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Who we are:
The Canadian Digital Service was created in 2017 to help change the way government designs and delivers services to Canadians.
From a small team of nineteen employees, the organization has grown in size and influence since its founding, now representing a team of over 200 employees, with permanent funding announced in the Federal Budget (Spring 2021).
Find out more about our teams:
- Org chart 🔒 ↗️
- CDS reporting relationships and funding over time (visual timeline) 🔒 ↗️
Our mission:
Change government to serve people better. We work with federal partners to build better services for the public and to help public servants doing this important work.
Our values:
We strive to live these values in everything we do at CDS. They guide our work, shape our decisions, our behaviour, and our hiring. 
Put people at the heart of services
Deliver measurable outcomes
Do the hard work to make things easier
Build for learning and iteration
Work in the open to help clear a path
Take care of each other
Other related links:
- CDS Code of Conduct 🔒 ↗️
- Guiding principles for conflict 🔒 ↗️
- A guide to better apologies 🔒 ↗️
- Values in Action 🔒 ↗️
- CDS Bilingual Glossary 🔒 ↗️
- Digital government reading list ↗️
Our principles:
We maintain common principles, whether we are building products ourselves or advising other departments on delivery.
- Work in small, independent, interdisciplinary teams that break down traditional silos.
- Engage directly with the people who will use the service, at every stage.
- Make small, incremental changes to products, continuously.
- Make accessible, inclusive services that work on any device or screen.
- Make it easier for other departments to work in similar ways.
We’ve applied our digital principles to help Canadians through the pandemic, Veterans and their families, people fleeing Afghanistan, entrepreneurs tackling big public challenges, victims of cyber crime and fraud, to name a few projects.
How we deliver:
- Partnerships
- We provide advice, coaching, and resources to help departments and agencies improve how they design, build, and deliver their public services.
- Platforms
- We build common components for common service steps that any department can use to make it easier and less expensive to deliver better, more consistent services.
- Work in the Open
- We share code, resources, work-in-progress, community, and lessons, so that others can contribute to, critique, and learn from our work.
- Remove blockers
- We advocate for and inform policy changes, grounded in delivery experience, that make it easier for departments to adopt agile, human-centred practices.
Meetings and team rituals
Learn more about organization-wide meetings and events on our dedicated page.