I consider editing (and administrating) GCPEDIA a part of my job, and I always have.  If you read the wording of your job description, there’s probably some significant wiggle room for creative interpretation, provided that your primary product or goal continues to be produced or achieved on time.

For example, do your duties specify that you must:

• Work as part of a team that provides advice, recommendations, and information to project officers and middle and senior management.

Can you use GCPEDIA as a development platform to draft advice or recommendations?  Are you part of a working group that shares discussions, suggestions and findings?  Do you produce reports that could be of interest to public servants across the country if you published them on a wiki?  Could your division benefit from a GCPEDIA presence in order to share information about its purpose, and provide the answers to common questions?  Mention GCPEDIA in your Performance and Learning Agreement.

If you can’t justify it as a tool that helps you to accomplish a primary work objective, or a supporting technology that you need to fulfil performance expectations, add it as a required or developmental learning objective.  You’ve got support in high places.  The Clerk of the Privy Council has repeatedly spoken and written about the importance of GCPEDIA:

• In the Seventeenth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada as a collaborative technology for enabling workplace renewal;
• In the 2010-11 Public Service Renewal Action Plan as an innovation allowing us to work with greater effectiveness and efficiency; and
• As a knowledge-base for capturing best practices and experiences so we can all learn from them.

“GCPEDIA and similar wikis are vital to the public service of today and tomorrow.”—Wayne G. Wouters

If it’s vital to the public service, it’s a vital component of your learning.  Add GCPEDIA to your Performance and Learning Agreement.  It isn’t taking time away from your work, it is your work.  It isn’t cutting into your value and productivity, it’s adding to it.  It’s an important component of the future public service, but it also provides increased  value to the Government—and ultimately, the taxpayer—here and now.

Let’s face it: few of us (if any) are completely consumed by our prescribed duties 100% of the time.  That said, the Government of Canada is paying for my time and my skills whether I am in the midst of high stress and high volume workload, or in a period of relative calm.  At minimum, donating my spare minutes to GCPEDIA gives the Government more value for their money.  I’m not playing solitaire, doing my banking, or making personal phone calls.  I’m working for Canadians and for my fellow public servants… and on those occasions that I am daydreaming, it’s about “How can I make this work even better for everyone affected?”

Which brings me to the last benefit of editing GCPEDIA: engagement—to purpose, and to people.  GCPEDIA keeps me productive, while allowing me enormous personal satisfaction, creativity, and choice.  “What can I fix today?  Who can I help?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: GCPEDIA’s value includes but extends far beyond merely storing the knowledge of those employees that the Government has lost (or will lose). Its hidden value is in capturing and retaining the knowledge, involvement and interest of current and future employees.  In the inventory of qualities that make for an attractive workplace, money isn’t the highest consideration on the list.  In terms of long-term retention, ranking higher is the quality of the workplace, satisfaction with the work, and highest of all, satisfying relationships with co-workers—a perception of connectedness and belonging.

GCPEDIA.  People & Knowledge.  Gens & Savoir.  It’s all right there, under the logo.

Your PLA Homework:

Developmental learning (career path: 1 to 3 year outlook)
Objective:
(1.) To increase my knowledge of Web 2.0 and social media, and their emerging application to the Public Service Renewal initiative.
Learning Resources / Activities:
- Learn and use GCPEDIA, the Government of Canada’s Web 2.0 document collaboration platform.
- Learn and use GCconnex, the Government of Canada’s professional networking platform.
- Attend relevant workshops, Armchair Discussions, meetings, etc. whenever possible.

Back in September of last year, sometime after I was already entirely swept up by obsessive compulsive wikignoming—grafting and pruning the site in a way I hoped would make it prosper—it occurred to me that a similar role should exist to help users grow and prosper.  I created the Peer helper category on GCPEDIA, made a shiny new badge for myself and pinned it to my homepage, then did almost nothing to promote it, short of maintaining a high-visibility presence in the recent changes log, and jumping in to help whenever I saw someone in need.

I have this tendency to do a lot behind the scenes, but say little about it.  This probably explains why I was made an administrator on GCPEDIA, but also why no one from Communications has called to ask if I’d be willing to leave my job as a policy analyst and come work for them.

