About
Canada’s Digital Business Network
DigitalCanada.io is a Digital Business Network for Canada’s technology experts and entrepreneurs, with a mission to build a world leading Canadian digital nation.
The site is a ‘social expert network’, combining social networking with an expert knowledge base of digital best practices, covering topics ranging from Blockchain through Cloud Computing and Agile Development.
Site Membership
Site Membership is free. You can create a Member Profile, connect with other Members, share updates and participate in Forums. Register here.
Business Membership
Business Membership costs £495/month and provides a managed digital marketing service for companies wishing to boost their profile across the Canadian tech sector.
Read more in Digital Marketing.
Open Sourcing Best Practices
A key technique for accelerating Digital Government progress is for agencies to share the innovations and best practices they develop via open source, so that other agencies can learn from and emulate them.
The GC Digital team are pioneering the use of open source practices and technologies to make these resources more accessible and reusable.
For example they offer their Digital Transformation Playbook online via a Google presentation, and it is also published as a Github repo. The Playbook is one of a number of programs within an overall Github presence for the Canadian Government; other key resources include the Open Data Toolkit and the Web Experience Toolkit.
On this page Canadian digital projects are listed as products, categorized by their lifecycle stage of Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live. For example one product in production is Impact Canada, a scalable, reusable platform that creates new opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs to help solve Canada’s biggest challenges.
By open sourcing the code and methods it means this capability can be easily reused for other projects and reinventing the wheel avoided. The competition challenge model is a common format for encouraging Open Innovation and could be reused across a multitude of different scenarios, meaning the original investment yields a much larger ROI for taxpayers, and makes sharing of best practices considerably easier.