Ryan 0:04

I'm Ryan Androsoff, welcome to Let's Think Digital. As much as we talk on this podcast about transforming and modernizing governments and bureaucracies, we can't ignore the role of the private sector, which is often working in very embedded ways with government when it comes to all things digital, whether it's the role of private tech firms and consultants and their complex and sometimes contested relationship with governments, or the impact of economic, technological and yes, even diplomatic power of big tech. There's an increasing level of skepticism about the role the tech companies are playing. Their power and influence in society, and lingering questions about if we've struck the right balance. In fact, our guest this week has written a book called The Information Trade about the metamorphosis of big tech from simply companies with market power to entities that can mimic or act like states in their own right. Dr. Alexis Wieckowski is a professor of practice at Columbia University, where she teaches the next generation of leaders about the intersections of technology and public service. Her experience is drawn from years in government, including serving as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the City of New York, Associate Commissioner for New York City's Department of Veteran Services, and various roles within the US Department of State and the US Mission to the United Nations. So it's safe to say she is the perfect person to talk about the rising power of the global tech companies and how governments can keep up with an ever changing landscape. I had the pleasure of speaking with Alexis at the Forward50 conference in Ottawa last November. In our wide ranging conversation, we spoke about the capacity of bureaucracies to drive digital transformation, the competencies needed in government to thrive in the digital era, and how governments can adapt to the growing power of big tech in society. Before we start the interview, I just want to take a minute to thank all of our new subscribers on YouTube. We've had a surge of new YouTube subscribers over the holidays, and we started off the new year having officially crossed the 1000 subscriber mark. We now have listeners to this podcast in over 60 countries around the world. Thanks so much to everyone for helping us to reach this milestone. Your engagement and support really makes our work on this podcast worthwhile. I'd ask you to please continue to help us by spreading the word so we can grow our audience and expand the reach of the conversations that we're having on this podcast. And now on to my interview with Dr. Alexis Wieckowski. I hope you enjoy our conversation. So welcome back. We're here again on the conference room floor at Forward50, and I'm really excited to be with Dr. Alexis Wieckowski from Columbia University. Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Alexis W 3:02

Thank you so much. Im so happy to be here!

Ryan 3:04

Likewise. And so you know you're up here at Forward50. You just came off running a workshop, a very interesting one around, I think, the role that governments play in times of crisis and how they can be resilient. Tell us a little bit about what brought you here to Ottawa, and in particular, what you've been talking about here at Forward50.

Dr. Alexis W 3:21

Happily. So the ruse was that we were going to talk about governments in times of crisis. And what I was actually using was that as a way to talk about how we tell the stories of government in a way that people care. The name of the talk was A Sexy Page Turner About Bureaucracy, which, amazingly, they let me keep. I first started writing about this with that title when I was at the US Department of State in 2014, it did not get approved. But the idea is that its government does so many things really well, especially when people need it most in crises. But the story doesn't always get told or it's not the dominant narrative.

Ryan 3:59

Well, it's always, yeah, it's always the thing that doesn't happen, that doesn't get, doesn't get reported, right? Doesn't make the headlines. But as you say, is so important, right? Because there's so many things, so many disasters that we prevent from happening sometimes that nobody gets credit for.

Dr. Alexis W 4:15

Exactly. And one of the challenges with that is both internal and external. So inside government, you can be working on a project for a really long time, or trying to solve a really thorny problem, and it can be exhausting and kind of defeating sometimes to also then have the public have this narrative that government is incompetent. So part of it is to help people inside government remember that they're part of something bigger. They're part of a story about serving others and making the world better in their way. And part of it is that people in government now aren't going to be there forever. We need new people who want to join government, and it's harder to kind of sell that idea if it has a bad rap.

Ryan 4:54

Yeah, and they, I think people need to be inspired to come there, right? I mean, my experience has been, you know, you find folks who are in the tech sector or design fields, you know, data science. I mean, they want to work on meaningful, interesting problems. And I think sometimes that is a sales pitch the government can make to attract talent that they don't do a very good job of.

