Home on Dafydd Vaughan

Modernising the vehicle logbook by delivering value early

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0100

By breaking the DVLA’s massive, 20-million-transaction paper logbook system into small slices - starting with commercial motor traders - we bypassed the paralysis of multi-year planning. Delivering value early allowed us to establish a continuous pipeline of delivery, proving that the best way to build institutional trust and momentum is to slice the problem thin and just start.

Welsh names and places deserve basic respect

Wed, 20 May 2026 10:00:00 +0100

The recent mockery of First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth exposes a persistent, casual disrespect toward Welsh language and culture within the English-speaking world. This modern dismissal continues a historical pattern of cultural erasure that dates back to the systematic suppression of the language in schools. My own experience navigating the workforce under an accommodated name shows the compromise individuals make when others refuse to invest basic effort. Reclaiming historic Welsh names for our people, our geography, and our democratic institutions requires a fundamental shift in attitude. Learning to pronounce a name or a place correctly is a basic boundary of courtesy, and cultural laziness remains a choice we must reject.

Rebuilding the car tax service in ten weeks in 2014

Fri, 15 May 2026 10:00:00 +0100

By replacing a failing legacy system with a working car tax service in just ten weeks, we proved that momentum and iterative delivery manage risk far more effectively than months of traditional planning. This approach turned massive legislative shifts into simple backlog items, demonstrating that 100 days is exactly enough time to prove the ‘art of the possible’ in any complex organisation.

2025 year note

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:50:00 +0000

2025 has been a difficult year. It was a year that forced me to pause, reflect, and eventually reach a much better understanding of how my own brain works.

The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture' won’t ever deliver

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 19:35:00 +0000

Stop funding fictional target architecture blueprints and start funding empowered, long-lived teams. The traditional, rigid approach is too slow for the age of AI and will never solve your real-world legacy tech problems. It’s time to trade the fiction for empowered teams and clear principles.

Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 19:35:00 +0000

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite complicated.

2024 year note

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:48:00 +0000

2024 has been a bit of a roller coaster. Work has been ridiculously busy and we started the first phase of renovating the house.

2024-08: August month note

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 10:49:00 +0100

Short(ish) month notes for August. I’ve spent the last week not working, which has been much needed. I’ve been feeling a little burnt out after a busy summer, and by last Friday I was running on empty.

2024-07: July month note

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 12:14:00 +0100

I think I’ve started every set of months notes saying I’ve been busy. But hoo boy was I not prepared for July! Thoughts on the general election, welsh politics, work, CrowdStrike, gin, house work and a final word on Twitter

2024-05 / 2024-06: Catch-up note - May & June 2024

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 12:15:00 +0100

Things got busy, and I predictably stopped writing. These are some brief catch-up notes for May & June dominated by work, my board, house renovation and Dilys

Public Digital Newsletter: CrowdStrike special

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Following the CrowdStrike incident a few days earlier, I guest edited a special edition of the Public Digital Newsletter to bring together articles and views that explained what happened, how it might have been avoided and what might happen next.

Public Digital: CrowdStrike - a global wake-up call

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000

I’ve published a post on the Public Digital blog with immediate reflections on the CrowdStrike outage which impacted millions of computers around the world.

2024-04: April month note

Thu, 02 May 2024 19:35:00 +0100

I started writing this last week, and then got completely sidetracked. This has been one of those months where so much has happened, I probably should have written week notes instead. But you’re going to get this abbreviated (but still overly long) summary instead.

2024-03: March month note

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 17:20:00 +0000

I’m sure I only wrote one of these a few days ago - but apparently we’re almost in April. Unintentionally, this one is very focussed on my health / NHS based work. March 2024: presenting reports, health annual plan, house work, duty of candour and cooking

2024-02: February month note

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Another month gone. It’s a cliche, but it really has just disappeared - I’m sure New Year was only a few weeks ago. But that means it’s time for another month note. February 2024: board, work, house renovation, turning the oil tanker, devolution and the resurgence of week notes

2024-01: January month note

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 20:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure I can stretch myself to writing something every week, so I’m setting myself a slightly less onerous goal of a note every month instead. So - January 2024: work, health, things I’ve read and things I’m thinking about

Horizon IT scandal: repeating patterns

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 08:40:00 +0000

There is so much that has been written and said about the Horizon scandal over the past 10 years, that it’s hard to pick out what actually happened, and how it got so bad.

