The feed of updates to Ron Bronson
A Model for Dangerous Agent Situations Reading this twitter thread (yeah, I know) about agents and escalation paths, left me thinking more about some earlier posts about the mostly dormant agent experience space and how there should be more content about these paths when they’re discovered. The short version about the thread suggests an alarm call for an agent to relay back that they’ve reached a…
Plane thoughts on multilateral public delivery from 44,000 feet after my most recent trip back from Finland.* We’ve been going about this work all wrong. Digital Public Infrastructure and “ civic tech” are far closer to statecraft and public works than they’ve been given credit for. For more than a decade, the work has had to fight for crumbs and pray for mandates, making it nearly impossible to…
I’m back on the forward-deployed design beat because I want to make sure that as this practice starts to scale, we’re writing job descriptions and hiring for the right shapes of folks. One thing that’s bugged me watching this conversation over the last year is how engineering-coded it’s become. I know it’s hard for engineers to believe, but not every important problem is a math problem. Some…
My latest contribution to your human-agent stack is a very basic but necessary tool for smaller human-agent collaborations that produce a lot of back and forth work. After-action reports are a common tool used in the military as a way to review fieldwork, report what happened and reflect on what we can do better next time. It’s also a useful way for people who weren’t there, to read up on what…
Back with another set of articles to share, gathered here in one place. This also helps me find posts faster than the various Are.na and other linksharing places I’ve cobbled together over the years. Still working on a better system, let me know if you have a system that works for you. Financial Times gift article: qualifying, lower-rank tennis, and the grind of making a main draw Financial Times…
State Farm just rewrote the contracts for 19,000 of its insurance agents to fit AI into the work, and it’s making me think more about Agent Experience . The word “ agent” carries the tension on purpose. In software, an agent acts. In insurance, real estate, law, talent, and public service, an agent is a person authorized to act for someone else, holding authority, accountability, and trust. We…
Why Llm Products Need Someone to Own the Response Experience When the old webmasters and information architects became user experience designers — and some split off into content design and content strategy — it was fine. The lineage held. The people doing the work still had some connection to where it began and why the specialization happened. And because you’d worked across those areas before,…
Over the past six months, I’ve been really prolific about building software & web projects that was too time-consuming for investing in. One of the ways I’ve been trying to keep track of AI agent behavior and judgment is using after-action reports. After-action reviews are a standard practice in military and emergency operations — you debrief after the fact, reconstruct what happened, surface what…
As an internet denizen of sorts, I have seen lots of folks returning to the old ways of the intenet — blogrolls, webrings and that sort of thing. Some of the ideas are more aspirational, but seeing people posting links made me think “ oh I can just do that.” I really like what Ethan is doing , and look forward to my weekly emails from Dense Discovery , Soft Labor and the totally rad, Perfect…
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people directly in or formerly part of the civic tech community and I’ve been sharing something that’s become apparent to me in the 14 months since 18F was shut down . Technologist isn’t a job. The catch-all term for people working in civic tech, it’s really meant to encapsulate all of the non-technical people who built a mission and vocation into an industry…
I appreciated both Roger Wong and David Hoang ’ s blog posts about Forward Deployed Design. Reading them, I kept thinking about my time at 18F , where we employed this model without calling it ’ forward deployed.” This operating posture is how most civic technology firms work too, though everyone has their own flavor and some models are more decentralized than others. There are lots of reasons for…
The current gold rush in civic tech is around HR1 work requirements implementation . Vendors are pitching states on systems to help them comply with the new federal mandates. The pitch sounds like operational efficiency, reducing burden on caseworkers, helping eligible people stay on benefits through the new verification gauntlet. What’s being built is administrative burden as a service. A…
I’ve done lots of random music analysis over the years — Spotify Wrapped, Last.fm charts, playlists for every occasion — but never anything quite like this. The result is Ron’s Listening Journey — 21 years of scrobble data, 468,910 plays across 45,647 artists, visualized with genre breakdowns, top songs by year (with 30-second previews), my vinyl collection cross-referenced with my listening…
Reading this Atlantic piece on the multisided problem that is War & AI in 2026. We’re not yet talking about how it impacts pensions and make 2008 look like small potatoes, but this will help cement why you ought to be thinking that way. One of the goals I had for this part of 2026 was writing more, even daily. The problems for why are a bit time related, but the real reason is 1) people don’t read…
I’ve owned oregontennis.org for five years. For most of that time, it hosted All-State team archives and not much else. It’s not that I didn’t want to build something more comprehensive. I’d tried before — multiple times. But building statewide tennis rankings meant collecting data that didn’t exist in any central place, designing formulas that accounted for the weird structure of high school…
