Lindsay Pica-Alfano, Co-Founder of Govlaunch
On this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Lindsay Pica-Alfano, Co-Founder of Govlaunch as she discusses public sector innovation and the value of peer-to-peer collaboration and knowledge sharing in the space.
Video Transcript
Ryan James:
Hello, and welcome to the 3rd Question. A video interview series of thought leaders in the public sector space from around the country. Today, we have a little bit of a unique guest. We have Lindsay Pica-Alfano, who is the co-founder of Govlaunch. And I'm going to let her describe what it is, but really I'm excited to have you here Lindsay, and I appreciate you taking some time.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Well, thank you for having me. As you said, I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, I'm co-founder of Govlaunch. Govlaunch is a community crowdsource Wiki for local government innovation. And we started Govlaunch because there's a really clear need for our local governments to be sharing information about what they're doing to solve problems, how they can learn from each other and ultimately stop reinventing the wheel, which I think a lot of governments feel that pain point.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
What really drives our mission at Govlaunch is our belief that local government impacts all of our daily lives and our quality of life. And we think knowledge sharing and resource sharing, and access to leading technology is critical for creating a better future for all of us.
Ryan James:
Tell me a little bit about how long Govlaunch has been around. The people that are now part of it, who is that?
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Sure. We were founded in 2017. It took us about 18 months to get our V1 product out the door, but we have developers all over the place. My co-founder is James Alfano, who also happens to my husband. So, that's a separate podcast on how we're navigating that one. But then we have a small team located, in D.C., and in San Francisco.
Ryan James:
Awesome. Well, let's get into the three questions. So, our first question for you today is, over the last, I think it's almost four years now, you've been involved with the finding and development of Govlaunch. Could you share with our viewers a little bit more about what Govlaunch as a resource is for the public sector vertical? And maybe also, even more important is, what are some of the success stories that have come from this collaboration and the Wiki?
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Sure. So, we've designed the platform to be used as a sharing and search engine for our local governments. So, we've focused a lot on content and working with our community of local governments to share how they're innovating and the tools they're using to do so. The idea being that there needs to be this rich and accessible resource for local governments who don't have access to go to conferences, and don't have networks to fellow innovators to bounce ideas off.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Obviously COVID has changed the dynamic around conferences a little bit. So, having more digital tools we're obviously huge fans of. We're trying to improve transparency in the space by helping expose local governments. Ones that wouldn't have this access to this information before, to possible tools and best practices that can go a long way in helping them innovate.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
You asked about our success stories, so an over-arching theme for Govlaunch has really been that these smaller underrepresented local authorities are being given the same access that larger cities already have access to. So, these innovation insights and tools, and I should mention that collectively these small to medium-sized cities across the world have massive purchasing power. And are in a lot of cases, a lot more vendor reliant than then larger cities who have the resources to build certain tools in-house.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
We're the first company that I'm aware of that's really bringing all these pieces together in a clean and user-friendly searchable directory and trying to connect the dots really on a global scale. So, providing specific success stories, I mean, we have all sorts, Clark County, Nevada was just perusing projects on Govlaunch and found a really neat citizen engagement tool and is now using that product that they found on Govlaunch.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
A small Australian government I was speaking with last week, that they were looking through projects and immediately called their finance director into their office because Anchorage had shared this project about how they made some design changes on a collection form. And they're printing their collection forms in the hot pink paper now. And it's resulting in great results in terms of people paying their outstanding bills.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
So, our search on Govlaunch allows you to find all projects related to art. So, there's inspiration there that doesn't even involve a product or a tool, but more best practices and design changes. As we continue to immerse this data, the platform is becoming increasingly valuable to local governments, is the one-stop shop for innovation, insights and tools. And we're at the size now where the platform has real value, and we're seeing a lot of traffic, and our community is growing and we're really excited.
Ryan James:
That's awesome. I mean, you think about it, you've got cities and counties, states around the world, countries and sometimes those best practices translate internationally which is awesome. Well, so my second question is this, I'm curious about the innovations, because innovation tends to not be forward thinking in the public sector.
Ryan James:
There are some very innovative people in the public sector as I've crossed paths with them over the years, but they tend to be laggard when it comes to technology. And I'm seeing a shift in that. I think COVID has actually fast boarded some of that in a good way, if you can take a positive out of what COVID has done to our lives.
Ryan James:
But as you've seen changes within the public sector vertical from technology adoption, from a Govlaunch perspective, I'm guessing there's a lot of startups that have been involved with you guys and had some impact. But how will those public sector organizations, as they've been sharing them, finding new ways. Like, can you talk about the specifics of how they're finding those new ways for better services, more probably most importantly for their constituents and their employees. You've talked about the search aspect, like how does that work?
