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.

For me, when I think about the practices of highly proficient, digital governments, I put it into three big buckets. So, those buckets are being agile, being user-centric, and being open. So some of the things that have come out of the BC Government that I’m very proud of are commitments to user-centricity, and how we build digital services. So, one thing that we run is the BC Developer’s Exchange, or our Exchange Lab, it’s in Downtown Victoria, and it’s a phenomenal space, we have up to 12 teams from the ministries that are working in there at any time, and they show up with a clearly defined business problem, we mentor them, we support them through the physical space, and we use resources from the ministry to procure a technology team. That comes and is completely embedded with those public servants.

So one of those areas in government that is a bit new, and is a change or an area of change in government is the way that we do communications. And, so, like some of the new techniques and methods, and tools that are coming into government through digital transformation, it provides an opportunity to also push some of those edges for communications as well, and so, there’s been a chance and an opportunity to bring together folks in government who are trying to do new things in storytelling, and trying to use new ways of communicating with the public and with each other, yeah. And so, we’ve put together a community practice for storytelling the government. And there’s an opportunity to meet with people who work in different government departments that are doing this kind of work, and search a job from those practices.

For me, it’s always about speaking the language of the individual that you’re working with. So, in the upfront process, it’s a lot of what’s within your scope of possibility, and then we can kind of negotiate that together. So it’s not often that they’re invited to design charrettes, it’s more so about, okay I have this idea, for example, having a harm-reduction program from a culturally indigenous perspective. What does that look like for you, community health centre. What does that look like for you, indigenous serving organization, what does that look like for you, Toronto Public Health, and I can tell you what it looks like for me, from a social services point of view. And then, we collaborate and use, very often, traditional government tools like term sheets. And project plans, but truly the product is more collaborative than perhaps other government intervention.

Yeah, there’s so many roadblocks, there’s the roadblock of trying to deliver things, in a short period of time, there’s roadblocks to being able to go out and do this research, and actually talk to the people that these benefits serve, there’s challenges in being able to use new tools and infrastructure. There’s tools around making things like consent forms plain language, while still pleasing the lawyers everywhere. Yeah, there’s just so many of them, and I think a big part of what we try to do, when trying to clear these roadblocks, is that we try to tell the story of why we’re doing it, and what the mission is, and there are many tools to do this, but being able to tell a story is one of the biggest tools to clearing those roadblocks.