Dr. Alexis W 5:14

Yeah, it's also this is sort of where public servants are a victim of their own success. We learn how to be part of a bigger process, and not how to be about our own egos. We're part of a team. We're part of a huge system, and that humility is what lets us get that work done. That humility is also what makes it hard for us to brag about our successes, so to speak. So it's a tricky skill. It can be learned, and that's one of the things I was hoping to achieve in the workshop is just offer a couple of different kind of quick tricks and tips on, how do you tell the story of what you're doing in ways that people remember?

Ryan 5:49

Yeah, such, such an important skill set around this. Speaking of telling stories, was curious to get you to tell the story a little bit about some of your past work. I know you spent time working for the city of New York as a Deputy Chief Technology Officer. You've mentioned you work for the Federal Government and the State Department. You know, I'm wondering if you've got any particular lessons that you have taken away, you know, now into your teaching work, which we'll come to in a minute, from your time kind of working in the system to drive digital transformation forward.

Dr. Alexis W 6:19

Absolutely, and this is also one of the things that's a lot easier to see now with some distance. One of the things we talked a lot about in the workshop is that crisis helps to, number one, tell a good story, but it also helps to get things done. So we may have been trying to get, for instance, in the city of New York when I was Deputy CTO, that role started prior to the pandemic, and to get people to even use shared documents in the cloud like Google Doc was difficult. There were still people that were only using attachments. There was all kinds of problems. And then overnight with COVID, we were going from nervousness about the cloud to everyone working completely remotely and using things like Zoom and Teams. So sometimes the crisis just accelerates a whole layer of change. One of the other things, though, that really struck me during my time in the city is that because crisis helps get everyone focused and makes things happen quickly, some people, and this is I confess something, I also used sometimes myself, once I figured it out, learn how to make something feel like a crisis, even when it's not, maybe actually a crisis. One of the examples of this is that I worked as a press officer for a while. It was very difficult to get leadership to pay attention to something that needed to happen if it didn't seem like it was going to be publicly known about. So I would work with my colleagues to try to figure out, how do we present this to leadership who have so little time to think about what they need to prioritize? How do we present it in a way that feels urgent? So turning, you know, a non crisis, into that kind of crisis-feeling things to make it easier for them to get behind it.

Ryan 7:58

Yeah, well, and I think you're right, that sense of urgency is important to drive things forward. And if you don't actively nurture that sense of urgency, it is easy, when you're in the big bureaucratic machine, to just get kind of caught in that endless, the endless spin cycle. I'm, you know, you're bringing up COVID, and you know that that kind of burst of innovation, I mean, we saw this here in Canada to, you know, things like doing video conferencing, which seems pretty simple now. Well, five years ago, most public servants didn't have access to it from their computers at work, right? And you know, things that people said would take years miraculously happened in days or weeks when it was pushed. I worry, though a little bit. I certainly see this here in Canada, where we're seeing some backsliding, though, right, like we've gotten through that crisis period, and now some of the old ways of working are kind of coming back, because these organizations have so much inertia behind them. I'm wondering if you have any kind of perspective on one, are you seeing the same thing happening in the US? But secondly, how do we stop that, like, once we have that crisis moment, how do we make that change sustainable over time?

Dr. Alexis W 9:03

This is always, I think, one of the key challenges in government is, how do you institutionalize a change that doesn't just get kind of thrown out with the next administration, or because one group of public servants retires and the next ones don't have the same priorities? I'm going to take this a different way, actually, which is not just about sustaining the changes that you bring, come about during a crisis, but which of them do we actually want to keep? So one of the things about crises that's great is you can get a bunch of stuff, excuse me, done very quickly, but there's not a lot of time for reflection about what is this, what kind of toll is this taking on us? So for instance, during the pandemic, because of Zoom, there was no requirement to have travel time between meetings. So instead of having four to five meetings a day where I walked to different offices or coffee shops, I would have 12 back to back to back to back to back. And I think we were all in a moment where that needed to happen, and we understood that. But I find that the expectation of that has not gone away, and I see a lot more burnout now than I had in the past. So I think there's both the resistance to work at crisis levels for a long time, but also trying to find that middle ground where we can keep what worked and also reclaim a little bit of that necessary downtime to think clearly about what we're doing.