When things go really badly wrong, there’s never just one cause. Many things have to have failed. In the case of Horizon, this list is huge: the tech, the supplier, the culture, the investigations, the lawyers, the system of private prosecutions, the management, the politicians, the governance and scrutiny, the recovery. There are things wrong at pretty much every level.

2023 year note

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 20:00:00 +0000

It’s half way through January, so I’m a little late with my 2023 wrap up. But better late than never!

About me

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:01 +0000

I’m a digital technology specialist with extensive experience in transforming complex legacy IT, coaching technology teams as they build new digital services and coaching executives on setting the conditions for success.

I advise governments, public institutions and commercial organisations on building digital capability, setting vision/strategy and leading complex transformation programmes.

I was a co-founder at the UK Government Digital Service and I’ve supported the creation of digital services units around the world, including the Nova Scotia Digital Service and the State of California Alpha team.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:01 +0000

My old blog

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:01 +0000

I have an old blog that I no longer update.

At some point I’ll migrate some of that content over here, but for now it’s over here

Privacy and cookies

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:01 +0000

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The cookies set by this site can’t be used to identify you personally. They’re just here to help make the site work better.

You can manage or delete cookies using your web browser - you can find out how at AboutCookies.org.

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DigitalBC: Legacy modernisation - The Why

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 18:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been interviewed by Jillian Carruthers, Executive Director of the Environment Sustainability Division in the British Columbia Public Service for their #DigitalBC series of videos.

In this video, I talk in detail about how government approaches legacy modernisation projects.

A version of this interview was also published as a podcast.

2020 year note

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 22:13:00 +0000

2020 is almost over. A year that will forever be remembered as that one lost to a global pandemic, people dying, many getting ill, and the March that never ended. But many other things happened as well, and this year note is an attempt at capturing some of those things for posterity.

O'Reilly: Solving problems with principles

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 18:00:00 +0000

James Stewart and I recently gave a talk at Velocity Conference in Berlin about how to use design principles to solve problems in technology projects

Public Digital: Building new services around older IT

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 18:00:00 +0000

Working with technology, it’s rare that you get to build something totally new without having to think about systems or services that already exist.

Talking to Parliament about digital government

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 20:50:00 +0000

This week I gave evidence to the Parliament Science and Technology Committee about digital government and the challenges ahead to continue delivering good services to users

The state of blogging in digital government

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 21:37:00 +0000

Publishing blog posts about the work you’re doing is a great way of making things open. In the early days, GDS was great at this. Working out loud and talking openly about even small changes was normal practice. It was just a thing that happened. Fast forward to 2018 and things are different. Blogs that were once active, now lie dormant – untouched for months.

2017 year note

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 20:20:00 +0000

This year has been a bit of a mixed bag, with many ups and downs: Leaving GDS; setting up my own business; getting married; visiting new places; exploring London.

Benefits of controls on government technology spending

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 20:35:00 +0000

Spend controls often focus on immediate savings, but there are many other benefits of introducing controls on technology spending which often get ignored

Deliver little, deliver often, avoid the big bang

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 15:29:00 +0000

When building and running services it’s important get into the habit of releasing updates to users on a regular basis. Always be shipping.

Create the space to let teams deliver

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 13:48:00 +0000

Organisations that create an environment and culture that supports delivery will find they build better services and have more productive teams. Don’t slow down delivery.

GDS: Completing our work to secure digital services

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:48:00 +0000

Progress and impact of the work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services

GDS: Incident report – GOV.UK DNS outage

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 17:57:00 +0000

An incident report about several issues that took government services offline

What I mean when I say "digital transformation"

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 11:09:00 +0100

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.

Plenty done

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 15:48:00 +0100

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. From sitting on the technology spend control board to hiring hundreds of skilled people into government.

GDS: Updating our security guidelines for digital services

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 18:06:00 +0000

Work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services

Plenty more to do

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 20:59:00 +0100

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. I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering what this means for me. Is it time for me to move on – do something new?