Thinking about anti-delegation as a retort to a world that’s fascinated with giving away all of its thoughts. We’re rapidly encasing private knowledge inside of self-storage units we don’t own. If there’s anything about self-storage, we know how many units get abandoned and left behind to be sold off. This is entirely different, but anti-delegation feels like a term I want to sit with and it feels…
I’m back at the University of Michigan again, this time as a part-time faculty member in the Urban Technology program. I’m teaching two classes this term, Service Design & Urban Needs and a new elective called Public Mechanics. The Public Mechanics course was devised from my own writing over the past few months, reflecting on years of work in the public sector and thinking about systems work and…
The other day, I stumbled onto a video of DJ set from the artist & producer KAYTRANADA . He was playing in an elevator, the set is marked by people coming in and out of the elevator to dance at different times. In all honesty, the set is electric and I was like “ oh this is fun.” The design itself is really just everyone doing their own versions of Tiny Desk meets Boiler Room, where you create a…
Today, in our rush to kill backlogs and modernize services, we are liquidating the human loop. We see a win when New Jersey uses AI to sign up 100,000 kids for summer benefits, or when an agency uses a chatbot to deflect thousands of calls. These are genuinely good outcomes. One hundred thousand children got access to food assistance they were already eligible for but couldn’t easily claim. That…
Not all are new books, most for research, several for my podcast with Joel , a handful of fiction and at least one cookbook. I’ll do better next year. I didn’t enjoy all of them, obviously. Political Economy & Labor Our Lives in Their Portfolios , Brett Christophers Fictions of Financialization , Nick Bernards Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work ,…
I’ve had an interesting trajectory as a professional. From IT shops to working in what was then “ digital” and onwards to “ UX ” and now whatever we’re living in now, the platform age and its convergence with governance has left me in a particularly reflective mood. Especially this year with the demise of 18F , I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why I see the world differently. The incentives…
When you have around three jobs at a time like I do, people will often ask “ how do you have the energy to do all of that?” I will be honest and say I’m not always sure how to answer them. For starters, I just like being a contribution because I feel like time is such a limited resource. And if I’m being more honest, I’m also motivated by the improbability of doing stuff that seemed unimaginable…
I’ve been a Toronto Blue Jays fan since I was eleven, so the past few weeks watching them rise from last place in 2024 to the World Series finalist in 2025 has been a wild ride. As a sports fan, it’s so easy to critique the decisions of players and coaches from the comfort of the couch or sitting in the stands. Anyone who has been part of a team understands that there’s far more context than what…
One of the perils of creating a blog where I can only write in Markdown is that it’s minimalist, but it doesn’t have the stickiness I need for jotting down quick ideas on the fly. I don’t know why it matters to have a GUI that I can type into like a document for blogging, but that’s precisely what I prefer. Back in the early days of Tumblr, it was a revelation to have a place that had network…
I launched AI Statements over the weekend. We’re seeing a real proliferation of AI integration in government service delivery. I’d forgotten all about Daniel Miessler’s thing to be honest. I remember when it launched and then didn’t think of it again until Taurean reminded me of it. What I’m doing here is a spiritual cousin to that project, except in this case I’m trying to offer a first pass at a…
I’ve been dabbling along the conversation around context engineering and agent experience for the past year. Along the way, I’ve been angling for more designers to be part of these conversations. They’re sometimes deliberately dense, but the reality is that we’re talking around the actual ground level deployment problems in a world where agents intermediate things we used to do ourselves. (I’ve…
Notes from Hype Studies Barcelona I ran a workshop on “ Hype and its impact on the City,” I ran in at the first-ever Hype Studies Conference we kept coming back to a single theme: technology hasn’t just changed how culture circulates. It’s stretched its half-life. My tennis players, born in the late 2000s, are fans of the Gilmore Girls , which really tripped me out before I realized that they were…
On Hype As Context Collapse We live inside the expo hall. What once was a once-a-year pilgrimage (badges, panels, swag bags) has metastasized into the way every institution communicates. Tech companies don’t just ship updates, they host “ cons.” Even the most banal update needs a stage, a trailer, a fandom. The logic of the convention collapses context. A product launch, a budget hearing, a labor…
I talked with Marc Fonteijn on The Service Design Show to talk about design, AI , and the work of repair. You can listen to the full episode below. This was a fun one, and while we recorded it over the summer, I’m glad it’s out now because it’s a good companion to my conversation at IxDA Oslo on Tuesday night and I get a lot more depth here even though these ideas are/were still new at this point,…
Remarks From IxDA Oslo, September 9, 2025 Note: These are the prepared remarks I wrote for my talk at IxDA Oslo. In the end, I spoke more extemporaneously, but I thought at least I could share my notes to give you something closer to what I was getting at in my q&a remarks. Ultimately a meetup was a great place to debut a new idea, I’m looking forward to writing — and talking — more about these…
Everyone loves to talk about government “ modernization.” New offices, new roles, new slogans. But service delivery isn’t magic. It’s not even particularly glamorous. It’s hard, daily work carried out by people who know how systems actually function. If you’re serious about transformation, start here. Rule 1: Services Exist to Be Delivered The starting point is simple: government’s job is to…