Recent content on Sean Boots’ blog
For some spicier takes! Anthony Moser’s “ I Am An AI Hater ”, Jenny Zhang’s “ choosing friction ”, Rusty Foster’s “ A.I. Isn’t People ”, or Ed Zitron’s “ The Case Against Generative AI ” if you have most of an afternoon to read it. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s podcast interview with Paris Marx is also excellent. Hello, it’s me: I’m a generative AI vegetarian. The tech industry is convinced…
Update: On November 3, 2025, Yukoners voted YES to ranked voting . 🎉 More than 56% of plebiscite votes were in favour of the “yes” option , to switch to a ranked voting system as recommend by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform . Read more on the Vote YES Yukon blog . I’m really stoked to introduce Vote YES Yukon , a non-partisan campaign in support of electoral reform during the current…
Later this year, alongside the next Yukon territorial election, we’re having a plebiscite on electoral reform in the Yukon. I am extremely stoked that this is happening, and I hope fellow Yukoners vote “yes” to changing to a new electoral system. Curious why? Read on! What’s happening? Alongside the next Yukon territorial election – taking place sometime between now and November 2025 – there will…
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. Effective immediately, Yukon’s existing government X accounts notified followers that the accounts were no longer active and suggested that people follow the Yukon on other platforms for more recent information. The Yukon government launched an official…
Back in March I wrote about the elimination of the United States government’s two leading digital government teams . These two teams – 18F and the United States Digital Service – were an inspiration for digital service teams in governments around the world, including our own as we launched the Canadian Digital Service . Beyond their digital service work – designing, building, and improving online…
It’s hard to know where to start. 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. And to…
I’m really thrilled that our research article on government IT procurement was recently published in Canadian Public Administration . It’s a bit over two years since Prof. Amanda Clarke and I began this research project , and this article being published is in some ways the final milestone of that work. The article is open access, and you can read it online (or download the PDF version ). Here’s…
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). You can see recaps of our previous two OGGO appearances from…
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…
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. You can watch the video recording here , or see my slide presentation here . Civic Tech Toronto is a really inspiring and welcoming space. I’d attended in person a number of times during visits to Toronto…
To John Hannaford, your team, and colleagues across the federal public service: 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. I…
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 watch it on the FWD50 YouTube channel or see my slides here . In the presentation I talked about how Canada needs a…
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 X (formerly Twitter) is both crumbling apart and morally suspect , I think we should make Mastodon our new…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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. She’s previously worked at the Public Health Agency of Canada , Canadian Heritage , Global Affairs Canada , and the Privy Council Office . Deepika has played a role in many of the public…
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…
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 . Nick and Ryan Androsoff brought me into the federal public service during…
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…
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…
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…
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to present in-person at FWD50 next week. Prof. Amanda Clarke will cover the AMA on government-vendor relations in my absence – I hope you can all tune in for it (either virtually or in-person!) The FWD50 team is brilliant and I’m really grateful to have been invited to present. For those of you who are going in person, I’m so sorry to miss seeing you! For in-person…
Ryan Hum is the Chief Information Officer and VP of Data at the Canada Energy Regulator (CER), a federal agency based in Calgary, Alberta. He’s an inspiration to so many of the best designers and design researchers I know in government, and he’s championed user research work at PCO , at IRCC , and in projects with a wide range of departments. At the CER, his team has done above-and-beyond work in…
Dan Hon ’s newsletter (which is excellent) had a great anecdote last week about the New York City Sanitation Department hiring McKinsey to study and design a procurement for trash containerization . Which is exciting ( urban planning !) but also, as Dan says, alarming : This kicked off my usual consultant-consulting-on-RFP threat-response mechanism, this time focussing on: under what circumstances…
Christopher Scipio is a long-time champion for a more diverse, equitable, and anti-racist public service. He’s currently the senior strategic advisor to the Black Executives Network , and has previously worked in a number of policy roles at the Department of National Defence , Employment and Social Development Canada , Innovation, Science and Economic Development , and Justice Canada . We’ve been…
(The answer is: about $4.6 billion dollars in the most recent fiscal year.) This week I’m coming up to the end of my Public Servant-in-Residence term at Carleton University. It’s been an absolute dream to work with Prof. Amanda Clarke and the School of Public Policy and Administration . A key focus of our research work over the past few months has been analyzing Government of Canada procurement…
Aubrie McGibbon is a long-time open data and public sector innovation expert with the Nova Scotia government. They’re currently the data strategy lead for the Nova Scotia Digital Service , and they previously co-led NS Govlab , Nova Scotia’s first social innovation lab. Aubrie and I have been Twitter friends since my very first month working in government; I’m so glad they could be part of the…
There’s been a lot of interest in adopting agile practices in the Canadian government over the past few years. Being more incremental, iterating more quickly, and breaking projects into smaller pieces are all really valuable approaches. One of the major challenges facing digital teams in government is that – even if they organize their own work according to agile principles – they’re operating…
In the federal public service, so many of the building blocks of digital government and tech modernization are thanks to Chris Allison . An early leader of the GCtools team and the CSPS Digital Academy , he’s now the Chief Data Officer at the Public Health Agency of Canada . He’s also perhaps the only senior federal public service leader who is fluent in Python programming. He’s a lifelong hero…
