I’ve just got back from a few days in the Republic of Estonia, looking at how they deliver their digital services and sharing stories of some of the work we are up to here in the UK. We have an ongoing agreement with the Estonian government to work together and share knowledge and expertise, and that is what brought me to the beautiful city of Tallinn.

I knew they were digitally sophisticated. But even so, I wasn’t remotely prepared for what I learned.

Estonia has probably the most joined up digital government in the world. Its citizens can complete just about every municipal or state service online and in minutes. You can formally register a company and start trading within 18 minutes, all of it from a coffee shop in the town square. You can view your educational record, medical record, address, employment history and traffic offences online – and even change things that are wrong (or at least directly request changes). The citizen is in control of their data.

So we should do whatever they’re doing then, right? Well, maybe. There is a fairly unique set of circumstances in Estonia that have allowed them – and to some degree forced them – into this model of service delivery. More on that in a bit.

So, how does it all work then?

Underpinning the entire state system are two crucial things:

• a national register (called the Population Database), which provides a single unique identifier for all citizens and residents
• identity cards that provide legally binding identity assurance and electronic signing

The UK has a fundamentally different approach to identity from many of our continental colleagues. One that doesn’t involve ID cards, big government databases or general identifiers – more on the UK identity assurance work here. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t wider lessons to take from Estonia’s digital ambition.

Government as a data model

As a general rule, government systems in Estonia are not allowed to store the same information in more than one place. Basic personal details are the most obvious example of this. So everything starts with the Population Database. Within this database for each person is a unique identifier, name, date of birth, sex, address history, citizenship, and their legal relationships. It is, quite literally, a relational database – the entire nation’s family tree can be visualised back until about 1950. The Estonians are confident the database is as close to 100% complete as it’s practically possible to get.

This profile of basic personal data doesn’t need to be held in any other system: they just need to hold the unique identifier. This distribution of data provides some degree of data protection – there is no one place where all the information about someone is held. Of course it’s useful to have someone’s basic details to hand when using local systems – like their name and address – and that’s where the data sharing layer, or the ‘X-Road’, comes into play.

The X-Road is a secure data sharing network, much like the Government Secure Intranet (GSi) used by the UK government. Each data owner determines what information is available and who has access to it. Couple this with some enforced data and messaging standards, et voila; you have joined up government. It’s basically how you would architect software, but on a macro level.

As can be seen in the diagram above, some parts of the private sector can also utilise the X-Road – allowing the principle of not duplicating data in different locations to flow out from government.

Putting people in control of their data

Citizens and residents can access nearly all of their own data online through the State Portal. There are around 400 municipal and state services integrated, and more are coming. You can log in, using your identity card and view all your data, even correcting things that are aren’t right.

Citizens can be associated with their employers, so it’s possible to transact and sign documents commercially using your personal identity. Business owners and board members are associated with their companies, and this data is openly available. Even land and property records are open for anyone to view. To demonstrate this, we were able to look at the President’s information and see the nice big block of forestry he owns in the countryside. Such transparency seems to increase trust in the whole system.

The volume and richness of this data, coupled with the common standards used to publish it, lead to some very impressive visualisations and visualisation tools for people to use. It’s possible to enquire about a company, see who the directors are, see what other businesses they have an interest in, see what the turnover and financial reports are, what land they own etc. It’s not just that all this data is publicly available: it’s also that the data is made easy to traverse with well designed visualisation tools.

How Estonian electronic identity cards work

Identity cards serve as both a physical identity document (they contain a photo and biometric data) and an electronic identity. Each card contains a chip. On this chip there are 2 digital certificates: one for identity and one for digital signing. The two digital certificates are each protected by 4 digit PINs.

The typical usage pattern is to log in to a service using your ID card and identity PIN (card reader required). A positive – or negative – response is then sent to the service. Then if you need to submit something during the session that would normally required a signature, you enter your electronic signature PIN. Finally, your time-stamped digital signature is created.

More recently they have introduced a SIM card equivalent, so you don’t need a card reader. You get a special SIM card containing the digital signatures, and your phone acts as the card and card reader combined. People can just sign in to services using their mobile phone number. This is expected to be very popular.

This identity assurance is also used commercially, initially by banks, but its use is now pretty widespread. It’s used for travel on public transport, so you don’t need to carry an additional card. Just purchase your ticket or weekly pass in advance and if a transport inspector wants to check you’ve paid, they just can scan your card to find out.

Who’s watching the watchers?

There’s an open register showing the profile information that is held in each government system, what reason it is held for, and who it can be accessed by (well, it’s open if you read Estonian). This register also shows the formats and data standards that each system is using.

People in Estonia can also see which officials have viewed their data. It’s against the law to view someone’s data without appropriate reasons (you could go to prison), and all access is logged. I looked at some of these logs and they show you clearly who has been looking at your information: in the example I was shown, I could see that a doctor had accessed this person’s health records, followed by a pharmacist to get details of the prescription required. No bits of paper are needed.

Of course, it’s technically possible that some official somewhere could have access that doesn’t leave a footprint. I was assured this isn’t the case and that the systems as a whole are independently audited regularly to ensure trust remains high.

