Tech for Good Declaration revisited

Posted on By John Gregory
Tech for Good Declaration, Communitech, Rideau Hall Foundation

The Tech for Good Declaration should have been the headline of the True North conference, as it tackled the problematic question of ethics in innovation. 

The Tech of Good declaration formulated by the Canadian Tech Community at the 2018 True North conference affirms tech as a force for good in the world. A year on a special Declaration workshop revisited the original work and continued the conversation. 

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Lightning in a bottle | What True North means for Waterloo Region

Posted on By John Gregory
True-North-Communitech-ONE-report-Waterloo-@gregiej

ONE may not be a familiar acronym to many, explaining why the expert review panel suggests renaming it as Innovation Ontario. Here we explore the intersection of the strands of tech debate and activities in the Toronto-Kitchener-Waterloo corridor. There is a spirit of optimism with Toronto Health Innovation Week, True North and Velocity 10-year anniversary, yet both the Building Global Winners report and the poignant book How We Can Win point squarely to the paramount need to gain global reach.

Steven Woods, Senior Director Engineering at Google Canada described “What we have, up here in the North, is lightning in a bottle.” He said that Google “recognized there was something special happening up here – the entrepreneurialism, the quality of higher education and the loyalty of the talented engineers who just want to do good work.” In the 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem ranking the newly combined Toronto-Waterloo corridor entity ranked 16th. The Region of Waterloo tech sector employes 30,000 people.

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