Book cover of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Book description

Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us.

"The book I wish every policymaker would read."
-Ezra Klein, The New York Times

A bold call to reexamine how our government operates-and sometimes fails to-from President Obama's former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America

Just when…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Recoding America as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Although I don’t work in government, this is a book I’ll come back to whenever I need a reminder to put user needs ahead of process or wisdom about how to work inside a large bureaucracy to make that happen. Where Meltdown focuses on spectacular blow-ups, this book explores run-of-the-mill failures—like long, complicated online forms and websites that only load in specific, outdated browsers. (Though bigger failures, like the launch of healthcare.gov, get airtime too.)

I appreciated this book’s thoughtful analysis of how government software gets built—it goes beyond the stereotype of the incompetent government employee and digs into the…

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