Changing the relationship between the citizen and the state. Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown about a lot in government circles at the moment.
It means different things to different people. This makes it impossible for people to really understand what you mean when you say it.
I’m not the first to write something about this. Simon recently wrote about how the phrase is misused. Matt has also written good things.
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Plenty done
A few weeks ago was my fifth anniversary at the Government Digital Service.
I’ve had the opportunity to work on a huge number of important projects in various roles including software developer, technical lead, product owner, delivery manager, troubleshooter and technical architect.
From building GOV.UK to travelling to DVLA in Swansea every week creating new digital services. From rebuilding a service that takes billions of pounds in payments in just a few weeks to bringing IT back in house after 30 years of outsourcing.
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Plenty more to do
It’s been a fortnight of big announcements.
Mike has announced he’s leaving. Leisa is going home. Tom, Ben & Russell have decided to move on. We’ve also said goodbye to some others – Andy, Lindsey, Sam and Mark.
There’s been lots of noise about what this means for GDS, for ongoing digital transformation, for the future of IT in government.
If I said this hasn’t all been unnerving and concerning, I’d be lying.
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Spending time with users
Last week I spent a day in Manchester with my team’s user researcher. She’s visiting people all over the country to help us better understand how people interact with government services.
Taking part in research like this gives you a great opportunity to meet people outside of your normal circle. As a civil servant, I spend most of my time with people who have an interest in and understanding of how government works.
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A busy start to 2015
January is usually a fairly quiet month. It normally takes people a while to get back into things following the Christmas break.
This year however, everything seemed to have hit the ground running. Lots of projects have moved forward quickly and it looks like the first half of this year is going to be rather productive.
This month the first phase of DVLA’s Vehicle Management service has moved to a public beta.
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Keeping motivated
When you’re deep in the day to day detail of projects, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the big picture. If you’re making lots of small, incremental changes, you can quickly forget what things were like when you started.
I’m currently taking a couple of weeks away from my DVLA projects, partly because it’s long overdue, but partly because I’ve done just that.
I’ve been feeling pretty demotivated and frustrated at the lack of progress in some parts.
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Simpler, clearer and faster car tax online
This afternoon, one of the projects I’ve been working on in Swansea launched into public beta.
For the past 3 months, I’ve been working with a small team at the DVLA to look at how we can make the process of buying tax for your car online simpler.
Taxing a car online isn’t exactly new – the existing service launched in 2006 and 54% of cars are already taxed this way.
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365 days later
A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop.
It’s now the home to 75 government departments and agencies who are publishing announcements, policies, publications, consultations, statistics and blogs on over 45 different topics.
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Talk: Digital by Default at Civil Service Live 2013
Yesterday (3rd July 2013) I have a talk about Digital by Default at Civil Service Live (an annual conference for civil servants) in Bristol.
There was quite a bit of interest in the talk (the venue we had was packed), so I thought it would be useful if I replicated the talk online and provide a bit of commentary.
Hello I’m Dafydd Vaughan.
I’m a Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service.
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The internet is fragile
At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage.
There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be forgiven for thinking that the sites and tools never existed. Every link ever made to any of those things are now broken.
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Surviving long distance commuting
As many of my friends and colleagues will confirm, I spent a large portion of the last 18 months commuting to work. Initially from Cardiff to London, then from Abergavenny to London. Both journeys over 2 hours in each direction.
It wasn’t really practical to do this on a daily basis, either from a time or cost perspective (4+ hours a day travelling in addition to a normal working day and a monthly season ticket of than £1000).
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Exploring local government services online
2019 update:
LocalDirectgov and the underlying datasets have now been replaced. This means the tool was getting out of date and inaccurate, so I’ve switched it off.
Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website.
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Hello GOV.UK
Last week we finally launched GOV.UK.
On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible1.
On Wednesday, the site received over 1 million visits and regularly had over 10 thousand people using it at the same time.
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Working towards launch of GOV.UK
As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state. The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site for government services on 17 October.
This past week, we’ve released (and written about) the new homepage design, updated browse categories and the removal of the search ‘auto suggest‘ feature.
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Helping to build a single domain for government
Just under two and a half years ago I joined CF Labs – a new team based within Consumer Focus with a remit to build useful online tools and make data more useful and accessible.
Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce cold calls and junk mail. I’ve been able to work with Consumer Focus’ energy team to publish complaints data on energy suppliers, the Wales team to publish performance data for the Royal Mail, and Passenger Focus to help open up rail performance information.
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An update on the EU cookie law
2019 update:
This e-book doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so I’ve removed the link
The law was meant to protect the privacy of people using the Internet. To accomplish this, the EU made over 90% of websites illegal EU Cookie Law, the definitive guide. Oliver Emberton, Silktide. Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012.
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Opening up rail performance data
I admit it; I’m a bit of a train buff. I don’t stand around at the end of platforms recording the numbers of trains, but I do like to know what is going on and how everything works.
