GCpedia's Sixth Birthday

by Kent Aitken

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Last night Jodi LeBlanc and the GC2.0 Tools team hosted a community meetup which included a birthday cake for GCpedia, the Government of Canada's internal wiki, now six years old.

Typically we don't celebrate platforms or software. I suspect you rarely get people together on the anniversaries of installations.

(Though I did notice yesterday that X-Wing is getting re-released, which came out 20 years ago.)

So why GCpedia? What is it that GCpedia represents that makes it a rallying point for government employees? Specifically, the question I want to ask is what has GCpedia represented for you?

For me, it's a way to learn that the sky won't fall when you put work in the open, and that comfort sharing a little can lead to comfort sharing a lot.

It was a conduit into the realization that I was part of a much larger community than I originally thought.

And it represents a way to learn the value of being sharing processes in a safe space, which has the dual benefits of walking the transparency walk and leaving material behind for others to pick up and use. As part of a workload-scoping experiment while working on the GC2.0 Tools team, I went back through the first Collaborative Management Day pages (2010, I believe). I'd still tell people organizing events to wander back through it - collaborative principles are baked into the discussions, and the resources posted after the event are still incredibly valuable and relevant. It was, for me, the perfect example of everything that GCpedia had and has to offer.

But that's just me. You?