The Municipal Innovation Pilot Project: A Retrospective

Recently I wrote a twitter thread on my thoughts on government and open source. It got me thinking about how I always meant to sit down and write about the Municipal Innovation Pilot Project, my biggest attempt to date to help move forward open source in government. What better time than the present.

TLDR:

The Municipal Innovation Pilot Project was an attempt by multiple governments to develop a platform that allowed all levels of government in Canada to find, share and collaborate on open source projects. The goal was to reduce work, save resources and speed up delivery on common platform needs. Ultimately due to shifts in leadership priorities the initiative was mothballed but the core project The Open Resource Exchange lives on through the Open Government team within the Government of Canada.

Long Version:

Context

At the time my colleague, Hero Laird, and I were working for the Government of Canada on GCcollab, an open source social networking platform designed to be a digital public square for the government (to this day, I this is still the most innovative project I have seen in government, alas it was also undermined by the same shift in leadership that killed the Municipal Innovation Pilot Project). Our goal was to expand it to municipal governments. To do this, we wanted a project to focus on.

Idea #1

The federal government has lots of resources and expertise but is very slow and risk averse; at the same time municipal governments lack resources and deep expertise but are much more nimble and open to trying new things. There had to be a way for the federal government to support local innovation that could later be scaled.

The Meeting

To explore this idea, Hero and I convened a small meeting of like minded people in Guelph. Also at the table were Connie McCutcheon and Nathan Childs from Niagara, Michelle Garraway from Durham, Hilary Kilgour from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and our host from Guelph, Stewart McDonough. Bianca Tomazali from Montreal was a last minute addition but turned out to be a very important one as Montreal became the primary driver of this project.

We called our group the Municipal Innovation Pilot Project. The goal of the meeting was to find a project for us to work on to show how municipalities could collaborate and become a petri dish for experimentation for the federal government.

Honestly, we were having a hard time settling on anything and I remember thinking man what happens if we can’t figure something out. Then during the break a couple people started sharing some of the software they were building to solve some of their challenges. It turns out they were building the same things. It was then that we struck on our project.

Idea #2

As governments rapidly work to adapt to our digital age they need to onboard large amounts of software to support digital work and service delivery. This is really expensive. All governments have basically the same needs and same problems, there has to be a way for us to share costs and support each other instead of working in silos.

Going open source will allow for shared investment and open collaboration on these projects. It also means everyone benefits from any one government/team’s investment, that’s a win.

What we did

The plan was to create a platform that would help governments find open source projects that other governments were working on quickly and easily and then foster and encourage collaboration. There are lots of open source projects out there but they are often hard to find.

The idea is before a government builds or buys a solution to their problem, they come to this “Open Resource Exchange” and search to see if any other government has an open source solution. They can then review the code, connect with the government team that built/manages it and in the process save time and money on reinventing the wheel.

We first did an environment scan to see if anything like this existed. It turns out my colleague Sebastien Lemay (literally sat next to me in the office) was working on just such a project in his spare time. Bianca’s team in Montreal then worked with Seb to get the platform to the state where we could use it. At this point the City of Edmonton had joined the project and Norman Mendoza’s team also contributed some time to the project.

While Seb, Bianca and Norman were working on the tech side of things, Hero, Hilary, Connie and I put our brain’s on developing the policy mechanism that would enable the sharing of money and resources.

Through Connie and Bianca, we were also able to get endorsement from MISA, the municipal IT network. I find good ideas tend to develop in multiple places at the same time. It was no surprise then when MISA connected us with Mark Dillon from Sarnia who was working on the same idea, so we agreed to combine forces.

It was around this time that we started working with Guillaume Charest who was championing open source work within the Government of Canada. Gui provided lots of great support on the policy side. He also was able to get the open government team on board (this was easy as it was already tied to a commitment they had through the open action plan which was why Seb was working on the project in the first place).

So what happened?

This all sounds great, all this momentum, what happened? A series of things happened all at the same time that by themselves wouldn’t have killed the project but together really slowed it down. A couple of the key people left for new jobs. For Hero and I, we had new leadership come into our department that did not see value in the project and therefore pulled us away from it. All of this caused the project to stall and people moved on to more urgent items.

Luckily, we were able to complete a prototype that currently sits on the open government website. But it needs more uptake to really grow into what it could become. This means people need to champion it.

Lessons Learned

1. The idea is solid and there is a lot of interest in it (it was easy to get groups to jump on board).
2. For things like this to scale you need network effect which means you need critical mass. This requires a lot of leg work to promote. Likely need someone dedicated to this in a close to full time capacity.
3. Before building something, always check to see what already exists so you don’t reinvent the wheel. Chances are someone else is trying to solve the same problem and you could save a lot of time by following them.
4. Build for sustainability. We tried for decentralized leadership so that as some people stepped back others could step forward. We weren’t fully successful but the project did get a lot further than it would without this, we had to make many pivots of leadership.

Other resources:

• Here is a draft of the unfinished business plan, lots of interesting stuff inside.
• Aaron Snow (formerly head of the Canadian Digital Services) is doing great work in this area for the Beeck Center. He recently wrote a blog highlighting the sharing of open source code in Canada and the US. The story of Notify is particularly interesting as that started in the UK, was forked by Canada and Nova Scotia is also using it.
• Check out this great resource on open source and government by Public Digital