If you need another example, a colleague of mine recently expressed surprise that accounts for @GCPEDIA and @GCconnex exist on Twitter.  I wasn’t surprised.  I started them, and still manage them.  Other than a couple of (arguably self-serving) #FollowFriday announcements, I haven’t done a lot to promote these either.

In my own defence I can only say that the accounts are highly unofficial.  I took the initiative to reserve them because I felt they would (and should) eventually have future official use by the Government of Canada. For now, I use them to transmit information on service outages and new content, although they were also allegedly responsible for rickrolling nearly 60 of you this April Fool’s Day.  Unofficially.  But I digress…

Recently, I attended a meeting where it was announced that, at present, about 100 new users create accounts on GCPEDIA each day.  I’m pleased with this growth, but also greatly concerned about retention.  Ultimately, active usership is more significant and meaningful than total users and volume of new signups.  Who’s caring for these people?  Technical support is critical, and as far as I know, the project has experienced a recent staffing shortage.  How many users will GCPEDIA lose in short order if recent signups can’t find dependable, accessible, timely assistance with their problems?  What percentage of our collective intellectual assets are failing to be captured by the wiki because fear or lack of knowledge about editing content outweighs the desire to share?

I’ve been a wiki administrator since 2005, and a user for far longer, but I think many of us assume a comfort and ease of use of wikis, and a common knowledge of wikimarkup that doesn’t exist.

Not long ago I provided group instruction for about 40 people.  It was productive, but I had difficulty meeting the combined needs of the participants at both the speed and the technical level that they individually demanded.  Some were ready to dive into complex design and formatting, while the majority were extremely anxious about attempting even basic text entry.  The more experienced group was bothered by the interruptions to discuss fundamentals, while the less experienced users became overwhelmed by complex discussions.

This was the Government of Canada in microcosm—a shared desire to contribute professional knowledge, but a greatly variable level of technical knowledge.

This doesn’t need to exist as a barrier, nor do staffing and funding levels need to remain a critical determinant of our ability to retain users and capture their ideas.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Jesse Good, Suesan Danesh, Amy Thorne, and Paula Ibbotson have joined me to assist users who need individualized support to help them achieve their personal or group goals on GCPEDIA.  I will continue to remain available as well, to the greatest degree that I am able, to provide training and support to groups or individuals in person, by phone, and over the wiki.

I’ll conclude with an excerpt from my blog on GCconnex, posted last September.  It’s written in the first person, but consider it an invitation to contact any one of us:

If you’d like to get your knowledge up on GCPEDIA but are unsure about the markup and layout, please contact me. If you’ve got a good start going, but things are becoming tangled and complex, or you need to add something new, just write or call.

I’m more than happy to help you to whatever degree you’d like, from a bit of coaching to taking a lead in structure, design and coding.   I can teach you the markup, show you by example by formatting and arranging the data as you need it, or even edit it with you live and in tandem during a phone call.

Don’t feel like you need to be an expert to get started on GCPEDIA.   This is, above all else, a collaborative tool.  Those with content but no software knowledge can help and be helped by users with the technical knowledge but no new content to share.

So… let’s get started helping each other.

Basically, between the income replacement that one is entitled to from Employment Insurance and the employee benefits paid out under the terms of the Agreement, an indeterminate employee can stay home to raise their baby at nearly full pay (93%) for one year (2 Weeks Waiting Period + 18 Weeks Maternity Benefit + 32 Weeks Parental Benefit).

Now as the father, I wasn’t entitled to any Maternity Benefit — my wife could take that — but the 32 weeks… 8 months away from work… well, maybe I could take that…

…provided I could get past the psychological hurdles, of course.  What kind of man takes 8 months off of work at the beginning of his public service career?

I’d never been in any financial position to entertain such a question before.

I took 2 weeks away from work for the birth of my first child, and three weeks for the second.  The extra week the second time around was to provide extra care.  My second was born with Jaundice, and needed near-constant phototherapy for the first nine days of her life by remaining wrapped in a biliblanket.

8 months?

I love my children; my children love me.  But I’m the sort of person that needs to remain engaged.  After two weeks of  R&R, I’m ready to abort my vacation and get back to my desk.  I crave mental stimulation.  I need structure.  As much as I should probably feel ashamed for my lack of evolution, I am a man first and a social worker second.  My sense of self is largely tied to my attachment to work.  My importance is in what I  create.  My value is in the income I am able to provide for my family.