They quite literally can’t afford for people to lose trust in this system.

Why Estonia?

So, how has Estonia managed to do this? Well, a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a small nation – with just over 1 million people living there – so it’s relatively quick to roll out change. They are also not a nation with large tax revenues, and there are not a lot of natural resources (forests aside). So the state needs as much efficiency and as little bureaucracy as possible.

Possibly driven by the timing of their independence from the Soviet Union (1991), the Estonians saw technology as crucial to establishing and running the country. It was, and continues to be, an astute group of political and civic leaders with the vision and determination to make the most of the technological opportunities available.

So what’s next then?

Much of what Estonia has achieved was possible because they started with a clean slate.

We don’t have that in the UK, but the visit convinced me that we need to increase our focus on two really important things:

• collating, documenting and publishing details of the data the government holds (and what format it’s in) for each of our systems
• publishing an agreed set of open data and messaging standards and protocols, to allow easier communication between systems (where that’s appropriate)

Work is underway on both of these things – expect to hear more very soon.

It’s important to get this right: along with our identity assurance work, it will make joined up digital services much easier and cheaper to deliver. So we’ll be able to really focus on making the services as good as possible for our users.

Pete Herlihy is a Product Manager, GDS

You should follow Pete on Twitter now: @yahoo_pete

Today we’ve published the latest quarterly progress report about the work we’ve been doing with departments on the Government Digital Strategy.  It highlights how we have turned our attention to improving services we provide to support departments moving to digital by default ways of working.

Structure and resources

It was three years ago that UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox sent Francis Maude her review of Government Online.  In 2011 we created the Government Digital Service; in 2012 we launched GOV.UK; and from January 2013, we have been making strides on supporting departments in transforming 25 of the most important government transactions.

As we’ve taken on all these challenges, we’ve needed to look at how digital teams in government are structured and resourced to do this.

We’ve been concentrating on things like our HR and recruitment work, and developing  frameworks to help buy in the right digital services and suppliers.

We’ve also been changing the way we lead, coordinate and deliver technology to support digital. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer is now working with a Technology Leaders network drawn from experts across government to provide strategic direction and promote best practice on how technology can support digital.

These are significant changes which give us solid foundations for the future. We’ve got a hugely ambitious programme of work running with colleagues across government, and we’re looking forward to seeing these starting to show ever more improved outcomes for users – the real measure of success.

You can read an overview of everything we’ve delivered this quarter in the latest update.

What’s ahead?

Well, we certainly won’t be standing still!  As well as carrying on with GOV.UK transition and service transformation, we’ll be continuing our technology work; in particular next quarter we’re aiming to improve hosting arrangements. In December, we will provide an annual report on progress with delivering the Government Digital Strategy. As part of this, we are considering whether there are new actions we need to add or any areas that need a refresh.

Watch this space!

This week Mike Bracken has news of GDS’ presentation to the Cabinet at No.10 and Nayeema Chowdhury talks about sharing GDS’ work at the Open Government Partnership summit.

Follow Mike Bracken on Twitter: @MTBracken

Transcript

Mike Bracken:

We went to No.10 to the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, and firstly that’s a moment in time. It was great to present to all the ministers of state and it was great to show them what we’ve done so far.

Our minister Francis Maude presented a video about GDS and particularly about GOV.UK which has been very well received, and particularly about our Transformation work and the work of our teams around government and departments around government and the great services that we’re transforming.

It was very well received, there was a lot of interest, I think there were 9 or 10 detailed questions at the end and we got a lot of follow up from ministers who have expressed interest in how we work and hopefully we might see some of them around Aviation House soon.

Nayeema Chowdhury:

The Open Government Partnership at the Queen Elizabeth Centre was bringing together governments from around the world who have basically signed up to be more transparent and more open, more responsive, and basically empower the citizen.

So GDS was there sharing our work on GOV.UK, the Performance Platform and also open standards. We were talking about the work we’ve been doing with transactional services so we explained the nature of the work of the Transformation programme, the 25 Exemplars and also the work we’ve been doing with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) on car tax and our most recent dashboard on Lasting Power of Attorney.

Today is the election for the next Mayor of New York City. Mike Bloomberg cannot stand for a third term, and there are more than a dozen challengers competing to take his place.

Whoever wins, I hope they support the great work that Mike Flowers, Chris Corcoran, Nick O’Brien and their data analytics team have been doing to join up information across the city to improve the way that the city fights fires, reduces crime, and administers child support payments.

I met them last week, having already heard about the work that they had been doing to use data to clean up New York and  predictive analytics to save lives. I wanted to hear more about the systems that supported these results, and to see what we could learn from them as we develop the performance pages of GOV.UK.

I was intrigued to discover that they have a small team, using old technology, and a lot of manual wrangling. No pretty dashboards here. Most of their time is spent acquiring the data and then cleaning it. They have built strong relationships with other agencies across the city by demonstrating how their data can be used by others, and how others data can help them to make their own operations more effective.

A map of agencies and data sources collected by New York’s data analytics team. Click image to see a larger version.

