Canadian Government Executive - Volume 23 - Issue 09

6 / Canadian Government Executive // December 2017 The Interview Q: First, Hillary, I think CGE readers will be quite interested in your background and how you came to the mission of digitizing government: a daunting and perhaps unglamorous job. So how did you get inter- ested in this area? It’s been a 20-year journey. My first job out of college was working with the State of Arkansas on their e-government efforts, where I was a web master and a web designer working on things like the Secretary of State’s homepage, and eventually working for the federal government in the U.S. I don’t think I intended for it to become a career, but it certainly did. Most of my time was with a company called MIC. They are a company that works with about 30 different states. They essentially create public-private partner- ships, and do very similar work to what we are doing, but from the outside. Bring a team together, hire locally, and start partner- ing with agencies and departments all across state governments. I worked with them for about 15 years on everything from coun- ty projects to being an internal consultant, working with different states. One month I would work with Utah, and the next month I’d work with Idaho. People were starting to really dip their toes in the water around social media. And I always joked that social media was a gateway drug to digital government, you know? It re- ally was, once we could convince folks within government to start to understand what social media had to offer, and the promise of truly engaging with people, going straight to users about ideas and how to make things better. That’s really, I think, what started this whole mission. I was trying to get states to take a gander at this little site called Twitter. It became a passion, and then I became a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013, which certainly changed my life and changed my career. Mostly because, for the first time, I was not on the outside trying to make change, but I was on the inside. And on the inside with the promise of delivering things for millions and millions of people. And that is, well just to be honest, it’s a bit intoxicating. I just got hooked. I had a six month fellowship during the Obama administration, and at the end of my six months, there were a bunch of us who just didn’t feel done. The Government Services Administration wanted to create something a bit more permanent. I was in the second class of Fellows, so the Fellows would come in and then they’d disperse to the wind. Sometimes, their projects would as well. We really wanted to lay down roots and create a team that could carry some of those ideas forward. We got the opportunity to start a team called 18F, inside GSA. And (we) grew that team from the ten of us that started in 2013 to about 200 folks over the next couple of years doing the same kind of work: building small teams that could partner with agen- cies and departments across the federal government to deliver on exciting digital government projects. Q: When it comes to the evolution of digital govern- ment and the use of social media by government, how would you characterize the change over time that you’ve witnessed? Well, it’s interesting, because I do like putting that moment in time about seven to ten years ago when Twitter started. You started to see how it was being adopted from the outside, but for the public good. Even things like hashtags. A friend of mine in San Diego started the idea of just starting every tweet about one of the big fires in San Diego with #SanDiegoFire. Suddenly, you had this stream of information. You had a channel where you could go for information. It was little moments like that. On the inside, governments started to see there were places where they could engage and go straight to us- ers. At the time, it was communication, and not so much collabora- tion and co-creation, but I think that’s where we’ve ended up. It’s allowed the work that we do to really come to the forefront. We may be building some sort of service, probably technology involved, but that’s almost the unimportant part. That is the out- come, but it’s about how we get to that outcome, about what we Recently CGE Editor in Chief George Ross sat down with Hillary Hartley , Ontario’s Deputy Minister responsible for digital government. Hillary Hartley An Interviewwith Deputy Minister, Ontario digital government