Spending time with users

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 10:20:00 +0100

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. As a developer, I spend most of my time with people who are confident using technology. Many of my friends have scientific, engineering or legal backgrounds. All of these give unrealistic expectations of how people cope with the real world situations we inflict upon them.

A busy start to 2015

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 11:44:00 +0000

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. Motor dealers can now notify DVLA that they’ve bought a vehicle online without having to return the paper V5C document. This will automatically update DVLA’s records, refund any vehicle tax due to the original keeper and cancel a vehicle tax direct debit if it’s set up.

Keeping motivated

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 22:28:00 +0100

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. But, of course, none of that’s really true. There’s been plenty of progress, I’ve just lost sight of it.

DVLA: Iterating the Vehicle Tax and SORN betas

Fri, 30 May 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Some of the recent tweaks we’ve made to the DVLA vehicle tax and SORN services

DVLA: Making vehicle information clearer

Thu, 29 May 2014 18:00:00 +0000

How DVLA is making vehicle information easier to understand for users

DVLA: Next phase of the tax disc beta

Fri, 23 May 2014 18:00:00 +0000

How DVLA/GDS are using A/B testing to push more people towards the beta vehicle tax service

Week notes #49

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 14:05:00 +0000

View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta.

It’s been a bit of a testing-fest with load, penetration and data quality testing going on. As the data from the driving records goes though a pretty complicated process to get to us, the DVLA testing team have been working hard to make sure we’re receiving and interpreting the data in the correct way. This work has been going on over the past few weekends, as well as testing the links to DWP/HMRC for our interim identity-assurance process.

Week notes #45

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 21:32:00 +0000

I started off the fortnight with 4 days in sunny Newcastle doing interviews for HMRC’s new digital centre. It’s always interesting sitting on the other side of an interview table, but these were somewhat unusual as we held them in hotel rooms. Luckily the hotel had replaced the beds with tables otherwise it could have been a bit awkward.

We finished off the Newcastle trip with a meet-up in the Brewdog bar where a fair few developers (and others) came to hear about what GDS and HMRC are up-to and how government is changing.

Week notes #43

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 15:28:00 +0000

Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff. They then launched the public beta on Thursday last week. Early counts suggest that nearly 5,000 people have taxed/SORNd their cars over the first few days using the beta. The team are now looking at the feedback and data to see what improvements we can make.

View driving record – a good couple of weeks for this project. They’ve test loaded a couple of million dummy driving records into the production system to see what bottlenecks exist & how long the initial load of data will take. They’ve also successfully loaded the real data from a select group of people into a special test environment so we can run a limited private beta for the next couple of weeks. This private beta will hopefully expose any data quality issues we have before we open it up to the public.

Simpler, clearer and faster car tax online

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 17:18:00 +0000

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.

What we’ve done is take the existing service and look at where we can make the process simpler. We’ve removed steps that were no longer necessary, stripped back the screens to make it clear and made look more like GOV.UK.

Week notes #41

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 17:03:00 +0000

Quite clearly I didn’t manage to keep up with my intention to publish my week notes regularly. As things became a little crazy before Christmas, these always ended up at the bottom of my prioritised list.

I’m going to give them another go, but they’ll probably be shorter, but hopefully still interesting.

So, recently…

Vehicle tax & SORN – in my last set of notes I mentioned that we’d set up a team to look at making the tax disc buying process easier. This team has been working away since then to build a service we can release into public beta. A few weeks ago we passed our Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment (read the report), so hopefully we’ll be ready to show it off to the public soon.

Week notes #25-27

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 17:22:25 +0000

The last few weeks have involved lots of spinning plates.

Two weeks ago GOV.UK reached one year old. We celebrated in the traditional way with blogs, cake and beer.

Building out the new DVLA cloud infrastructure is ongoing. The View driving record team has started and completed the first stories focussed on Identity Assurance. There has also been conversations about network connectivity and the wider DVLA technical transformation plan.

365 days later

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 09:25:00 +0100

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. It’s publishing information and statistics on government transactions including how many people are applying for a Lasting Power of Attorney each week, the things that stop people applying for car tax online, and the digital take up of the replacing your driving licence transaction.