But I created this child.  And the benefits will allow me to provide for my family.

With much urging from my wife, I took the 8 months.

I wish I had the right words to express how great it was.

Not idyllic, by any means.  A lot of work; worries; weird hours; exhaustion; exasperation when nothing worked.  But also immense joy; attachment; love; connection like I never believed I could feel.  And tangible response from my baby; recognition; pleasure from my presence; anxiety from my departure.

8 months went entirely too quickly.  For those last 2 weeks, I held her constantly.

I thought I’d been a good father to my first two children.  I’d taken as much time as I could afford, to be there as they entered the world.  But in retrospect I was something of a stranger to them, and they to me.  It bothered me enormously that they seemed more curious than pleased to see me return home at the end of the day.  I was often beside myself with frustration for my inability to calm them when they were hurt or distressed.  Nothing I could do had anything near the effect of my wife simply reaching down and picking them up.

My baby will be 18 months old soon.  For some time now — for as long as she’s been able to, really — she has come running to see me when I arrive home from work.  Perhaps it’s better described as high-speed toddling, but more often than not she beats her 4 year old sister to the door.

Even after I’m settled in for the night, in between her adventures with her pets and her older sisters, she’ll come back to me with arms outstretched, “Da da!  Da da!” insistent that I hold her immediately.

I credit the baby for ‘teaching’ her older sister that these are good practices.  Not long after the daily return-from-work ritual began, my 4 year old also started racing to the door to get her own turn at being swept off her feet and kissed soundly.

I loved those 8 months.  They meant everything to me, and really showed me what they can mean to a newborn.  If there was any effect on my career prospects or my reputation, I can’t tell.  My profile is actually higher now.  Twitter, blogging, involvement with GCPEDIA and GCconnex — these all came after my return to work.

Honestly, I’m kind of ambivalent about becoming a DG anyway.

If you’ve taken parental leave, or just have something to share on the subject, I’d love to read your comments.

Later this week, I’ll be attending a meeting with colleagues in another province.  It won’t involve the discussion or exchange of any protected, classified, or otherwise sensitive information.  But what if it did?

All of the major web conferencing services including those offered by WebEx, Citrix, eBLVD, and GoToMeeting are hosted in the United States. All data exchange over these platforms utilizes American Internet infrastructure, and therefore any information residing on those servers or passing through those networks is subject to monitoring, interception and collection under the terms of the Patriot Act.

This law, which was hurriedly passed in October 2001 in reaction to the September 11 terrorist attacks, has remained largely unchanged despite the substantial presence of controversial and highly-criticized provisions that were intended to expire beginning December 31, 2005.

At the time I attended my conference last month, the US Congress and House of Representatives were continuing to debate the line between privacy and homeland security, with the House shelving further discussion of the law until later this year.

This “temporary” legislation which, according to Congressmen Jim McDermott and John Conyers, Jr., passed while remaining unread by the majority of officials responsible for voting it in, has now survived for nearly 10 years with the most contentious powers (like the expansion of National Security Letters) completely intact.

Should the Government of Canada really be conducting daily business over American Internet under these circumstances?

Before you dismiss the idea of a major institution losing access to its stored data as ludicrous, consider this quote from Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the UK National Archives:

“If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years. If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago [2003-04], you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it. Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper. The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation.”

The UK National Archives includes a collection of 900 years of written material. As of 2007 they estimated that 580 terabytes of their data (the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopedias) was stored in file formats which have since become extinct.

While Ceeney’s estimate of “three or four years ago” strikes me as somewhat hyperbolous, changes in technology have certainly changed our selection of media storage and electronic file formats.  5.25″ floppy disks are nearly absent from current use, and 3.5″ disk drives are disappearing as standard equipment on modern computers. Information on high-density floppies isn’t necessarily difficult to access, though doing so may require the purchase of an external USB floppy drive and compatible application software.  I’ve already experienced some electronic data loss due to incompatible, extinct file formats.  Much of the material I produced in the 90′s, both academic and personal, was saved in AppleWorks or pfs: Professional Write format.

