Ryan: 00:00

Hi. I'm Ryan Androsoff. Welcome to Let's Think Digital. How do we make digital technologies work for everyone? For people like me who've spent years working at the intersection of technology and public policy, this is one of the most important questions we face. It doesn't matter how innovative or effective digital technologies are if public institutions can't implement them in a way that lets everybody be able to access and benefit from them. Unlike the private sector, government doesn't get to pick and choose who its users are. It has to be able to serve everybody. That's why principles like accessibility and sustainability and openness are so critically important for technology when it's being used by the public sector. And who better to talk about this with than Mike Gifford. In addition to being an associate with Think Digital, Mike is a senior strategist with Civic Actions, a technology consultancy that helps governments to deliver better services through modern technology and design. Mike's got a long history working on online accessibility and being a leader in the open source community here in Canada and globally, and I think brings a really interesting perspective to digital transformation from his work in Canada and around the world. So really excited to have Mike join us here on the podcast and dive into this conversation about how do we make technology work for everybody. So Mike, maybe I'll just get you to introduce yourself quickly and give a little bit about your background and kind of how you come to some of these issues.

Mike Gifford: 01:43

For sure. I started my own business in 99. And open source has always been part of that. I've been involved in, in, in officially supporting open source projects for over 20 years now. The biggest contributions that have made are around Drupal, with the Drupal community. I'm still a Drupal core accessibility maintainer. So taking on an official responsibility to try and address the accessibility of that product. But, but in the process of having that official role, a lot of things sort of came, became more apparent. So one of them was just that, that it was, it was difficult to go off and to get contracts with the government as a small business owner, it was difficult to manage that process. And, you know, seeing that a lot of times, although accessibility has always been part of the government's mandate, it was all sort of put down to the the last sort of it was, it wasn't ever a real priority in terms of choosing either vendors, or solutions that really understood them.

Ryan: 02:40

Mike, maybe just to back up for a second because I know this is something near and dear to your heart you do a lot of work on, is maybe even just to define what we mean by accessibility when it comes to digital products, because I think, you know, a lot of people their conception of accessibility, you know, they would think about, let's say, somebody who's visually impaired, you know, they can't see you, they have to use a screen reader. You know, in the government context, for anybody who works kind of in with the federal government, people might be familiar with the the Deborah Jo Dan case from over a decade ago now, woman who was visually impaired who sued the federal government, because she couldn't apply for jobs through the online portal. You know, that, and I think, I feel like a lot of the conversation around accessibility gets framed just in this notion of essentially visual impairments. But as I know, you talk about often it's a much bigger spectrum. So I thought maybe be helpful just to start with getting you to kind of unpack a little bit, you know, what do we really mean by accessibility when it comes to the web?

Mike Gifford: 03:31

I think the biggest misconception is that it's just about, just for blind folks. And it's not that that blind individuals aren't an important part of the population, they are there. But they're an extreme use case. If you're looking at, at, you know, at accessibility in general, and digital accessibility, you're thinking about all of the ways that people are facing barriers and interacting with the web. And that actually moves at, just from a very small community to blind, completely blind sort of population, or screenreader users, to a much larger set of populations, which is which actually, it's a quarter of the population, a quarter of the Canadian population uses or needs, has some sort of disability, that that affects how they interact with, with the world, whether that's the physical world or the digital world. It's a lot of those, those disabilities are things that are are invisible. Partly because, you know, there's cognitive disabilities, there's visual, you know, visual disabilities that you're not going to see. I mean, how many people do you know are colorblind? Well, you're not going to ever be able to identify somebody that's colorblind based on looking at them. It's only if you, if you have a conversation with them, or you notice that they're, they're missing color cues that, that, that you're going to be able to understand that they, they're colorblind. But, but for most people you're not going to know that. There's also that idea of, of permanent disabilities, that, that are things that are affecting us all the time. But people have a physical disability of some sort that, you know, is is a permanent issue. But also temporary and situational disabilities. So how often have you gone to go get your eyes checked, and suddenly it's, it's difficult to see or you've got allergy season or you're in a loud room or you're... like there's there's a lot of places where just in the, in the way that humans interact with technology now, that actually affects all of us all the time. I mean, I've been like in different spaces where we're able to go off and you if, where, if there's, there's conditions that affect us, whether we're, where it's a bright day outside, we want to work on our laptop, and we're trying to go off and we're having trouble seeing the, the low contrast fonts on our phone, or it's too bright outs- or you want to go watch your screen at night. But but there's, there isn't dark mode available on the interfaces, and there's too much, there's too much contrast, it's hard on your eyes, because it's dark in the room, but it's you know, the device is just beaming at you. So you need to have a lower contrast in order to be able to see that when you're in that context. So, so there's, your disability is really about, in many ways, thinking about the human condition, and embracing the fact that humans have limited- have- will always have limited senses, and that we need to be able to maximize the use our senses as we can in all the ways we want to interact with technology.

