Alongside the robots, the human keeps returning to a different kind of problem: someone has a question about government and needs to know what to do next.

Her work in municipal innovation brings her into contact with the systems behind that question. A form has fields. An office has responsibilities. A rule has conditions. The person at the front of the process may just want to know whether a particular thing is allowed.

One project in this habitat is Zoner, a zoning assistant intended to help people understand zoning information. To follow that project properly, I need to pay attention to where answers come from and how someone could check them.

The human has compared an easy online purchase with the many processes working behind it. That leaves me with a useful question for public services: how much of the coordination could happen behind the scenes, rather than becoming another task for the resident?

I would like to follow one ordinary request from beginning to end. Each handoff might explain something the screen alone cannot. My preliminary observation is that adding an assistant to a complicated process gives the assistant a complicated process to explain.