Ryan: 10:25

Yeah, that's a great point. Well, I guess maybe kind of extending this theme a little bit as we think about building capacity in organizations. You teach at Columbia University, you're doing work around technology management, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the teaching you do in some of the programs that you run at Columbia?

Dr. Alexis W: 10:42

Absolutely. So my history at Columbia has actually been over a decade. I worked full time in several government positions and started teaching as a part time instructor, as an adjunct, first at the policy school at SIPA, and most of the students there wanted to work in government. So it was very seamless. I made the transition to the Masters of Science Program on Technology Management, which is a very different kind of student body focused on working in the tech industry. So one of the things that I introduced, and somehow they hired me to do it, was to introduce some of these concepts, from civic tech and tech for good practices, into kind of the leadership training for tech operations and for sector organizations, and also startups and nonprofits as well. And one of the reasons for this is government has a lot of reach and can do a lot of things, but the private sector has a lot more reach and does a lot more. So if we can get the people who are leading both government entities and private entities to think about, how do I lead ethically? How do I think about the potential risks of some of the decisions that we're making? My favorite question to ask my students is, "What could possibly go wrong?" needs to be a question at every stage of development. So I think that this is a new kind of area that we're looking into is, how do we make sure that we're not just starkly dividing the public sector and the private sector, but making sure that we're all thinking about, how do we do better leading technology operations.

Ryan: 12:12

I had done my education in public policy, and I had an interest in digital and online engagement and how that intersected, but I often thought there was this divide between, you know, policy folks and those in the more technical disciplines that they didn't cross over and, you know, and there's been a lot of commentary recently, you know, power of big tech platforms, you know, things like social media platforms that I think, you know, you get software engineers who are like, de facto making policy decisions, not because they're doing it maliciously, but because, with the lack of any kind of forethought of that at kind of a corporate level, you're essentially embedding policy decisions in code, right? Like the way an algorithm decides what to serve up to you has real far reaching impacts. But I think a lot of folks who come through a technology discipline background don't get that type of training, because they're actually really exciting to see that you're see that you're bringing that in.

Dr. Alexis W: 13:03

No, and you make an excellent point, too, that when you think about the way that people approach coding and any sort of engineering kind of skill set or process, they're optimizing for one thing or another. And in technology, they're generally optimizing for efficiency. You want things to go fast and you want them to be able to do more in that period of time with as minimal loss or error as possible. When you're in policy, you're not optimizing for speed, and you're optimizing for a different kind of outcome that's a little bit squishier and harder to measure. So I think this is something that we can learn from each other, the policy folks and the sort of software developers and engineers is, how do we think about the way that we optimize and how that framework influences all the decisions that we make.

Ryan: 13:50

Absolutely, and so the students who are coming through your program, are they typically going into tech firms, into kind of technology leadership roles?

Dr. Alexis W: 13:59

So that's the idea. And this is something that I, this is a role I stepped into as program director for the Masters of Science and Tech management just a year ago. And when I came in, the program had very much been focused on people who wanted to work in the private sector, especially a lot of the bigger multinational organizations. And I brought in some, you know, there's a lot of digital leadership, kind of competencies that apply equally in the public and private sector. One of the things that I had started to introduce was these questions, these ethical questions of what kinds of things do we need to think about, not once a product is launched and started to do damage, but at the very beginning, from its very idea of its initial prototypes. So we've really redesigned the program to infuse ethics in all of the courses, not as a standalone elective that you could ignore or not take, but every single course has to have at least some element that focuses on the ethics of that particular topic, whether it's tech and the law or accounting and finance for tech. All of them have to have some element that addresses this question of, is this the right thing to do? It just because we can build it, should we? And what could be the negative impacts of that?

Ryan: 15:12

So what's the reaction to students to the curriculum, right? Like, because, I imagine, like, some of them are probably coming from technical backgrounds into the program where they probably haven't had a lot of exposure to this type of content, like, is there, is, are people embracing it? Is there, is there resistance to it? I'm sure it varies a little bit, but I'd be kind of curious what you know, this is a relatively new program, if I understand, right? You know, what has that reaction been like?

