The PDF, short for portable document format, is a file format created by Adobe that lets people easily create documents.

Government loves PDFs. They’re used for meeting agendas and minutes, newsletters, staff reports and, well, everything imaginable.

When not created properly – and often they aren’t – they are inaccessible. But there are broader public service problems PDFs cause, particularly in the machine-readable direction we’re heading. They are cumbersome and research shows that people just don’t like them.

In this episode, I speak with Department of Civic Things CEO Rebecca Woodbury. Rebecca works with governments on content strategy and implementation. This includes PDF audits and best practices. Rebecca and I talk about why PDFs are a digital experience pain point, and how government can move beyond them.

• PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later
• Why governments should get rid of PDF documents
• The elephant in the new accessibility law: PDFs

Rebecca is the founder of Department of Civic Things. She worked in local government for 12 years and was the City of San Rafael’s first director of Digital Service & Open Government. Government Technology named her one of the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers. She has a masters in Public Policy from Mills College in Oakland, California.

In December of 2019, a small, ad hoc team assembled for a 90-day experimental project. Called California Alpha, its goal was to help the state rethink government digital service delivery. Its members – picked from government and private sector – had never collectively worked together. Their mission was to create – in three months – a culture and product that embodied a new way of delivering services to Californians – one that focused on designing for user needs and challenged the status quo of digital delivery in state government.

This is the story of California Alpha, why it was stood up, how it worked, and the resulting impact it had on the government digital ecosystem, inside the state and beyond.

This is a series on California Alpha, where I speak with Angie Quirarte, who played a key role in its creation and then led the project’s work.

In this episode, Angie and I discuss setting the California Alpha foundation.

• California domain name policy
• California open data policy
• CalData
• California web standards policy
• Digital Services Network
• California 2019 Budget- Creation of ODI
• How civic hackers helped California’s DMV get digital momentum
• Francis Maude 2013 Letter on Open Government and Digital Strategy in UK

Angie Quirarte most recently served as Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Management and Budget where she led efforts to fix federal hiring and talent policy. She is a 2025 Federal 100 awardee. Angie has built digital service teams including leading Alpha, helped transform the California DMV, led the COVID-19 digital response team, matched hundreds of technologists in the public sector, and implemented policies and programs around open data, open source, web standards, and web accessibility.