#fwd50

Tuesday

Tuesday officially kicked off the FWD50 conference here in Ottawa. 

According to the organizers, FWD50 is “more than an event. It’s a conversation between public and private sector about what we can be when we steer progress towards our better selves.” This three-day event featured a variety of speakers talking about digital transformation, particularly in the public sector. 

A sampling of Tuesday sessions topics included:

Governing From The Edges: Digital Change, Inclusion And Impact In British Columbia

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Of Government Of Canada Innovation Work

Technology, Trust And Talent For The Digital Age

Exploring Next Generation Citizen Experience

But for all the innovators onstage at Aberdeen Pavilion, we were most excited about what was queued up that evening at the Orange Art Gallery. Three of the four current Code for Canada cohorts presented project updates at a loosely-affiliated offsite Open House. 

 Working on the relatively short presentation (10ish minutes) was a great exercise for the team. What did we want to leave the audience with? We reflected on some of the powerful presentations we’d seen in the past, and tried to bring the audience on a journey (and not just b/c our challenge is travel-related). Giving presentations can sometimes be daunting, but this was a great opportunity to talk about our work in a safe, supportive environment. As we talked of some of the existing challenges travellers face, there were so many nodding faces in the crowd! It was a great reminder that the work we’re doing can really impact people’s abilities to do their work. 

Also, Mike decided to step up our presentation style with coordinated t-shirts, which were a big hit! More than one person asked us where they were from, so if this whole tech thing doesn’t work out post-fellowship, we may have a new business idea to pursue 😎

Wednesday

With Tuesday night’s presentation behind us, we were able to settle in and focus a bit more on the conference itself. 

The day kicked off with CDS’ Aaron Snow talking about The Art of the Possible. I basically retweeted the entire presentation :-)  Later we got a chance to sit in on David Eaves’ session about Digital Transformation Strategies from across the world. As part of our Code for Canada onboarding, we’d had the chance to spend a day with David, so we were familiar with his rapid-fire presentation style. I still think I only really comprehend a portion of his material, but it keeps me thinking for a long time after. 

I was really inspired by the presentations by Shu Yang Lin about the civic tech community in Taiwan, and blogged more extensively about it over on my medium blog: What can we learn from the civic tech community in Taiwan about public discourse and engagement?

Some of Wednesday’s great sessions included: 

The PIA Review

Prototyping Future Democracy

Open Data For Justice: Tracking Down NYC's Worst Slumlords

Policy Making For Nobody

Digital Transformation Strategies from Around the World

Thursday

Things were a bit slower on Thursday morning for some of us. After the Code for Canada-hosted breakfast meetup, we gaggle of fellows and Code for Canada staff gathered and chatted on some of the comfortable couches around the space. 

This was definitely the type of conference where you could see folks who didn’t attend any of the informational sessions, and just used the time to connect with other government innovators. Our track jackets made us noticeable in the crowd, and let us finally connect with some #GCDigital folks we only know off Twitter. (Hi Rob!)

A  few of the sessions I managed to jump into were Failing FWD: Lessons In Building Digital Teams And Products with the Ontario Digital service team, and Digital Disruption: Fundamentals, Business, & Execution with CIOs from three departments within the federal government. 

The MC for this session was Sagar from Code for Canada, and he pointed out that each of the three departments (PSC, PSPC and TC) have each hosted fellowship teams in the past. Coincidence? 

The CIO session was pretty interesting, to see the leaders of these different departments at different stages along the journey. It was a nice wrap-up and reminder of the week: there’s a lot of ‘best practices’ being circulated and shared, but the gap between theory and practice can be huge. 

Friday

Even though FWD50 officially wrapped up on Thursday, we managed to wrangle an invite to a “Rules as Code” working group session at the Canada School of Public Service. The speaker, Pia Andrews, participated in many sessions throughout the conference, and this was a relatively smaller audience as she went over some high-level topics and then answered open questions. Mike happened to pick the seat immediately next to Pia, and then the two Aussies chatted a bit after the session was over. Mike told her that he’d connected with the Code for Australia team that’d worked on Rules as Code, and it turns out it had been Pia who’d brought that team in.  I suppose it is a small world! (Mike wrote about Rules as Code a few months ago)