Archive

Hello everyone and hope you've had an excellent weekend!

It's almost the end of August (time flies!) which has made for a busy past few weeks as I get ready for my research exchange with Carleton University to wrap up. On Sept. 1st I return to my regular job at CDS; I can't wait to catch up with the crew there but it'll definitely be a race to the finish line on the research work that I'm doing.

On that note – here's a preview of the procurement contract analysis that I've been working on with Prof. Clarke and two of her research students. The analysis is an at-scale look at federal government contracts (which are proactively disclosed on the Open Government website); it's fascinating to see where contract spending has gone up and down over the past couple years of the pandemic.

Hello everyone and happy Monday!

As part of this year’s “send more than one newsletter email per year” effort, here’s an update with the latest on the blog!

The highlight over these past couple months has been starting a small series titled “Public service heroes”. Two of these interviews have now been published, the most recent one today:

• Rumon Carter, from BC Parks and the BC Exchange Lab
• Honey Dacanay, from the Ontario Digital Service, CSPS Digital Academy, and Service Canada

Hello everyone! Happy Monday, happy mid-April, and as usual, happy "how is it 2022 already"?

You're getting this since you signed up for newsletter updates on sboots.ca. Which I have sent all of once before, so no, you haven't missed anything in the meantime. Appreciate you signing up!

Another winter is wrapping up; the days are getting longer; COVID is still around. In March, I started a 6-month interchange as a Public Servant-in-Residence at Carleton University. The "at" and the "in Residence" are both, er, virtual as it were; I'm working remotely from here in Whitehorse where the windchill bicycling around this morning was a cheerful -18°C.

I'm working with Prof. Amanda Clarke (a legend in the digital government field here in Canada) as part of her research project on Trustworthy Digital Government. Part of what we're looking at is the role, influence, and scale of large IT vendors and management consultants on the public sector. If that's something you have thoughts on, I'd love to hear from you! You can give me a shout by email or schedule a coffee chat here.

Hello everyone! Hard to believe that it’s mid-January, and really, hard to believe that it’s 2021 already.

You’re getting this because you signed up in the little newsletter subscription box on sboots.ca. Possibly last week or quite possibly a year ago! Welcome to the blog-newsletter! The blogoletter! The newsoblogger. We’ll, uh, workshop that later.

I’ll send these out every couple of months, recapping the latest posts on the blog with a bit of colour commentary. Which is what the posts are too, really. Colour commentary on the colour commentary, you’re welcome everyone. I’ll end off with a suggestion for other newsletters you could read in addition to this one.