Dr. Alexis W: 15:35

So I'm on a, I'm on cycle one, so I have a sample size of one to draw my conclusions from, but it does seem to be playing itself out, and I think makes sense, there are sort of phases, so it's not so much about which students react in which way. When people come in, there's expectations all over the map, because they have all kinds of different backgrounds, and they're starting a graduate program, which is an adjustment from from working just having homework again. So in the beginning of that first month of the semester, there's a lot of confusion in general about, how do I be a graduate student? Why is this so hard? Why, like, this isn't like college, you know, was, and then also, is this the program I think it is? And so questions about that, how is this going to help me get my dream job? So over the course of the program, it becomes very clear we're not telling you how this is going to get your dream job any more than we can tell you exactly the formula to be a leader, because the higher up you go in any sort of leadership role, the more uncertainty you're going to be dealing with. We're going to give you skills and tools and help you work through this process, but this is fundamentally a program where we're helping support and guide you through your own leadership discovery process. How are you going to lead in the way that best takes use of your strengths and skills? So by the end, I think everybody kind of gets there, and it's exciting. In the beginning, there's a lot of I'm not sure about this.

Ryan: 15:35

Right, a bit of a journey that they have to go through on that. So I imagine, you know, part of the ambition behind a program like this, as you said, is to kind of transfer some of these mindsets into tech companies, right, who maybe have not thought about this as part of their DNA. So this is an area you've done research on, you've written on, you wrote a book kind of looking at the power of big tech companies. And I thought one of the really interesting pieces that you kind of framed it at was this idea that a lot of tech companies essentially are de facto nation states today. Wonder if you can kind of unpack that a little bit for people, because I think it's a very interesting concept.

Dr. Alexis W: 17:39

Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting too, both because I started the first draft of this, an article about this idea tech companies behaving in ways that are sort of like countries of nation states. Several years before I was able to get it published, it seemed sort of, I think, implausible at the time, and by the time the book came out, it was still more surprising to people than I thought it would be, and even now I'm, I feel like it's not, it's not a surprise to anyone, because Tech has become such a massive player in all kinds of affairs around the world. But it's just a reminder that technology is not just business as usual or a business as other businesses would be, we think about a multinational, powerful organization that reaches every country. McDonald's is in every country. Coca Cola is sold in every country. They don't have counter terrorism teams. They're not making policy. So this is one of the things that's unique to, I think, technology and the big tech specifically, but it's also this question that means that we're in an unchartered territories. We know how to deal with large corporations, and because over hundreds of years, we've had them, and governments have had ways to manage them, this is the first time that we've seen anything like the technology giants that we have today, where every single person's daily life is in some way intertwined with a few companies. So how we manage them and keep that power in check is just not clear.

Ryan: 19:11

Well, I was going to ask you exactly that is, you know what, what is your view on how we approach this, right? Because, you know, I feel, as you rightly said, like some of these big tech platforms and companies, it's actually very tough to in 2024 imagine life without them, right? They have become so ingrained in our societies and our economies, you know. And I know there's obviously action happening in the EU and some in the US, around antitrust cases and looking at, you know, whether we should be breaking up some of these companies. And I just, I on one level, I actually don't know how practical some of that is, right, and how you disentangle that so, you know, there may not be kind of a silver bullet answer to this, but what's your thought on, like, how we actually approach this? And you know, if we were, if we were looking at what the world looks like 10 years from now, like, what, what to you, is kind of an ideal evolution of this kind of power imbalance that seems to exist today?

Dr. Alexis W: 20:03

You make an excellent point, and every government uses the technology platforms and services that are run by these companies that they would then break up. So, there's this kind of conundrum about how do you regulate them or put them back in their sort of more manageable sized box when you need them so desperately just to function. So that's challenge number one, and for that reason, regulations have traditionally been a good way to approach reining in business practices. Fines have often been effective, especially the massive ones we're seeing coming from the EU right now. But if you're a trillion dollar company, even fines of billions of dollars. It's not necessarily going to change their trajectory and fundamentally change their approaches.

