Building in public in the public sector: why showing the process, and not just the delivery, generates legitimacy

The public sector has learned to be transparent with money. Spending portals, budget execution panels, mandatory accountability. This is a democratic achievement and is not up for discussion. But there is a transparency that almost no government practices, and it perhaps generates more trust than all the portals combined: process transparency.

Spending transparency answers “how much did it cost”. Process transparency answers “how it was done, why this decision, what was the work”. And it is in this "how" that trust lives, because it is there that citizens see real people solving real problems, instead of an inauguration with a ribbon cut.

TikTok's 2026 trends report shows that audiences want unfiltered, behind-the-scenes stories and real people, and reject curated perfection. Government is, perhaps, the institution that most abuses curated perfection: it only appears when the project is ready and the platform is assembled. The thesis of this text is that this goes against how trust is built, and that a government that shows how it builds gains legitimacy.

What is building in public applied to a government

Building in public, in the private sector, means showing the product as it is born: the decisions, the mistakes, the ugly versions. Applied to the public sector, it means showing a digital government project, a municipal modernization or a service to citizens as it happens, and not just in the final photo.

Posting why you chose to remake the healthcare scheduling system instead of patching the old one is an example of this. It is to say that the first version of the city hall app had a bug queue and what was learned. It is about opening the decision to prioritize the IPTU queue before the permit queue, and explaining the criteria.

It is not management marketing. Marketing shows the secretary smiling during delivery. Building in public shows the meeting in which the team discovered that the citizen registration was duplicated and had to rethink everything. One thing calls for applause, the other calls for trust, and trust is what public authorities lack.

Why process generates more trust than delivery

The population distrusts the government for an accumulated reason: they only see the result, never the path. When only the finished work appears, it is easy to imagine that between the announcement and delivery there was waste, improvisation or worse. The silence of the process fuels distrust.

Showing the process reverses this. When citizens follow the decisions, obstacles and adjustments, they understand that digital government is difficult work done by competent people under real restrictions. He doesn't become a fan, he becomes a witness. And witnesses trust more than spectators.

There is a second benefit, which many managers underestimate: talent and partnership. Good technology professionals avoid the image of slow and opaque government. When management shows that it builds with method, openness and learning, it starts to attract good people who want public impact. The same goes for universities, free software communities and companies willing to collaborate. This speaks to what I argue about building in public as a practice: openness is, in itself, a mechanism of attraction.

Specific care in the public sector

Here the text needs to slow down, because building in public in the government is not the same as doing it in a startup. The context has legitimate constraints, and ignoring them is not bold, it is irresponsible.

The first concern is LGPD and citizen data. In the public sector, personal data is not yours, it belongs to those who entrusted it to the State out of obligation, not out of choice. Showing a process can never mean exposing a database, a screen with real information about a person or anything that individualizes someone. The backstage of government is the backstage of decisions and architecture, never of sensitive data. When you need to illustrate, use fictitious or aggregated data.

The second is legal secrecy. There is information that the law protects: ongoing process, security issue, contract in the negotiation phase. Transparency of the process does not authorize breaching the confidentiality provided for by regulations. The rule is legislation, not the enthusiasm of those who communicate.

The third is institutional communication. Government speaks on behalf of an institution, not a person. This requires care with tone, with promises and with what may sound like an official commitment. Showing difficulty is healthy, but it is different from generating panic or expectations that management cannot fulfill. Honesty must be accompanied by responsibility for the effect of each word.

Electoral expectations and continuity between administrations

There are two concerns that are almost exclusive to the public world and deserve their own section.

The first is electoral expectations. Building in public can be confused, in good or bad faith, with management propaganda. The antidote is to focus the narrative on the project and the technical team, not on the manager, and maintain the focus on learning and serving citizens. When the protagonist is work, and not politics, communication better resists the electoral period and the accusation of self-promotion.

The second, and most neglected, is continuity between administrations. Digital government project goes through mandates, or it should. Public building done well documents decisions and reasons in a way that survives the change of those in power. This reduces the classic waste in the public sector: each management throwing away what the previous one built because they did not understand why it existed. The public record of the process becomes institutional memory, and institutional memory is continuity.

Where does a manager start

You don’t need a new platform or communication funds. It starts small: an honest monthly report about a project, telling what progress has been made, what has stopped and what has been decided. It can be simple text, on an official channel, in people's language.

Choose a low-risk project for the first cycle, validate with the legal area and institutional communications, define what is public and what is confidential before publishing, and maintain the pace. Consistency matters more than production. A modest, regular report builds more trust than one expensive corporate video a year.

A government that only shows what it delivers is always on the defensive, proving that it did not waste anything. A government that shows how it builds changes the game: it invites citizens to follow, transforms civil servants into recognizable people and creates legitimacy that no inauguration can buy. In the end, delivery is what the government does. The process is who the government is, and that is what the population wants to see.