Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 01

January/February 2018 // Canadian Government Executive / 25 THE INTERVIEW The system told me I was too young and I needed to cool my jets, almost literally. So I left and worked five years with Open Text – Canada’s largest software company, and the eighth largest in the world now, if you read the data – I worked for the chair- man directly on modernizing the G20, the Commonwealth, and the Olympics. And then I ended up running their government business, so to speak – from a government relations and business development angle. After traveling the world 100 times over, the position at the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation came up, and I was asked a couple of times to apply. I said no the first time, as we were doing some interesting work on free trade. But the second time they came calling a year later, I took the job because I needed to anchor myself – and I also wanted to run a government public sector organiza- tion the way I think it should be run in the 21st century. We were the first in the world to be ‘open by default.’ That means that content was published within two hours of pressing save – to all of our documents. So 90 per cent of the organization became ‘open by default.’ That created new partnerships. Video game companies started doing video games based on the content of the Muse- um. These games were downloaded in 180 countries. Documentary companies started approaching us. Someone in channel start- ed approaching us because we were doing things out in the open. We became a plat- form for science and technology culture to do things and create on, as opposed to a linear government delivery mechanism, which is what most governments do. So I did that to a point where the folks at TBS said, “Hey, could you replicate