The picture above shows the map of agencies and data sources – a treasure trove of actionable information that goes well beyond the web analytics and social media sources that are the easiest to collect. And they take great care to respect the sensitivity of the data that they collect; the team often can’t see the raw data concerning individual citizen transactions, just the results from the aggregated analysis.

In a city with 240,000 public employees, they have fewer than a dozen data scientists and a handful of other analysts. Nevertheless, while lots of people are talking about data analytics and its potential to change the way that government is run. Mike Flowers, Chris Corcoran, Nick O’Brien and the team are walking the talk. I hope the new Mayor continues to sponsor first class data driven decision making in New York City.

Follow Richard on Twitter: @richardsargeant

We asked Matthew Coats from the Ministry of Justice, to talk about his experience at the first meeting of the Technology Leaders Network

In the Ministry of Justice I’ve already seen the positive impact that doing things a different way can have. We’ve had a great response to our lasting power of attorney beta (one of the 25 digital exemplars), and I’m excited to be building on this success. Last week I went along to the first Technology Leaders Network meeting. It was opened by Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and chaired by Liam Maxwell, Government CTO.

Setting the scene

Francis Maude talked about how important it is to get technology in the civil service right, as civil servants (and Ministers) are often frustrated by their experiences of IT. His personal conviction, that the procurement and delivery model needs to change, is a source of support for us all in departments.

He then set out 4 challenges for the network and the civil service:

• we should be able to share documents to work on together
• we should be able to see each others diaries
• to be able to send an email to the whole of the civil service
• the technology at work should be better than technology at home

Liam talked about some of the things his team had done since the review of governance for technology began. A new, simpler model replaces the old: where the Technology Leaders network sits alongside, and complements, the Digital Leaders network. At the moment I am both the Technology Leader and Digital Leader for the MoJ, so I will have my hands full!

We agreed that this model should now be considered a ‘beta’ and, will be run in practice until January 2014 – at which point we’ll review again.

Working together

The group took some time to think about our priorities for the next 3 – 12 months, as well as thinking about what behaviours we must adopt and avoid.

Common themes included:

• finding great people – we need to ensure we have the right skills and capability in our organisations to take us through the changes ahead
• we need to make the common services (a cross government approach to the things that everyone uses like desktops, hosting etc) offering work
• we must share the resources we have – for example being able to see information on new projects across departments

In technology there’s a huge legacy to deal with – both in terms of governance and the technology itself. However, the consensus at the meeting was absolutely clear. In order to meet the needs of a twenty first century digital government a new approach to technology is required.

The last year or so has been all about the direction being set by the centre. The coming year will be all about departments grasping the challenge and increasing the pace of implementation.

On my recent trip to Korea, I was hugely impressed by the technological innovation on display and by the progress on the digital development of the public sector. That why it was a pleasure yesterday to see GDS host a ceremony for the signing of Memorandum of Understandings between the UK and Republic of Korea.

A memorandum of understanding is a written agreement between two parties – in this case, two governments – that sets out the principles for cooperation. The three agreements on digital collaboration were signed by Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Choi, Mun Kee, Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

The focus of the agreements is on technical standards and building digital government services based on open principles. The ceremony coincided with the State Visit to the UK of the President of the Republic of Korea, Park Geun-hye.

As demonstrated in last month’s Conference on Cyberspace in Seoul, we have much in common with Korea, but we also have much to learn from each other. Yesterday’s signing commits both of our countries to creating digital public services that put the needs of the citizen first, and I’m excited that we’ll be working more closely together.

Follow Liam on twitter: @liammax

An important part of the work we are doing on capability building is making sure that people who will be leading public services in the future really understand what digital by default means; for policy-making and service delivery.

Civil Service Learning (CSL) run a one and a half day residential induction event, called a ‘Basecamp’, for newly appointed deputy directors and directors within the Civil Service a couple of times a year. A few weeks ago we helped CSL with one of these; for the first time it focused on a digital theme.

Challenging questions about digital

Around 80 people attended, drawn from 14 departments. Their roles vary hugely: some work with ministers in their private offices, others carry operational responsibility for thousands of people.

As well as more general sessions focussed on networking, personal development and corporate and change leadership there was:

• a briefing session led by Government Digital Service on the implications of the Government Digital Strategy
• a challenging discussion on what digital leadership really means featuring Will Perrin, one of the Digital Advisory Board, drawing on his experience both inside and outside government
• a series of ‘challenge questions’ covering topics as diverse as creating digital awareness and capability at all levels, culture and process changes needed to achieve digital by default, digital policymaking and user-centred services, which participants had to present back on at the end of the second day

Taking the messages further

Will welcomed the chance to get involved, saying: “To retain a professional edge, to do its job properly and know its customer, the civil service has to keep up to speed with big changes in society. I loved working in the Civil Service because its leaders were always up for a challenge and I was glad to see at this event that that hasn’t changed.”

And as Sir Bob Kerslake, who came along to give the keynote session, said: “My ambition, and one I hope you will share, is for us to be able to look back and say we were the leaders who delivered better public services and built a stronger, more sustainable civil service. To do this we need to become more efficient, to be smaller and become Digital by Default”.

