Orders In Council, from paper to online product
There’s an old reception desk on the fourth floor of the Whitney Block (the government building where a large part of the digital team works) that many of us pass, every day, on our way into the office. If you look closer, this unassuming desk is actually the public home to Orders in Council.
An Order in Council (OIC) is a government order recommended by the Executive Council and signed by the Lieutenant Governor. Ontario has an average of 1,800 OICs per year.
For years, OICs were printed and filed, and posted on this one reception desk in Toronto. Anyone who wanted to find an OIC or see the latest ones, had to contact Executive Council Office (the department who oversees their posting) or travel to that reception desk and search through a stack of paper records until they found what they were looking for. It was an all-out analog process.
Last month, that analog process went digital: we published a searchable, bilingual, and accessible catalogue of the Orders in Council on Ontario.ca.
Making the OICs more easily available and searchable, online, was a milestone in making it easier for people to interact with government (part of our digital strategy). The bigger win, though, was removing barriers to information and making the content open and more accessible to all people of Ontario, no matter where you live.
Rethinking the process
To make it happen, we didn’t just take some printed sheets of paper and put them online. Instead, we had to rethink the entire OIC drafting and posting process, and apply a digital-first approach to it from top to bottom.
The Executive Council Office, who are the custodians of the OICs, took a leadership role in redesigning the end-to-end process. They began by mapping out the journey of an Order in Council: from draft to legal order to publishing, and consulted with people from various ministries involved in the process.
Using that map of the OIC journey, the Executive Council Office found places where a paper process could be digitized, and used that digitization as an avenue to alter the entire drafting process in order to ensure accessibility and translation, as well. This led to a major change in the way that OICs are drafted: starting on July 1, 2016, ministries were asked to submit OICs to the Executive Council Office electronically in an accessible and bilingual format.
To help colleagues understand the change, consultations and information sessions were held to provide an overview of the new process for ministries. Each ministry identified the staff (legal, operational, etc.) who were accountable for preparing and delivering OICs for Cabinet consideration and ensured that they were consulted on changes as they happened. The Executive Council Office also created a new email address for any public servant to submit questions, concerns, and feedback.
The office continues to monitor, assess, and gather feedback on the process, so that it can rapidly iterate when change is necessary.
The new online catalogue
Together with the Ontario.ca team, the Executive Council Office created new templates and practices to support online publishing. Digitizing the internal process and moving to electronic submissions made online posting quick and easy. Now, the catalog can be regularly updated without a long manual process.
The new go-forward standard: all OICs will be published on Ontario.ca within 10 business days of being signed. This new standard and digital process will help provide citizens with clear, timely information about the government’s plans and priorities through proactive publishing.
On January 3, 2017, the new Orders in Council online catalog launched with 874 OICs, taking the first step to meet a target outlined in the Open by Default report.
The online catalog includes all OICs approved and ordered after July 1, 2016, and will be regularly updated. The online product has received over 1,800 pageviews since launch, and individual OICs have been clicked on over 50% of the time from the homepage.
Looking forward
This catalogue should make it easier for citizens, media and researchers to search for information about government. It’s also an exemplar of how we can work together, inside government, to re-think the ways in which we work in the digital age.
Now, every time I walk by that fourth floor desk, I smile. It’s a great reminder of the digital change underway and that it is possible to make when we open our work and teams up to new methods and possibilities.