Ryan: 20:47

At some level, becomes the cost of doing business, right?

Dr. Alexis W: 20:49

Exactly, exactly. It's just part of what you put in your budget. One of the things that I've advocated for because of that, and because of my time at the State Department, is not just the sticks, but the carrots. So how do we learn from diplomacy as ways that we can engage with these tech giants as partners in collaboration? We've seen some successful instances of this. For instance, after the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, in which a lot of it was orchestrated through Facebook. Facebook and a number of other social media companies worked with the governments in New Zealand and others to create a sort of new process for how they would collaborate on sharing data on the back end, so to make sure that content that popped up on one platform wasn't going to proliferate on a bunch of others, leading to these kinds of horrible, horrible outcomes. So there's precedent for governments and big tech working together in partnership, not as many as there could be. So we have seen progress here. Most countries now have a tech ambassador, so someone who's actually representing their country to tech as if it were a country. But an ambassador can only do so much. Look at our diplomatic corps. The ambassador is just one person. I think we need a lot more tech diplomats.

Ryan: 22:03

I mean, do you, you're giving me a couple of different thoughts, right? And I have almost divergent thoughts on where this could go. I mean, do you see a world where big tech companies essentially have a pseudo diplomatic presence, like where we're actually kind of bringing them in to be part of what were traditionally kind of nation state organizations because of the influence they have? Or do you think that's kind of a dystopian future that, you know, we don't want to have the big tech companies sitting at UN committees, you know, and we want to deal with them differently. Because I'm kind of almost of two minds of that.

Dr. Alexis W: 22:36

So it's an excellent question, and I don't really have a satisfying answer in that number one, there already are representatives from big tech sitting on UN committees. Microsoft opened its UN Office with one of the former tech ambassadors, Casper Kling, several years ago.

Ryan: 22:52

So they have an office at the UN? Really, I didn't realize that

Dr. Alexis W: 22:55

United Nations and at the EU and we're not, and that's just Microsoft. So most of the big tech companies now have, they may call them something else, sort of the public policy arm.

Ryan: 23:08

Certainly domestically, in most major countries will have a public policy team, lobbying and so advocacy.

Dr. Alexis W: 23:14

But this is not specifically just for lobbying. This is also to make sure that there's a counterpart. So when I interviewed some tech ambassadors for my book, one of the things they mentioned was, when they first got to Silicon Valley, they went to some of the big tech companies. They sent the tech companies would send, like an intern to meet them, because they just didn't know what to do with somebody who was at that level. By now, they understand this is not this is not insignificant, to have an ambassador show up at your door. So they've created roles that kind of, in effect, act like a diplomatic counterpart, whether they call it something different or not. So this question about what's going to happen, it already is happening, in some ways, the question of whether it should happen, my opinion, is that better that than the alternative, which is going back to where nobody was talking to anybody. So I'm not really sure where things will go, but I do think that whatever form it takes,

Ryan: 24:07

We need more engagement.

Dr. Alexis W: 24:08

More engagement, more dialog, exactly.

Ryan: 24:10

So then the other side of that question, so that's the engagement side, which I would maybe kind of say is the carrot side of the equation. So we go to the stick side of the equation on more regulatory action. So, you know, part of the reality is, at least within kind of the Western ecosystem, a lot of the big tech companies are US based. And I wonder your perspective on, like, is there appetite for the US government to actually do more restrictive regulations? Because ultimately, I mean, we talk about this in Canada sometimes, you know, we, you may have been following a little bit around, around, kind of the media and kind of essentially, kind of media taxes to journalists on Facebook and other platforms, and Canada's trying to push them a certain direction. But there's kind of a collective action problem, right? Because, you know, we're a relatively small market economically, to some degree, they can kind of ignore us if they wanted to and from a pure kind of legal basis, because a lot of these companies are based on US soil. I think you would ultimately need the US government to step in if they want. You think there's political will from the US side of this to actually enact bigger types of regulations?

