It's always infrastructure week

Thanks to Sarah Hopkins for sparking this idea / rambling

So, the election is over. Donald Trump lost.

The bad news? This doesn’t mean “Trump is over”. It really doesn’t. Because this, truly, is just the start. If we want to address the infrastructure and the behind-the-scenes stuff, the inglorious but necessary work, it’s going to take work.

With politics, I will happily admit that the past two presidential elections were the first two I really got involved in (and even that level, to be blunt, was pretty damn limited.) I text banked for a lousy proposition on the Colorado ballot that needed to be defeated, and it was. I texted and called for Hillary in 2016. But that’s been about the level of engagement I’ve had, other than sitting on a pot of outrage for the past four years.

This doesn’t work. And of course, I am going to pull in a parallel from content strategy work.

I talk a big game with clients about training and governance. I’ve heard that governance is not a friendly word, it’s scary, because it carries a lot of weight (and sometimes we head into “processes” land, which I personally dislike but whatever.) I’ve been articulating it this way: when you’re revamping a website or other digital touchpoint, unfortunately, it doesn’t come with a manual. So you’re given a CMS, a DXP, a CDP, and a bunch of other acronyms and told, “Well, good luck! Have a blast.”

And isn’t that how I, and a lot of others, have treated our federal government? We get to the point of a launch, we launch it, we say YAY WE DID IT and then we let it rot. Our content gets old. Our experience doesn’t stay up to date. When we change our values (hopefully for the better), we don’t update anything on the main site because we aren’t sure how or it requires IT or red tape and so we do our own microsite or a half-hearted rebrand or whatever. Because we still need to do the work, and we need to get it out. But our infrastructure hampers us. And then in 2 years we decide, “Well, I guess we need to throw all of this out and start over” and it costs money and time and effort and the emotional labor is just sky high.

And fixing that infrastructure is not exciting work. But it is essential, necessary work.

So, electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris doesn’t mean we’re good now. We aren’t in a position to throw everything out and start over (although that is incredibly tempting!) Racism didn’t end with Barack Obama. Ignorance didn’t start with Donald Trump. But it’s clear that we need to look at what’s crumbling – and there is a lot! – and fix it before we can move forward.

This is the gap analysis portion of our government work. We’re identifying what we need to update, what needs to be retired, and what we need. And then we need to execute on it. If we don’t, we’re going to be doing this same audit in 18 months, wondering why.