Drop in to our office hours
Last week, we held our third monthly ‘office hours’, bringing together a few dozen members of the community and public service to chat about digital government in Ontario.
We’re of the opinion that digital transformation is a project we must complete together. We won’t succeed unless we benefit from the ideas, creativity, and input from people working throughout the civil service, the broader public sector, non-profits, the startup and business community, and engaged Ontarians who believe in better government for people.
As Sameer mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re committed to working out loud — inviting members of the broader community to join us at our monthly office hours is one way for us to do that. For us, they’re an opportunity to hear about people’s experiences, aspirations and ideas for digital government.
At our most recent office hours, we were joined by Steve Orsini, the Secretary of the Cabinet, and head of the public service. When he’s not jumping in to take a selfie with the crowd, he’s urging his Deputy Ministers to consider the profound implications of digitization for everything that we do — in service delivery, our people and skills, and most fundamentally, how we make policy.
It’s very energizing to know that the big boss has your back. It’s also energizing to learn from the entrepreneur looking to sell her innovative new product to government, the public-sector executive who wants to make his granting agency’s data more open, the policy advisor who is gathering the most detailed dataset ever assembled on a vulnerable minority community. We’re committed to working with all of them.
We’re also going to be thinking about other ways of engaging and working with the community. We love to drop in and visit with groups like Civic Tech Toronto, Open Toronto, and some of the great public tech hackathons that have been hosted locally. We’ll be looking for opportunities to convene and connect people, share what we do, and explore opportunities to get work done together.
We look forward to seeing you at our next office hours. In the meantime, if you have an idea, a comment, or an event you’d like to invite us to? Leave a response here, or get in touch.
