Build Canada’s digital future… or watch it fall apart

What happens when you put residents, municipal CIOs, local businesses, service managers, privacy advocates, and elected officials in the same room and ask them to build the digital foundations of a modern city?

In this interactive simulation, participants take on real-world personas, from city leaders and frontline service teams to community organizations, startup founders, and residents trying to access public services. Each person comes with their own goals, pressures, constraints, and red lines.

Together, they must design digital public infrastructure that works at the local level: trusted, inclusive, interoperable, privacy-preserving, and useful for the everyday services people rely on.

But nothing stays stable for long.

A cyber incident. A change in council priorities. A provincial mandate. A failed vendor contract. A breakthrough technology. A resident backlash.

Unexpected challenges will test decisions in real time, forcing participants to negotiate, adapt, and make hard trade-offs under pressure.

This is a live experiment in how municipal government actually works.