Posts tagged "CF Labs"

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.