Working in the Open: Aug. 12–23, 2019
One of Code for Canada’s principles is to operate in public. These regular blog posts put that value into practice, giving readers a window into what we’re doing — and how we do it.
Welcome to a double edition of our #weeknotes! Here’s Code for Canada’s Rose, Bud and Thorn for August 12–23, 2019.
🌹 Rose: The past two weeks were chock-full of Open Houses. We ran five in total, from Vancouver to Halifax! We really enjoyed connecting with both familiar faces and people who had never heard of Code for Canada before. It was a great chance to talk about what we’ve been up to and answer questions about the 2020 fellowship. Thanks to all the fellows who helped make the Open Houses happen, and to everyone who came out to the events!
🌱 Bud: When do you stop researching and start writing? When should you stop gathering and reading articles, and finally put pen to paper? It’s a perennial question for writers, especially when working on more rigorous or academic content. Merlin has been researching monitoring and evaluation frameworks in relation to civic tech, and will be writing an academic article about the field (based in part on our work!). It’s a new space and there’s not a lot of existing peer-reviewed literature, so the process has involved diving down some pretty deep research rabbit holes. It’s time to climb back out and get writing, so if you have any helpful tips for doing so, please share them with Merlin (but no articles please!).
📌 Thorn: We were doing the final recruitment push for our fourth cohort of fellows, reaching out to as many relevant tech and design communities as possible. One unexpected obstacle has been the difficulty in reaching out to Meetup groups. There are a plethora of groups across the country focused on solving challenges using tech and design — exactly the type of people we’d like to apply for our fellowship! Unfortunately, Meetup makes it difficult to message group admins to ask them to share the fellowship opportunity with their members. After getting unexpectedly declared spam by Meetup, we had to resort to finding and messaging the admins on LinkedIn. We would love if there was a better way of directly reaching out to all these groups (Pssst… if anyone from Meetup is listening, let’s connect).
As always, thank you for reading our weeknotes! If you’d like to know more about Code for Canada, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter.