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Well, governments are obviously in the platform sharing what they're doing, the tools that they're using. We have a way for companies to also share projects and how they are working with their government clients to help them innovate. Yes, we have a lot of interests from startups. A lot of them don't even know where to begin when it comes to tapping into the public sector.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
We have some strategic partnerships in place, Kickstart is one that comes to mind. They're an accelerator if you haven't heard of them for companies that have tools that are really trying to revolutionize or diversify the gov tech space. So, we've worked with them to help highlight some of their startups on the platform and how they helped their clients be more innovative.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
The biggest thing, as you mentioned technology lags a little bit in local government. I was speaking to a small to medium-sized city in California just the other day. And she said, their trouble is they're so vendor reliant and she feels she looks at all the different options available and she's picking between the chicken, the chicken, or the chicken. And I love that because it rings true to so much of government technology.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
And so, what we're trying to do is, yes, we're putting up a highlight on some of these more disruptive startups, but also we have a podcast ourselves and we're taking a little bit of a different spin. And in 2021, we're bringing in Seattle's CTO to talk about what he thinks companies are doing wrong, both public sector, like enterprise players or price shaped private sector enterprise players, and also startups. What they're doing wrong when trying to sell to local governments and the mistakes they're making.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Local government is a totally separate beast. And I think also what startups are doing wrong now, is they need a revenue stream and local governments are hard. So, what they do is they diversify their product offering and make it so that... Okay, local government is just a piece of what we do. We also have all of these other customers that we're serving. Which really detracts from their business model in local government and their potential impact there. So, helping to guide these startups, a lot of them reach out to us personally for advice.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
But we've had some other great stories shared on Govlaunch like Corona, California, for instance, they're working with Cisco, which is obviously not a startup, but they're working with Cisco and they've created the first ever cloud based BDI model for local a government, which is really a game changer for them during COVID.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
In terms of how the projects are actually shared on Govlaunch, we have a tool that allows you to very quickly go in and share a project you're working on. You can link different products that you're using. You can tie other governments that you might be collaborating with on the project.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
And every one of our projects, everyone of the products on our platform, all of our stories, all of this various content has key tag keywords that help you search. So, if you want to look up what governments are doing with relationship to drones, or if you want to see what governments are doing with broadband or 5G, we have all tags that you can search across the platform.
Ryan James:
One thing I love about Govlaunch is also the validation that it's being driven by the public sector groups themselves, the organizations themselves, regardless of size. It's like, these are their stories, these are their real use cases. It's not a white paper from company, A, B, or C, in the private sector saying, "Hey, look at how great we were with this group." It's the other way around. Which I think really holds a lot of accountability there.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Yeah, definitely. And I should clarify that the vendors that are coming in and seeding projects in our system, we go in and we verify that they are actually legitimate projects. And vendors have a very closed off portal to the Govlaunch site. So, government information they are not able to see, you all know your vendor on Govlaunch.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
So, we really do try to make it, it's a private community for verified local government folks who can come in and really openly share the things that they're working on. And we have a variety of different privacy settings on projects that they're sharing. So, they can either share a project within their internal team. They can make it available publicly, or just make it available to the Govlaunch community.
Ryan James:
Got it. Well, we're at the third question and this year we've changed it. And obviously as a technology firm, this is probably one that you could do a lot of things with, but I've been asking all my guests this year, you see, I've got a blank check here, written out to Govlaunch. So Lindsay, if I was able to really give you a blank check, what would you envision using it for and why for maybe next year for your organization, as you continue to work with the public sector space?
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
I think with a blank check, I would really love to work on building more strategic partnerships with smaller underserved governments across the world. These are really hard to access folks. We're in seven countries now. We have plans to expand in 2021. What has become so painfully obvious for us and what we're seeing in our platform, that all local governments are facing the same challenges largely.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
And we have other big challenges that we really need to be working on together, sustainability, strategies around homelessness, the opioid crisis, for a lot of places in the world, access to clean water. These are things that we should be talking about together and really looking toward best practices versus another local government 20 miles down the road, working on the exact same problem and beating their head against the wall.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
We truly believe that Govlaunch, this living directory of innovation projects from across the world, bringing this all into a unified hub, all tools and services to help drive innovation. It's really going to help us get to where we need to be a lot faster, and without headache. So much focuses on these large metropolitan areas that are leading innovation and we miss some great opportunities to share smaller local government innovation and ways they themselves can be innovative.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
You read the headlines and it is all about drones and 5G. We don't necessarily think that that is necessarily where you need to be innovative. We think there's a lot of different process flow changes and more strategic ways of engaging with the community that aren't product driven necessarily, and don't require a massive budget or all these resources to deploy.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Separately back to what you were talking about with startups, I think if I truly had a blank check, I would focus as well on these startups. And we have a lot of really valuable insights that are coming from the Govlaunch platform. Trends we see just with what people are searching for. The projects that are getting submitted into the site.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
We also have the ability to submit project failures. So, I know when a product implementation didn't go so well. We have some really great insights there that we could with a blank check, we would be able to help some of these startups get more involved and expanding their reach. And really meeting the needs of local governments who are sitting there going, I'm picking between the chicken, and the chicken and the chicken.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
And to do that on a global scale would be amazing.
Ryan James:
Well listen, as somebody who's been in this space for over 13 years now, it's crazy, I love your passion for what you envision in the public sector. I think you're completely on point with the needs and the collaboration, availability of a tool like this. Like I said to you at the beginning before we even started recording, being able to find out how some city in Ireland might benefit a city in California that wouldn't normally happen, except for something like this.
Ryan James:
So, I really appreciate your time today and answering the three questions. I'm excited to follow Govlaunch as it continues to grow in 2021. And I really love this story and vision that you guys have there. So, thank you so much for being part of this today.
Lindsay Pica-Alfano:
Thank you so much for having me.
Ryan James:
And if any of our viewers want to see more stories like this, they can go to the 3rdquestion.com, and subscribe there and be notified when we continue to put out new interviews in 2021. So, thank you all. Have a great day.
