Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 03

28 / Canadian Government Executive // May/June 2018 procurement Discussions continued and broadened to include public servants working not only in public engagement, but also in IT and open source in other departments. A vision started to emerge of a new way of working that would benefit not only federal colleagues, but freelance developers and small businesses as well. Could innovations in procurement facilitate these new ways of working? The team imagined that it could look like this: Mohammed is a public servant who works in a non-IT branch that would like to build a prototype of a digital app to run an experiment. Chris recently pro- cured a similar prototype for their de- partment, but it is not licensed as open source and so they cannot share it with Mohammed. Wouldn’t it be great if Chris’ prototype was licensed as open source and stored in an open repository so that Mohammed could repurpose it? Feria is a freelancer and a member of her local Civic Tech group. She regu- larly contributes a day here and there to government hackathons and proj- ects but is not compensated for her contributions. Wouldn’t it be great if Feria could continue to share her valuable insights and be paid for doing so? Val is an executive who would like to inject some fresh new thinking into her team. She is interested in bringing in some students to work on a prototype. Wouldn’t it be great if Val could pro- cure the services of these students as and when her projects required and students could choose the work as and when their studies allowed? Can innovations in procurement lead to new ways of working? B y June 2017, the Public Engage- ment Team at the Privy Council Office (PCO) had received many questions from departments about digital engagement tools. The team began searching for these tools, only to find that while there were some great open source public engagement tools out there, none were immediately ready for Government of Canada (GC) use. The team began to ask...wouldn’t it be great if we could pay someone to modify these tools to meet accessibility and official lan- guage requirements, and then put them in a library for all departments to access? Open Source Software Software with its source code made available with a licence in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Source: GC Open First Whitepaper By Rachel Muston