November 4, 2023

Sean’s blog – November 2023

Hello friends!

I’m writing this from the Vancouver airport on my way to Ottawa for the FWD50 government technology conference.

Travelling without Heather and Ben (our 10-month old) feels very strange, like a step back in time. Going back to Ottawa to talk about federal public service reform – several months after I began a new job with the Yukon government – also feels like a throwback. I’m staying around the corner from the Lord Elgin Hotel Starbucks where Ryan Androsoff first asked me if I’d be interested in joining his team. That was in 2016. A lot has happened since then!

I’m really stoked for the conference this week, not least to see many of you in person! I’m presenting a keynote on Monday morning, participating in Aaron’s panel on open source in government on Tuesday, and then hosting a panel with two brilliant public servants – Uchenna Moka-Solana and Dr. Rim Khazall on Wednesday. In the meantime I’m really excited to see presentations from friends and heroes like Hillary Hartley and Jennifer Pahlka and Lucas Cherkewski and Honey Dacanay and Andrew Greenway.

If you’d like to tune in, you can still get virtual tickets (and several federal departments have gotten departmental passes which you might be able to access).

My Yukon team is planning to watch the livestream (they’ve bought virtual tickets) from our office in Whitehorse. At 7am Yukon time! On a Monday! Which is really lovely of them. ❤️

In the meantime, I am bemused to be arriving in Ontario just as Daylight Savings Time changes are happening. Which I thought I escaped several years ago.

What's new on the blog

It’s been a bit of a quiet year for blogging, not least because – since around this time last year – procurement became a sensitive political topic just as my research with Prof. Clarke was wrapping up, then Heather and I welcomed our first child, then we moved across town in Whitehorse, and then I started a new job! All the things!

Amid this, I wrote a few posts (that I'd mostly been meaning to write for a while!):

• Saying goodbye to Twitter, and then confirming it’s really really dead and we should use Mastodon instead.
  • On that note – if you're attending FWD50 – please sign up for a Mastodon account and join the #fwd50 conversation! I’ll help walk you through it in between conference things if you'd like.
• Public service heroes interviews with Sameer Vasta, with Shannah Segal and Sheena Samuel, with Nick Wise, and with Deepika Grover. Each of these people are dear friends and inspiring public servants and I’m really glad they could take the time to chat!
• A public service tech tip on better audio gear that (I promise) wasn’t secretly a comment on any colleagues that I could never hear on video calls. 😂
• And, a commentary on “why do our most senior public servants retire and then say all the things that should change about the public service”? The answer? Structural barriers to change! And some thoughts on how to make change happen anyway. Which my keynote on Monday is a meta-attempt at. Let me know how it goes. 😄

As always, super grateful to all of you for reading (and to my colleagues for putting up with my enthusiastic shenanigans over the years).

In the months ahead, expect more and/or fewer blog posts and newsletter updates as I begin parental leave at the end of November! (Not a second baby, which would be wild! Just taking 6 months off as Heather prepares to go back to work.)

Much love and for those of you attending FWD50, see you in a couple days! To everyone else, rock on and see you on the internet.