And we’re continuing to look at ways to spread this thinking and learning further. We’ll be asking those who attended this Basecamp to help us with ideas and suggestions for masterclasses on digital topics, based on what they found particularly interesting and relevant.

Watch this space!

Image of Will Perrin at Talk About Local taken by Nick Booth.

On Thursday 7 November we hosted Sprint Share in Birmingham, the latest of our Sprint events for people in government to share their experiences of transforming UK digital services. Phil Buckley, GOV.UK Performance Platform Product Manager, also gives an update on the most recent releases of performance data for the car tax renewals and Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN) services.

Follow Mike Beaven and Phil Buckley on Twitter:

Mike Beaven (Transformation Programme Director): @MichaelCBeaven

Phil Buckley (Performance Platform Product Manager): @philbuckley5

Transcript:

Mike Beaven: Today is about all the folk across the whole of government working on transformation to get the chance to share what they’ve learned, share problems, talk and interact, and really get to know each other a bit better.

Clips from Sprint Share attendees and speakers: People are here to understand what everyone else is doing, but also to offer advice to anyone else who’s just starting up, setting up digital services.

You are all delivering, we’re seeing things happening, we’re seeing things coming out, we’re making progress.

We are moving from old to new across government.

Coming here, re-emphasises the fact that you’re part of something much wider across the civil service.

And that’s very invigorating, very enthusing.

It’s really interesting to find out that when we come out of our offices and go to meet other departments, they’ve got some very similar issues.

It allows you to share in some of others’ successes and to share problems, and to get feedback around how you might go away and deal with some of the things you’re struggling with in your own project.

Phil Buckley: Recently we released two dashboards: one for renewing your car tax disc and the other for taking your car or motorbike off the road – Statutory Off Road Notification or SORN. These are the biggest dashboards we’ve had on the Performance Platform up till this date, many millions are done every year, and some really interesting information has come out.

In particular, for the first time ever we’ve got information on the same page about how many people are doing it digitally compared to how many people are doing it by going in to the Post Office, and there are a very small amount of people who still will go into a DVLA office and sit there and somebody will help them fill in a form, so it’s been really interesting to put this information onto a dashboard for the first time.

For almost a year I’ve been part of a small team helping to create a new way for government to work with companies that design and build digital services. The result is the first iteration of the Digital Services framework, which is now open with 183 companies evaluated and selected to supply services.

The framework was originally conceived to support the Transformation program, but it’s actually available to the whole public sector to use. It gives government access to a competitive and wider pool of innovative suppliers, to design and build user focused digital by default services in an agile way.

We worked with the Treasury Solicitors to create a new set of flexible terms and conditions, which support software development in an agile environment.

As the press release says, the pool of suppliers is pretty diverse, made up of companies of all sizes and based across the UK.

The Digital Services Store

The store goes live this month with 13 different roles available to make up your digital team, across 8 capabilities:

• software engineering and ongoing support
• product development and service design
• agile delivery management
• front-end design and interaction design
• content design and development
• system administration and web operations
• user research
• embedding agile

The framework directly supports Action 10 in the government digital strategy and also represents a single strategic approach to the digital services market. Suppliers have one place to go to apply to offer these services, and in the upcoming store, buyers will have a single place to procure. The framework will also be the first one of its kind to be supported with a managed service from Government Digital Service and Government Procurement Service.

What’s next

It’s iterative, evolving and adapting, the framework itself being designed in an agile way and based on user needs. Much like G-Cloud, we’re aiming for a 6-month refresh cycle, iteration two should be open to applications in early 2014. We’ll be learning from the journey, continuing to engage suppliers and buyers, our users, along the way.

Find out more about the framework and how to use the store.

Last month we celebrated the first anniversary of GOV.UK’s launch. Today marks one year since the first two departmental domains were switched over, and the “Departments and policy” section (then known as Inside Government) went fully live.

Today we have also hit a new landmark: the 102nd organisation has moved its corporate publishing to GOV.UK which takes us a third of the way to completing the programme of transitioning agencies and non-departmental public bodies onto the site.

GOV.UK is growing

It’s been twelve months since the Department for Transport and the Department of Communities and Local Government moved to GOV.UK, and we shall remain ever grateful to them for blazing the trail. Traffic to the departments and policy section continues to grow as more organisations join: currently it accounts for about 1.5m of the 6.5m weekly unique visitors to the site.

The graph below shows departments and policy traffic scaled up for comparison with the services and information section. As you’d expect at this point in GOV.UK’s life cycle, services and information traffic remains relatively constant, and departments and policy traffic is still climbing.

So, to paraphrase a festive song that’s already playing in the shops – another year older, and what have we done?

What’s changed in a year

Despite the name change, the proposition remains as it was. The departments and policy section of GOV.UK seeks to make it simpler, clearer and faster for people to find out how government works, see what it’s doing and get involved.

And we’ve come a long way towards doing that better in the past 12 months.

The site is now home to 102 organisations, which means users can now easily find those organisations’ content by theme and in consistent formats without trawling separate domains. Between them these organisations published 4,400 new or updated pages in the past 30 days (that’s around 145 things a day).

