Yeah, I’ve drunk my boss’ kool-aide probably. We’re pretty spoiled being at a publicly funded university system, and are not even tax-levy employees. We raise a lot of grants off of our potential to rope in government funds for implementation, and conversely get bigger government grants for implementation based on the experiments prototype implementations we’ve run with private dollars. Our government funders are very strict with oversight and account for every penny, while our private funders give us more leeway. We’ve managed to just get done things that are very difficult for government who can’t hire people or restructure easily or quickly around new projects and challenges. And once our research-based experiments are proven and have enough momentum, we just hand them off to government offices, or they get folded into processes.
I only said the first part, though, to emphasize how when something is a popular, tested idea, and just needs scaling, it should be a direct municipal service. Our organization is all about experimenting with ways to improve government services, not actually provide them ourselves.
