Daniel X. O'Neil

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) expanded its partnership with ZeroEyes (a Philadelphia-metro #GovTech), rolling out advanced AI gun detection technology on even more CTA cameras to boost rider safety across the City. https://lnkd.in/eYD3mGgb

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Here’s the start of a 5-part series on my evolving thoughts on AI especially in the emerging society. “A few months ago, a lady we hired as an editor resigned. I found myself wondering why she would willingly leave, especially given how much of my work—both professional and personal—she had helped refine. At one point, I had been concerned about the number of errors in our publications, so bringing her on felt like a necessary safeguard—a human filter for quality.”

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Nathan Storey's civicaitools.org inspired me to integrate data queries into my City of Chicago Front Door chatbot. You can now ask it limited domain & data-related queries for data available in the Chicago Open Data portal. I decided not to use a MCP for this use-case and instead use Function Calling as it's more traceable & auditable, which I feel is critical in a government tool prototype. Read about the trade-offs of MCP v. Function Calling v. direct API integration in my latest post on Substack here: https://lnkd.in/gFzqCx4v

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“This is not just about folks using assistive tech to interact or trust these systems. It’s also about ensuring everything AI creates is genuinely accessible and free from ableist bias.” — Liz Tupper In January, CivicLabs—a joint venture formed by CivicActions and Huntridge Labs, LLC—hosted an Ethical AI Roundtable on responsible AI in public sector contexts. Accessibility was an important part of the conversation. As AI becomes embedded in government services, accessibility must go beyond interface compliance. It needs to shape how AI systems are designed, evaluated, and governed from the start. 📽️ Watch the clip: https://lnkd.in/gaxzpPZ9 #EthicalAI #Accessibility #a11y #CivicTech

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My father ran operations at a municipal bus service for many years, and he told me a story last night: The bus maintenance department needed a new batch of rags. It’s just rags, they thought, so they used a Lowest Price Technically Acceptable contract. The contract was awarded to a new vendor, and when the rags showed up, they were (clean) recycled underwear. Well, the maintenance people were furious! They found it offensive. An affront to the dignity of their work to be forced to work with other people's used tighty whities. The shipment was ultimately written off and a new batch put out to tender with an additional stipulation about the origin of the rags. Tiny story, but I think it says a lot about innovation. About how even simple requirements are hard. About the benefits of dealing with companies who you know “get it” - or at least have reputation at stake. And obviously about cultural boundaries. There’s no moral to this post, except perhaps that even a tiny mirror can reflect a whole landscape. 🪞

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Steve Fox got back ten hours back every week — just from fewer emails. As Treasurer of the Illinois Association of Clerks and County Recorders, he used to spend chunks of time managing communication across 102 counties and four geographic zones. With Roundtable’s platform, members now get instant answers on their own without waiting on him. The bigger shift is what happens to knowledge across the association. When someone answers a question once, it doesn't disappear into someone's inbox. Every answer becomes collective intelligence, instantly captured and surfaced the next time someone asks. Experience that used to stay siloed in one zone now reaches everyone across all 102 counties. Read how IACCR did it here: https://lnkd.in/exGwQ5eD

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City websites weren’t designed for how people search today. But some cities are fixing that. Here are a few examples worth watching 👀 👉 Lowell, AR layered in an AI resident chat tool so people can ask questions in plain language instead of digging through menus or city codes. (s/o Ordinal) 👉 Gilbert, AZ leverages an asynchronous Gilbert 311 system allowing residents to self serve and the city to provide great accountability. 👉 Long Beach, CA built numerous self-service portals so residents can complete tasks online, not just read about how to knock them out at city hall. Different approaches. Same principle: Design around how residents think, not how City Hall is structured. Democratizing access isn’t about flashy tech. It’s about removing friction between people and information. And it's the only way you'll build real trust with your community in an increasingly digital world.

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“Systems don't usually fail all at once. They leak, jam, get stuck. And when that happens, it's not designers or senior leaders who respond; it's the people embedded in those systems, doing the work that keeps things running” —Ron Bronson. But what if designers saw maintenance as their primary job? What if our field were less obsessed with innovation…and more focused on finding what’s broken, and actually fixing it? That's what Ron will be talking about at Throughline. Ron’s been doing that work for years in civic tech, including leading design for 18F until the team was dismantled by DOGE earlier this year. He’s been up close and personal with more upheaval and uncertainty than anyone should have to be. And yet he still believes that there’s a powerful future for design and designers—a future focused on repair. What would be different if repair were at the heart of your design practice? 

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