Consultations from all central government bodies are now routinely published to the site, meaning our consultations page is a comprehensive source of opportunities to participate formally in policymaking. We’ve made the consultation format much clearer too.

We’ve evolved the ways users can browse content, with improvements to the topic pages and a new “collection” format for curated lists of closely related content. There are also many more ways for users to be notified when things change. Around 250,000 people are subscribed to GOV.UK’s email alerts across 7,415 specific mailing lists: more than 2m subscriptions in total.

Our responsive HTML publication format, which we hope will become the new default format for government publishing, has improved dramatically as have the publication summary pages that house them. 37% of visits to the departments and policy section involve looking at publications.

A lot of what we’ve done is behind the scenes. We’ve made the publishing tools (now used by more than 1,000 people around government) easier and faster to use, and we’re working collaboratively with publishers to raise the standard of the content they produce.

The road ahead

There is plenty of room for improvement, and huge potential to achieve profound change by continuing to develop this shared publishing system for the whole of central government.

The site as a whole is a constant work in progress, and we’re excited about where ongoing iteration will take us. Our vision for 2014 and beyond is to make content in the departments and policy section much more democratic, transparent and reusable to better meet users’ needs, and to improve the quality and efficiency of content production.

Stay tuned to the Inside GOV.UK blog for updates on what we’re planning and working on.

And of course we’ll be completing the transition of nearly 200 more organisations’ web presence to GOV.UK. Keep an eye on the the transition team blog for news as that unfolds.

Happy birthday to DfT and DCLG and everyone who has worked on the departments and policy section, past and present.

Follow Neil on Twitter – @neillyneil. ‘Done‘ photo by Ross Ferguson, while Frances Berriman took the photo of the slightly terrifying Inside Government sticker.

The Performance Platform exposes a lot of service data to interested parties, both within government and outside of it. We thought it would be interesting to tap into the platform, pluck out individual pieces of data and present them in a different way.

Here’s the creative brief:

“Screens” like the one pictured above can be used at presentations and events on various devices and displays. The eventual aim is for them to find a home on those big TV screens you see in glossy ad agencies or pubs that show football. We needed:

• several independent screens, each showcasing a tasty morsel of data
• a cycling “container” to hold a selection of screens
• the ability for screens to function offline if necessary

What got built

This: https://gds-screens-items.herokuapp.com/

Screen shot of the dashboard

As someone who’s mostly comfortable hacking around with the html / css / js triumvirate I chose to use the “web platform” as opposed to anything else. Design and sketching was done in code for speed.

Google Chrome running in fullscreen mode displays the Heroku page when a connection is available. When offline is needed, a local install can be used instead.

Each “screen” consists of an html page, a script, and a css file. The cycling container consists of a set of iframes animated with css. Honestly.

Getting hold of the data

Service data is available from the Performance Platform API. For example, if I want to see how many people are currently on the start page for the Tax Disc transaction, I can query the API:

https://www.gov.uk/performance/tax-disc/api/realtime?sort_by=_timestamp%3Adescending&limit=1

In response I’ll get some json back to play with:

{
     "data": [
          {
               "_day_start_at": "2013-11-12T00:00:00",
               "_hour_start_at": "2013-11-12T11:00:00",
               "_id": "2013-11-12T11:02:04+00:00",
               "_month_start_at": "2013-11-01T00:00:00",
               "_timestamp": "2013-11-12T11:02:04+00:00",
               "_updated_at": "2013-11-12T11:02:04.232000",
               "_week_start_at": "2013-11-11T00:00:00",
               "for_url": "ga:pagePath=~^/tax-disc$",
               "unique_visitors": "362"
          }
     ]
}

As accessibility, bandwidth, and browser compatibility weren’t an issue for this project I chose the path of least resistance and simply used jQuery to fetch and insert what I needed.

A project like this one isn’t really appropriate to host on http://www.gov.uk itself, so cross domain requests to http://www.gov.uk/performance need to be handled.

A wee Sinatra app was made to deal with this. It acts as a proxy and simple server, displaying the html pages and grabbing data from the Performance Platform.

Offline considerations

Out and about doing presentations, there’s always a risk of being offline. A toggle variable was built in, that simply loads locally saved json files, rather than fetching them from the Performance Platform.

“The code is a bit bleurgh. Couldn’t you have…”

https://github.com/demotive/gds-performance-slides

The main objective here was to get all the things on the screens. There’s plenty of scope for tweaks and improvements, as always things like:

• including a setup script to populate offline json files automatically
• implementing “offline” as a command line parameter rather than it being buried in javascript variables
• getting rid of those iframes – trying out different transition styles would be a lot easier without them
• doing a general code audit – tidy up all the scruffiness!

Where we ended up

The screens have managed to photo-bomb a few big GDS occasions so far, including….

The Cabinet Office meeting, lurking on iPads.

The Open Government Partnership summit.

And, most recently, during a visit from the Korean Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

Take a look at the data yourself, or check out the project on GitHub.

Follow Mat on twitter: @demotive

This week we celebrated that we have transitioned more than 100 websites to GOV.UK over the last 12 months; 102 to be exact. Elisse Jones, GOV.UK Departmental Engagement Lead, talks about the challenges of such a big programme of work, while G-Cloud Product Manager Stuart Reeve updates us on the latest iteration of the G-Cloud procurement framework.

