Connecting across Canada
When working on digital government, I’m constantly impressed with the work that digital teams are doing across the world. I often ask: “How do others do this work? What can I learn from them? Who are our counterparts in other jurisdictions?”
(As someone who specializes in domain registration, you can imagine my delight when I meet someone else working in a similar role elsewhere.)
We talk to our colleagues in other parts of Canada quite regularly, but there hasn’t been a formal, organized connection between all the various digital teams. Since we’re all on the same journey together — and in the Canadian spirit of sharing — we’re excited to announce that we’re working across the country to put that connection in place.
A few weeks ago, the Ontario Digital Service had the pleasure of hosting a video call that included people from a few digital teams in the federal government, two territories (Northwest Territories and Yukon), and seven provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan).
The goal of this first call was to meet, see what everyone is up to on the digital transformation front, and figure out how we can help each other advance the mission. We asked all the participants to contribute to a document that describes our teams, including our resources and strengths — this was fodder for a lively conversation.
A lot of the conversation during this call focused on digital identity and the work being done across the country to make digital services personal to each citizen. (Hat tip to Mark Burns from the Yukon who coined the term “non-creepy personalization” during our chat.)
Among the many excellent ideas we talked about on the call was the idea of letting the public getting text message notifications of their position in a queue if they are in line for a service. Roxie Wheaton shared how ServiceNL currently does that currently in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We’ve set up a Slack channel where digital government teams from across Canada can chat informally between the formal, more organized calls. If you’re a digital team at a Canadian province or municipality, please do visit the log-in page to sign up. (Contact either Beth Fox, Sean Boots, or myself to get an invitation to join if you’re having any trouble signing in.)
We’ll be having our next call in August, and we’d love to make more friends in New Brunswick, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec. Drop me a line if you’re working on digital and want to get involved.
(I’ll be back in a few weeks to talk about some of the connections we’re making internationally, too!)