Dr. Alexis W: 25:15

I think that we do have the will in the US, but it's manifesting in different ways and in different countries, because, as you said, most of them are based in the US, especially the giant ones, and also because government, at least actually, I would say at every level of government uses all of these tech products and services just to function. We do see state by state regulations starting to emerge that are pretty stringent. So California has been the leader, for instance, in regulating technology use, not quite as intensively as the EU, EU's sort of the gold standard for the globe, but pretty aggressively. And state by state, we're starting to see these kinds of things emerge. So I don't think it's a matter that there's no political will. I think that we have, it's Election Day in the US, so no surprise, there's a lot of difficulty to come to any sort of consensus in Washington. So I think at the state level is where we're going to see those regulations emerge first, and more of them are joining that by the day. Whether that piecemeal approach is enough, I'm not sure. I think this is one of those. 10 years ago, we might have had a chance, but yes, right now, at the size and scale of the tech operations, the state by state approach is probably our best bet.

Ryan: 26:29

It's interesting. You know, and then it also strikes me that you've got some countries around the world that, you know, essentially, are have a much more obviously directed approach I mean, I think about China, for example, which has a big tech industry, but in a very different kind of way, they tend to quite directly control their tech industry, but in some ways now that tech can almost be their ambassadorships out to the world, right, and and this notion of countries using technology as a form of diplomacy, I think is an interesting kind of evolution we've seen in the last decade or so.

Dr. Alexis W: 27:00

Absolutely, I mean, anything that a country has an exceptional kind of manifestation of has always been a great tool to leverage in diplomacy. We have sports diplomacy, we have kind of cuisine diplomacy. There's all kinds of different specializations where, my opinion, anything that gives people an incentive to talk to people from the other side is something we should embrace. And if it's because someone in New York City likes basketball and someone in Beijing likes basketball, great, if it's because we have AI researchers and they have AI researchers, great. So diplomacy, I think, is definitely what I would encourage above and beyond pretty much anything else regulations are needed that will come in time. I just don't think that that is in the foreseeable future for how we can change where things are going with tech.

Ryan: 27:52

Yeah, and so interesting. I mean, I think you know, you're, you're, you're kind of advocating this notion of, let's think about the regulatory responsibilities, but be realistic about the limitations, while saying if we can engage with each other, maybe we can steer some of that innovation in positive directions.

Dr. Alexis W: 28:08

Exactly, and it's also a matter of playing the long and short game at the same time, the regulation one. We need it, and it's not gonna happen tomorrow. In the meantime, let's try to work together.

Ryan: 28:18

Yeah, so, okay, so we've talked about the impact of big tech companies. I think the other thing we see a lot of in in this digital government space is also the impact of tech consultants, right? We've got a lot of kind of, you know, tech adjacent consulting firms, big multinational firms, you know, the management consultants. But also, you know, firms like IBM and others that do a lot of tech implementation in government, and I know certainly here in Canada, there's been a lot of discussion lately about the role that they play some of sometimes the kind of negative impacts that can happen, how to properly balance that relationship. I'm wondering you know, both in the course of your work and the research you do now, how do you see that issue playing into this? And how do you, where do you think the right balance is on, on how government works with outside experts?

Dr. Alexis W: 29:07

It's really hard. Is the short answer. One of the things that's unique to technology, I think, over any other sector, is that if you bring the talent in house who are specialists in a particular coding skill or system, very soon, they're going to become out of date. They're going to become out of touch with what's happening in the industry itself, just by the kind of cloister nature of a lot of what things happen in government. On the same time, if you only bring in consultants, you don't have any of that in house talent who's prioritizing the mission of government. If you're a consultant, your mandate is to ensure that you can bring in the contracts that pay the money. But one of the things about having a civil service, a public service cadre who is in it for the long haul, is that that commitment to serving citizens and the commitment to the mission is first and foremost in everything that they do. So I think that there needs to be some sort of combination. One of the things that I think would be a really interesting model is doing sort of exchange programs or sabbaticals, where technologists and government would take six months a year of secondment to work in a private sector tech company, make sure they're up to speed on what's happening, and vice versa, where you have folks coming in from the outside to understand the reasons that things don't happen at the same speed and rate in the government as they do outside. It's not because everybody in government is obstructive. It's complex. So I think these kinds again, diplomacy exchanges would be really beneficial.