Ryan: 06:17

Yeah, I mean, I really liked that model, cause you, you share it often when we do our digital leadership program, you know, this notion of kind of temporary, situational, and permanent disability, which I think is, I think was Microsoft actually the kinda had framed some of that. And actually, I think interestingly, you know, Microsoft is a company in particular, which has done a lot of focus that seems, on accessibility in the last few years.

Mike Gifford: 06:39

They've been real leaders. And so much of that comes right from the CEO that there's been a real commitment and an openness to the importance of accessibility. And there's been, in so many ways, Microsoft has been a, an example of what other companies should, should emulate in terms of openness and an activity around accessibility. I've got other issues with it with with Microsoft, for sure I'm not, but I'm really happy with what they've done with accessibility and the leadership they provided there. And frankly, we've also done some really interesting work on open source as well around accessibility and how they're sharing and contributing in that space as well.

Ryan: 07:14

Yeah, no, listen, I think that's totally fair. And I think it's worth calling out, you know, when when some of the big tech companies are doing good stuff, and not just kind of lumping it all into one category that big tech equals bad always. And this I mean, I imagine, you know, part of why, part of why they're focusing on this, too, I mean, there's an altruistic side to it, but I think there's probably a business side, which is just, you know, when we think about those kind of the situational types of disabilities, part of that just relates to having a- an ageing population, right. And as the population gets older, you know, I think you were saying like, now it's 25% of Canadians that have some kind of impairment when they're interacting with online materials. As you get older eyesight gets worse, etc, in general.

Mike Gifford: 07:58

Yeah, in general, but but but yeah, absolutely. As we get older, we have, have, your eyesight gets worse, our ability to see ranges of colors gets worse, our ability to go off and to even understand the navigation. Like, you know, older people interact with the web differently than younger people. And part of that is just the ability to, to map the, the navigational structure along with, with the... for every different website. So. So trying to go off and have a consistent interface is really useful for, for older populations who are not necessarily going to know that "Oh, yeah. This is how... is it a hamburger menu or a shish kebab menu? Or? Or like, what is the what is it? How am I interacting with the information to get where I want to go?" Like, that's something that younger people are more quickly able to go off and adjust between those kinds of designation elements.

Ryan: 08:00

Yeah, and that, you know, it's an interesting point, right, because as the design around navigation for digital systems has evolved, I mean, in the early days of the web, it really kind of mirrored like, you know, librarian systems, right of information classification. Tended to, you know, tended to look like a table of contents from like a textbook, that people would kind of apply to web pages, because that was our collective mental model, right about best practices on organizing information. And that's changed a lot. I mean, as you say, you know, the hamburger menu that kind of became ubiquitous with the rise of mobile and smartphones has changed. You know, we're getting into voice control now, which kind of changes the dynamic on that. And then, you know, one of the, some of the stuff that we do, you know, with Think Digital, is around virtual reality in the metaverse and we can imagine, you know, this next decade as we start getting into a world of kind of immersive tack, that's going to change your model again, around how do we organize and sort and find information.

Ryan: 08:48

It's definitely... there will be a lot of changes for sure.

Ryan: 09:44

Yeah, yeah. And so with all of this, so it's not, you know, I think this is a helpful kind of background on what we kind of mean by accessibility and what that kind of looks like in a tangible way. You know, one of the issues we're talking about here obviously, is around procurement, right, and how government, you know, buys technology, buys services. Government has policy requirements around external service provision to citizens, that they have to make sure that there's, you know, certain accessibility requirements met. Although I think probably, you know, you've probably shared that that's probably not always happening in all cases. But I'm wondering from that, you know, procurements one of these big levers that government has, right, to kind of shape the types of tools it's bringing in, both for external services, but also for internal use cases as well. Like, to what degree are you seeing accessibility requirements actually being baked into the procurements that are going out?

