Keeping Up With the Speed of Disruption

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Back by popular demand, the Public Policy Forum’s professional development seminar series Keeping Up With the Speed of Disruption is being offered for a third time.

The first of four sessions takes place on Dec. 7, 2018.

Who should attend

The series is for current and prospective executives, policy directors, and practice leads in the public and private sectors who seek a better understanding of digital government trends and digital-era governance challenges. The learning modules provide a deep dive into a selection of emerging technologies, likely areas of disruption and impact, and an exploration of how governments around the world are reacting – or not – to a quickly shifting technological landscape. For each session, we’ll explore the common threads of information security, privacy, ethics, regulatory implications and sustainability.

What to expect

Discussion, learning, and critical thinking about emerging technologies, the challenges for governments in leveraging, regulating, or predicting impacts
Building capacity for understanding and navigating emerging trends and pressures
Creating a core group of ambassadors for change

Participants have heard from amazing speakers during the course of the first two offerings including:

Allan Dafoe, Director of the Governance of AI Program, at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Steffen Christensen, Senior Policy Researcher, Policy Horizons
Marc Saner, Chair of the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Ottawa
Rees Kassen, Department of Biology, University of Ottawa
Rob Annan, PPF Fellow and Vice-President, Public Affairs and Communications, Genome Canada
Christina Lomazzo, Consultant & Blockchain Leader, Deloitte
Erin Kelly, CEO of Advanced Symbolics Inc.
Eric Swedersky, Senior Vice President, Delivery and Public Sector, SecureKey

Sessions

The following sessions will be facilitated by a team of experienced moderators and consist of short presentations by leading experts and guest speakers, interactive learning modules and roundtable discussions.

Data Literacy Primer (date to be confirmed, will be held in January 2019)

All participants are invited to attend a hands-on session about data literacy – interpreting the myriad facts and figures that come at us every day and understanding how they fit into both day-to-day work and the big picture.

Session I: The New Biology (December 7, 2018)

This session will explore the technologies that are changing the way we interact with biological information and biological systems.

Session II: The New Intelligence (January 18, 2019)

This session will explore the technologies and applications arising from artificial intelligence and the big data movement.

Session III: The New Community (February 15, 2019)

This session will explore networks, including blockchain technology, and the many ways they are (and soon will be) connecting people and communities.

Session IV: The New Governance (March 22, 2019)

Our final session runs longer than the first three and focuses on the themes of 1) actual government pilots implementing disruptive technologies, 2) regulatory responses to disruptive technologies and 3) the government-wide ramifications brought on by disruptive technologies. During this session, the participants will be divided into three groups, each corresponding with one of the three themes. Each group will develop a proposal related to the theme.

The aim of this series is to equip the participants, public service and private sector executives, to better understand disruptive technologies, how they can be used to enhance government services and the ways they are challenging policy and governance approaches. Government reactions often lag long behind technological changes; how can governments not only catch up, but reorient their organizations to reliably keep up in the future? It starts with understanding a panoply of powerful technological developments and their broader social and economic impacts.