This site is run by Adrianna Tan, who spent five years working in government technology as the former Director of Product Management at San Francisco Digital Services, where she helped build and ship SF.gov. Before that, she worked at database startups and in open source toolsl.
She now runs FutureEthics.ai, an AI research lab focused on improving AI evaluations for government and high-stakes industries. Her work includes leading red teams with Humane Intelligence on projects for the Department of Defense, Singapore's AI regulators, and a groundbreaking report on multilingual red teaming in the Asia Pacific.
Tech in the Public Sector is the resource she wishes she had when she started in government. The landscape has changed enormously in just a few years: civic tech and digital government have matured, new AI tools arrive faster than anyone can evaluate them, and the gap between what's sold to government and what actually serves people continues to widen.
But the questions haven't changed. They're the same ones practitioners and the communities they serve have always asked: Was this the right tool? Who decided? Who benefits? Who gets left out? How do we do this better next time?
This site exists to help people sit with those questions. There are no easy answers, and software definitely won't fix everything. After going through several evolutions, from a simple buttondown newsletter to this resource, the goal is to track and discuss how people who build technology for the public sector did it, and what they can do better.
What is this site's stance on AI? Since the start of this publication, our stance has not changed. AI, like any other technology tool, and that can benefit and also worsen society. Intentional, values-based inquiry into AI is the stance that we take. Just as we would never say 'use React to build a gov service because everyone's doing it', we would never say 'use genAI to build a form because everyone's doing it'. This site aims to explore the difficult space of interested exploration and critical inquiry. All technology, all companies, all politicians, deserve to be evaluated based on their values and their performance. What have people built with AI for thet public sector? Was it the right tool or were they just using AI just because? Did they do anything interesting beyond using Microsoft Copilot? Did they move the needle in any way? These are all questions that we hope to address here.