For me, the most uncomfortable aspect of the source article I’ve quoted above is that it announces the “solution” to the National Archives’ problem in the form of a partnership with Microsoft, who were contracted to ensure future compatibility to read old formats, and ostensibly, to convert and write them into a modern, proprietary format. So, while access to data may be restored, the issue of reliance on a monopoly corporation remains (or, in the case of the National Archives, begins).

The Government of Canada’s relationship with Microsoft initially came by way of a competitive process, but in my opinion it has become a relationship of dependence, because Government data is saved in an electronic format wholly owned and controlled by a private, foreign corporation.

Storing files in a proprietary format like Word .DOC, Excel .XLS or PowerPoint .PPT places the Government in a position of perpetual dependence on private enterprise. We require a certain office suite (Micosoft Office) that is available from only one company to access our own data —  the peoples’ data.  Why?

While the lack of a suitable alternative may have once made this a necessary concession, other formats presently exist which will allow all the various types of information we use to be preserved in a format that can be opened by a variety of software packages, indefinitely, without concern for legal, financial or technical constraints.

In a recent exchange I had with a colleague, two important questions were raised: (1) is the mandatory use of Microsoft Office by employees anti-competitive? and (2) in the competitive process that led to the Government’s use of Microsoft Office, were free/open source options in the running?  Given Microsoft’s monopoly of the office software industry, and their trials for engagement in anti-competitive business practices in court systems worldwide, these are legitimate concerns.

One of the Microsoft practices that has been criticized is the control and regular alteration of file formats, including those used for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, databases and websites.  This creates software and version incompatibilities, regular upgrade cycles, and difficulties for open source and other private competitors who wish to support the proprietary standard.  This business practice is known as “embrace, extend and extinguish“, and it was a subject of the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial.

OpenDocument, an ISO and IEC International Standard registered as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, is the leading open standard used by governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan, the United States, and over a dozen other nations.  In response to this increasing popularity, Microsoft (via an interview with Tom Robertson, GM of Interoperability & Standards) stated that if OpenDocument becomes a requirement then Microsoft would implement it, but extend it. Later, Microsoft presented the ISO/IEC with a competing ‘open format’ called Office Open XML.

While Microsoft should clearly remain eligible to compete in future competitive processes, in my opinion the Government should adopt open data file formats that are independent of Microsoft, or any other proprietary vendor/product.  When external contractors are required for future business, full compatibility with a list of Government-approved open standard formats would be a condition that bidders must guarantee as part of the competitive process.

Eliminating proprietary formats increases opportunities for other corporations offering service solutions to the Government. No company’s ability to compete with or replace a prior service / software provider will be impaired by their lack of the previous company’s internal knowledge or control of a closed format.  Correspondingly, it increases choice for government, increasing the pool of companies that can knowledgeably manage information (now stored in an open format).

In North America, the Commonwealth (state) of Massachusetts was an early adopter of open formats.  In 2005,  Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration and Finance said:

“It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access.”

Their data is now accessible by a variety of free and open source office suites including OpenOffice, KOffice, and StarOffice and free stand-alone word processors like AbiWord.  This not only ensures the State’s continued access to the data into the future, but also offers it in a format that can is usable by their citizens regardless of their ability to pay for proprietary software like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office.

Consider the Canadian people I serve.  At best, the inability for people to afford software creates a technology gap between classes, where the have-nots do not possess the tools they need to be productive in an information society.  At worst, this gap fosters software piracy as people feel compelled to illegally share and crack copies of MS Office.

While it is feasible for a struggling family to obtain an older computer that runs some version of Windows, it is of limited use without an office suite. OpenOffice is compatible with Windows, Linux and OSX, is publicly downloadable from the Internet, and free of charge or other licensing fee. For those without broadband access, copying and distribution on CD or USB drive through friends at school or at work is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Now consider the government I serve.  2009 was a year characterized by the state of the economy: shrinking expenditures by cutbacks, and shrinking staff levels by attrition.  Could a government initiative to reduce dependence on proprietary software and formats contribute significantly to a future economic action plan, reducing financial burden on both the Government and its citizens?  I believe so.

