Believelander in DC helping governments serve people better. Not here anymore — moved to @aaronsnow.net on https://xitter.cf/t.co/fdIoig8gDY
Joined March 2008
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It was an honor to serve as CEO of the Canadian Digital Service. Some reflections on @CDS_GC's first four years: medium.com/@aaronsnow/the-ca…
“Le merde est utilisé pour fertiliser la croissance des années suivantes.”
A friend introduced me to this excellent New Year sentiment, which translates roughly to:
“The manure of shit years is used to fertilize the growth of the next.”
May our 2024 be so filled. HNY, y'all.
For folks who don't know the backstory:
About 200 years before Jesus, the Jews were subjects of an empire whose ruler respected their cultural and religious freedom. That lasted for ~25 years.
Then the empire's leadership changed.
The new leader took all that away … (1/2)
Aaron Snow retweeted
Thank the IRS for the new 10-minute college aid application process!
“The new FAFSA pulls from information the government already has through the IRS to automatically input family income details.”
abcnews.go.com/Politics/fafs…
Aaron Snow retweeted
18F is one of the most effective line items in the Federal budget: medium.com/@tvanantwerp/18f-…
🎶 Butter me up
and know you're enough
To sauté me good
- my 17yo just now, flipping onions & spinach on the pan for his special grilled cheese sandwiches
He says sorry-not-sorry @JasonIsbell
An incredible example of why government services should be open source
Aaron Snow retweeted
.@dominiccampbell offers insights ahead of the trans-Atlantic Transformations panel at #SolaceSummit23, looking at how the UK and the US have addressed the challenges of the last decade.
➡️bit.ly/3QkZAVf
By funding this: washingtonpost.com/business/…
Aaron Snow retweeted
So why is the new Speaker "dragged" to the chair? The Speaker, by tradition, feigns reluctance to take the post dating to the days when British speakers were the ones to give the King bad news.
This tradition is done in our Legislatures as well.
Check out this photo. With Fergus, that's Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader PM Justin Trudeau — polar opposite foes. But per tradition, they led Fergus down the aisle and into the Speaker's chair together, literally arm in arm, smiling and laughing.
ALT A photo from the linked CBC article, of Pierre Poilievre, Greg Fergus, and Justin Trudeau, arm in arm, smiling, during today's ceremony installing Fergus as Speaker of Canada's House of Commons
At least our neighbors have a new Speaker of the House!
And he's terrific. An historic choice, well deserved. Congratulations, Mr. Speaker @GregFergus.
At least our neighbors have a new Speaker of the House!
And he's terrific. An historic choice, well deserved. Congratulations, Mr. Speaker @GregFergus.
#Breaking: Liberal MP Greg Fergus has been elected the next Speaker of the House of Commons.
Fergus pitched improving decorum in the Commons — something past Speakers have also promised with little success. cbc.ca/news/politics/mps-vot…
Is there any country on earth that punches itself in the face quite the way we do when we threaten or actually enact government shutdowns?
A good, important read about the aspirations vs. realities of federal child care subsidies from my colleagues here at @BeeckCenter
🧵Currently only 2m of 12m eligible children in the US receive the child care subsidies due to them. In our new report, we set out a way for federal government and states to come together to show how this is entirely preventable. beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/b…
Aaron Snow retweeted
"If these seem like nerdy weeds, they are. But neglecting those nerdy weeds is how we got here."
Read more from our very own @aaronsnow in @OttawaCitizen about what Canada can learn from Ukraine, and how they can become a truly digital government.
ottawacitizen.com/opinion/sn…
Hey, I wrote a thing in the Ottawa Citizen today, about what Canada's new Citizen Services ministry can learn from Ukraine's resounding success in becoming a truly digital government. ottawacitizen.com/opinion/sn…
Anonymous IT officials calling GSA's US Notify pilot a “small niche project” is a terrible look, twice over.
Firstly, is it small or niche if it saves government $45 million a year? That's what UK's Notify service does for them, while also making people's experiences with (1/)
Scoop: Key parts of the Biden admin tech agenda have stalled due to misalignment and major disagreements between top federal IT officials causing massive delays to key digital projects, according to four Biden officials familiar with the matter. @fedscoop
fedscoop.com/top-biden-tech-…
Second, dismissing the Notify pilot because it's starting small is a bad tell of how those officials think about service delivery. Worthy projects going to scale *should* start as small pilots and iterate. The government's own Digital Service Playbook explicitly advocates (3/)
working that way, as has GAO (not to mention most of the rest of the software universe), but there's still plenty of waterfall-from-the-start IT happening in government anyway. GSA is doing it right. playbook.cio.gov/#play4