Working in the Open: July 8–12, 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 the week of July 8–12, 2019.
🌹 Rose: Civic Hall Toronto‘s Public Salon on Data, Policy-Making and City-Building was a hit! We were overwhelmed with interest in the event — so much so that we had to switch to a larger venue to accommodate everyone. This was Civic Hall Toronto’s first public event of this kind, bringing together people from across sectors to discuss a specific issue, and it wrapped up our series of events on data. Our speakers had very engaging presentations that sparked interesting conversations, both in person and online (using the hashtag #CHTsalon). We’re looking forward to putting on more events like this as we plan our programming for the rest of the year.
🌱 Bud: We’ve started creating a framework for offboarding Code for Canada fellows at the end of their 10-month term. While we’ve already gone through the offboarding process for one cohort, we want to make sure that it’s more formalized before Cohort 2 wraps up their work (which is coming up soon!). So, we’re documenting objectives and existing practices for supporting fellows in their transition out of the program, and identifying any gaps that need to be addressed. If you’ve been through a great offboarding process, let us know what made it great, or feel free to point us to offboarding resources that you’ve used in the past.
📌 Thorn: We’ve now completed eight usability tests with GRIT Toronto! As part of our goal of working in the open, we publish a blog post for each test containing the key findings and our learnings. This means we now have quite a few blog posts that need to be written, reviewed and published. While this sounds simple enough, it requires working closely with our test partners, who can have very different timelines and privacy considerations. While some want the test results right away, others need more time to review our findings (and determine what we can share publicly) before we can post them. Regardless, we have plenty of writing to do in the next few weeks to clear the backlog of blog posts!
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.