Follow Elisse Jones (GOV.UK Departmental Engagement Lead): @ElisseJones

Transcript

Elisse Jones: Since last year we’ve transitioned over 102 agency and ALB (Arm’s Length Body) organisations and their associated websites over to GOV.UK. This is a third of the way through. We know that we’ve got another 193 to transition and we think that’s about 350 to 400 more websites. Some of them can be done as quickly as 4 to 6 weeks, and the bigger ones we know are going to take at least 6 months going right through to 12 months purely because of the amount of content. With the top 20, we’re at the user needs step of the process, so before Christmas those agencies should all be ready to start building and creating the content that we agree should be moved over to GOV.UK, and at the same time archiving the content that no longer meets a user need.

Stuart Reeve: G-Cloud is a procurement framework for procuring cloud commodity services. It’s like any other procurement framework except that it’s open for the entire public sector to use whenever they need it. Last week we had the latest iteration of that go out to G4. We had a really good turnout; we had 999 suppliers with over 13,000 services now live for the whole public sector to buy, and we also had 84% of those coming from SMEs. We’ve had an additional number, obviously quite a lot more suppliers come on, more services, and generally lower prices for the services as well, so the public sector buyers should be able to get a better selection of services at a better price.

For the Individual Electoral Registration project I’ve been out and about doing user research around the UK.

These pop-up research days are fascinating, frustrating, scary and fun. However much I plan, I never know exactly what I’ll find when I get to the location. But I always learn so much about our users and our services.

Broad audience

Our project is aimed at around 47 million people who are eligible to vote in UK elections. They have every level of experience and confidence using digital services, and a wide variety of personal circumstances that can have an impact on their application.

And we have a particular focus on those who are less likely to be registered to vote, such as young people, people with disabilities, people from ethnic minority groups, homeless people, and people living in communal accommodation.

Pop-up research is a great way to reach all parts of this broad audience.

Pop-up research

My ideal location for a pop-up research day is one that is busy all day, and that members of a particular target group are likely to attend.

On the day I put up two large, colourful banners to attract attention. One for the entrance and one for the spot where I’ll be doing the research. I also put out A4 fliers with a design that matches the banners.

For the research, I look for a corner where participants will feel comfortable, but where passers-by can see me running the research. As well as helping to recruit more participants, running the sessions in a busy location creates a realistic and challenging test for our service. We know that people access our services on a laptop at a kitchen table while their partner is making a meal. Or on their phone on the train to work. Or sitting on a sofa while their family are watching TV. So I love seeing how our service works in a similar situation.

Passers-by rarely have much time to spare, so I focus on one or two important tasks or questions. And I keep the research activity short, ideally 10 minutes, but no more than 20 minutes.

To keep the technology setup simple, I use just my laptop on a table with two chairs and record sessions with the laptop camera and microphone. I also take a mobile wi-fi device in case I can’t get a good connection to the wi-fi at the location.

Ticket for research sessions

For most researchers, the hardest part of working in the field is approaching strangers and persuading them to take part. And I’m no different. Saying that I’m from the government isn’t a huge draw, but it at least let’s people know that I’m not trying to sell them something. I’ve also had success giving people a ticket with a hand-written time, if they say they might come back later.

More to come

So far I’ve run pop-up research sessions at a day centre for older people, a large library, a further education college and a youth parliament.

I’m currently planning pop-ups to try out our service with homeless people, students, the gypsy and traveller community, members of the armed forces, people with disabilities, and voters who live abroad.

Look out for the banners.

More and more teams across government are getting involved in the transformation programme. We asked Mat Costick to write about his experiences working on an Agile project.

I’m the portfolio test manager for several projects at the Home Office. We’ve recently started to do our testing using Agile techniques; a big change for the team, but one that’s gone very well so far.

A bit of background

TDCS is a shared service within the Home Office; it stands for Test, Design and Consultancy Services. We support projects in the Home Office and other government departments like the Ministry of Justice and DEFRA.

We’ve always used waterfall as our test methodology for our major programmes with TDCS being responsible for user acceptance tests, system integration tests and assurance tests. As part of the assurance role we’d get involved in writing contract requirements for testing and then assure suppliers’ capability to do that testing. Later we’d review what suppliers were doing; test plans, coverage, scripts, data, that type of thing… policing the quality of what suppliers said they would do.

Typically, there’d be a huge gap between the work that we’d do up front and the actual acceptance testing of the service, and there are a few downfalls that go with that – things like requirements changing by the time we get to testing, or managing huge amounts of change requests. In turn, that usually means spending lots of money, lots of extra testing, more regression for the supplier – who has to go straight through the waterfall model again.

We do it pretty well, but it’s a very laborious and long-winded way of getting there and by the time we have got there things have usually moved on in terms of what the business needs.

The visit visa application is currently in beta. We completed the alpha back in July, which was the first time we’d done Agile testing for the Home Office on a major programme. It’s been quite a big cultural change. It’s been worth it though.

Kim has written about some of the specifics, but two things stick out for me.

