New paper on federal government IT contracting
The Government of Canada breaks almost all best practices in modern IT procurement. Using our open access research tool govcanadacontracts.ca we use this paper to explain how, and why we should be worried about it.
Protecting Public Advice: New report with the Royal Society of Canada
In the past year I've been working with the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) as a member of the Working Group on Protecting Public Advice within the RSC's Task Force on COVID-19. In February my co-authors (Julia Wright, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Matthew Herder and Howard Ramos) published our final report, which will also be published as an article in FACETS.
Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age: A Briefing For Potential Research Collaborators
Over the past year I've helped lead a new Research Workstream within the international teaching collaboration, Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age.
To initiate the Research Workstream, Tom Steinberg and I co-authored a Research Briefing, which outlines the key research questions that we think need to be answered to test and refine what have become widely accepted - but rarely empirically scrutinized - best practices in digital era government.
New book review: Take a Number: How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement
The book reports on the first comprehensive study to investigate policy feedback effects in Canada and has a number of particularly notable findings. First, policy feedback effects operate quite differently in Canada than they do in the US.
One year into the pandemic, federal digital government is largely business as usual
It's been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the federal government to make the sudden shift to working from home and to expand its online service offerings. What difference, if any, did this make for ongoing efforts to renew the federal government for the digital age?
Data Governance: The Next Frontier of Digital Government Research and Practice
Elizabeth Dubois and Florian Martin-Bariteau have put together a great collection of chapters focused on Canadian citizenship in the digital age in their new edited collection, Citizenship in a Connected Canada. I contributed a chapter that identifies gaps in research and policy on public data governance in Canada. The abstract is below, and the entire book is available for purchase or as an open access download here.
What are Public Servants Doing on Wikipedia?
Journalists have made much of a bot that reports on edits made to Wikipedia by public servants, framing these edits as absurd and wasteful, or as acts of state-led propaganda. But maybe these edits actually generate public value? With this question in mind, Elizabeth Dubois and I analyzed the edits that Canadian federal public servants make to Wikipedia, and found that many of these edits represent valuable contributions to public knowledge.