Working in the Open: Dec. 9–13, 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 our #weeknotes! Here’s Code for Canada’s Rose, Bud and Thorn for Dec. 9–13, 2019.
🌹 Rose: This week, we turned the Code for Canada office into a winter wonderland for our annual holiday party. There was a crackling fire, (the fireplace channel on a big screen T.V. still counts!) a holiday tree, and a steady supply of our team’s favourite treat: pizza! It was great to have so many current and former fellows, staff, and board members together in one place. We also brought our partners and kids, and since we’ve grown so much as a team this year, that filled the room with lots of new faces. We were excited to hear that two fellowship teams had met up on their own for lunch before coming to the party, too. That sounds like a simple thing, but seeing different teams connect and collaborate is a reminder of the success we’ve had as community builders. All in all, it was an awesome way to celebrate the season and wrap up the year!
🌱 Bud: It’s also performance review season here at C4C, and this year we’ve completely updated our approach. We have a new competency framework that’s the anchor of a 360-degree review process. We’re using it to frame our self assessments, our peer reviews, and our 1:1 meetings between management and staff. The framework’s pillars are planning and problem solving, execution, communications, relationship management, team contribution, and civic tech knowledge. True to form, the way that we structure these moving forward will be informed by a retro on how the team felt about the process. We’ll collaboratively assess how we score our ability to collaborate. Meta? Maybe, but it’s how we work!
📌 Thorn: We hear a lot about the difficulties of government procurement from everyone we work with: fellows, government partners, and our core staff. Getting the green light to use a new product or service involves navigating a lot of considerations — standards, security, cost and liability, just to name a few. It can be a real balancing act between accountability and simplicity, and it creates challenges for those on both sides of a procurement. We like to say that many of the conversations we have about innovation in government are actually conversations about innovating procurement. And we’re not alone; from suggestions for how governments can be proactive about procurement to calls for vendors to be more informed about the issues they’re being contracted to help solve, it’s a hot topic. We certainly don’t pretend to have the answers, but it’s nice to know that others out there share our pain points, and are thinking about solutions.
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.
