Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 02

8 / Canadian Government Executive // March/April 2018 Game changer Q: Can you tell us how your organization started? RS: As an entrepreneur, I’ve worked on tech and social change all my life. I was ul- timately drawn to government because of its potential for scale and to get upstream of problems – dealing through policy with their causes and not their consequences. And when I started looking at the gov- ernment space, I got more and more ex- cited by the opportunity to use technology and great design to drive change scale. It seems crazy that in a worldwhere we’re celebrating innovation in the private sector and civil society, we hardly ever celebrate the innovators and government, despite the fact their work affects so many lives. We hardly ever talk about what’s working Q: Robyn, for the benefit of our readers, what is Apolitical all about? Robyn Scott: Apolitical is a global plat- form that helps public servants anywhere in the world quickly find essential and inspiring policies and programs around the world and connect with the people who’ve worked on them. We have our original reporting on topics that range from cities and data through to early childhood development inclusive growth and women’s empowerment. We also write about how to manage, lead and innovate in the public service, and our platform is full of interesting, important ideas from our members, as well as from around the Internet. in government and what makes innovation so much harder. It also makes it harder for government to attract and retain talent, and perhaps most importantly, it means citizens lose trust in institutions of government, po- tentially leading to populism. We wanted to show that governments could have heroes and policies can be fixed, so we founded Apolitical to make this happen. Q: How can Canadian public servants become involved with your organization? RS: Any public servant anywhere in the world is welcome to sign up to our pri- vate network. We’d be delighted to have as many Canadian public servants as pos- sible to join. They can visit apolitical.co and join thousands of inspiring, innovative and influential public servants from more than 120 countries, including mayors and minis- ters. There you can search policies, suggest policies you think we should feature, and find peers in other countries. You can join communities of practice on the platform; for example, we have a policy labs group of 70 different labs from 40 different countries – they have a private group on the platform. And we also host a monthly show-and-tell where we feature one lab’s work. Q: The Prime Minister of Canada has a strong focus on feminism. Can you share with us how people can use Apolitical to learn more about innovations around gender equality? RS: Women’s empowerment and gender Robyn Scott Co-Founder and CEO Apolitical We would like to introduce a new section starting with this issue of Canadian Government Executive - Game Changers. In this section, we will profile executives who are making a difference to the public sector community both in Canada and overseas as a game changer. In this inaugural Game Changers piece, we are excited to an- nounce Game Changers: Lisa Witter, Co-Founder and Execu- tive Chairman of Apolitical and Robyn Scott, Co-Founder and CEO of Apolitical. Here is the interview that J. Richard Jones, Group Publisher of Canadian Government Executive conducted with Lisa and Robyn. GAME CHANGER