Laure Lucchesi on government innovation and open data. All opinions expressed in these episodes are personal and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations for which our guests work. How does government innovate? For this episode of FWDThinking, I sat down with Laure Lucchesi, director of France’s Etalab. In her role as Chief Data …
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In conversation with Code for America’s Amanda Renteria and Code for Canada’s Dorothy Eng. All opinions expressed in these episodes are personal and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations for which our guests work. We often talk about the “private” and “public” sector to separate the activities of free enterprise from those of …
Continue reading “FWDThinking Episode 13: The Nerd Peace Corps has grown up”
A conversation with Kill it with Fire author Marianne Bellotti: Monoliths, Murder Boards and Code Yellow All opinions expressed in these episodes are personal and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations for which our guests work. Marianne Belotti is no stranger to government IT. In her years of public service, she’s tackled some …
Since we launched FWD50 in 2017, we’ve run an annual survey of public servants worldwide to capture their thoughts on the challenges, needs, and opportunities around digital government and public sector innovation. Who answered the survey? This year, we received roughly 100 responses. Roughly half were from Federal governments, primarily in Canada: The top roles …
Continue reading “Unpacking the 2021 Digital Government Survey”
In collaboration with Coding it Forward All opinions expressed in in these episodes are personal and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations for which our guests work. Talk to anyone who’s spent more than a short while in government modernization, and they’ll tell you it’s a people problem. The move from physical to …
Continue reading “FWDThinking Episode 10: Passing the torch”
Farming, not weeding: Changing our mental model of Legacy systems We tend to talk about IT in analogies. Words like API, Microservice, Monolith, and Data Contract aren’t widely understood, so we use familiar examples to help us communicate. Some of these analogies are dangerous, however. One mindset is particularly insidious: Software development as a factory. …
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In the last century, tech has been massively democratized. Government services must be more than digital destinations—they need to become a home for their denizens’ ingenuity. We talk a lot about “digital.” But, ironically, digital isn’t binary. It’s a gradual encroachment of technology at the intersection of humans and computers. If public services don’t keep …
One of my favorite German words is fingerspitzengefühl. There’s no easy English translation, but it loosely equates to “feeling in the tips of the fingers,” or an innate sense of how to do something after years of practice. The German language is fungible. It’s easy to smash together words and make another, longer, more nuanced …
During FWD50 2020, our speakers—nearly 240 of them!—brought up several vital topics we want to explore in 2021. As we launch our fifth annual content survey (you can see the 2020 results here on our blog) these are some of the things we’ll be diving into, both online throughout the year, and at the November …
In conversation with Nick Adams, Founder & Chief Scientist of Goodly Labs. Nick Adams describes himself as a parallel, rather than serial, entrepreneur. He started his work in public service as a campaign manager, hoping to go into politics himself. But Nick quickly realized he could do more good focusing on technology. One of the …
Continue reading “FWDThinking Episode 8: Recalibrating risk”
