One Team Gov “Around the World”

For some time, now I’ve been looking at the success of the cross-government Slack, including writing an article about it for aPolitical, and wondering why something similar isn’t happening one level up — in the international space. There are a number of great organisations that host conversations between government leaders and public servants on specific topics, but there isn’t either a global directory that government employees can add themselves to or a chat-based forum to host ongoing discussions.

I brought the idea up again at GovCamp in January, and several people said it sounded like a good idea, but it didn’t gain much traction afterwards. However, since then I’ve had the great fortune of running into a few people from non-UK governments who are as enthusiastic as me about trying this out.

We’ve had a number of conversations about this now and have agreed that the following things are important:

• The forum mustn’t have the appearance of being run by a national government (no “UK forum for international discussion”)
• The forum mustn’t have the appearance of being run by a private sector organisation (no “international discussion forum, sponsored by Accenture”)
• The forum mustn’t have the appearance of being run by a potentially controversial 3rd party organisation (no “international discussion forum, sponsored by Amnesty International”)
• The forum needs a committee to own the Code of Conduct and be the ultimate arbiter of disagreements
• The forum needs a group of highly motivated “community animators” who will encourage people to join the site and who will also look after specific discussion topics
• The forum needs a group of high-profile “ambassadors” who will encourage people to join
• There needs to be a discussion on how we can support the probable diversity of languages spoken by potential members (e.g. automated translation or channels in different languages)

And — the most important thing on our minds at the moment:

• The organising group needs to rapidly expand beyond being a set of white folks from western nations.

One of the things we started discussing recently was whether there was an existing group we could join and encourage to create and support the kind of forum we’re interested in producing. We had a few preliminary discussions, but we quickly decided it wasn’t reasonable for us to approach an existing organisation and ask them to change their remit to suit us.

At that point, we were looking for something with a certain level of brand recognition in international governments but that was open and flexible enough to accommodate what we are looking to do. One Team Gov immediately became the obvious choice. The Principles of the organisation line up beautifully with what we want to achieve and, following a number of One Team Gov Global events over the last few years, the group is known in a lot of different governments around the world. Additionally, and ideal for our purposes, OTG already has its own Slack instance (albeit pretty quiet at the moment).

So, our new objectives became to think about (1) how we can persuade significantly more public servants from around the world to join the OTG Slack and (2) how to support them when they get there.

After some consideration, we’ve decided the best way to raise the profile of our intention is to host a new One Team Gov Global event with the specific goal of fostering ideas on how to add more people to the shared forum. Our current thinking for this is for it to be an online “around the world” event — an unconference where the session slots are organised over a period of at least 24 hours to accommodate people in all time zones.

It’s going to take some months to organise such an event — starting with putting together an organising committee which, again, we recognise needs to be considerably more diverse than the group currently having these discussions.

How things stand now is that we are starting discussions about how we can both make a general open request and also approach specific individuals asking if people would like to take one of the paths of involvement I’ve mentioned above (community animator, committee member, ambassador).

We’re only just getting started but, if you’d like to be involved in this very early stage, please let me know.