During the months of May, June, July and August, every employee is permitted to take on a special project. If their project is approved, they may dedicate up to 5 hours a week to its completion; subject to management's approval, this may rise to up to 15 hours a week in August.

1. The project must be outside of the employee's regular duties, but it may relate to them.
2. The project must be chosen by the employee with a free hand. (If you want to go weed the file room, you can volunteer to do so -- but your manager cannot voluntell you to take it as your project.)
3. The project must have at least one clear, quantitative deliverable.
4. No central budget is allocated for individual projects, but if groups and managers want to invest money, they can -- subject to the usual policies and requirements around development, investment, etc.
5. Employees are encouraged to collaborate with each other, with OGD staff, and with other federal, provincial, regional or local government employees.
6. Departments are permitted to set up initiatives to attract the interest and involvement of qualified OGD staff to their projects.
7. The project must not interfere with operational requirements. However, managers may not merely cite "operational requirements" in refusing approval for a project.
8. Permission to participate in a project may be withheld or revoked as a disciplinary measure, or in the event of an emergency.
9. For compensation purposes, all contributions to a project are made within the confines of the employee's present position, whether substantive or acting. (Even if your contributions to your project involve doing work associated with another classification or level, because you are essentially on paid volunteer leave, you can't use a project to alter your position or compensation.)
10. Management can assign student and co-op workers to contribute to projects on a full-time basis, subject to the usual requirements of these programs.

My intent here is to create a program so broad that a project might involve:

• A department setting up a multidisciplinary strike team to tackle a big problem, perhaps even filling the project through a process that looks something like staffing.
• An employee deciding this is going to be the summer they clean out the storage room and weed the filing cabinets.
• A team taking an opportunity to step back from a recurring process and do some design/reworking.
• Five friends from branches across the department deciding to start a summer knit-while-you-learn circle, where they watch educational videos, listen to podcasts, complain about their managers, and knit for charity.
• Giving people a guaranteed opportunity to do some micro-missions and job-shadowing, even if their manager is indifferent on these ideas.

In practice, it would never fly. Too many people who genuinely cannot carve out 5 hours a week even if they wanted to and had management's support. And too many others who would grieve their manager telling them that playing League for 5 hours a week is not an acceptable "special project", even if one of the other players on his team has a C/C/C.