About the Model

The Public Trust Model for Digital is a capability and maturity model for public institutions — cities, crown corporations, provinces and government agencies — developed over roughly a decade of practice in digital government. It's free to use and designed for executive teams to assess their current capacities and digital literacy.

The Public Trust Model began as a roadmap planning tool used with public-sector leadership teams and has been rebuilt around three things those teams now have to answer for: whether their data is governed well enough to be trusted, whether their digital operations are meeting the needs of stakeholders, and whether their defences are proportionate to what they hold.

The model is maintained by Paul Bellows, based in Edmonton, Alberta.

The history of the Model

Version 1.0 of the model was piloted with the City of Mississauga on behalf of Yellow Pencil, a Canadian digital agency. Thanks to Rob Cummins at the City of Mississauga and to Tracey Vantyghem at Yellow Pencil both of whom collaborated deeply on the initial development. The Model was further road tested with the City of Edmonton and the Yukon Government (thanks to Mark Burns for ideas on the components of a digital platform) as part of the build out of their digital operations teams and digital platforms.

Version 2.0 of the model was developed at Northern Commerce following their acquisition of Yellow Pencil. Version 2.0 was used in collaboration with the Government of Manitoba in the build out of their next generation operations model and digital platform.

Version 3.0 now incorporates more of the dialogue from The 311 Podcast, a series of conversations between Paul Bellows and senior digital leaders from government agencies across the US, Canada and the EU. In particular, the work of Stephanie Dietrich from the City of Tempe was influential on the latest iteration as well as Ashley Casovan and her work on AI Assessment while at Canada's Treasury Board Secretariat.

About the author

Paul Bellows was CEO of Yellow Pencil, a Canadian digital agency, for nearly 30 years. He led digital transformation programs for major Canadian and US government and private sector agencies during that time and developed this model as the foundation for Yellow Pencil's consulting practice. All of the wisdom that informed this model was gained honestly and with the collaboration of dozens of senior leaders, and the Model has been road tested in practice.

Paul sits on Canada's Digital Governance Council and Digital Governance Standards Institute as well as the A100. Paul is the host of the 311 Podcast and would love to talk to you about being a guest.

If you're interested in a deeper dive, if you have feedback, or if your organization would like to bring Paul in for an executive session, please reach out to paul@paulbellows.com.