OpenOffice’s lack of cost does not reflect in any way on it’s value or utility. As I’ve already mentioned, OpenOffice and the OpenDocument group of file formats are presently being used by the governments of Massachusetts, Belgium, Finland, the National Archives of Australia, and the Allahabad High Court of India, among many others.

The adoption of open data formats is a logical first step towards the use of free and open source software (FOSS) applications (like OpenOffice suite), which will reduce or completely eliminate per-user licensing fees on the thousands of computers where the Government of Canada currently uses proprietary software.  In an ideal world, my government would also roll out an open source operating system, but… one step at a time.

If we do hope to update all the desktops in the Government of Canada — many of which were recently “upgraded” to Windows XP after having run Windows 2000 for many years — an open source operating system like Linux or BSD would offer the same savings, stability, and control over our information infrastructure that an open format offers to the information itself.

Linux is free, and its ability as a server is demonstrated whenever you are on the Internet (60% of the web is power by Linux; 30% by Microsoft). As a graphical desktop operating system, Linux has replaced Microsoft Windows at Google, Novell, Panasonic, Tommy Hilfiger, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Federal Court System, and the U.S. Postal Service.

Just some food for thought. To conclude:

Freeing data: Open file formats ensure the government’s perpetual access to its own data well into the future, regardless of the software used in the coming decades. While applications change over time, the standard evolves and endures independently.  More importantly, the data remains in an open format (beyond plain text) usable by citizens, regardless of their ability to pay for software.
 
Cost savings: OpenOffice (and other open source office software) is free of charge.

Conversion ability: At present, OpenOffice, StarOffice, and other suites can load and save documents created by Microsoft Office. No special software or expertise is needed to change them to OpenDocument (or, to re-save them back into Microsoft format if necessary).  NOTE: Due to the nature of the Microsoft proprietary format, complex formatting may not convert exactly, which is why the use of an open format like OpenDocument is preferable.

Choice: OpenOffice and the OpenDocument format is something that the government can adopt and support internally. Additionally, we can choose a proprietary office suite that uses open file formats (like StarOffice) if a commercial product is preferred.

• A translation of this article in Vietnamese by Lê Trung Nghĩa.

Social work can be the shortest career of a person’s life.  I’ve known people that lasted less time in the field than it took to earn the degree to get them there.  To say it’s a hard job is a grievous understatement.  It’s frequently misunderstood — even feared and hated.  It’s societally undervalued, emotionally draining, and woefully underpaid.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was the last of these which finally forced me to take down my shingle.  Decisions I’d made to improve my own life — marriage, children, a home of my own — made it an impossible wage to live on.  But where to go?  Well, if you read my previous piece, you’ll know that life led me back to university, then into the government, despite it being the last place I expected to work.

After a positive experience as a CO-OP student, I told someone that I was considering a long-term career in the public service only to have them ask, “What does social work have to do with government?”  Good question.  Tip: You can easily gauge someone’s perception of government by answering: “Well, they both exist to help people.” just as I did.  Tip: If the person you’re speaking to falls over laughing or punches you in the face, this may indicate that they harbour repressed anti-government sentiment.

Trust me: I’m a behavioural expert.

All frivolity aside though, this change of direction prompted a number of questions and doubts, from others and from within. Was my most valuable contribution to society now to be a thing of the past?

When you think of government, what images does it evoke?  Imagery of power, bureaucracy, hierarchy, insularity and disconnect?  I can’t say that these spectres didn’t leave me feeling unsettled.  As a social worker, I possessed a sense of identity, duty and integrity that I didn’t want to risk compromising to any degree.

I think that bureaucracies can create efficiency and logical order, but can also foment disordered thought and behaviour through their structure and culture.  Bureaucracies have the ability to change people for the worse, if individuals lose sight of themselves, or begin to closely integrate their sense of power and position within their definition of self.  I am not singling out the Federal Government.  Rather, I’m thinking of my workplace experiences as a whole, along with information gleaned from co-workers, and plain old common sense.  I understand that this capacity exists within any large and complex organization: the risks associated with becoming part of something  that makes you lose a part of yourself.

