Working in the Open: March 16–20, 2020
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 March 16–20, 2020.
🌹 Rose: This week, Jason and Marisa hosted our first ever remote Civic Hall Toronto Office Hours via Google Hangouts. Our monthly Office Hours are casual, drop-in events that create connections between people inside and outside government (usually hosted IRL at Civic Hall Toronto). This week, like thousands of others navigating social distancing while staying connected, we moved the meetup online. And we had one of our biggest turnouts yet!
For Office hours this week, we had Brittany Lee from Ratio.City as a guest speaker (another first, as we’ve never teamed up with a private sector presenter before). Brittany shared the way Ratio.City’s tool helps city builders make data-driven decisions for land acquisition with their mapping platform, and spoke about the launch of their six-month pilot project with the City of Toronto.
While chatting over coffee and donuts was sorely missed, we’re happy the event still reached folks!
🌱 Bud: We’ve been pretty focused on how we communicate internally, but our communications with external partners and colleagues have changed too. Our work involves a lot of public servants, many of whom have had to make some pretty big changes to their priorities overnight. The calendar feels more fluid, and we get it; supporting residents is the mission above all else right now.
It’s also an interesting time to be communicating with our external stakeholders. It’s not business as usual—but in a good way. Emails and phone calls have rarely felt so human. We’re all listening with a lot more intention when we ask one other how things are going. We’re taking a moment to commiserate, and making time to wish people well seems to be an invisible agenda item at most meetings. Hopefully it’s a change that will persist in the post COVID-19 world.
📌 Thorn: Even though we’re familiar with the tools needed to work remotely, WFH comes with its own set of challenges. Some of us are having trouble focusing on deep work, and feel like our productivity is low (no big surprise as we adjust to life during a pandemic, but still not a great feeling). Some of us are juggling childcare responsibilities, others don’t have spaces that make for comfy (or ergonomic) home offices, but most of all, we just miss hanging out. We’re a high energy team and a lot of that has to do with feeding off of one another’s good vibes together in the office. We’re doing our best to send that positivity to one another through our screens, but it’s not always easy.
On the plus side, we know what we’re doing is for the best in the long run, and we shared a bunch of ways to avoid feeling cooped-up while we wait out COVID-19. In addition to leaning on one another, there’s an at-home workout using your own bodyweight, and a free yoga app that we’re using to relieve some stress.
That’s it for this week! As always, thank you for reading, and if you’d like to know more about Code for Canada, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter.
