Hello, world
Hey everyone, welcome to our blog.
The last few months have been a whirlwind. In February, the Government of Ontario announced that it would create a new digital service office and recruit the province’s first chief digital officer to rethink how we design online services and make them faster, clearer and simpler for people.
We’ve just finished hiring the small, but mighty start-up team to begin this work. The new team works with the Ontario.ca team, who pioneered many of the practices we’d like to introduce across government — including rapid prototyping, Agile development, user research and service design. Together, we’re going to kick transformation up a notch, partnering with all parts of our organization, and people outside of government.
I want to thank all the passionate, talented people who applied to join the Digital Government team — it was really inspiring to read your thoughts on how we could make government better. And if you’re interested in helping us, we want to get you involved.
For starters, this blog: you can expect a new post every week or so. We’ll write about our wins, weaknesses, ‘wow’ moments and worries. We’ll profile the people doing the work: the coders, user experience experts, content designers and contributors, digital strategists and public service partners making change happen. Most importantly, we’ll ask for your advice and input as we go — because feedback helps us improve.
You can also get involved by following our team on Twitter. You can also join our mailing list to get regular updates on the work happening here.
For those who live in the Toronto area, we’ve started monthly ‘office hours’ for anyone who has comments, ideas or questions about what we’re doing.
We’re doing this because Ontarians deserve the best-possible service from their government. Making things simpler, faster and better online means we have to bring a lot of different groups together — policymakers, senior officials, front-line staff, coders, civic tech geeks and most importantly, the people who use our services every day.
From this point on, our work will be open, online and available for all to see. My goal is to put our work in plain sight, because we know there’s an incredible community of people out there who can help us.
We’re just beginning, but Digital Government is the start of something big, something awesome and something I’m honoured to be a part of.