And while social workers may have a certain sense of themselves, their purpose, and their personal and professional principles, there is no denying the lure of expert power.  It’s something that the public expects and demands, and something that social work therapists like I was may aspire to even if they do not consciously acknowledge it. While we may strongly identify with the professional goal of empowering those we work with, we also harbour a human need to feel personally respected, professionally competent, and societally valued, and we may assert this in a way that feels empowering to us but that places us in a position of power over those that we intend to help.

I would be very surprised to learn that none of my fellow social work practitioners perceive any difference in status between the so-called “soft sciences” and “hard sciences”. I know I felt this “legitimacy gap” as a university student and sensed an internal imperative to close it somehow by trying to appear more scientific. What better way to achieve this than to become part of a large and powerful organization with a macro-focused  human service, where my Master’s degree is a Master’s degree, and my value as an analyst or an advisor is based on the results of my work?  After all, is all bureaucracy as evil as some fear, and is social work really as pure as I like to believe it is?

As a social worker who worked in a variety of settings and networked with a great many others, I’ve observed environments where constructed ideas about being a therapist, a supervisor, or a person with a diagnosis (part real, part theoretical — based on a best-guess) orchestrated a reality that governed how people thought of themselves, interacted, conducted their affairs, and perceived other people. I’ve experienced environments of co-option where people were so consumed by the necessity to get up to speed with the entrenched policies and procedures, there was no time to consider whether they were right or wrong, let alone change them. I observed people so fixated on meeting deadlines, paying bills, and surviving professionally, they did not have the presence of mind to understand how they were being changed in the process.

What have I learned from this?

While I’m proud of the good I’ve accomplished as a social worker, the groups I worked with and environments I practiced in weren’t idyllic.  Nothing is.  In the final analysis, there is danger in any large and complex organization, be it a government, a health care network, or a school district. There isn’t a job to be found that offers complete safety of integrity, or any person that can make a guarantee to watch out for you (and what you might change into) except yourself, of course.  Probability of indoctrination is the risk inherent to attachment to anything significant.  Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the learner to remain aware of what is being learned, and exercise personal control over what becomes integrated as “self”.  This is as true for indoctrination by a bureaucracy as it is for the indoctrination I received through my university education.

So today I am a social worker who was taught to embrace structuralism, but I work within an entrenched system that I believe must be fundamentally altered.  I was educated to be an agent of change, but must work mindfully to avoid becoming an agent of the system.  I am able to bridge this gap because I believe that small change is possible, even within a bureaucracy. It isn’t the permanent, fundamental change that structuralism desires, but then, nothing is permanent in government.  I am eager to see what small changes I can accomplish, particularly as a member of the small but powerful group championing social media in the Government of Canada.

Failure to earn a livable wage as a social worker with a growing family was what drove me from full-time employment and part-time Master’s courses (whenever I could balance them), and into full-time education and voluntary unemployment.  Leaving employment had obvious repercussions, but the coursework was not as hard as I feared; a decade of experience in the field gave me a wealth of perspective which was not too difficult to reconcile with academic theory.  And in the instances where theory did conflict with real-world practice, my academic papers were even more interesting.

As with my BSW, a field placement was just part of the requirement; practical experience to balance academic learning.  While I acknowledge the value and necessity of this component, for me it was an afterthought.  I knew I could easily slip into a counselling role at some social services agency and pass the course, but that seemed … well, almost like cheating.  Certainly much too easy.  What was the point in using the placement to demonstrate skills I already had? But then, doing so would certainly free up my mind to concentrate on other pressing things…

I considered my options; for too long, as it turned out.  By the time I approached the administration, only one placement was left.  By some coincidence, they were an option that no other student had been given the chance to even consider, because they also had missed the deadline for student co-op placements.

It was a paid placement in an emerging field, and I was the only student who would be interviewed for the spot.  I had some previous experience working for municipal and provincial government, though it was tiny in proportion to my experience in the private sector.  I interviewed, everything clicked, and when my student placement ended, my employment didn’t.

It was what I needed, exactly when I needed it, in a place I never would have considered.  I wasn’t looking; I was found.  It doesn’t happen often, and it makes me wonder…

Is serendipity a reward reaped from the culmination of hard work — dividends paid for your investment into life and the people in it — or is it good fortune by random chance?

