Many lengthy books and articles have been written on how to be fulfilled at work, good management, and keeping your staff engaged and excited. However, I’ve found one simple equation that is the secret to all of these.

It takes time, money, and other resources to execute on any new information technology initiative. In theory, there should be a return on investment for any new IT development. However, in the current market landscape, a lot of effort is being wasted on reinventing the wheel or misapplying solutions, rather than driving towards proving greater value to citizens and customers. The relatively low cost of experimentation and implementation of processes result in a fetishization of abstraction, leading to further and further complexity even if a proportional benefit is not achieved.

Over the last few years, an increasing number of technology companies and agencies have adopted a flat hierarchical structure. This organizational system promises to improve the efficiency of organizations by removing management structures, leaving as few management layers as possible. I believe that it is also almost entirely imaginary.

A few months ago, I joined Sunlight Foundation as their Senior Technology Adviser. Kat Duffy, who was then the Sunlight Labs director, brought me on to help bolster their programming efforts and lend support across the organization. However, only a couple of weeks later we learned that Sunlight Labs was being shut down entirely. With the time we had until the official closure, we quickly shifted our focus to

Here are my slides from my 2016 Transparency Camp talk on Documentation – or, “Write Stuff Down and Share It”.