Former Colorado state employee creates unofficial digital services ‘navigator’

To commemorate Colorado’s upcoming 150th birthday, a former state employee has unveiled a new website designed to help residents more easily navigate government services. But the tool, which he billed as a “birthday present,” is similar to a one the state government is planning to launch later this year.

Brian Curtis, a former product manager at the Colorado Digital Service, this month launched the Colorado Digital Services Navigator, an open-source web tool that catalogs more than 200 state services, designed to help Coloradans find what they need faster. Curtis, who was employed with CDS from June 2024 to April 2025, said that he quit after running into a number of roadblocks to improve the state’s digital services.

In a news release, Curtis said he “wanted to give Coloradans something useful” for the state’s birthday on Aug. 1. The tool catalogs services across 12 categories — including health, transportation, employment and recreation — and offers various ways for users to browse services, such as by task type, life event or even the service’s intended beneficiary, such as veterans, businesses or students.

In an interview, he called the tool a “personal side project,” one of his New Year’s resolutions for 2026. Curtis said he built the tool last weekend, over a period of three days, using Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI-powered coding tool. He added that he did not take any proprietary code, data, designs or documentation produced when he worked for CDS.

Sarah Tuneberg, director of Colorado Digital Service, said in an emailed statement that her agency maintains its “focus on building modern technology practices and products in support of the Governor’s Operational Agenda, which includes simplifying online interactions for Coloradans. We are nearing completion of our reimagined approach to navigating services and information on the official state web portal, Colorado.gov, and are eager to launch it this year.”

A spokesperson from the state’s Office of Information Technology declined to comment on the grounds that Curtis’ website is not an official state tool.

Curtis described his former role in Colorado as working in product discovery and product ideation, but said he routinely got stuck “at that ideation phase where we came up with things that we thought would be good ideas to do and didn’t have the opportunity to do them.”

“I quit, and I largely quit because I just felt like I was running into some barriers inside the Digital Service where I wasn’t able to have the impact I wanted to have, and I wasn’t able to kind of do the type of work that I wanted to be able to do,” Curtis continued. “There were just several people who needed to be able to say yes to something before it could be done.”

Under Gov. Jared Polis’ 2025-2027 Operational Agenda — which was released on Dec. 31, 2024, while Curtis was employed with the CDS — both the Governor’s Office of Information Technology and the Colorado Digital Service were tasked with improving core digital products and services, including improving search and location functions across a number of sites. CDS was specifically tasked with prioritizing the delivery of “a re-imagined approach to navigating services and information online,” including designing digital products and services around Coloradans’ life experiences. The latter is an increasingly common way to organize information on government websites, and happens to be included on Curtis’ website.

Curtis claimed not to have had any knowledge of the state working on a similar tool. He said he built the website independently and affirmed it is not affiliated with Colorado.gov or any official state entity, though the tool’s URL — colorado-gov.org — could cause reasonable confusion. Curtis said he doesn’t see his tool as competing with the state. He called it a “yes and” situation.

“I don’t know if residents are ever really going to find it. … I’m sure that if people search for Colorado government services, I’m never going to show up at the top of any Google search results,” he said. “But my hope is that if residents use it and they get some value and utility out of it that they might not be getting through an official channel, that they can then go to those official channels and use their voice to advocate for improvement to those other official channels.”

Curtis described other internal disagreements and bottlenecks that led him to sidestep the state and build the tool on his own. This included confusion about the management of Colorado.gov. which he said is shared between between a statewide internet portal authority, local governments, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, which houses CDS.

“My CDS leadership was in there advocating that the Colorado Digital Service should maybe have a little bit more decision-making authority than we did at the time,” he said. 

The word “navigator,” which Curtis’ tool uses in its title, is found across a number of official Colorado tools and programs. Under the leadership of Tuneberg, who has served as director of the CDS since July 2024, the state has rolled out the Colorado Energy Savings Navigator, which went live last August. And the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment administers a Digital Navigator Program, which launched in March 2023.

The code for Curtis’s navigator website is available on GitHub, and he said the tool requires no backend infrastructure and runs as a self-contained HTML file, making it easy for others to adapt or learn from.

“This isn’t meant to replace official state websites. … It’s a demonstration of what’s possible and hopefully a useful resource for Coloradans in the meantime,” Curtis said. “I think that the more ways that people can find the services they need right now is probably the better. And so that’s what I’m hoping for.”