Week notes #22-24

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 23:25:00 +0100

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up.

We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services. This is giving us the chance to learn from each other and avoid repeating mistakes or falling down rabbit holes. All seems to be going well, but we’ve got at least another couple of weeks of this ahead.

Week notes #16-21

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 11:06:00 +0100

I’ve neglected my week notes for a little while so here is a condensed update covering week 16 to 21.

Part of the reason for the lack of notes is that I took a couple of weeks off towards the end of August. I tried to avoid using my computer during these weeks and completely cut myself off from anything work related. This inevitably led to an insane amount of work prior to my time off and a crazy period of catching up upon my reassimilation.

Week notes #14-15

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:13:00 +0100

It’s been another busy few weeks.

Our big focus over these few weeks has been making sure absolutely everything we have to do before our public beta is included in our backlog.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time with the dev team and lots of people at DVLA teasing out missing stories, converting ‘documents’ into stories and working out dependencies. It’s always amazing how many stories are hidden in documents and not fully visible.

Week notes #12

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:48:00 +0100

Some belated notes from last week.

The week started off with a very quiet few days in Swansea. Lots of people were away for various reasons so, for me, it was pretty unproductive. I did however get to spend some more time with the IT contract management team and see the latest show & tell from the view my driving record team.

Wednesday was the biggest feature of the week with our Sprint Alpha event. It was a chance to show off everything that GDS has been doing with transactions across government. Filled with a mixture of civil servants, press, permanent secretaries and ministers we had a chance to update everyone on what we’ve been up to and what comes next. We’re working on 25 services across government, including 3 (view driving record, vehicle management and personalised registrations) at DVLA.

Week notes #11

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 12:11:00 +0100

At the beginning of the week I took part in a workshop to look at abolishing the Counterpart Driving Licence (the piece of paper that comes with the plastic card). The counterpart contains additional information such as what you can drive (entitlements) and penalty points / disqualifications (endorsements).

It’s seen to be a fairly important piece of paper. If you drive a van for work, you can use it to prove to your employer that you can drive that type of vehicle. Similarly, if you hire a car you can use it to prove to the rental company that you can drive. There are lots of reasons why someone might need to see it. Unfortunately, lots of people misplace the counterpart or throw it away not realising they might need it and then have to get a replacement.

Week notes #10

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 15:27:00 +0100

After a couple of very busy weeks things are starting to calm down and return to normal.

I spent more time on Monday with some of the team working on the DVLA IT transformation. We’re looking at ways to strangle down the complex legacy IT estate to make it simpler to maintain and to make it easier build new services. Given how complex and tightly coupled the existing systems are, this isn’t going to be a simple process.

Talk: Digital by Default at Civil Service Live 2013

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 16:21:00 +0100

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.

Week notes #9

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 19:52:00 +0100

After the last few manic weeks, this week was a chance to slow down a bit and take stock of everything that has been going on.

On Monday I and a bunch of technical colleagues met with the DVLA team leading on their ICT contract procurement (a piece of work to split up their existing IT estate). We took at look at the work their team is doing and made some suggestions on how to proceed.

Week notes #8

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 22:38:00 +0100

A little late this week.

On Monday I got to spend a day visiting the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Bristol. Amongst other things, VOSA look after the MOT service. They’ve got a small internal development team and some SMEs working on various internal tools and an alpha of a potential future MOT service. It’s fantastic to see this sort of thing happening in departments that are getting very little support from GDS.

Week notes #7

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:03:00 +0100

Lots of progress this week.

The Department for Transport Digital Strategy published in December last year contained three transformation projects at the DVLA in Swansea. We started the first – the Integrated Enquiries Platform (IEP) – back in January. The other two (vehicles online and personalised registrations) hadn’t been started yet. Until this week.

On Monday and Tuesday we kicked off our ‘discovery‘ process for these two projects. We took over some space at the RLDC in Swansea, invited lots of people to talk to us and explain everything that might be related to the projects. We filled whiteboards and post-it notes with thoughts, diagrams and figures. By the time we left on the Tuesday we’d taken on a huge amount of information.

