In early April, the Yukon government announced that it would no longer be using X (formerly Twitter) in response to new US tariffs taking effect. The Yukon government launched an official Bluesky account the same day. I’d love to see other Canadian jurisdictions and government organizations make the switch away from X, just like the Yukon did.| sboots.ca
Back in March I wrote about the elimination of the United States government’s two leading digital government teams. Beyond their digital service work, these teams also did a lot of heavy lifting to change processes and policies that held back better service delivery – including around procurement. As 18F and USDS were suddenly shut down, anecdotes about the hundreds of millions of dollars saved by helping departments and decision-makers make better technology choices quickly emerged.| sboots.ca
We’re six weeks into a new US government administration. The scale of deliberate and gleeful destruction of US state capacity on the part of the Trump administration is hard to process. As someone who writes about public service excellence it’s heartbreaking to hear so many stories of people’s careers, teams, and accomplishments being ripped apart. In my specific field of government tech, it was jaw-dropping to learn this past week that the US’s best digital government teams are being...| sboots.ca
On Wednesday, July 24, Prof. Amanda Clarke and I will be appearing at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) to discuss the research paper that we recently shared as a preprint. If you’d like to tune in you can watch via the ParlVU livestream starting at 11am Eastern Time (8am Yukon time).| sboots.ca
These two videos are a small celebration of why people choose public service careers. Brian Whittaker, Rebecca Croll, and I compiled these with the help of wonderful public servant friends across Canada and the United States. They were shown at the 2023 FWD50 conference in Ottawa. Part 1: Part 2: A big highlight of FWD50 this past year was being able to work with Brian on a panel celebrating awesome and inspiring public servants. Brian runs the Humans of Public Service project, a celebration ...| Sean Boots
Back in March I gave a presentation at one of Civic Tech Toronto’s weekly hacknights. It was really nice to be able to tune in from Whitehorse and talk about some of my past civic tech projects.| sboots.ca
This morning I gave a keynote presentation at FWD50, Canada’s leading digital government conference. It’s a really wonderful community and I’m really grateful for the chance to speak there. My talk was titled Revolution, not evolution, for federal public service delivery and you can see my slides here. In the presentation I talked about how Canada needs a revolution in how we operate as a public service – not just when it comes to technology work in government, but there in particula...| Sean Boots
It’s been almost a year since I stopped using Twitter on a regular basis. It was a big change given how large a role Twitter played in my professional life – connecting with public servants across Canada and around the world and learning from their experiences. Now that it’s 2023 and Twitter is both crumbling apart and morally suspect, I think we should make Mastodon our new community. If you’re at FWD50 this year either in person or virtually, I’d love to see you on Mastodon!| sboots.ca
Conversations around “state capacity” – can government organizations do big things? Can they meet the complex challenges of modern society? – have taken on a new urgency over the past few years. Pressing social and economic issues, confronting the consequences of climate change, and navigating disinformation campaigns and threats to democratic participation all require an effective, nimble, and robust public service. One of the themes of my writing here is that I really want our fede...| Sean Boots
This past week wildfires forced the full evacuation of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as well as many other communities both nearby and across the territory. That evacuation is currently ongoing. As of this morning an estimated 28,940 people were under evacuation orders, in a territory with a population of about 46,000 people. Meanwhile, late yesterday Kelowna, BC residents were suddenly ordered to evacuate when a major wildfire crossed Lake Okanagan. Close friends of ...| Sean Boots
This past week I started work with the Government of Yukon, wrapping up almost seven years since rejoining the federal government and the team that became the Canadian Digital Service. In my new role, I’m the open government program manager within the Yukon government’s eServices for Citizens branch. Part of my responsibilities will be the Yukon open government portal, along with supporting a number of initiatives that the team has on the radar. eServices is a really outstanding and welco...| Sean Boots
Hybrid work is here to stay, which – for all of us as public servants – means a lot of hours in Teams meetings. (Or Zoom or Google Meet or your organization’s videoconferencing system of choice.) Whether you’re at home or in the office, chances are good you’re tuning in to video meetings on a very, very regular basis. We’re all getting better at un-muting before we speak, but even a few years into this it’s rare to go a week without an “I can’t hear you” or a “your sou...| Sean Boots
Update: As of May 1, 2023, a tentative agreement was reached between PSAC and TBS. You can read more about the agreement on the PSAC website. On June 23, the agreement was ratified by the federal government after being previously ratified by members of each bargaining group. Today the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) began strike activities. With more than 155,000 participating PSAC members, it’s one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. PSAC’s Frequently Asked Questions pa...| Sean Boots
Shannah Segal and Sheena Samuel lead the experience design and technology chapters, respectively, at the Ontario Digital Service (ODS). They’re brilliant and thoughtful leaders, and have brought experience from their careers in the private tech sector into government. Friends all across ODS speak very highly of working with them, and it was a real honour to hear about their experiences over the past nearly five years working in government. We chatted in late October. (Views here are their o...| Sean Boots
Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually been migrating from Twitter to Mastodon, an open-source, federated social network. You can find me there at @sboots@mastodon.sboots.ca. (In early January I moved to an individual instance – Gersande La Flèche has a great overview of that here, and the Fedi.Tips feed has useful instructions on how to migrate an existing account between instances.) If you’d like to learn how to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, Patricia Aas has an introductory guide...| Sean Boots
Below are a set of radical (but implementable) ideas that would make the public service better equipped to handle the challenges of today and tomorrow. We need to invest in state capacity in Canada, and that starts with changing our public service structures, processes, and organizational culture for the better.| sboots.ca
Deepika Grover is a strategist at Finance Canada, a member of the Free Agents program, and a long-time practitioner and advocate for equity, inclusion and anti-racism work in the federal public service. Deepika has played a role in many of the public service’s innovation programs over the years. We’ve been friends on social media for many years and I’m always grateful for her thoughtful and candid insights on how to make the public service better. We chatted by email in February, follow...| sboots.ca
Nick Wise is a long-time technology leader in the Canadian public service, most recently serving as the Chief Information Officer of Public Safety Canada. Previously as an executive director in the Office of the CIO, he was responsible for the GCtools team and for the small team that became the Canadian Digital Service. I’ll always be grateful for Nick’s insightful and humble style of leadership, and for his thoughtful stewardship of the teams he led. We chatted by email in October.| sboots.ca
Sameer Vasta is a founding member of the Ontario Digital Service and one of the kindest human beings I know. He currently works on the Talent team at the Ontario Digital Service and until recently taught the “Government in a Digital Era” course at the University of Waterloo’s Masters of Public Service program. Sameer is on the board of several community organizations, an advisor to a number of small non-profits, and a mentor to early-career public servants. We chatted by email in June.| sboots.ca