more granular and not kind of super well known and the sort of general population. But I love what both of them are doing on that front.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Do you have a substack yet?
Luke Fretwell:Well, I have one for GovFresh, but, you know, I just post, you know, the GovFresh work that I do there, but not one, you know, for me personally. I guess they're both the same. In the GoFresh is one in the same.
Steve Burge:Most of your work is available via lukefretwell.com. Right?
Luke Fretwell:Most of my sort of thought work on government and technology as I go fresh.
Steve Burge:So to find out more from Luke, either gofresh.com or lukefretwell.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Luke.
Luke Fretwell:Thank you both for having me. This was a pleasure.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. Thank you.