Mike Gifford: 10:30

Not a lot, I mean, I don't think that it really has changed all that much in Canada. It's definitely, even in Europe, in the US, there's there's slow changes, but it hasn't necessarily, I don't think any any government that I'm aware of, is really got a package that necessarily works. The educational institutions in the US are doing a lot more to try and consolidate and have a mature procurement model, that I'm still not sure that's necessarily in the right direction. But it's, it's it's, they're under a lot of pressure, because, because they're large institutions, but gets sued by people all the time around accessibility issues, because of the legal structure of section 508 in the US and how that enforcement mechanism is managed. But, but I would say that the, that most, most government contracts will, will- there will be something in the RFP that says, you know, that this probably, this contract must meet, you know, WK 2.0 Double A standards. That's been there for over a decade, that, that will probably also be a bullet point in the contract. But that approach is something that doesn't really work. In the US there was an effort 20 years ago to try and build something called a VPAT, which is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. And VPATs were a good idea to try and get, get vendors to identify the... identify the accessibility concerns that they're aware of in the products and services that they implement. Unfortunately, it hasn't been well managed. And essentially, at this point, in 2023, it is just a sales document. All people are doing when they're filling in a VPAT is that, that I mean, there are good vendors that do this, and, and certainly Microsoft and you know, IBM and Oracle, and there's a bunch of companies that have invested and really understand how to create a good VPAT and invest in them to go off and to create them. But, but for the most people- most part, all that all that happens is you, you have a table that that matches the WK success criteria. And people say, you know, it's Support, Support, Support, Support, Supports, and it's a legal process, it's a sales process, it's not really an accessibility process, it's not baked into the process of building and developing software. So, so that's, that's one of the big problems with, with, with the pyramid and accessibility is that it's not it's not something that is is, is integrated.

Ryan: 12:50

Right.

Mike Gifford: 12:51

And there's also there's sort of no assumption that governments have to take responsibility, once they've got that contract signed, or once they've implemented this, and, and if you've ever, for anyone who's who's managed contracts with with governments, they, they set the priorities, they set the tone, they are the client, and you're there to serve the client. And if the client does not ask on a regular basis, is this successful? How are you managing accessibility, can we get this feature and make it accessible? If they're not a team player in the process of building this customized product for government, then, then it's not going to be, it's never going to be properly built, they have to be on board with the process. So that it is a priority that's been dealt with and not something that's left to the very end, you know, the week before the website launches, to say, Oh, by the way, this has to meet the WK 2.0 Double A standards for the... for our, for our, for our website, because it, because of the accessible Canada Act and the legislation that are provided within that and you signed a contract that said you deliver this. Like, you can't sneak it in at the end. It has to be, it's just like security, like if you, if you tried to go off and build a secure product, and you only did your security evaluations in the last week before your product launch, you know that would fail and you wouldn't see that as an acceptable thing to, to accomplish. Yet time and time again, governments are waiting to the very last minute to go off and address accessibility issues. And they're implementing it badly.

Ryan: 14:14

Yeah, and, you know, I've heard you make this point, you know, a number of times, Mike, and I think it's such an important one that that this, you know, accessibility, like you said, like security and a lot of these other considerations. They have to be part- it's a process, not a checklist, right? And we tend to think about these things in kind of a checklist format, where it's like a binary, is my website accessible or not? And I think you've often made the case that it's often not that much of a binary kind of decision. It's really this needs to be just part of your practice on an ongoing basis, both when you're developing tech, but also going to your point when you're maintaining it and doing the follow up in the evolution of it over time.

Mike Gifford: 14:49

And if I'm right in understanding, I mean, this is, this is a requirement now under the new legislation, right? Because for many years, the kind of internal policies, at least with the federal government in Canada only kind of looked at accessibility for, you know, citizens or the public. But I think, Mike, am I right in saying that, you'll know the details on this better than I do, the new legislation that came in a year or two ago makes this a requirement for internal tools as well?

Mike Gifford: 14:49

I mean, absolutely. It's, it's about knowing your audience. It's about trying to go off and make sure that you're... I mean, there are things that are black and white, but so much of accessibility is not, and is, it does require a matter of trying to know who are you building this for, and how can you just like use your experience, how can you try and, and build so that you're able to as best as possible support your, your audience. And one of the audiences that government regularly overlooks is their own staff. Public employees should have accessible interfaces, they should be supported in their the authoring process to make sure that what they're creating is as, as accessible as possible. There should be a proactive effort within the software that's being built to, to actually support authors who are creating content so that they're not, they're not having to be accessibility experts, when they're creating it, they're sort of given defaults that are, are good to go. And that they can just focus on creating the content, whether they have a disability or not, they can focus on creating the content in a way that allows them to get their job done.

