2025 is a year like no other in recent history, particularly for digital government. And that means FWD50 will be like no other year.
At the end of the 2024 in-person conference, we held an open conversation with the Before we get into the details of 2025’s conference, here are some of the assumptions we’re starting with.
The realities we’re facing
Every organization that works with the public sector must accept some fundamental truths in preparing for the coming year, and we’re no exception.
Tight budgets
At every level of government, austerity and budget uncertainty are here. Economic and political uncertainty mean less investment in new possibilities and a huge pressure to find efficiencies, sometimes at the expense of worthwhile services.
In 2024, spurred in part by investigations into ArriveCan and the resulting findings on contractor mark-ups, the Federal Government of Canada cut service spending unilaterally. This included both consulting and training budgets.
In response, we’re renewing our focus on practical lessons public servants can put to work immediately. We’re changing the formats, timing, and duration of the event (more on this below) to make it more affordable and accessible to a wider range of governments in every jurisdiction. We’re also increasing the number of in-person tickets that departmental buyers receive.
Stuck in the mud
This will be the ninth year that FWD50 returns to Ottawa. Yet many of the conversations we’re having are the same as they were a decade ago. Since 2010, Canada has fallen from 3rd to 47th in the UN Global Rankings of digital governments.
We’ve always worked to be a nonpartisan voice—after all, the “FWD” in our name comes from “neither left, nor right, but forward.” But we are biased towards progress. Expect us to have strong opinions, loosely held. We’ll be more public about this in a podcast we’re launching that will look at specific digital services, seeking first to understand why service delivery is hard, and then investigate other countries who have overcome these challenges. We’ll focus on outcomes over ambitions, and speak for public servants who sometimes can’t.
A loss of trust
Frustrated by complexity, citizens worldwide are challenging democracies and dismantling the social contract. After all, liberal democracies are founded on consent: We agree to pay a parking ticket because we believe, on the whole, that regulating parking is a good idea. When the payoff of collective institutions erodes, so does the consent we afford it.
The breach of trust is economic, too. Well over a third of Canada’s total productivity goes to government services, a number that continues to climb. This represents a significant economic burden on the country. That leaves little to reinforce ourselves as a sovereign nation or improve the quality of life of our citizens. Delivering useful digital services that remind citizens why they consent to rule must be a key plank in any modern party’s platform.
That’s why, this year, we’re going to insist on “demos, not memos.” Our Call for Proposals is looking for case studies based on public, delivered services that include before-and-after comparisons. We want quantified results, clearly explained and easily understood, that we can share with the public to promote progress. Our workshops will tackle community-of practice topics such as Product Management; AI, Task Efficiency, and Automation; Marketing and Communications; and Metrics and Analytics.
We want to know what does a service cost, and what does modernizing it save? We’ll focus on the benefits of modernization to the user (in terms of time, money, and accessibility); to the taxpayer (in cost and accountability); to the economy (in productivity and balanced budgets) and to society (in rethinking what’s possible.) Expect us to challenge the hidden costs of complacency, and private-sector rent-taking.
Ignoring what might help
No, AI won’t save us all, or replace us all, or solve all our problems. But neither can we let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Huge advances in information technology have reduced the cost of many government services by several orders of magnitude. Generative AI gives us an entirely new kind of computing (nondeterministic) that not only allows non-technical users to create technical things, but can synthesize and summarize information while conversing in natural language.
Now that we can do $8,000 of legal work for $3, expect a full-scale rebellion by voters who are left footing the bill for outdated platforms.
We’ll discuss how to apply frontier technology to low-hanging fruit: Where is imperfect, evolving tech good enough to produce real change, and when does it make sense to wait? What can we do now to make implementing future technology faster & more reliable?
Little political willpower
Modernizing government takes several basic building blocks, such as single-sign-on (the ability to log into all government services with a single account.) In Canada, this is complicated by federation, and the fact that services like driving and healthcare are provided provincially.
But the reality is that single-sign-on is a political hot potato: A vocal, misinformed minority is preventing us from moving forward. Single-sign-on is more secure than our current system—and if a billion Indians can implement it, then 30 million Canadians should be easy.
What’s more, powerful commercial interests fight attempts to reform and simplify complex law. In Europe, many countries spend no money on tax preparation because tax forms arrive pre-filled; in North America we spend $10 billion in a tax-on-taxes.
We can remain nonpartisan while acknowledging that policy unlocks possibility. Public servants implement the law, but a complex law begets complex systems. What could we do if the policy was different? How can we inform lawmakers when requirements aren’t implementable within the time and impact allotted?
Our plan: Quarterly content on a community platform
We’re embracing these new realities with a strategy that’s been several years in the making. Many of you already know our community platform, Access. It’s where we host hundreds of videos from past years, since we started recording all talks during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re captioned in both French and English, organized by topic, and free to everyone in the world.
Here are just a few of the case studies available now:
Access is more than a video sharing tool, however. We’ve used it for private group discussions (such as the Executive Cohorts we ran in 2023 and 2024) and as a way of publishing documents, holding threaded conversations, and messaging the roughly 1,300 people who already have accounts on the platform.
This year, we’re going to use Access as the core of our events. We’ll be running three one-day virtual events on April 15, June 3, and September 16. To participate, you’ll simply create an account on Access once. Then you’ll automatically see the events you can attend within the platform.
We’re still setting up the system, but here’s a sneak peek:
This year’s content
In keeping with a focus on practical lessons and delivery, we’re devoting each of five days this year to a specific topic:
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On Tuesday, April 15, we’ll dive into Product Management. Users don’t think about services or web pages—they think about the job they’re trying to accomplish. Thinking of your job as a product to be managed can yield incredible results. We’re also inviting alumni from the recently-shuttered 18F to talk about their work and what might have been; after all, three of its former directors are on our advisory board.
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On Tuesday, June 3, we’ll look at data, AI, and automation. How are people using generative AI to streamline processes and improve accessibility. Where is it production ready, and where does it make sense to wait? How can we get better results through careful data governance? And what does the future of government IT look like when employees are augmented by algorithms?
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On Tuesday, September 16, we’ll turn our attention to design and communication. Because government is effectively a monopoly—after all, you don’t have your choice of passport providers—there’s less incentive to make services easy, compelling, and even fun. And when services do work, governments seldom promote them. We’ll look at design thinking, marketing communications, and the surprising impact of common knowledge on change.
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On November 3 and 4 we’ll return to Ottawa for a two-day, in-person event. Day one will look at analytics, metrics, and ROI, with a focus on how to measure and communicate progress while ensuring that the metrics we track don’t become their own targets. And day two will look at policy-first transformation, and where we need to simplify legislation in order to simplify the services we build to enable it.
Tech and government are both changing quickly, so while a year-round approach of this kind is far more work for the FWD50 team, it gives us the opportunity to adapt to current events and incorporate the latest innovations.
The big news: Our first event is for everyone
April 15 is less than a month away. So we’re making a fairly radical decision—one that makes sense in the face of widespread changes to the public service. After all, many public servants have lost their jobs, or are facing unprecedented uncertainty in their careers. Canada has called an election. Digital sovereignty is on the minds of leaders worldwide.
So we’re making our first quarterly event free to everyone.
Just create an account on Access, and once we’ve verified you, you’ll be able to attend the first day of FWD50 2025 absolutely free. Save the date, and stay tuned for more details on the agenda and speakers in the coming days.