Code for Canada 2020 Summit event recap, part 2

I think a really core component of the work that I do and that people who work in municipal service, municipal governments do, is fundamentally thinking of everybody as a subject matter expert. So people with lived experiences of poverty are subject matter experts and often in a system that is replete with challenges, it is a system where people are critically underserved in so many different facets. The problems are, there’s a range of problems that need solving, and I don’t believe the solutions are necessarily challenging to get to. It’s just a matter of asking and ensuring that the right people are engaged in that solution making. So when we think of residents in precarious situations as subject matter experts, when you think of frontline caseworkers and staff as subject matter experts, it’s actually very simple to figure out how to marry needs and solutions.

So we can’t say we’re only gonna design for the average. We have to design for the entire spectrum. And that means designing way out to the margins. But the margins are actually probably more important than the average. Because if people can’t opt out, then the people who are gonna be most ignored are those people on the margins.

I just think of the language that you’re using. If you think of the design of your app, there’s one session that we had in our accellerator where just in terms of the designer website one of the companies, very blue, all the pictures that you use were male, et cetera. It was like, so they got feedback that this is an intimidating product and intimidating website for a lot of people.

So the digital government movement, follows two principles essentially. The first is work in the open, which means fail forward, and share everything in terms of what works, what doesn’t. And then the second is pay it forward. And so make it easy for others to do the same thing. Help other governments get set up. There is no other community globally that’s as tight knit I think then the digital government community and everybody’s always welcome to, so there’s even a tradition of visiting different counterpart officers or the ability to pick up the phone and call your counterpart from somewhere else, since you’re just starting out and helping figure out a pass forward together and so even at the summit today of figuring out how we can share best practices for teaching and learning digital, is something I knew in principle we need to do together.

The summit is really exciting because it is a larger scale version of what they are doing. It’s not just embedding the follows into a team for 10 months but it’s embedding all of these people from a diversity perspective who thinks in different ways, who work in different ways to share with each other. It’s creating that human friction that we need to find and is allowing us to be grateful to be part of the community who actually embraces these kinds of thoughts. I love what they’re doing with the fellows. I love what they’re doing with great, I love what they’re doing with their . There’s so many things that they’re doing great but the thing I love most of our code for Canada is helping us understand that we’re not alone. That there’s a community of people who believe in the same kind of things and that we can work and make great change if we work with the community and alongside it.