Behind the Curtain: A Digital Delivery Story Slam for Former Federal Employees

Presented by the Digital Service Network and Humans of Public Service

Claire reminds us to be intelligent reformers in our world. Formerly with 18F, Claire reflects on the importance of understanding users and context when building tools and changing processes. Fences sometimes exist for a reason. Before you take down a fence, remember to talk to the people who use and need them first. 

Presented in May 2025

🎨 Sketch by Frances Yllana
📹 Video by Felipe Gacharná

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My story

My name is Claire Blaustein, and until 12:03 AM on March 1, I was a service designer with 18F.

For accessibility and narrative structure, I’m a tired-looking white woman with short brown hair, wearing a black sweatshirt with 18F embroidered on it, and a bronze 15 year service pin.

When I joined the federal government in 2012, my position description was for a Secretary. It hadn’t been updated since 1976, didn’t mention computers, but did specify that I should be able to operate a mimeograph.

I never did get to learn, which was a bummer, but I stayed in federal service, through jobs across a bunch of acronyms – IRS, ACF, NCI, LOC, and GSA.

I really wish I had some impressive story to share about how something I built directly helped millions of citizens. It would make the job search I’m unwillingly doing right now a lot easier. But I don’t.

My federal career has mostly been in helping other feds do their work.

Early on, it was a lot of training and writing guidance on how do effective digital communications. Plain language, accessibility, content for mobile, using and maintaining a CMS.

Later, I got to take a different perspective. I started looking at fences.

I mean fences in the sense of “Chesterton’s Fence”, which comes from a passage in a 1929 book by Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Seems timely, eh?

As a service designer, I’ve dug deep into systems for copyright examiners, civil rights lawyers, railroad retirement specialists, and passport adjudicators.

In all of them, there have been fences.

Processes without clear purpose. Requests with no results.

And while it’s tempting to just knock it down and move on – to move fast and break things – the only way to EFFECTIVELY and SAFELY CHANGE a fence is to really, deeply understand it.

To get at where it came from, where it goes next. What it was intended for, and how it’s been repurposed.

In my first project with 18F, I worked with the DOJ. They have a thing called a DJ Number. It identifies a case. It’s usually written in Sharpie on big red accordion folders.

It was also used as the main ID for every single record in their electronic case management system.

Most of these records were not for cases, and would never become one. BUT because they “had a DJ number”, they had to conform to all the rules around record keeping and closing procedures that would apply to a case that had been litigated over decades.

Rules that only applied here, because of that one number.

The requirements themselves were necessary. We should track what happens to a case. But they didn’t make sense in this context.

We needed to move the fence. Apply the number, and it’s requirements, only when it was needed, and save people the time and effort when it wasn’t needed.

There is no way that we would have been able to get that understanding from looking at the technology alone. It wasn’t in the 600 tables in the database, or the 20 year old documentation from the original vendor.

It could only come from talking to the people who provide the service.

This is my favorite part of my job. I love that I get to learn about new domains from experts.

And I’m most effective when I can demonstrate to those experts that I care about their work, and am trying to understand it in all it’s complexity, to really get where the fences are sound, or broken, or covered in barbed wire.

That I respect them and their work enough to talk to them before I start trying to change things.

Briefly back to my pin.

You might have noticed that it’s only been 13 years since my federal career began in 2012. And the months that have felt like years don’t count.

So how do I have this?

In an attempted salary negotiation, instead of more money, HR gave me a non-standard service credit, putting me three years closer to that sweet 8 hour accrual rate.

As it would still be another three years until it kicked in, I didn’t think much about it.

But when I moved to GSA, I found out that is the date they use for service anniversaries.

So in September of last year, I got an large unmarked envelope at home, with a certificate and this pin.

I wear it as a reminder.

A reminder of how easy it is to take a piece of information and assume that you understand what it’s for, and therefore how it can be used.

In this case, I got a pin too soon.

But in other different circumstance, it could mean a critical contract being canceled.

A check not getting where it was supposed to go.

Having to prove to the government that you’re not dead.

It reminds me to be the more intelligent kind of reformer.

It reminds me that if you don’t know what a fence is for, go find out, before you tear it down.

Watch the video