A few years back I remember reading about bike infrastructure improvements in Seville, Spain , where the city had built 80 kilometres of protected bicycle lanes in 18 months. (Ottawa’s protected bike lanes on Laurier Ave. and O’Connor St. are 1.5 and 2 kilometres respectively). The key to Seville’s approach was starting and finishing the infrastructure project within a single mayoral political…
Public service departments’ “return to office” plans have been a hot topic over the past few weeks. After more than two years where a large proportion of the federal public service switched to working from home, departments are planning to require that staff come back into the office at least a certain number of days per week. Meanwhile: COVID-19 is still happening . The reaction to messages and…
Madelaine Saginur and Melissa Toutloff work at the Privacy Management Division for Health Canada and PHAC. They’re two of the most kind and most brilliant public servants I’ve ever worked with. We worked together from the earliest days of COVID Alert onwards, and the app’s positive reception from Canadian privacy experts is very much credit to the two of them and their (equally brilliant) director…
Beth Fox is a service designer and digital strategy lead at the Nova Scotia Digital Service. She’s an amazing public speaker, a champion for users, an occasional blogger , a maker of awesome stickers and buttons, and one of my first-ever public service Twitter friends. We chatted on May 3. Ask her about her (excellent) sound-check warm-up phrases. Sean: Tell us who you are and where you work these…
I wrote this piece in April, suggested by some friends who used to work as enterprise architects. Agree or disagree with the post? I’d love to hear your feedback ! When I rejoined the federal government in 2016, our team’s desks were (for a few months) around the corner from a large team working on a financial management transformation project. The walls in their area were covered in mesmerizing,…
A couple of months ago I wrote a post on my hopes for the future of digital identity in Canada . As someone who has lived in three different provinces and territories, and spent several years working outside of Canada, I have some thoughts on what I’d like it to look like! Most of the ideas I wrote were related to technical implementation details (to be fast , to be cross-department , to work with…
Honey Dacanay is a digital government legend in Canada – part of the founding team at the Ontario Digital Service , and an early leader of the CSPS Digital Academy . She currently works on Service Canada’s Digital & Client Data team and teaches at McMaster’s Public Policy in Digital Society program. Honey is a longtime inspiration both for her digital policy and legislation work, and for her…
A few weeks ago I was part of the second English-language episode of the FYN Unscripted podcast , organized and run by the Federal Youth Network . Brittaney Lewis from DND hosted a conversation with Sidra Mahmood from ESDC and I. The topic for the episode was “ Building a reputation remotely ”, and from there we dove into our early public service career experiences, finding friends across the…
I’m really thrilled to be kicking off this series of blog posts with Rumon Carter , a hero of mine for years since I first saw his work with the BC Dev Exchange . He replied immediately after I reached out, rejected the “hero” label entirely, and we chatted the following day on April 21. Sean: Tell us about yourself! Rumon: My name’s Rumon Carter, I work for BC Parks within the BC provincial…
It’s been more than two years now since I started blogging here. Part of the motivation for writing was to fill a bit of a void, trying to make up for the spontaneous conversations with fellow public servants and techies that were a highlight of everyday life in Ottawa. Over time it’s become a neat way to spark or contribute to public conversations about government IT and how to improve the public…
Last week, Kathryn May published an article in Policy Options titled “ Speaking truth to power discouraged in public service ”. The article recaps a recent report from the Institute on Governance that surveyed senior public servants and examined their views on trust in government in the context of current social issues. The report includes insights from public service executives in all three…
It’s April, so like most Canadians, I spent a lot of time logging in to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and other government websites. As an experience, it was okay – the CRA’s login system is better than that of most federal government departments (and there are almost 60 separate login systems , at least!). Last year the CRA added two-factor authentication by text message or phone call, after a…
Update: Last week the prime minister announced new senior leadership at SSC . All the best to the incoming team! In early 2022, the President of Shared Services Canada (SSC) announced that he was retiring. In what has accidentally become a tradition , below are some suggestions for the next president to take on the role. SSC was created in 2011 and is the centralized IT infrastructure department…
Last week I was invited to be a panelist for the Canada School of Public Service’s Spring 2022 Digital Accelerator Demo Day , along with Manu Kabahizi , Nadine Davis , and Kathy Graham. It was a really fascinating and inspiring event! Each of the teams that were part of the Digital Accelerator program had spent the previous 10 weeks working on a digital initiative; across the teams they…
During my Public Servant-in-Residence term at Carleton University, I’ll be working with Prof. Amanda Clarke as part of her larger research project on Trustworthy Digital Government . I’ll be studying the role and influence of information technology (IT) vendors in the public sector – the companies that provide software, technology equipment, cloud infrastructure, and professional services to…
This past week I officially joined Carleton University as a Public Servant-in-Residence (PSIR) , working with Prof. Amanda Clarke . I’m really thrilled to be joining the School of Public Policy and Administration (SPPA), and the faculty and staff have been tremendously welcoming. You can read more about what I’ll be doing on the SPPA website : “Research and teaching on public management requires…
(More on my Public Servant-in-Residence work to come next week.) Why yes, I am writing this as a distraction from everything happening in the world lately . As public servants, we’ve mostly all been working from home for almost two years now. That might change to some extent in the months ahead , but I think it’s safe to say that some form of hybrid work (working at least part of the week from…
Update: As of May 18, 2023, a tentative agreement was reached between CAPE and TBS . It was ratified by EC members on June 17 . You can read more about the agreement on the CAPE website (PDF). For an unofficial salary change calculator, you can use Lucas ’s online Observable notebook . Later this month, collective bargaining agreement negotiations are starting for the Economics and Social Science…
Last week the FWD50 team launched their annual survey on the future of digital government. If you haven’t already filled it out, don’t miss sharing your perspective . It’s something I look forward to each year, partly since I genuinely love filling out surveys (hello, fellow public servants) and partly since the results are always fascinating . They’re a deep look at how we all see and imagine the…