Category: innovation

In a session with an Immigrant and Refugee-serving organization yesterday I shared a couple of slides that I tend to share in many presentations. It's a summary of IRCC's priorities from December 2021. I realized that I've never shared the entire presentation, so here it is for you to access and review. With some of my thoughts, of course.

The next IRCC national call for proposals is coming. It might be later this year. It might be next year. Funding could roll out as soon as 2024. It might be in 2025. I'm starting to hear rumblings of sector consultations. This call for proposals is crucial. It will indicate how serious IRCC is about sector digital transformation and hybrid services. So what we can we learn from past consultations?

In this post I'm providing some background information about how the evaluation toolkit was created and why you should connect with the WESO team soon to learn more about and implement it in your organization.

I was watching a video about Apple’s new Vision Pro, their Virtual Reality headset. The video talked about questions you might typically ask when creating a new product or technology. Specifically, what problem is this product trying to solve? Combined with tech stewardship questions such as can we build the solution, should we build it, how do we do it responsibly, I thought it would be useful to go through these questions when it comes to technology and the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector.

I get a morning email from Lexology, a free legal news service. It's incredibly useful. Today, it was Key legal considerations with generative AI. The first line grabbed me and I had an aha moment: "Mass media attention following Open AI’s release of ChatGPT has pushed the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) back into the limelight."

The Ask Your PDF AI site allows you to "Upload your PDFs, and instantly transform them into conversational partners that are just as knowledgeable as the content they're based on. Engage with your documents like never before, and extract valuable insights with ease." So I tried it with a document/report I was part of writing. Ummm, it's really good.

Pre-arrival settlement services were funded by the Federal Government in 2005. It took them a while to shift to digital service delivery. Now that is the norm. This report looks at the published data on outcomes and provides recommendations to the sector.

As part of the two-year, national research project funded by the WES Mariam Assefa Fund entitled “Envisioning the Future of the Immigrant-Serving Sector,” ACS-Metropolis Institute, the Mhor Collective Scotland, and GEO Nova Scotia partnered together to pilot and tailor the delivery of the Digital Champions program for the Canadian settlement sector, a holistic “train the trainer” approach to delivering peer to peer support for newcomers to advance digital literacy.

Digital transformation is more than the tech or software used to deliver services: it’s approaching current models for service delivery in ways enabled by technology. This makes digital transformation a human process as well as a technical one, requiring human support to implement. A settlement sector organization in Nova Scotia, ISANS, is addressing the human element of digital transformation in their support of staff and clients.