How can governments better collaborate with civic technologists?
Today I participated in a fascinating conversation hosted by MySociety on the topic of public-private partnerships in civic tech. Civic tech practitioners discussed the challenges they face when trying to work with government, including the mismatch between agile design processes and government budgeting and policy cycles, the inflexibility of government approval processes and departmental silos, and dated and overly onerous public procurement processes.
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.