Ever since the early days of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of an AI-powered, government-vetted chat interface (voice or…
A few months ago, I delivered a talk at the 2018 FWD50 Conference on the topic of “Communicating Change and Tech Disruption to Citizens”. The official description was as follows:
“Your role as communications and policy professionals in the public sector is growing with the need to improve transparency and accessibility, promote new and expanded digital services, safeguard reputation, and maintain public confidence. This session will explore the current state of global trust in technology and provide participants with possible approaches towards better communicating the value and importance of change and technology disruption, especially if it can lead to improved service delivery. Participants will be introduced to a social marketing/ behaviour change framework, which aims to move beyond “awareness building” and into attitude and behaviour change.”
This post features my key takeaways and notes from two events I attended earlier this month here in Ottawa.
1- Public Sector Social Media (#cbocsocial) –“Where Canada’s social media leaders gather to discuss the most effective strategies for the most powerful media.”
2- Forward 50 (#fwd50) – “A three-day conversation on digital transformation held in Canada’s capital city, bringing together citizens, the public service, elected officials, technologists, and innovative thinkers from around the world.”
Both events were geared at the public sector, albeit very different audiences were present for each. The first event (#cbocsocial) attracted many comms folks along with those responsible for running their organization’s social media channels. The second event (#fwd50) had many senior government leaders, program and policy folks, as well those interested in the general advancement of government through modern disruptive tech. Ideally, I would love to one day see these audiences overlap a bit more at each others events to build up cross-functional learning and reduce existing silos. I do realize however that with limited training/conference budgets it’s wishful thinking on my part. Nonetheless I found both events very valuable. Here are some of my high-level key takeaways from each along with general notes from specific sessions.