I’ve been a regular user of trains for nearly 10 years. When I was in college, I had to use the train to get to classes. Before I moved to Cardiff in December, I commuted to work by train every day.
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Using website cookies in the EU
Later this week a new law comes into effect – the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. This law requires all website operators in the EU to gain consent from visitors before storing or retrieving information from a visitors computer.
Essentially, this law blocks the use of cookies until a user has been asked for (and has given) informed consent. Francis Davey, the fantastic tech legal expert has written an in-depth blog about the changes.
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Attack on @baskers and the public sector
Disclaimer:
These are my own personal thoughts and not those of my employer.
I’m disappointed. Over the past few months a concerted media campaign against public sector workers has been building. We are continually portrayed as being lazy and overpaid, not only by the ‘old’ media (by which I mean the traditional print media in general) but also by MPs and our ‘bosses’ in Government. An image has been created of thousands of staff sat around twiddling their thumbs while earning footballer-style fat salaries, not to mention huge benefits, fabulous working conditions and cushy pensions to boot – all at the taxpayer’s expense.
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Costs of government websites
On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in the last financial year.
If you dig a little deeper into the figures you can see that central government has spent £14m on Strategy & Planning, £15.
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Helping you to Stay Private
On Thursday, CF Labs launched their latest project – Stay Private – into public beta. This site is designed to make it easier to sign up for the various marketing opt-out services that exist in the UK.
There are lots of different opt-out services that exist, all of which have separate sign-up forms and require you to fill out the same details (such as name, address, email address), over and over again.
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The new government on the web
We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday).
Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the technology arena has written a fantastic overview of what might happen to public sector IT over the next parliament.
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CF Labs one year on
Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publicly available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of all of this fun, the three man CF Labs team was put together to experiment with a new way of doing things.
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A quick note on MP expenses
As some of you may remember, a few months ago I waded in on the MP expenses controversy with a crowd-sourcing website for putting together a list of what they all claimed.
The Guardian (and others) produced their own websites that did a similar job and generally worked better. Since then, there have been further developments including the Legg report and further detail released (twice).
This means that the data added to WhatTheyClaimed.
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Hacks and Hackers working together
Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build “cool stuff”. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them.
On Friday, Charlie and I attended a hack day with a difference. The ScraperWiki Hack and Hackers Hack Day was designed to bring designers, developers (hackers) and journalists (hacks) together to see what they could do.
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Communications in a crisis
The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening.
The focus today is on the cause of the incident and the safety procedures. However the issue that concerns me is how public service companies like Eurostar handle communication in such emergencies.
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Open government and open data
It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate website.
Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
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Opening up community information
When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is available. Others might wander around and talk to neighbours, a few people just won’t care.
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Setting the postcode free
The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit recently?!). However yesterday they took on a new tact: they appear to have decided to bring the rest of the UK down with them.
The issue surrounds a small piece of text – the Post Code.
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A look at the new Birmingham City Council website
Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back!
There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed for 6 months (original launch date was expected to be March 2009), and going significantly over budget (costing a total of £2.
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Why Government needed a Twitter strategy
Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point.
I wanted to spell out why I’m pleased Neil has written this document.
There is a lot of skepticism about new media in Government.
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WhatTheyClaimed.com - a lesson in crowdsourcing
Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.
The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes.
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Time for a change
I’ve been a part of the team at VSI for the best part of nine years, originally as a summer job, but more recently as a full time developer. During this time I’ve seen significant changes in the way the internet works, from new technologies and new standards in design, to new ways of communicating and ways of thinking.
The internet landscape is completely different now compared to when I first started out in the industry.
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Talking about website accessibility
Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility. I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is. This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the whole presentation & demonstration while using a screen reader.
I understand how screen readers work and have tried out some myself, but seeing someone use one in a real situation was really humbling.
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CllrTweeps - the directory of UK councillors on twitter
2014 update:
The Local Government Association funded and launched their own version of this service called TweetyHall. Our version has now been turned off.
A quick update this week!
Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps. The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter. After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service.
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School closure information
Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. What is important, however, is that a large number of schools have been closed because of the snow.
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Cinema-style content ratings for websites
Recently, the UK Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Andy Burnham did an interview with The Telegraph. During the interview he confirmed that the government was looking into a cinema-style rating system for websites.
As a web developer, hosting provider and internet user, I do not understand how such a scheme would be possible. There are a number of issues that need to be considered before anything like this is implemented in this (or any other) country.
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A look at government branding
A few days ago I came across an article about the branding of the Dutch Government. It appears that they are fed up of having different brand for each of their 200(ish) departments and ministries. Instead, they are developing a single ‘Government’ brand that will be used for everything the government does, irrespective of the government.
This strikes me as a great idea – not only could it save money by just having one brand instead of 200, but it could help people recognise the work that government does.