July Newsletter | Reflecting on Reconciliation
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Reflecting on Reconciliation
With thousands of unmarked children’s graves being uncovered at residential school sites, our team has been focused on reconciliation and reflection and our Executive Director, Dorothy, shared her personal reflections on the role of civic tech and Code for Canada in supporting Indigenous communities.
As an organization with “Canada” in our name, our commitment to creating a pathway to Reconciliation is central in our mission to support positive, progressive and sustainable transformation in governments that can serve all residents. Our efforts are just a starting point: we’ve consulted Indigenous communities in our work, implemented inclusive hiring practices, and shared educational resources and anti-oppression training. But we know we can do more.
We’d love to hear from you: what are some ideas, actions or resources we can learn from to address Truth and Reconciliation?
Here are some of the resources our staff have shared:
- Indigenous Corporate Training Inc has great free e-books available
- Native-Land.ca to learn about the history and current Indigenous communities
- Read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s Calls to Action, and determine which items apply to you as an individual
Voices from the team 📣
📍 Gillian Wu, design fellow at the Canada Energy Regulator, considers the pros and cons of three methods: affinity mapping, the rainbow sheet, and the scorecard method. She shares how her team used these frameworks to synthesize their research findings, understand user problems, and prioritize effectively.
🚀 The fellowship team at Employment Social Development Canada used speculative design to reimagine what service delivery could look like for residents. Learn more about their processes, key tips and takeaways from a 8 day speculative design sprint.
🔍 The City of Toronto’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration (SSHA) recently worked with GRIT Toronto to conduct usability testing on their updated intake form. In this blog post, Stephanie Malcher and Roshni Patel from SSHA share their views on the role of user research and their key learnings from usability testing.
Civic tech in conversation 💬
🎨 Curious about community-based participatory research methods? Juliana Rowsell, inclusive designer for Shared Services Canada, kicked off a conversation on best practices for co-designing resources and tools that live on outside research efforts.
🤿 Anna Cook, senior accessibility designer at Northwestern Mutual, shares her deep dive into resources on making data visualizations and experiences more accessible.
💭 Crowdsourcing ideas from the civic tech and digital government community, Angelica Quicksey, service designer at Nava, asked — what tools frameworks, courses or resources are folks using to become comfortable with ambiguity?
What we’re reading 📚
🧠 “It became undeniable to me that the brain I’d relied on my entire life had stopped working the way I was used to it working.” Amy Meng, delivery management lead at Truss, shares her story of burnout in civic tech and outlines steps she took to recover.
🧰 Mark Lerner, fellow at the Belfer Center, makes the case government teams need to hire in-house technical talent to build better digital services for residents.
🏆 Learn more about deep-rooted myths on digital accessibility and the ways we can all be #a11y champions in this blog from Neesha Daas at Ontario Digital.
💼 Civic tech job alerts and opportunities
The City of Toronto Transportation Services is hiring two transportation data specialists. You’ll be working on a data team that is flush with fascinating data sets about the movement of people in our city with opportunities to use this to drive policy and change in Toronto.
The Nova Scotia Digital Service is growing! They’re hiring for three Director roles in Digital Strategy, Policy, and Governance to help lead their digital government transformation.
Want to use your data skills to support charity fundraising? Ajah, the organization that supports Giving Tuesday globally, is seeking a data scientist. In this role, you’ll be leading research and analysis of global giving data.
Ready to take the (virtual) stage and share what you’re working on? FWD50’s call for proposals is open until July 15. Each year, experts from academia, government, and tech share their hard-won lessons with a global audience. Sound like you? Apply now!
Do you know a leader in the open data community? Nominations are open for the Canadian Open Data Society’s 2021 Awards! As well, the call for proposals for the Open Data Summit is now open — share your ideas for conferences, panels, workshops and projects!
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We’re Code for Canada, a national non-profit working to build digital capacity in government and civic capacity in Canada’s technology and design community. In other words, we help people use tech and design for good!
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