DCD Blogs/Derek Alton Trip to Europe
Inspired by my time with Dan Barrett and the Weeknotes Meetup in London, I am going to try doing my own Weeknotes.
What are Weeknotes? A written summary of your weeks’ work and publishing externally so others can see, learn and engage. Lindsey Green wrote a great blog about it — give it a read.
I want to quickly note that this is my own personal thoughts and reflections on this trip and not an official communication of the Government of Canada.
Ok, here it goes…
During the first week of June, I had the opportunity to do an exploratory trip to France and the UK to learn more about their work around digital government and civic tech. The goals of the trip were:
- Network Building: Strengthen connection between the Digital Collaboration Division and the growing international network working to change government
- Knowledge Sharing: Share the vision of the Open and Accessible Digital Workspace and learn from the experiences of international colleagues
- Find Potential Partners: Identify people and groups interested in working together
Over the course of the trip, I had the chance to meet with over 40 people including researchers, public servants, entrepreneurs, community organizers and activists both inside and outside government. Each is doing amazing work to bring our governments into the 21st century and ultimately, change the way our democracy works. This blog is a summary of what I heard, you can find my complete notes HERE. I also experiment with vlogging (video blogging) during the trip. You can see a collection of these videos in my notes and on my twitter feed (@DerekAlton).
Finding 1: There are many projects happening to make government more digital
It should come as no surprise that lots of people are trying to figure out how to leverage digital technology to help governments work more effectively. With this has come an incredible amount of innovation and experiments leading to an amazing sea of projects and platforms being created both inside and outside government.
I was left thinking that in many ways we already have most of the solutions we are looking for: it is just a case of sharing and leveraging what everyone is already doing.
Recommendations:
- Build a database/forum that allows everyone to share what they are doing and see what others are doing
- Encourage people and groups to develop with sharing and interoperability in mind
Finding 2: There is a deep desire to work together
The core idea our team is exploring is the question: what would it look like if the world could work together to create a network of open source platforms that allowed us to do government digitally (or what we have been calling) creating an international open and accessible digital workspace. In essence this forms a digital public square that allows people to come together to co-create policies, programs and the many other functions of government.
This idea seemed to resonate deeply with everyone I met. The question was not whether we should do this (that was a resounding ‘yes obviously’) but rather a question of how do we effectively coordinate all the different groups and projects that want to be part of helping create this digital public square. How do we help governments coordinate their resources? How do we ensure groups outside of government can contribute and be fairly compensated for their contribution?
We know this will need to be a decentralized model that allows governments to maintain their autonomy and tweak it for their own needs.
Recommendations:
- Develop a set of world standards that allows us to design for interoperability and sharing
- Create a forum that allows us to easily share and learn from each other
- Develop financial models that allow for non-government actors to contribute their work in an open source manner and be fairly compensated
Finding 3: There are big challenging questions ahead
As we transform government, evolving it into the digital age, the shifting landscape opens big questions around power and access. I left this trip overwhelmed by the immensity of some of the questions we face.
· How do we balance openness and transparency with privacy?
· How do we leverage the gig economy in a way that ensures and raises labour rights?
· How do we work and build off the early adopters while ensuring access and a voice to those harder to reach?
The good news is that there are lots of people and groups that are thinking deeply about these topics. The question for me is how do we better integrate these conversations with the groups doing the building and design.
Recommendations:
- Connect with international working groups to explore these questions and the many others that will continue to rise
- Create stronger connections to researchers working on these questions