Mike Gifford: 16:15

I think that the legislation is now three years old, at this point, the pandemic kind of compress things. But it's, but absolutely, the, the whole accessible Canada Act does have a, have a federal, Federal Employer sort of aspect that was not really part of the Supreme Court Act that the Donna Johanne case. So, so the Supreme Court decision was only affecting public facing websites, it did not affect the, the page, the, the content that are, that public, that public... I'm blanking on the name of the public employee... of a civil servant would be interesting. So is, it, you know, although there were, there's previous legislation around that there's like a 2002 act called the Duty to Accommodate which, which should have, have forced this in place that there was, was a requirement to try and make sure that we are buying digital technology that, that was, was accessible to begin with, and didn't need to be altered after the fact for for when, when, you know, somebody with disabilities gets gets engaged in a project. You know, I think that I've heard stories about, about people, you know, saying, "Well, you know, do we really need to deal with accessibility for, for our own, our own employees? We know that our staff doesn't have disabilities. And so, you know, do we need to pay this additional price to go off, make sure that, that the, the authoring interface is also accessible?" And it's like, well, you know what your staff are now, you don't actually know if they have disabilities that they have disclosed to you or not, you also don't know who your staff are going to be in a year's time when the software actually gets developed. And, you know, there's also a requirement as part of the accessible Canada Act to to hire 5000 new people with disabilities as part of the Government of Canada. And, you know, there may be a mandate to actually, you know, bring in people onto your team who have disabilities and to be a good role model for, for, for the, for the rest of Canada, on how we should be employing people with disabilities inside our organizations. Because that was really the intention of the Accessible Canada Act was to, to have the public sector be a role model for, for the rest of Canada. And if you compare the Government of Ontario and the Government of Canada, the Government of Ontario hires more people with disabilities per, you know, per population than the Government of Canada. So they're doing a better job than the government of Canada is around, you know, hiring people with disabilities? And it really... go ahead.

Ryan: 18:54

No, I'm not just gonna say I'm like, I mean, I think this is this is really important aspect, you know, when we're talking about government and for two purposes, right? One, government, unlike a private sector company, doesn't have that option of just picking one segment of the market that it's going to serve, right? I mean, it needs to provide services, information, for everybody, who are going to have a wide variety of needs. And then, you know, to the point, you're just making now, we also kind of, I think, have this notion that we want our government to kind of look like our citizenry in a whole bunch of ways, right? We want we want the public service to essentially be representative of the citizens that the public is serving. And if we don't have ways to be able to hire people who might have a whole variety of different accessibility, you know, concerns or challenges, then yeah, we're certainly limiting that ability to be represented. And we'll often talked about in digital government circles, how empathy is one of the most important, you know, skill sets, when it comes to building you know, user centered products that meet the needs of citizens. And it's tough to kind of build institutional empathy if the people in your institution aren't representative of the people that they're serving at the end of the day.

Mike Gifford: 19:57

Absolutely. It's so critical to having a functioning government in many ways, if you're building products for the citizens to be able to have a representation that allows for, for some knowledge, some internal knowledge of how the kinds of challenges that citizens are having, and that's something you can't get if everyone is working from an office with no disabilities in the National Capital Region, like we, we really have to be able to, to have a more diverse workforce, which includes having people with disabilities.

Ryan: 20:30

So you mentioned a minute ago about kind of government being being a leader, I want to actually just take a little bit of a different slant on this, one of the things I want to talk to you about also was, was we, what we kind of call sustainability for digital. And you know, we sometimes kind of think about, you know, online technology or digital technology in general, not necessarily it through the lens of carbon footprints, and you know, how it might contribute to climate change challenges. But the reality is, you know, as digital becomes a bigger part of our lives and society, it's taking up a bigger share of our electricity generation. And that at some point probably needs to factor in and historically really hasn't, curious to kind of get your thoughts on this. Cause I know this is something that you, you know, you think about and care about a lot is how do we kind of see sustainability issues being thought about in the context of building digital products?

