Government of Canada’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the next Third Tuesday Ottawa
Posted by Joseph Thornley on January 21st, 2009
In the autumn, the Government of Canada announced a new initiative to integrate social media into its operations: GCPedia, a government-wide Wiki.
GCPedia has been up and running for several months. However, because it lives behind the Government of Canada’s firewall, you and I can’t see it or track how the experiment is proceeding.
The curtain will be drawn back briefly for attendees at the February 2 Third Tuesday Ottawa. Jeff Braybrook, the Government of Canada’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer, will talk about GCPedia and some of the more promising social media for government pilot projects.
I believe that social media holds tremendous potential to bring government closer to citizens. And I’m looking forward to the discussion with Jeff.
If you’re in Ottawa on February 2, you can register online to attend Third Tuesday.
And thanks to our national sponsors, CNW Group, Third Tuesday continues to be a free event.
I hope to see you there.
January 21st, 2009 » 10:37 am
Hey Joe,
Given that we’re unlikely to have bus service, Tom Hofstatter and I are offering up the ride board we created for Social Media Breakfast Ottawa. I posted a link on the meetup site but in case people find it here first: http://is.gd/gHFi
No reason a missed carpool should keep people from the event!
Thanks for organizing this, it should be really interesting for people in Ottawa especially.
January 21st, 2009 » 12:23 pm
Ack. Bus strike. I didn’t think about that. The car pool idea is a great one. Thanks for suggesting it.
February 7th, 2009 » 1:38 am
[...] me it’s senior) and a driving force behind the development of GCpedia. Jeff spoke at the most recent Third Tuesday Ottawa event (which I missed due to a blazing, blinding headache. [...]
February 9th, 2009 » 11:35 am
Hi Peter,
I agree with have some organizational culture issues which will impede the adoption of wikis, or at least collaborative work on wikis. I think that we do collaborate in the government. (God knows, what I initially write for any product is not what appears in the final version. And I’m not the one making the changes.) But this collaboration is very structured and hierarchical. S/he who gets paid the most, gets the last edit. A wiki-type of non-hierarchical, synchronous collaboration is hard to find in the gov.
This became very clear to me in the work that I have been doing with one of our units on a small wiki and we are failing disastrously. They don’t WANT to collaborate. They have all worked together for years and have their ways of doing things. The documents follow a certain path and that path is very, very well-worn. The other issue that I am finding is that they are having a lot of trouble separating how something looks from its quality. They have briefing documents which have had a standard format for years. Put them on a wiki and they don’t look the same. And they don’t convert back easily to Word. This screws up the workflow and makes working on the wiki a burden.
All of this said, I want to point out that for all of its failings, GCPedia has made Ottawa and what is going on in Ottawa far more transparent for us in the hinterlands. I have learned more about social media projects in the months since GCPedia launched then I would have EVER, EVER found out through regular web site. Also, since we are at the small end of budgets often in the regions, we don’t have money for event or project web sites. GCPedia is a god-send for this reason. Of course, none of this is really, truly collaborative in the wisdom-of-the-crowd sense, but it makes me hopeful.
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February 9th, 2009 » 11:51 am
hi Nancy
thanks for your comment.
Glad to hear the GCpedia is having a real impact outside the bubble in Ottawa!
BTW totally hear you on the document conversion issues. Don’t think there’s an easy answer to that one; never has been (e.g. think of wordprocessing vs HTML vs PDF issues, which have been around for a loooong time)
This comment was originally posted on http://spaghettitesting.wordpress.com/)“>Spaghetti Testing