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La version française est en dessous de l’anglais 👇

Hi there! My name is Gillian, and I am the UX Design Fellow that is part of the 5th cohort working at Code for Canada to improve digital governance. Alongside my teammates Malik Jumani (Product Manager Fellow) and Ian Cappellani (Developer Fellow), we are working with the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) to improve the tools that Canadians use to participate in hearings regarding energy projects regulated by the CER.

To learn more about us, click here.

During my first week of work at Canada Energy Regulator (CER), I brought up the idea of scheduling weekly design critiques with the rest of the designers on the Digital Transformation Team. We discussed whether or not we should create a separate channel to get feedback on our work outside of our weekly critiques.

One of my colleagues suggested to avoid creating our own private design channel because the CER is working towards breaking down silos amongst different teams and create an open working environment. An example of this can be found in the Government of Canada Digital Playbook.

While everyone agreed that keeping our design channel open was a good direction to go with, another colleague made a great point from a different perspective. She said that just because we open all our channels for everyone to view, does not necessarily mean it will help us break down silos or contribute to information transparency.

There are two key points she provided according to her learnings from the book Data Feminism:

Information overload is a huge problem. Expecting people to keep up with a firehose of information on all projects is unreasonable, and it becomes easy to hide information under the guise of transparency. I’d argue it’s more transparent to do the work to provide accessible, plain-language summaries of key information. (The playbook seems to be in line with this, as it suggests specific types of information to share).

It’s important to have safe spaces to work out decisions and sift through the information to find what’s relevant. It’s also important to have some control over when to invite feedback from others so that you have the bandwidth to incorporate it.

Her feedback facilitated further discussion.

A third designer on the team provided their perspective on things:

As someone who receives and takes information, I want to be exposed to all information, but also have the choice to filter information that is not relevant to my work.

If a designer doesn’t feel safe to share with the larger group, then one could share it in a private chat or a smaller group meeting. Personal judgement calls on this as it depends on the project too.

Personally, I would like it if someone wanted to give feedback outside our group — not expecting it though. It will be the designer’s/team’s responsibility to respond and explain why we should or should not implement their feedback. It is good practice for us to really think about our design. I get a lot out of this in my experience. Non-designers sometimes have good points that us designers have not thought about. Also, most of our work will eventually be exposed to the larger group, so the sooner we get the feedback the better.

Everyone provided different thoughts on what it means to work in the open. From my experience, sometimes I get valuable tidbits of information when I am a part of many different channels. However, having a constant and continuous flow of information doesn’t help either. In fact, according to Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, if you are constantly skimming and scanning over information, the content doesn’t get stored into your long-term memory. Therefore, it begs the question, is forgotten information useful or helpful?

Another part of working in the open is having a place where everyone can easily find and access the files they may need. My fellowship team and I quickly learned the importance of file organization and how it impacts searchability. We had to organize and figure out file naming conventions early on in our fellowship. This way, files can be easily understood and navigable from someone outside our team.

Sometimes we don’t always have the files we need or know where to begin looking for it. We would then need to ask around, which might be a barrier to working in the open.

From our discussions, I believe creating open channels is only one piece to breaking down silos and aligning with the Government of Canada Digital Playbook. While we haven’t fully nailed down the perfect approach to working in the open, we are taking an agile and iterative approach to see what might work best.

Most recently, we have been seeing non-designers join our weekly design meetings. Many saw the value of receiving early feedback on the problems they were trying to solve. They got fresh perspectives on potential ways to approach their project.

What is your team’s approach to working in the open? What has worked best for you so far? What hasn’t worked? How has Covid-19 impacted the way you collaborate with your teammates?
 

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Le travail ouvert : quelle est l’approche de la Régie de l’énergie du Canada?

Lors de ma première semaine de travail à la Régie, j’ai proposé d’organiser des séances hebdomadaires de critique avec les autres concepteurs de l’équipe de la transformation numérique. Nous avons aussi discuté de la possibilité de créer un canal distinct pour recueillir des commentaires sur notre travail en dehors de ces séances hebdomadaires.