No new piece on eaves.ca today as I wrote a special for the Globe and Mail. The piece is entitled Has Canada entered a ‘Bush-like vortex’? and explores how the Colvin testimony suggests the public service has become compromised in a critical way. Specifically, it suggests that increasingly, public servants are being forced to shape [...]
Entries tagged as “public service of canada”
Has Canada entered a Bush-Like Vortex?
Which government embraces Facebook? (hint: it’s not ours)
A few weeks ago Dave D. kindly sent me this article out of England about how junior public servants are teaching their senior colleagues how to use facebook. And just in case you think this is an ad hoc thing… Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson yesterday said Whitehall mandarins had been given new guidelines ‘to [...]
Oh, to live in a country with an open government
So the British Government doesn’t just release masses of data so the people can mash it up – they are now offering a prize to the best mash-up. Sadly, our (Canadian) government couldn’t be more secretive with it’s data. Sure there are some low hanging fruit that I (with the help of my trusted colleague [...]
The Open Source Public Service
Consider these to quotes side by side: First, “Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process [...]
The Public Service as a Gift Economy
In his description of why Open Source works Eric Raymond notes that open source communities don’t operate as command hierarchies or even as exchange economies. Instead they often operate as gift economies: Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival [...]
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