Week notes #6

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:57:00 +0100

This has been a week filled with workshops.

On Monday I spent the day at the Richard Ley Development Centre (RLDC) in Swansea. The RLDC is the DVLA’s conference and training centre. It’s perfect for workshops and planning sessions – there is lots of space, lots of whiteboards and Wifi!

As part of the driving licence project I’ve been working on, we’ve been building a bunch of services to handle lots of queries against the DVLA’s driver databases. We spent Monday looking at the systems that currently (and might in the future) make queries for this data. The aim was to identify which services might be next to transfer over to the new platform.

Week notes #3-5

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 13:31:00 +0100

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. There’s been lots going on and I’ve been travelling to and from Swansea quite a bit. There’s also been a bank holiday, and a couple of days off.

Work on the driving licence service has continued. We finished sprint 8 and started sprint 9. The end of sprint show and tell was really well attended by staff from across the organisation. We’ve been concentrating on the public facing elements of the service recently so we could start user testing. We’ve now started spending more time on the backend services including the internal APIs, data services and auditing.

Week notes #2

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Last week was a very short week with both a bank holiday and a day of annual leave. Despite this it was probably more productive than previous weeks.

On Tuesday I attended a show and tell to see the work that’s been done over the last sprint. It’s great to see things starting to come together. We also had a general pre-sprint planning catch up and team retrospective.

On Wednesday we started the first round of user testing the online service. We tested with both DVLA staff in Swansea and members of the public in Birmingham. This round has highlighted some things we can change now to make the service simpler and confirmed some suspicions we had. It has also given us some things to investigate further – it’s important not to jump to conclusions from just one round of testing.

Week notes #1

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:21:00 +0100

A number of people are starting to put together week notes about what they have been up to over the past 5 days of work. I want to give this a go too, partly so I can look back in a few months time and remind myself what has been achieved.

I probably won’t get round to writing these every week, but hopefully often enough that it makes sense.

The internet is fragile

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 22:25:00 +0000

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.

Surviving long distance commuting

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:57:00 +0000

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). So I travelled down on a Monday morning, stayed in a hotel* (and a friend’s sofa) during the week then travelled back on a Friday evening.

GDS: Browser usage on GOV.UK

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:49:00 +0000

An overview of browsers and devices that are using the GOV.UK website on the GDS blog

Exploring local government services online

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:26:00 +0000

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.

Hello GOV.UK

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:12:00 +0100

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. The teams at GDS monitored how the site was working, responded to feedback and made fixes where appropriate.

Working towards launch of GOV.UK

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 18:15:00 +0100

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. In addition, we’ve also made a few other, smaller & slightly less noticeable, changes to the site.

Brushing off the cobwebs

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:21:00 +0100

Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government.

Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary:

The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many bits of government that were working on similar things, including the project to create the new website
We released a public beta of our proposed new website for citizens (to replace Directgov). We followed this with a beta of a platform to replace all central government websites and an alpha of our design principles
I got involved in, wrote and talked about the use of cookies on websites and the new law that has caused a lot of fuss
I got to go to Number 10
I left Consumer Focus and joined GDS full time as a developer and tech lead
I spent a huge amount of time travelling from South Wales to London and staying in hotels
I eventually stopped this madness and relocated from Cardiff to a flat in East London
We released the first batch of things for businesses on the public beta
We announced the date on which GOV.UK will replace both Directgov and BusinessLink – the two biggest government websites.

Over the last year, this blog has been very much unloved and has gathered an unhealthy layer of dust. It’s not for want of trying – there are several half finished posts that I just haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m hoping I can resurrect some of these, but I suspect many are now too out of date.

GDS: It's not about cookies, it's about privacy

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:49:00 +0000

An update on how government websites will be implementing the new cookie / privacy regulations

GDS: Local Services and GOV.UK

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:49:00 +0000

How the gov.uk beta website will be exposing services provided by local government

GDS: Cookies on the GOV.UK Beta

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:49:00 +0000

How the gov.uk beta website will be using cookies

Helping to build a single domain for government

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:00:00 +0100

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.

An update on the EU cookie law

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:17:00 +0100

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

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.

