“When I started Code for America in 2010, one question I heard a lot was: if you want to improve the services people get from government, why specify using the internet? It’s a fair question. People engage with government in all kinds of ways, and especially did then—in person, by mail, over the phone. So why insist on this particular technology? My answer was that people expect to be able to use the internet to interact with their government. For a growing number of people, the internet was how they accessed almost every other service in their lives. When dealing with government meant in-person visits during working hours, and confusing, sometimes insulting paper-based forms, it not only cost people time they didn’t have, it also caused them to miss out on benefits they needed, to get in legal tangles when they failed to pay a ticket or comply with a regulation, and to generally feel that government was the enemy. These dynamics were clearly eroding trust in public institutions.”