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by Kent Aitken |       |
Starting today, I’m on a year-long interchange from the Government of Canada. It's a research fellowship at Canada's Public Policy Forum to study governance in the digital era. I wanted to post a couple thoughts and invitations.
First, I’ve been fortunate and delighted to be able to work with an amazing group of people over the last few years. The open government scene involved a lot of interaction, communication, and collaboration with the civil society community and colleagues across the public service - on public engagement, the CODE series of hackathons, open data, and the general push for open government in Canada. This has been a distinct and resounding highlight of my career thus far, so thank you.
Second, I’m completely bummed out to be leaving the open gov team, even temporarily. The initiative is incredibly important to the way government functions, and we’re not running out of work anytime soon. I’m very hopeful and optimistic that the work for the next two years will make things better for many communities. And I can’t say enough about the awesome and talented team there, and I appreciate both how much they’ve done (a lot) and how they’re always pushing to do more.
Lastly, I have lofty goals for the year to come. I see the role as somewhat of a common resource for governments (and observers of governments) in Canada, and I’d be really open to people dropping me a line (or, for academics, finding me on GCcollab). I’ll be looking at both the opportunities that the digital era provides (like connecting with people and information) and its challenges (such as how we develop policy, regulation, and legislation around technologies and trends that emerge and evolve quickly). I’ll be posting about the research as I go, so there’ll be more specifics coming.