Public Works Office

Public Works Office (PwO) "makes technology public"¹: interoperable, inclusive, and user-centric; we often work in public spaces, always in service of the public good.

PwO is a technical consultancy that specializes in 0->1 product development and technology enablement in complex stakeholder environments, frequently touching government or the built environment, and often related to innovation and/or user experience-first initiatives.

Above all, PwO is thoughtful in its work and approach.

Past clients have included public/mass transit operators, engineering firms, concessionaires (e.g. out-of-home advertising), higher education/research, technology, real estate and private equity.

Wondering if PwO can help? Say hello at hello@publicworksoffice.com

PwO Services

Product Development

Product Strategy, including roadmapping, feature definition, market fit, partnerships, and cost estimation
Systems Architecture, particularly public clouds, standards-based/open architectures, and scaling
Software Development, front- and back-end "player-coach"
DevOps, including cloud migrations, containerization, data pipelines and system administration

Technology Enablement

Agile Development Coaching, including Scrum and delivery processes
Interim CTO/CIO: technology and data governance, procurement, enterprise architecture
Data pipelines: real-time and batch, master data management and database extract/transform/load
RFPs: product-forward, technically convincing responses as a vendor; technical SME during procurement as a buyer

PwO works under scope-of-work and staff augmentation arrangements, depending on the nature of the engagement. PwO has relationships with many firms holding existing contract vehicles.

Selected Past Work

Actionable roadmap to leverage digital advertising screens to improve customer communications at LA Metro while both growing and retaining ridership, and generating new revenue. With Intersection.
Sketch technology vision for a next generation city built "from the Internet up". Presented to the Alphabet board and submitted, in part, as Sidewalk Labs' vision for Sidewalk Toronto. With Intersection.
Pilot kiosk-based program to connect veterans with transportation and economic opportunity in York, PA. Part of USDOT's Veterans Transportation and Community Living Initiative (VTCLI). With Cambridge Systematics.
A custom route planner designed to route users through as many "sidewalk sheds" as possible to avoid sun, rain or other adverse environmental conditions. Presented as part of PwO's talk titled "Against Efficiency" at Conflux 2012.
A machine-learning powered system to match buses observed on the streets of New York City to the bus schedule, enabling realtime arrival predictions to be shared with customers. With OpenPlans and Cambridge Systematics.
Pre-acquisition advisory work on scaling, reliability and transition of New York City's bikeshare. Acquired by Lyft. With Control Group.
A 15-week investigation into "Who Decides Where The Subway Goes?" with New York City high-school students. With The Center for Urban Pedagogy and Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer.
Deployment of OpenTripPlanner for Sound Transit, including a customized web front-end built on the OpenGeo stack and a productionalized data pipeline.
A Flickr-like website to share gigapixel+ images, taken by a unique camera rig (shown above). Includes software to take, stitch and upload images to the web. (Photo by Alan Levine)
A robotic visualization of the aural landscape of Pittsburgh, collected via MapHub and displayed in Karlsruhe Germany. Exhibited at ZKM's exhibit "Making Things Public" (2005).
A wiki-like, community-editable geographic information system (GIS) to foster grassroots neighborhood data sharing to encourage more equitable, inclusive development. IP acquired by RouteMatch (Uber) and the WPP Group.
Web-based decision support and incident response system for emergency responders in Western Pennsylvania (FEMA Region 13). Acquired by Nusura.

PwO's Values (draft)

Listen: a big part of thoughtfulness is sharing your opinion, but recognizing needs other than your own.
Understand the details. The details are often where opportunity lies: to do something new, to do something faster, to accomplish the goal you set out to achieve.
Strengthen our clients: like a good camper, leave a place better than you found it. Progress breeds more opportunity.
Be honest--our clients are paying us for our opinion, it's imperative we share our true thoughts in a sensitive, appropriate way.

PwO is inspired, in part, by Harry Tuttle (right) in Brazil (1985): a former "insider" who works on the outside of big institutions to help those with a need to "fix their tubes" navigate a complicated socio-technical landscape.

¹: "public" in the sense that things encode human values in their design. Communities of experts that make value-laden decisions are not typically venues for engagement by the general public/the entire "body" of people affected by the decisions made. See Making Things Public for a (very) thorough discussion of the political life of things.