News — 22 February, 2012
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada department, Ottawa
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada department (DFAIT) Open Policy Day Session, Feb. 9 in Ottawa, was attended by 200 staff members. Personal in embassies could follow the morning session by teleconference.
The objective was to expose the DFAIT staff to new ways of working for policy making and information exchanges inside the department (ie. Web 2.0, Social network, Open Data, Open Innovation, NGO's and how to adapt with collaborative efforts, etc). There were formal presentations in the morning from USA Secretary of State staff and DFAIT staff, Google, Wikimedia Foundation and World Bank representatives.
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada department (DFAIT) Open Policy Day Session, Feb. 9 in Ottawa, was attended by 200 staff members. Personal in embassies could follow the morning session by teleconference.
The objective was to expose the DFAIT staff to new ways of working for policy making and information exchanges inside the department (ie. Web 2.0, Social network, Open Data, Open Innovation, NGO's and how to adapt with collaborative efforts, etc). There were formal presentations in the morning from USA Secretary of State staff and DFAIT staff, Google, Wikimedia Foundation and World Bank representatives.
Most of the afternoon was for workshops where the staff in Ottawa could be exposed to NGO's ways of working. It started with a Speed Geeking presentation. We were height exhibitors used as motivators ( Wikimedia,Google, Ushahidi/SBTF, ESRI, Crisis Commons, HotOsm, etc.). This was a 45 minutes rolling fire. Height consecutive presentations of 5 minutes took place. For each, the Start signal was given with height simultaneous presentations in a noisy hall. HotOsm presentation of the Haiti Earthquake case (map at day 1, day 24, humanitarian layer, GPS for rescue teams), had the instant attention of participants despite the noise embiant. I could then continue to present the various HotOsm projects and see real interest for these subjects. Coming back to the conference room, we could feel the overexcitement of the crowd.
For the Workshops. The DFAIT Staff could propose, for the year to come, Open Policy minded projects integrating Social medias and new ways of working. A very dynamic DFAIT team proposed a joint Crisis Map Simulation project with SBTF. At the end of the afternoon, coming back to the main Session, each group had a few minutes to present the project and the necessary budget to a Shark Tank of directors from DFAIT (inspired from a TV show). The Crisis Mapping Team was finally one of the projects selected at the end of the day.
DFAIT personal didn't know very much about humanitarian NGO's, OpenStreetMap and HotOsm. Internet could surely be used more intensively to join a larger audience and talk about our successes like Mapping of Haiti and other HotOsm actions. Pierre
Documents used for this event