Public Service projects are critical to the advancement of our nation, can increase the public's technological know-how, and enrich peoples' lives through improved efficiency and transparency of government.

Technology and the Public

I feel very fortunate that my location in NB - which is one of the most Internet-connected jurisdictions in the world, and which has 2 cities on the world Smart 21 "High Technology Communities" list (Moncton & Fredericton) - has given me a headstart and advantage in terms of technology being a part of my life from an early age, and, that accessiblity of high quality networks and information services has changed the way I think about business, entertainment and learning. Simply put, because of my background, this stuff seems natural to me. Not quite as simply put (but certainly the more professional statement):

Having been exposed to information technologies at a young age, and having been a regular daily user and developer of them for the past decade, I recognize the value of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular as an indespensible communication medium with the potential to store, and enable the exchange of, the cumulative wealth of all human knowledge.

Research

Personal Development & Lifelong Learning

E-Government
Making information transparent and accessible to the community helps to improve efficiency, it also helps support the government's many civil service projects for building and improving the country's core infrastructure and technological knowledge. I've enjoyed challenging the status quo and doing my best in any public service position to make government more accountable, accessible and useful to Canadians.

E-Learning
My knowledge of e-learning used to be centered on how to run online quizzes, chat tools, or, other feedback mechanisms such as surveys. In my recent positions though, I've taken that my e-learning knowhow to an entirely new level through the integration of complex Virtual Patient scenarios, creation of Authoring Tools and rich user interfaces through libraries/frameworks such as jQuery, ExtJS, Wookie, WireIT and Draw2D; as well as curriculum planning and activity sharing mashups with LMS suites such as Moodle and LAMS, using industry standards such as LOM, HL7, UMLS and SCORM)

Expanded on my SOA development skills through the extensive use of:

Projects

FEDERAL

  1. NRC
    HSVO: Health Services Virtual Organization (HSVO)
    Is an early-stage ($2 million, CANARIE-funded) Heath Services project which was supported in its initial research and development through a contract with National Research Council of Canada and Communications Research Canada. The project is focused on building an E-Learning platform long-term, and on the short-term, integrating research efforts at:
    • Northern Ontario School of Medicine (Laurentian & Lakehead)
    • McGill
    • Stanford
    • University of Wisconsin
    • Cork University (Ireland)
    HSVO.
    The project also lead me to make a few small weekend contributions back to the Apache Incubator project, out of interest in the emering W3C Widget spec, answering the call for more complex widget examples with API integrations of popular Web2.0 services Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter
  2. StatsCan
    Census2006: Enumeration System
    The census happens every 5 years and produces extremely valuable data on the state of Canada's people, communities and resources. For the first time in Canadian history, the 2006 Census was offered online as well as via paper or telephone. As with most new initiatives the process was subject to error, and indeed this Census was no excpetion as many people reported problems with browser settings and requirements. The Statistics Canada Internet enumeration teams themselves often needed support. My tasks were mostly Internet & Telephone enumeration, but occasionally my Computer Science background also gave me the opportunity to troubleshoot for Atlantic Region.
    (software built elsewhere; made only minor customizations to browser settings and layout)
    Census2006 Online Questionnaire
  3. Environment
    EnviroLab: Backup Tool
    The Environment Canada Atlantice Environmental Science Center (ESC) needed a Backup Tool for the valuable environmental data contained on their Lab servers, and since it needed to be a desktop application which runs on many platforms, the natural choice was to implement it as a Java-based Swing GUI, built atop the Quartz scheduler plus AT (Windows) and CRON (Unix/Linux), and thus provide a cross-platform version of the Windows-only Microsoft Robocopy GUI.
    EnviroLab Backup Tool
  4. HRSDC
    HRSDC: Accessible Departmental Menu
    The department needed a dynamic menu which could also allow blind, deaf or otherwise disabled users to easily access, following W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (which by todays standards, the equivalent "hot topic" in accessibility would be WAI-ARIA)
    Accessible Menu
  5. HRSDC
    ERP & Legacy Migration: Federal Workforce Management
    The Federal Workforce Management tool is a custom implementation of SAP's mySAP Business Suite (formerly known as R/3), considered by many analysts to be the industry's leading ERP solution. My task in aiding to bring it in to all Federal Departments via the HRSDC (at the time HRDC and SDC were separate, I was working from HRDC department) involved automatically converting, exporting from Excel and importing into the new SAP backend system large amounts of employee and client data via the LSMW. Apart from data entry itself, I also wrote a number of VBA macros to assist staff in automating many of their migration tasks. A good example worth sharing was the EmailExtractor which could locate multiple email addresses per row, where the email could appear in any column (due to data inconsistencies and/or different ways of structuring the spreadsheets among departments).
    Excel Conversion Macros

PROVINCIAL

  1. NB
    Department of Transportation: Highway Camera switcher
    Worked with a member of the Highway Safety team in a consultation to create a prototype for a more efficient Highway Camera Weather/Condition Switcher using the Province of New Brunswick Department of Transportation's existing and publicly available Highway Cameras and provided a visual interface for switching between them (either by Arrow Key or typing a city/route name).
    Highway Camera Switcher

MUNICIPAL

  1. Moncton
    Engineering Department: Access DB to Crystal Reports OLAP
    Experimental project in generating Crystal Reports from Microsoft Access DB data and producing OLAP datacubes for use by Engineering and Environmental Services for asset and human resource management.
    MS Access
  2. Moncton
    Public Works - Work Orders: Street Address to Map Coordinate Converter
    Converting Street Addresses to Map Coordinates (using geocoding) for use in the City of Moncton's locally developed GIS software called AMI.
    Excel to AMI Map coordinate conversions for Work Orders

Organizations

HSVO

Remain an invited member of the HSVO.

Publications

  1. HSVO: A Functional XML Specification For Integrating Simulation Devices

    Publication: 2nd International Conference on Virtual Patients & MedBiquitous Annual Conference (proceedings)
    Location: London, United Kingdom
    Authors: Rachel H Ellaway; David Topps; Jordan MacDonald; Bryan Copeland; Adriana Olmos; Bruce Spencer

Conferences

CANARIE NEP-II Meetup (2009)

Met with the 12 other teams funded by the CANARIE initiative and presented software and research to a number of key stakeholders.

KIRA Awards (2009)

Runner-up in category Most Important IT Contribution of the Year (province of NB).