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for those who would make a difference

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November 23, 2013

Minister Clement Promotes the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) with Tech Students in the Waterloo Area

The Honourable Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, recently spoke about the Government of Canada’s first national appathon, the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE), to students and data enthusiasts at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.

“Our Government is promoting and supporting CODE to encourage entrepreneurial innovation that leads to the start-up of new business, economic expansion and job creation,” said Minister Clement. “Innovations like the apps created at CODE will ensure Canada remains at the forefront of the global Open Data movement.”

The Canadian Open Data Experience will appeal to innovators, students, technology experts and developers, who will be challenged to use and explore roughly 200,000 datasets on data.gc.ca, the Government of Canada’s Open Data Portal. The contest will take place next February, and will encourage participants to create apps that solve real world problems for the benefit of Canadians.

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November 9, 2013

Should the Government of the Future Function as a Social Business?

GovSocBusSeems just about everyone is trying to decide what government needs to be in its’ next iteration and what parts social media in all of it’s flavours can play in that future state.

Here in Canada initiatives like Blueprint 2020 appropriately hashtagged as #GC2020 are underway tweeting through @BlueprintGC2020

In parallel, looking specifically at social media, the first step was release of the Treasury Board Guidelines unveiled by Minister Tony Clement at our PSengage 2011 event. And today initiatives like the Deputy Minister Committee on Social Media and Policy Development which you can follow @DM_SMPD are beginning to formally plan and move forward.

At the grassroots level informal groups such as #w2p have been working (and playing) hard for years to establish the initial bottom up groundswell among public servants as a key driver for the coming transition. Even the design and customer experience community has been part of this rising wave since 2010 with UXCampOttawa aka @UXCampOttawa and hashtagged as #uxott.

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September 1, 2013

Thoughts on the Disruptive Web

I spoke to a group of civil servants this week as part of their development program’s lunchtime speaker series; the talk covered a lot of ground and I wanted to take the opportunity to share some of my key messages from the discussion.

The web is disruptive 

The internet has disrupted, is disrupting, or will disrupt every business model currently in use today. To think it hasn’t, isn’t or won’t disrupt the public sector is naive at best. Understanding the impacts of these changes is critical to understanding the role of the public service because context is key and the context is now constantly changing.

GCPEDIA is a microcosm of a larger problem

GCPEDIA is still the only open communications tool that holds that could help us mitigate our geographic, ministerial and hierarchical information challenges and yet we have tremendous difficulty integrating it into the fabric of our business. The fact that as an organization we have such difficulty understanding how to best lever a technology (wikis) that is (conceptually) almost 20 years old concerns me (see: Debunking the Myths of Working More Openly).

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March 20, 2013

Rather than ‘why’ ask ‘why not’

The US government uses challenge.gov to involve citizens in designing innovative solutions to government and civil challenges.
The UK government has adopted a digital-by-default approach and has mandated that agencies follow this, providing detailed guidance on what they must do and by when (even open sourcing service design guidance on GithHub for citizens to improve).
The Finnish government has adopted a crowd-sourcing approach to legislation, amending their constitution a year ago to allow citizens to develop laws which the parliament must consider and put to a vote.
Iceland’s government went a step further and crowd-sourced a new constitution.
The Canadian government used the free open source mediawiki platform to create a whole-of-government wiki for information sharing within government (the site isn’t accessible from the outside). In May 2012 it had over 32,000 users and contained over 18,000 pages of content.
58 countries (roughly 25% of all countries in the world) have joined the Open Government Partnership, making committed steps towards openness and transparency in government.
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