In an effort to talk a little more about what we’re up to at work it seems only right to mention the new Government Service Design Manual (and accompanying Digital by Default Service Standard). Their release is the next step in the Government Digital Strategy, providing a guide to what “digital services so good that people prefer to use them” look like and a framework to assess whether new services are ready to launch. ...
The second of the three GOV.UK beta releases was unveiled last week. " INSIDE GOVERNMENT" is the promised “corporate publishing platform” designed to bring together the core web publishing activity of all government departments in one place. Neil’s written very eloquently about it on the Government Digital Service blog, outlining some of their core challenges, and James Mead has added the developers’ perspective on the Free Range blog about their involvement in it. It’s a strange release for me—it was the first of GDS’ launches that I didn’t press the button for, or even attend as I’m currently out on paternity leave—but I’m really delighted to see it out there for the world to feed back on. Since I first heard about the vision for the single domain I’ve been excited about the possibility that government information could be published in a way that allows it to be sliced along axes other than ‘department’ and “INSIDE GOVERNMENT” begins to give some life to that. ...
Nearly five months ago we revealed Alpha.gov.uk. And then this blog became even quieter. It’s been a few months of big transitions, two of which had to be kept quiet for a while. Since I last wrote here we’ve been busy arranging a move of house (from Harringay to Homerton), have discovered we’ve got another child on the way, and I’ve become a Civil Servant. All three are exciting changes, but it’s the last that I sat down to write about here. For several years I’ve been working on building Ket Lai, initially alone, then with James Weiner, and gradually with a wider selection of collaborators. Things were going well, and we were building up a solid base of clients and getting close to having a couple of products of our own to release. But when the call to the public sector came, it didn’t take long to agree that we’d put Ket Lai on the back-burner and jump on board. ...