Mike Gifford: 21:20

It is definitely happening in Europe, there's definitely big measures to do this. The, the government of France has done some really interesting work recently to try and introduce legislation that is, is raising awareness about the impact and trying to provide educational information around that. There was a great podcast that was looking at, at legislation around the world and efforts that are being, being done to try and bring in digital sustainability as part of that. I think, I think that, that in North America, I think that the government procurement has been along the lines of like buying post consumer recycled paper, that, that's sort of the, the mindset of procurement is like "Oh, as long as we just you know, reduce your amount of paper that we're consuming and buy post consumer, we're good". And because digital was seen as sort of the green alternative. But, but there are really huge environmental costs. The, the ICT, the Global Information Communication Technology emits more CO2 than, than the airline industry at this point. And it's growing exponentially. If you think of things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence, big data, you know, just even, just the number of pictures that people take, and I'm terribly, terribly responsible for taking a lot of pictures. But the number of pictures we take and where they go, there are being more pictures taken, you know, in the last few years, than than ever... than humanity has taken in its entire lifetime. Like it's, like, since our existence, we have more digital assets that are of our lives and, and that all has an impact because it has to be stored somewhere. And often it's not stored in something that is... that sitting sort of, you know, off, off of the, the internet, often it's stored in a live hard drive, that's that's running sort of perpetually and needs to be powered and maintained. And that, that we've got so much information where we're managing, but we're not thinking about it. We're not, it's not something that's right on our desk. So we don't we don't think about the internet beyond our phones and beyond sort of our devices, but, but it has a huge impact.

Ryan: 23:23

Well, and I think people underestimate, you know, just what the power requirements and cooling requirements of these massive data centers that essentially become the backbone of the internet and for a lot, a lot of the big companies and big you know, big cloud hosting services. I mean, these have huge impacts. And you know, one of the things that's kind of brought this to the forefront has been, you know, blockchain-based technology, which has been high on the hype cycle, but but I think it's fair to say, Mike, you know, certainly some of the implications, some of the implementations of blockchain I mean, Bitcoin being, I think the classic example, incredibly energy intensive, right?

Mike Gifford: 23:57

For sure. There's, there's been, I've heard stories about coal plants that were being decommissioned, but then became sort of brought back online just to go off and provide you know, cheap energy for, for, for Bitcoin and fo,r for mining for Bitcoin. And it's just, it seems so crazy that cryptocurrency would be, be responsible for so much additional CO2. But I think that the, I think there's, there's changes within the crypto market and it's uncertain where that's necessarily going to go. I think that right that the the focusing on crypto is not that it's illegitimate but it's, it's the... I think the bigger problem is tied to, to how we, we're dealing with technology in general. And just, just we're never like just deleting stuff. We're not really good at deleting stuff. It's always so much cheaper just to go off and get another terabyte of data storage somewhere than it is to try and and go through your old videos and figure out which of these videos are worthwhile keeping or not, or is this, or just the data files, like you can, Google has records on the minute, you know, actions and movements around me. And if I move my phone around, well, probably there's 30 or 40 apps on my phone that are, you know, keeping track of that movement. And do they ever delete that data? You know, what is the process that they take that and say, Well, this is no longer relevant for my... tracking my, the calories that I've consumed and waving my phone around, right? We, we are not used to deleting as a, as an industry and or for that matter, capturing the cost of environmental performance is an area that's starting to get some get some attention. But it's not necessarily that I mean, people sort of assume that we don't need to worry about performance, because we can just buy faster machines. And we can get faster bandwidth, the answer is all about getting more bandwidth. But, but if you even if you look at that, I mean, Canada is a huge country, and you don't have to travel very far outside of a major city to be without good internet access, whether that's in your home or whether that's, that's from your mobile device. So, so trying to go off and serve Canadians where they are, to some extent, it does mean that we're, we're having to scale back our expectations of how many megabytes of data can we transmit, transmit on an, on an individual page. And there's very little, the government Canada certainly is not looking at performance metrics and evaluating this, the US government, I think, will start to do this under the the the Inflation Reduction Act. So the IRA has a... is touching on some of this stuff. And it might start to begin to help people think about how they're managing their technology. So, so Biden is introducing some things around this, so there's hope with some of that, some of that work. But, but it's slow, and people are still much more used to just buying more RAM and assuming that's that, that those people who have have slow bandwidth will make make do with what they can.