Test with your users

The amount and quality of testing with users was revolutionary from our perspective; we’ve never really seen it to that level with customer research and experience key to everything we did. Chris and Katy shared a bit of their thinking about that in a blog post recently.

We were lucky; we had very good people both in the supplier and GDS teams. The way they did it and all the feedback that came out of it was superb. That’s what we’re trying to write down now to share with other projects; these are the methods, this is what you need to consider, these are the resources you should think about and put into your requirements for suppliers to provide.

Automate as much as possible

The other thing, I think, that was key from a test perspective to learn was the role of using automation (as much as possible).

We need a different technical skill set in addition to the Test Analyst role which carries out user acceptance testing, integration and exploratory testing. To get real benefit, we want to automate everything we can. We didn’t have those skills in the alpha but we now do in the beta, and it has made a marked difference already.

Agile doesn’t solve every problem

There are still hurdles that we’re trying to get through. Testing with legacy systems can be very difficult. We’ve got no problems accessing front end services to test them, but it’s more complex with something like the biometric matching systems that are on dedicated restricted networks.

We need to book slots in advance – multiple Home Office projects might be using some of them – and they don’t lend themselves to running in a virtual environment. That means you can’t work as fast as you want to get those suppliers to deliver the fixes in unison. Ideally, you want both teams to be Agile. Instead you effectively start running semi-iterative waterfall methods.

We need that balance of being able to continuously integrate within what we’re delivering while recognising that to do the full end-to-end testing against the old systems we need to build that into our estimates a little bit more.

That legacy state will, obviously, change over the next two or three years, but at the moment we’re not there.

There’s much more to come

At first, it really was hard to let go of traditional methods of, “I need a full design spec; I need a full test plan.” But once the team took that leap of faith they wouldn’t go back. The biggest problem for us is changing that mind-set to work differently; it really is difficult. But once they do it, it’s a much better, rewarding way of working for them.

It’s not the answer to everything but there are huge gains in terms of failing fast and changing quick and delivering working solutions early that work and can be built upon using constant business feedback. It’s been a huge step for us in terms of getting engaged in Agile teams, but it’s like a train now; it’s really difficult to stop and we don’t want to get off!

Last week we paid a visit to the Ministry of Justice to find out more about the innovative work going on there to bring legal services online. Kit Collingwood tells us about how great it feels for the Lasting Power of Attorney team to have been nominated for a Civil Service Award; Daniela Tzvetkova talks about the value of open source and how Court Finder has been picked up and re-used by the European courts; and Eliot Fineberg reports on the latest steps in the Civil Claims exemplar’s development from Alpha towards Beta phase.

Follow Daniela Tzvetkova and Eliot Fineberg on Twitter:

Daniela Tzvetkova (Service Manager, Information Services): @daulfn

Eliot Fineberg (Service Manager, Civil Claims): @eliotfineberg

Transcript

Kit Collingwood (Service Manager, Lasting Power of Attorney):
Last week the LPA (Lasting Power of Attorney) digital team were shortlisted for a Civil Service Award for operational excellence. The tool was co-designed between GDS and OPG (Office of the Public Guardian) and it’s one of GDS’ 25 exemplars. It’s now being supported by MoJ’s (Ministry of Justice’s) digital services and it’s great to have that partnership recognised.

Daniela Tzvetkova (Service Manager, Information Services):
Court Finder went live in August of this year. It allows you to search for information on courts, such as address, contact information, emails, areas of law that they service, how to get there. Almost immediately we open sourced it because we knew about the benefits of open data and open source. Very quickly everybody started noticing that there’s a faster and better way to search for courts and data related to these courts. That reached the European Commission and they thought that the tool could actually be reused for searching information for courts across Europe, and because it’s open sourced already they could just copy what we’ve done and build on top of it to service the more complex requirements of the European Courts.

Eliot Fineberg (Service Manager, Civil Claims): 
Civil Claims are a way for the public to solve civil legal disputes or obtain money or property owed. Examples of property claims might be tenants not paying the rent, homeowners not paying the mortgage, or squatters living in a property. We are trying to build a universal civil claims system. The service will allow you to do that process online. Moving from Alpha into early non-live Beta allows us to start planning what we need to do to produce a live Beta by March. The reception to the Alpha has been good. By delivering a piece of software or a slice of the service that is demonstrably better, not only have you done that thinking that allows you to more quickly run into Beta, you also win over parts of the organisation because they actually see the output of what you’re doing, rather than the theory of it.

A couple of weeks ago, the Digital Services framework went live. Today we’re opening up the Digital Services Store. Buyers in government can browse the suppliers on the framework, and then filter on their capabilities to create a list of companies to approach for delivery of a digital project.

We’re here to help

We’ve put together a buyers guide to help you get started with the service, but we’re also on hand to help you understand what you’re looking for.

If you’ve got a digital project that you need some procurement help with, get in touch with the team: dsf-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. The earlier you get in touch, the more help and guidance we can offer you.

