Emily Macrae is a member of the Ontario Public Service. She's a longtime co-organiser with Civic Tech Toronto and a more recent volunteer with Techfugees Canada.

The problem: It can be hard to imagine a career in the public service, especially given narratives that frame “innovation” as driven by the private sector.

Why it matters: Public sector teams need people at all stages of their career willing to work at the intersection of empathy and technology.

The solution: Volunteering in civic technology can be a way to meet public servants and learn about their work.

Around the world, public servants grapple with how to gather data in collaboration with racialised communities, help youth build digital skills, and prioritise infrastructure investment.

These are the same questions that volunteers from Civic Tech Toronto chip away at every Tuesday night. Volunteering with this multi-generational community of people with skills and interests in web design, user research, data analysis, digital storytelling and policy development led me to a career in the public service.

Instead of simply “clocking out”, these volunteers left their day jobs only to continue working on passion projects.

When I first arrived at a Civic Tech Toronto meeting in May 2017, my goal was to see inside Twitter Canada, which was hosting the group for the month. But as I returned week after week and then month after month, I no longer came for the peek inside high-tech offices or for the abundant pizza. Instead, I started helping out on volunteer-led projects that examined how data and technology can shape public spaces and services for the better, rather than accelerating privatisation and precarity.

Civic Tech Toronto brings together students and retirees, self-taught coders and professionals with experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Getting to know volunteers who worked in government smashed any stereotypes I may have held about public servants. Here was a group of professionals applying community-based research and critical thinking to tough problems like housing support and racism in policing. Instead of simply “clocking out”, these volunteers left their day jobs only to continue working on passion projects.

The example of these volunteers helped me to imagine a career in the public service. Volunteering together, I saw how empathy, curiosity and patience contributed to public servants’ work on ambulance services, open data standards, road safety and bilingual web development.

The project I was most involved in as a volunteer is called BikeSpace. It taught me about how public servants make decisions and gather data. BikeSpace involved a partnership with the City of Toronto: municipal funding supported a part-time product manager, who helped keep our team of programmers, designers and researchers on track.

We built a web app that allowed users to drop a pin on a map and show where bike parking was needed. The idea was that this data could help the City of Toronto determine where to invest in cycling infrastructure. Our team worked with passionate public servants who not only shared their evenings with volunteers to discuss the morass of content moderation, but also developed low-tech tools to improve public consultation.

I applied to work with the Ontario Public Service because volunteering had shown me that the public sector could be a home for motivated communities of problem solvers and listeners. Since then I’ve worked in four different ministries and continued to support the growth of civic tech groups across Canada; volunteers in other cities have forked the code for BikeSpace to adapt the tool to local needs, and brought together organisations working with refugees. But like me, members of civic tech communities also build careers in government where their grassroots engagement with privacy by design, open source and the ethics of AI can inform conversations with other apolitical colleagues.

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