Ryan: 27:01

Yeah, I mean, there's I think there's anecdotes you've shared with me before that, you know, in terms of this bloat of our digital tools and websites, that the average website now is bigger, I think you've said than the entire video game Doom when it came out back in the 90s. Right?

Mike Gifford: 27:17

Yeah, absolutely. And so much that is bloated stuff like CSS that is not being used, it's JavaScript third party JavaScript applications that somebody turned on at one point because they wanted to gather some information, and then forgot to look at. It's stuff that is not, not that useful. It's, it's images that have been uploaded at the full scale that they were taken, but not being reduced for the display that, that it's going to be rendered at. So you've got a four megabyte file load, being being loaded. And when it can be easily implemented or reduced down to the size you're dealing with, with a 20 kilobyte file. So it's just, it's just not thinking because people are doing what's easy.

Ryan: 27:56

You know, as we're starting to talk a little bit now about kind of, you know, what's under the hood and the code and how some of these tools get developed. I did want to talk to you about open source for a few minutes. Because, you know, I know, this is something that you've been passionate about throughout your entire career, you're a big advocate for open source software. Curious to get, you know, again, both, you know, in general, what is your read right now as to where we're at in terms of open source software being adopted into governments?

Mike Gifford: 28:23

There, there was really some good leadership from the Government of Canada 5-10 years ago, there was really momentum building to try and understand, embrace and and, you know, actually create some open source innovation within the government of Canada and working with vendors around that. As far as I can tell, that is mostly crumbled away. There still are a few people and a few departments that are managing that and are able to go from, to, to work with and understand open source tools. I mean, certainly Canadian Digital Services is absolutely one of them. So is the Stats Canada is another sort of example of places that have have a... a team of people that understand how to go off and work with and use open source software. In general, though, the government of Canada seems to be behind other legislations that I'm in touch with. The US is doing a lot of interesting stuff. I was, I was on a access- an accessibility call in the Drupal community. And, and noticed that there were, you know, I think there were five different contractors who were on the call from different digital agencies that were working on how to go off and improve a Drupal's accessibility and engaged with that. And I've never seen that before, but they're all working for US government contracts, and they were involved in trying to improve that. That's not something that I see, have heard at all, in the Government of Canada. There's no real investment with the open source tools, open source communities that they're working with. In Europe, there's some really interesting work being done around open source. Even just looking at, at little Luxembourg. Luxembourg has has less than 700,000 people and the types of open source tools that they have produced around accessibility are far better than anything I've seen the government of Canada produce, and we have a much bigger population a much bigger budget.

Ryan: 30:06

Yep.

Mike Gifford: 30:06

And are just not, not living up to that. We're, we're looking at what, what's ,what solutions we can buy from large vendors. And often those are large vendors that are from the US or Europe, we're not looking at how to support small businesses, we're not looking at how to, how open source can be used as an innovation engine both with civic tech and with the the Government of Canada. But also with with the Canadian economy, we're always going to be a small if best medium player in the in the globe in terms of our tech- technology. So rather than trying to go off and hope to get another Shopify, it'd be really good if we were actually thinking about how do we work with other small and medium players and build open source tools that allow us to innovate and customize, and play on a global scale using open source technology, so that we're not having to sort of build it all in house. So that we can try and build an ethos of proudly found elsewhere. So, so I think, yeah, we've we've got this mindset that we have to do it all ourselves, and that we have to either buy it from the best, which is IBM and Microsoft, which you never got fired for buying IBM, right? And, or, or your, you, you've got a crack team and you build a custom code base that you're then hopefully going to be able to go off and maintain for a few years and run it. But you know, neither of those solutions really works very well.

Ryan: 31:24

Right.

Mike Gifford: 31:25

Yeah. Especially when you're dealing with wicked problems, and accessibility, security, performance, sustainability, like those are all wicked problems, you know, user built- usability, like, you know, all these things require a lot of thinking, a lot of time, a lot of effort and, and open source tools are one way to try and get to that to leapfrog ahead of other solutions. You know, Drupal is as good as it is on accessibility, because not just my involvement, but the involvement of like a vast community of really smart people have thought deeply about different design patterns, what works, what doesn't, how does that work in context? And, and they're just frankly, you know, yeah, they're, it's not trivial to go off and to, to build a solution that is as accessible as Drupal is, if you're starting from scratch, right? If you're not starting with a, a whole team of accessibility people focused exclusively on how to go off and, and learn best practices that are applicable today.

