Fellowship Status Report

Code for America is

partnering
with Salt Lake County to build technology solutions to improve services and strengthen the relationship between the county and its citizens,
with an aim to lower the rate at which citizens fail to appear in court, for supervision and treatment appointments in addition to lowering the recidivism rate. To
accomplish these objectives, we pursue three workstreams - build, measure, learn - to iterate quickly and ensure our decisions are data-driven and user-focused.

Phase IV - Iterative Development Sprints Part 1 (05/05/2016 to 06/14/2016)

Workstream

Goals during this phase

Build
agile development

Iteratively implement features to improve case manager use of ClientComm

Focus areas: case manager workflow, passive client capture services, auto-notifications

Measure
data-driven
decision-making

Implement feedback measures to determine parameters of each clients close out

Target use goals (by end of Fellowship):
35+% of clients per case manager communicating via ClientComm
80+% of onboarded case manager using ClientComm daily

Learn
user centered
design

Catalogue and address pain points in ClientComm that impede case manager efficiency
and reduce likelihood of use
Direct client-facing opportunities to reduce FTA based on opportunities identified in our
research

Week ending 05/06/2016

This week has been dedicated to three primary activities for our team. The first was aggregating and analyzing all the results
from the user interviews that we performed last week as well as cataloging and documenting what we learned from the 3
workshops that were run with case managers in Pretrial and Probation, as well as supervisors from both. Ben wrote up two
nice pieces on
our blog
with regards to these efforts.
The first
focuses on how grouping and tagging might be rolled out for
ClientComm as well as, more broadly, how we understand the methods by which case managers sort clients. You can read it
here
. The
second
covers our learnings from our interviews with clients. It summarizes the dominant trends we observed in
how people sort and organize their schedules, as well as how individuals differ in terms of how they consider their process
and level of completion and progress as they move through the criminal justice system.
In addition to this user research aggregation, we have taken a moment to review all the code that has been written. During
our 2-month sprint, we rolled out a number of feature improvements in quick iteration. This led to a great deal of code being
written quickly. This week, weve been taking the time to review that code in order to ensure that it is stable and optimized.
Furthermore, ensuring cleanliness in the code will be a key component in making sure that the codebase is something that
can be transferrable, should CJS take on ClientComm in-house at the end of the year.
In addition to an all-around tune up, we have also been focusing on security. Over the course of this week, Kuan has
identified some key elements that have been identified as potential vulnerabilities. Over the course of the remainder of this
week and into the early part of next week, we will be focusing on improving and building out systems to ensure that critical
security measures are rigorously implemented in the project. This will ensure the safety of information being passed back
and forth through ClientComm.
Finally, this past week was Twilios SIGNAL conference. Twilio is the API service that is utilized on ClientComms backend to
support conversion of the conversations seen on the application into real world SMS messages to clients phones. This
conference held a great deal of new information and was valuable in terms of learning strengths and opportunity points to
further capitalize on the tool. For example, through attending a number of Twilio Voice sessions, we have learned to a far
greater degree what kind of automated voice and conversation components, as well as voice-to-text transcription services
might be possible with ClientComm in the future.
Read more about the conference
here
and about our project via a new article published on Code for Americas site
here
.
Workstream
Build

This weeks accomplishments

Perform a security review of

ClientComm and ensure sufficient
design security on new features

Measure

Analyze Department of Public Security

citation data dump

Learn

Synthesize user research on

notifications and to do management
with clients from week in Salt Lake
County
Synthesize case manager workshops
on notification system design

Next weeks objectives

Thanks as always,
Kuan and Ben, Code for America, Team Salt Lake County

Complete security modifications identified

as critical during security audit
Improve email notifications feature
Produce visualizations of VINE data from
Court-County secure FTP server