A new dawn for government operations
As a team of technologists with extensive government experience, we have two fundamental convictions that led us to build Civic Roundtable:
1. The public sector is a force for good.
2. Technology and tools that are supposed to help public servants are failing them.
When we started building Roundtable, we talked to hundreds of public servants who shared similar challenges over and over again: “Information is scattered across dozens of websites and chat apps and email and listservs and document repositories. It takes me forever to find the people or information who can answer my questions. It shouldn’t be this hard.”
These public servants work on critical missions, from helping people experiencing homelessness get back on their feet, supporting people suffering from opioid addiction, and spurring economic development, to keeping our elections secure, maintaining the safety of our communities, overseeing public transportation systems, and responding to emergencies.
That public servants experienced such fundamental failures from technology — tools that were supposedly designed to help make things easier — showed us something was broken with a status quo that has resulted in more than 40% of public servants reporting they’re burnt out.1 And burnt out public servants mean government agencies are inadequately responsive to the needs of their communities.
So we set out to fix it.
A new standard for government technology
We know government work is inherently collaborative — police departments work with fire departments, homelessness coordinators work with public health departments, local election officials work with their state and federal counterparts, and the list goes on. Technology that fundamentally improves how cross-functional groups of public servants work together to solve a problem is non-negotiable.
Then, Roundtable was born.
Our government operations platform powers complex interagency efforts, ending the frustrating norm for public servants of spending too much time doing admin work in order to do their actual jobs. Roundtable consolidates listservs, messaging tools, document repositories, websites, learning management systems, CRMs — all the tools and technologies that collect and disseminate information — into a centralized, easy-to-use platform that can be deployed in less than 60 days.
With Roundtable, peers and experts across government agencies and partner organizations work together in one platform, while public servants become more efficient as they spend less time on admin tasks and trying to answer questions because they can search across all their systems with a click. And if it’s a person with the answer, it’s easy to identify them and reach out. Public servants can reallocate that time towards achieving their agency’s mission.
Department leaders can easily share information with everyone who needs it. Roundtable provides data about which initiatives are making progress, what resources are making a difference, and what’s not working and why.
Our government operations platform and its benefits are the new reality for the 600 cities and counties we serve, and the 70 million people they represent. Roundtable is a better way for public servants to get work done and support people because we’re empowering public servants and helping government agencies become more data-driven, efficient, and mission-focused.
As a result, our communities become better places to live, work, and thrive.
And we’re just getting started. Join us on our journey to transform government operations, in service of public service.
1 Burnout among government employees high, study shows | Safety+Health.