Opening up rail performance data

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:05:00 +0100

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. Now, I travel by train to meetings in London on a pretty regular basis. I like to think that I’m a bit of an expert at train travel.

Using website cookies in the EU

Tue, 24 May 2011 20:45:00 +0100

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.

The last half of 2010

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:57:00 +0000

Whenever there has been an extended gap in my blogging I try and find something to get it going again. It usually involves some kind of recap of the missing months to try and fill in the gap. This time is different only in the sheer amount of things that have happened. Over the last six months I’ve moved house, worked on (and launched) five major projects for CF Labs, begun work on three more and my employer has been abolished.

Attack on @baskers and the public sector

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:11:00 +0000

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.

Costs of government websites

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:53:00 +0100

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, £15.8m on Design & Build, £23.8m on Hosting & Infrastructure and £9.7m on Testing (these are categories that COI requires under their TG128 standard). Despite their efforts (gathering this kind of data is by no means easy) I have concerns about the quality. For example:

Helping you to Stay Private

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:06:00 +0100

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. We felt there was a better solution, and so we built a site that combines the forms into one and does the hard work of submissions for you. The initial version of StayPrivate.org incorporates the Telephone, Mail & Baby Mail Preference service offered by the Direct Marketing Association.

The new government on the web

Mon, 24 May 2010 19:22:00 +0100

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. While these potential plans seem to focus on large scale IT projects, we’ve already started to see the effects of the new government as it has attempted to make its mark.

A brief moment of silence

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:17:00 +0100

Unless it escaped your attention, Gordon Brown called the much anticipated UK General Election yesterday. It will take place on May 6th 2010.

In line with guidelines for civil service and other public sector employees, I will be curtailing my blogging and tweeting activities until after the election. If I do post anything, it won’t be about work.

You can view copies of the guidelines on the Cabinet Office website.

To find out more about the UK General Election and the voting process, take a look at the Electoral Commission and Parliament websites.

CF Labs one year on

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:08:00 +0000

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.

A quick note on MP expenses

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:52:00 +0000

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.com has become out of date and incomplete. This presents a problem as it may confuse and mislead visitors to the site.

Hacks and Hackers working together

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:46:00 +0000

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. While other hack days may have involved journalists in a media capacity, this event involved journalists from the beginning.

Communications in a crisis

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:06:00 +0000

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. Poor communication can lead to frustration, anger and even panic. I’ve experienced this in much less drastic circumstances when commuting to and from Cardiff by train.

Open government and open data

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:27:00 +0000

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.

Opening up community information

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:20:00 +0000

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.

Setting the postcode free

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:40:00 +0000

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. It sits at the bottom of every address (similar to the Zip code in the USA). It is the holy grail of data in the UK. It maps each place in the country to a physical location. The Royal Mail uses it to assist with routing mail from A to B, developers use it to verify addresses and locate other services nearby. Unfortunately, access to this database costs thousands (approximately £3800 per website per year).

A look at the new Birmingham City Council website

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:11:00 +0000

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 £2.8 million), you’d expect the site to be the best thing ever developed.

Why Government needed a Twitter strategy

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:11:00 +0000

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. Many people are scared about it – I partly believe this is because of the lack of control. With ‘old media’ people had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into. With ‘new media’, its well, new, big, scary and uncontrollable.

WhatTheyClaimed.com - a lesson in crowdsourcing

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:20:00 +0000

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. I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.

Time for a change

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:43:00 +0000

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. For the first time, we are starting to see businesses and government use the internet in completely new and innovative ways. Groups are being set up to take the vast quantity of data available and turn it into something useful. From services such as FixMyStreet.com by MySociety to the more recent School Closures website from Directgov, the internet is starting a new phase of open development.

Talking about website accessibility

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:30:00 +0000

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. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it is to use a large part of the internet for someone who suffers from a disability that affects their ability to use a computer.

CllrTweeps - the directory of UK councillors on twitter

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:19:00 +0000

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.

School closure information

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:15:00 +0000

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. The BBC reported earlier that over 500 schools were closed today in Wales alone.

Cinema-style content ratings for websites

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:51:00 +0000

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.

A look at government branding

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:25:00 +0000

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.