Speaking at Civic Tech Toronto | 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
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
I read a great post this week from Robin Rendle, about design systems and about the mismatch between how people describe their work publicly and how it’s really going on the inside: “My hunch is this: folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything doesn’t just make it harder for us personally, it hinders progress within the field...| sboots.ca
Federal Field Notes is an infrequent newsletter about digital transformation in Canada’s federal government.| federal-field-notes.ca
Although our public service institutions are full of systemic issues and barriers to change, the people within these organizations are brilliant and inspiring. I’m really lucky to have met public servants that are lifelong inspirations, from the very start of my career to today. Over the months ahead, I’ll be sharing small interviews with public servants that I really look up to. I’m calling this series “Public service heroes”, because I think we should celebrate the awesome and oft...| sboots.ca
In a society and world where misinformation is a large-scale problem, public service habits that default to secrecy are not great. Generally speaking, public service work is only valuable based on the degree to which it interacts with the public and world at large. Fighting secrecy culture – and working as much in the open as possible – is a really important part of making the public service relevant and effective.| sboots.ca
If you work in government IT, you’ve probably heard this before: “We’ve got one standard database product.” “We’ve standardized on this programming language.” “This software is our standard for case management systems,” and so on. There are a number of important downsides, though, to standardization efforts: one size all ends up fitting nothing well, they act as a placeholder for more informed technical discussions, and they end up being a barrier to continual change.| sboots.ca