Is serendipity the occasional failure to miss opportunities that are normally present in everyday life? — opportunities that we could embrace openly and actively were we not distracted by life’s regular crowd of bidders, each simultaneously clamouring for the largest piece of mental real estate?

Looking at your own life, do you fully perceive what is happening all around you most of the time, or do personal and professional commitments paired with ongoing unexpected developments leave you in a state of functional tunnel vision?  To what do you attribute small strings of good luck, or large gifts from life that you can’t clearly congratulate yourself for?

What’s stirring me to ruminate about how I got here, how fortunate I’ve been, and where life might direct me next? — A blog post by one of my (virtual) colleagues.

I completely empathize with his state of mind, although as one of the recent employees to extend into the participation and promotion of Web 2.0 within the Government of Canada, I’m not fatigued, nor am I concerned about the future.

I love what I do: often, it’s my immediate job, but increasingly it’s the work I’m able to do as a result of these social media tools emerging within the Government of Canada.  I’m talking to anyone who’ll listen, and teaching anyone that wants to learn.  I’m editing content that I had no input into, and providing tech support to communities that I’m not a member of.  I’m tweeting and I’m blogging.  I’m thoroughly excited and completely energized by what I’m doing, and what I might be able to do in a month or two.  And I’m very moved by what other public servants are doing and feeling… which brings me back to my colleague.  As it turns out, one of the casualties that he may have been anticipating was himself, and this is a crossroads that I have also found myself at.  I took a leave of absence from the Government myself and experienced a rebirth of sorts upon returning.  I’m confident that my colleague will return refreshed and renewed, should he decide to take a year for other projects and personal reflection.

I’m not sure I have any answers to the questions I posed above, but I do know that the risks I’ve taken and the choices I’ve made when things got tough have nearly always led to me finding myself in a better place.  I wish the same for everyone.  Should I someday find myself fatigued from my efforts of putting social media to work in government, I’m confident that there will be others ready to continue the work in my absence.  I just hope that the work I am able to do in the meantime will be inspiring to others, in repayment of the inspiration I’ve received by the energy and output of those that were here first.

When I joined the public service I often heard it said, “In Government, everyone is an editor.”  For recent graduates — or others just accustomed to the experience of creating polished work and having it accepted verbatim and with full attribution — this is a warning about the process of government.

You write a document.  Several peers or senior colleagues will review it and add suggestions and changes.  After this initial round of  development, your manager will likely wish to take out their own red pen for additional quality control.  Once you’ve folded these in, your document (or rather, “the” document) will be ready to make its way up the chain to your director, who will likely make other edit requests for you to include before returning it for final approval.  Depending on who or what the document is for, the document may continue to morph for some time even after its left your workgroup.

For people who are either protective of their product or simply used to creating something “final” by themselves, the whole experience can be a bit unnerving.  Some edits will feel legitimately useful: significant additions of important information, corrections of errors, or re-ordering of content to make the ideas flow more effectively.  Other changes may sit less well: wholesale deletion of entire paragraphs, wordsmithing, or comma moving.

But this is the way we work in government.  What you create is a draft, which may ultimately be returned to you several times covered with sticky notes and red ink, or, in the case of electronic documents, with multicoloured strikeouts and comment bubbles detailing the tracked changes.  It can be initially painful and occasionally still frustrating, but more often than not the resulting product is superior to what any one person could have created alone.

If this is any different to what a wiki accomplishes, the distinction is lost on me.

You create a wiki document.  Several peers or senior colleagues review it and add suggestions and changes.  After this initial round of development, you advise your manager that you’ve got a draft posted.  The manager logs in and makes their own contributions to quality control.  Now there’s something online for your director to have a look at when they have some time.

The process is completely transparent.  Everyone’s edits, major and minor, are captured in the wiki’s history tab.  There are no multiple copies of the document floating around through email, nor any misplaced hard copies with edits yet to be added.  Everyone is editing the master copy of the document in real time.  None of the deleted text is ever really lost: it exists in a previous version.  Any content deleted from a previous version of a document can be copied forward into the current version, if someone decides it was worth including after all (as-is, or as draft text to be re-worked).

A wiki isn’t useful for every document — sensitive information requires sensitive handling, and you probably don’t want employees making wish-list alterations to official policies — but for fast and efficient building of unclassified documents, why not wiki?