Working in the Open: Oct. 21–25, 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 admittedly somewhat irregular #weeknotes! Here’s Code for Canada’s Rose, Bud and Thorn for Oct. 21 — 25, 2019.
🌹 Rose: Meha and Gabe took a roadtrip to Cleveland for Code for America’s Brigade Congress. Unlike CfA’s annual Summit, which focuses on digital government, Congress is all about the incredible grassroots civic tech work being done in cities across the U.S. Learning how residents are coming together, often in volunteer fashion, and using tech and design to tackle challenge in their communities is always inspiring and energizing. There were plenty of highlights, but Meha came back to the office raving about April Urban’s keynote. April’s presentation explored how data is being used to help Ohio residents better understand the impacts of poverty, and then co-create policy solutions to address those issues (to learn more, check out the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing website).
Bonus rose: We discovered that our office printer can print 3x5 index cards! We run lots of facilitated workshops for government partners, and the ability to print nicely designed cards is a real facilitation perk. In the words of Gabe, “this is a game changer.”
🌱 Bud: Sticking with the Brigade Congress theme, the team is pretty excited about the project canvasses Tom Dooner presented during his breakout session. Tom is the Developer Evangelist for Code for America’s Bridgade Network, and he’s built a series of canvasses to help teams prepare for things like product discovery and usability testing. The canvasses (you can find them here) contain some super smart questions to ask and answer before embarking on a technology project. And we’re keen to see how we can incorporate some of those questions and framings into our early conversations with government partners.
📌 Thorn: We’ve probably griped about this before, but we’ve yet to find a suite of bookkeeping tools that meets our needs. And our needs aren’t all that complex… we’re an 11-person nonprofit operating in a single jurisdiction, not a 500-staff multinational corporation (maybe that’s the problem; it feels like no one has worked through the user experience smaller orgs have with finances). Regardless, we’re still spending too much time and manual effort on bookkeeping and it’s taking time away from the work that energizes us. 😡
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.
