Working in the Open: March 9–13, 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 our Rose, Bud and Thorn for the week of March 9–13, 2020.
🌹 Rose: We hosted our inaugural Summit this week! (!!!)
On Monday, we chuckled at a sticky during our stand up meeting that said “Do the Summit” — three words summing up months of emails and phone calls with generous community members, poring over floorplans, booking flights, and hundreds of other tiny details that go into planning a 250-person event. But, we did the Summit.
You can see all of the conversation that stemmed from Summit using the #C4CSummit hashtag on twitter. We’ll lso be building a microsite with all the event photos and video. Stay tuned.
A huge thank you to everyone who made the Summit a success. It means a lot to us.
🌱 Bud: Marisa had to make a tough decision about whether or not to move forward with GRIT Toronto tests as COVID-19 concerns intensified. She made the ambitious choice of pivoting to remote testing, which is something the GRIT team has never done before. But Marisa and co. rolled up their sleeves, and with an assist from our testing partners at Normative, eight remote GRIT tests happened successfully.
We’re learning more each day about how to maintain that feeling of human connection as we all adjust to working remotely, so Marisa’s experiment is an interesting challenge and we’re excited to explore it further.
📌 Thorn: COVID-19 is incredibly scary. Saying “how are you” at the beginning of a phone call now is a heavy question, because we’re all feeling anxious about what the future holds. Like many others, our team started to work remotely this week and will be for the foreseeable future. That means hosting our quarterly retreat remotely, and holding everything social, from meetings to coffee breaks, through a screen. We made the call to postpone our planned Fellowship Showcase in Victoria too.
While uncertainty is unnerving, it also can bring out the best in people. We’ve never been kinder to one another, and the community at large feels poised to dive in and help at any moment too if they’re able. There have been offers of virtual storytime for kids, so parents have free time for meetings. On our team slack, offers to shuttle groceries to anyone immunosuppressed have circulated. It feels good to know we’re in this together, and we hope you’re feeling supported too.
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.