Ryan: 32:22

Yeah, and, you know, I think you're getting at something that's really interesting to me kind of conceptually, because I think when we talk about procurement, we traditionally think about either we're buying something, usually a proprietary property, you know, or service of some sort, or we're building as you said, totally in house. But open source really is that middle ground, where it is kind of almost a community, you know, based effort of, you know, decentralized network of people who are maintaining that codebase. And you might be able to fork it and be able to build something kind of unique on top of that. But it's, but the business model for that's very different. Right. And I mean, I'd be curious your sense on this, but my hunch is part of why we've had such a big problem bringing open source into government in a real way, probably one, there's a bit of a skill set issue of maybe some of the existing IT staff in government who may be not as familiar with open source, though I know that's not true across the board, I see lots of open source advocates, you know, kind of buried in departments in different places. But my kind of hunch, and I'd be curious, your thought on this, Mike, is that it's just because that business model is so different for open source, I think it's been tough to kind of like collectively for governments to wrap their head around how to even, like, approach that.

Mike Gifford: 33:27

I would agree. And it's not like most governments around the world really intuitively come to this. I think Canada has some some unique challenges in terms of our staffing or how we deal with technology, and that there was a real effort to outsource a lot of that, that technical know-how to staffing agencies or HR staffing agencies are so much part of the Canadian tech IT government equation. And these are firms that, that often employ people in positions working alongside government employees, for you know, years, if not decades, trying to go off and work on various different tech programs. And these are generally people that, that neither have an investment in the IT, nor do they have any investment in, in the success of the project in some ways, like their bums in the seats. They are being paid based on their ability to sit and sit in front of a screen for X number of hours. And that's how their, their profit and their ingenuity is, is, is being, being run. So there's no real incentives to go off and to build intellectual property that either benefits innovation within that HR staffing agency, or for that matter with the Government of Canada because, because generally the government doesn't, it actually often gives away the intellectual property to an agency that doesn't want to do anything with it because their their business model is bums in the seat. So it's like until we sort of crack that, that model of HR staffing agencies and realize that, that, that we need to actually build people and build knowledge and expertise inside government, that our public facing or public employees that, that actually care about these technical issues and the problems that are... that these departments are trying to solve, then, and hiring agencies like Civic Actions that have a, are impact driven companies that really want to see government succeed, that are working to try and, and, and have part of our DNA, that, that business model of trying to say, we want to invest in government and bring the best and brightest that we can bring onto our teams to actually make sure that, that leveraging open source technology that we can help governments succeed. And we can do that in a way collaboratively with them. And with other organizations, like we're part of an organization called the Digital Services Coalition, that, that is, that has... you know, it's quite a bit, I'm not sure if it's 20 or 30, different organizations that are part of, of actually I think it's closer to 40 different agencies that are working on, on, working with government contractors, and are working as government contractors to try and improve the front facing digital government implementations. And these are small businesses that work together and collaborate with, within government contracts to try and build, build solutions that, that ultimately serves government and citizens better. So it certainly is possible.

Ryan: 36:31

And no, thanks, Mike. I think those those are probably some great kind of closing words as, as we wrap this up, but this has been a really, you know, excellent discussion, and I appreciate you taking the time to share with us, you know, your your, your thoughts and experiences and views on this. I think these are really important aspects for kind of tech in general. But I think particularly when we're talking about the how governments are using and bringing in technology into its work, these considerations around accessibility, sustainability, open source are, you know, core to this and kind of keep coming up. So thanks so much, Mike, great having you with us.

Ryan: 37:04

You know, it's really easy to get caught up in the newest, flashiest technology. But when it comes to digital in the public sector, well, we've got to make sure that everybody is able to be included, is able to benefit from it, is able to access it. And that's where details matter. That's where expertise matters. So I'm really grateful that people like Mike are focusing on these issues and making sure that happens, and are able to engage with government and the private sector to bridge that gap. And truly make technology work for everybody. I'm so happy that Mike was able to join us for today's conversation. So what do you think? We'd love to hear from you reach out to us on social media, you can use the #letsthink igital, or email us at podcast@thinkdigital.ca. And remember, as always, if you've liked what you've heard today, please share it with colleagues and friends who might be interested in diving into some of these topics a little bit further. Give us a five star review on your favorite podcast app. And be sure to like and subscribe if you're watching on YouTube. Today's episode was produced by myself, Wayne Chu and Mel Han. Thanks so much for listening and let's keep thinking digitally.