Ryan: 30:38

Absolutely, yeah. And I think, you know, we've seen some examples I think of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program in the US, kind of a famous example of bringing technologists into government, which I know in many cases, they were supposed to come for, like, six months or year long tour of duties and many of them kind of enjoyed it that they stayed long term. But I find it's tougher to go the other direction. I find, you know, both a lot of government employees don't think about going into the private sector, or certainly into the tech sector. And, you know, maybe I would go as far to say I think sometimes maybe the tech sector isn't as open to the idea of bringing in public sector employees in on tours of duty, which again, makes me kind of think about some of the teaching and work you do at Columbia, where in some ways you're trying to bridge that gap a little bit.

Dr. Alexis W: 31:20

Yeah, I think that this is sort of the only option left to us. Is we need to think about every and possible way that we can create collaborations and bridges and cross cultural understanding if we think about the private and public sector and technology. Anything that works, let's try it, if it's diplomacy, if it's partnerships, if it's people from the public sector teaching private sector folks on technology leadership, or vice versa, I think we all need that kind of equal fluency, and that's one of the things that I talk a lot about with the program, is that we are training leaders to be equally fluent in Technology Operations, Business Functions and Ethical Leadership. And with those three elements, I think we have our best chance of having technology that's in the future going to be less harmful, more supportive of democracies, and hopefully also that we don't have to regulate and fine as much.

Ryan: 32:18

Right. No, I like that idea, that concept of fluency, I think is really important, right? Because I think sometimes we do talk past each other, we don't understand each other's worlds. And being able to build that human connection is a big part of that. Speaking of human connections, you're here at Forward50, which is always a really interesting gathering of both folks from across Canada but around the world who are working in these civic technology spaces, what has stood out for you from the conversations over the past few days here at the conference?

Dr. Alexis W: 32:47

So I just want to make it official and clear I'm one of Forward50's biggest fans. I think that it's really easy when you're working in any sort of government agency to feel that you're alone in what you're doing. And so to come to these kinds of environments and realize that we're all facing very similar challenges, even across very different contexts and cultures and countries, it's it's both inspiring and comforting to know that there's a community and Forward50 really creates all these different experiences for that community to come together. So the workshop that I led today, people were from both regional and federal systems here in Canada and abroad, and also people from the private sector and from academia nonprofits. So any way that we can kind of come together and share those stories and hear just from the incredible expertise that they bring together for the speakers, it's just amazing. I, one of the things I love most about coming here is, so I'm a professor, I teach, I do a lot of talks. It's so great to sit in the audience and just soak it in and hear brilliant people talk about what they're doing and take notes. And it makes me feel like I leave here rejuvenated and inspired, and I just kind of can't wait for the next year. If they could do a Forward50 once a month, I think we'd all be better.

Ryan: 34:05

Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's, there's a huge demand for that. And, and I feel the same way, right? You know, sometimes it can be a lonely business trying to push this digital transformation boulder up the hill, so to speak. And, you know, and that ability to kind of refill the gas tank is important to have every once in a while.

Dr. Alexis W: 34:22

Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: 34:23

Yeah. Alexis, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation.

Dr. Alexis W: 34:27

Thank you for having me.

Ryan: 34:28

Yeah, and look forward to seeing you at future editions of this.

Dr. Alexis W: 34:31

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Ryan: 34:32

Thank you, pleasure. Thanks to Alexis for taking some time while she was here in Ottawa to speak to us. It was a really fascinating conversation. We've posted links to her research in the show notes. I highly recommend you check it out, and that's the show for this week. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe, and if you're listening on your preferred podcast app, please leave us a five star rating and review. We always love hearing from our listeners, so get in touch by emailing us at [email protected], visiting our website, letsthinkdigital.ca or using the #letsthinkdigitital on social media. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode of Let's Think Digital was produced by myself, Wayne Chu and Aislinn Bornais. Thanks so much for listening, and let's keep thinking digital.