The Authors of FWD50

While we’re also a networking event and technology conference, our main goal has always been to create learning and training opportunities for the public sector on digital transformation. To that end, since 2017 we’ve welcomed hundreds of speakers to our screens and stages. They’ve brought valuable insights and advice to thousands of attendees, and many of them have also shared that wisdom in books.

So when Library and Archives Canada decided to invest in departmental training this year with a bundle of passes to our November conference, we decided to build our own library onsite at FWD50. We scoured our back catalog of talks, and ordered as many of the books our speakers have written over the years as we could, to say thanks.

Just a few of the books we’re bringing to Ottawa.

Turns out, it’s a big list—27 in all, with a couple more that are out of print! Here’s what will be on our FWD50 library bookshelf in Ottawa this November:

1. Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand by Jonathan Craft and John Halligan

2. Recoding America: How Government Fails in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka

3. Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age by Taylor Owen

4. Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley Is Destructive by Design by Dipayan Ghosh

5. Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

6. Hacking Happiness: Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking it Can Change the World by John Havens

7. Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke

8. Distributed Network Data: From Hardware to Data to Visualization by Alasdair Allan and Kipp Bradford

9. Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future by Gideon Lichfield

10. Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley

11. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom? by David Brin

12. A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz

13. Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality by Renee DiResta

14. Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery by Andrew Greenway, Tom Loosemore, Ben Terrett and Mike Bracken

15. Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai

16. Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization by Coco Krumme

17. How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McCraney

18. Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World by Beth Simone Noveck

19. Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti

20. How to Write Rules That People Want to Follow, 3rd Edition: A guide to writing respectful policies and directives by Lewis S. Eisen

21. Opening the Government of Canada: The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age by Amanda Clarke

22. WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O’Reilly

23. The Tech That Comes Next: How Changemakers, Philanthropists, and Technologists Can Build an Equitable World by Afua Bruce and Amy Sample Ward

24. The Splinters of our Discontent: How to Fix Social Media and Democracy Without Breaking Them by Renee DiResta, Mike Godwin, and Charles Duan

25. The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World by Alexis Wichowski

26. Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll

27. Propose, Prepare, Present by Alistair Croll

In-person attendees will be able to scan these books onsite (please leave them in the library when you’re done!) and see which would be useful for their work in government transformation. As we did last year, we’ll also be giving away copies of some of our speakers’ books from the main stage, so some of you will be leaving with new resources you can bring back to your desks at home and in the office.