Meanwhile, leave feedback on the store in the comments, or by emailing us at: dsf-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

It’s just been announced that Martha Lane Fox is stepping down from her role as the UK’s Digital Champion. Martha’s been an inspiration to us here at GDS, and the tremendous impact she’s had right across the civil service is worthy of someone who called for a ‘revolution’.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you’ll know how often we refer to Martha’s report. It’s impossible to overstate its importance to GDS.

It gave government the impetus to assemble this team, and it gave us a mission and a mandate to get on with making world-class, digital by default services.

We’re over two years into that job. The work involves people from all around government inspired by Martha to make radical changes to how we deliver public services. I’m pleased to say that there really is a digital culture right at the heart of government now, and that’s all down to Baroness Lane-Fox.

Martha Lane Fox speaking at Sprint 13

Personally Martha, I just want to say thanks. The last couple of years have been among the most rewarding – and challenging – I’ve ever had, and I’m here because of you.

You’ve been an invaluable ally, always challenging us to do better and always keeping us focused on what matters most; users.

Of course, this isn’t goodbye. I’m looking forward to working closely with you, our Digital Inclusion team, and with Go ON UK, to make sure everyone can make the most of the services we’re building.

From all of us here, good luck!

@MTBracken

Today is the 2013 International Day of Persons with Disabilities. This year’s theme, “Break Barriers, Open Doors: for an inclusive society and development for all”, resonates deeply with me.

My work at the GDS since I became a Civil Servant has been almost entirely focussed on ensuring the work we do is as inclusive as we can make it. People don’t typically choose to interact with government, after all, so we owe it to our users to do as much as we can to ensure they aren’t excluded unnecessarily.

For example, we’ve gone to great lengths across the different projects we work on to ensure that our blind and partially-sighted users can access our services through assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. We’ve worked hard to simplify the language we use so that it’s simpler and clearer to understand. We’ve also tried to make GOV.UK a consistent, responsive platform that is accessible at its heart.

Recently I’ve been working to understand how we can better serve the very diverse needs of our deaf users.

To do this, I’ve been talking with organisations, with colleagues across government,  and with the many thousands of users in Facebook groups such as Pardon? and Spit the Dummy; we wanted to find out first-hand what our deaf users think of the services we provide.

Yesterday I met with Sir Malcolm Bruce in his role as Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness to discuss how we might improve access for deaf users, and I’m confident we’ll be able to make a start on meeting the needs of those users soon.

Inclusion is important to me, not just in my Accessibility role here, but as a guiding principle. When it comes to being inclusive, it’s not a matter of providing special access for the disabled; it’s about providing an equivalent experience where we don’t exclude anyone.

For me this work isn’t about disability, it’s about fairness.

We should all strive to make the products and services we build as inclusive as we can. Not simply because of a legal requirement, but as a mark of empathy and respect for our very diverse audience.

Here’s to what we can accomplish in 2014. Onwards!

@partiallyblind

When I ran the open standards consultation, I heard first hand the effect that government’s choice of technology was having on people. Take documents, for example. You might think sending something to a department online is an easy thing, but that’s not necessarily true.

A pet shop owner based in the North West needed to receive information on her business from a department through an online service. The information was only provided in a proprietary format. So, to read the information she was forced to spend her profits on new software – software that she didn’t want or need for anything else. She summed it up eloquently, saying that as a business: “I have almost no problems communicating with the outside world…except when it comes to government.”

I see this as government’s problem, not hers. What’s more, I’ve seen this sort of frustration inside government too, where we’ve been locked into particular technologies that have an impact on how we work with our colleagues. We need to make sure we’re using the right formats.

What are document formats?

The documents we’re talking about here include the texts, spreadsheets and presentations that we create and share in government. These documents are saved in different file formats: ways to encode the instructions for double-spacing lines, making text bold or arranging images on slides, for example.

You might recognise these formats as extensions that are added to the names of documents when they’re saved – things like:

• pdf
• txt
• doc
• odt
• xlsx
• odp
• html

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve government technology through adopting open standards, the Government’s Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Kelly, has volunteered to lead two document format challenges. These have been published on the Standards Hub so that users of government documents can get involved in helping us to select the right formats.

Making the right choices

The document format challenges are descriptions of the problems that users face when they try to read or work on these documents. We are asking for ideas on how we should solve these challenges, including which technical standards we should use across government.

We’ve published two document format challenges on the Standards Hub. If you have some ideas about the open standards that you think could help, please post a response on the Hub:

1. Viewing government documents
2. Sharing or collaborating with government documents

I asked Stephen for a few words about his role as the challenge owner:

“These challenges will really make us sit up and focus on putting the needs of our users first. The only way we can make the right decision is if people get involved and tell us what works best. Then we’ll be able to take out some of the frustration and inefficiency, making it easier for people to do their jobs or use our services. I’m in listening mode – trying to get a better picture of what people need.”

When this discovery is complete, we’ll publish early proposals so that you can help to shape them before they go to the Open Standards Board for consideration.

Get involved through the Standards Hub – help us to make the right choice.

This week GDS Head of Content Design Sarah Richards talks about meeting our counterparts from Canada, Ontario.ca, and their exciting One Site project, and Josh Russell and Warren Smith explain how the new Digital Services Store will make make it easier for government buyers to work with SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises).

Transcript

Sarah Richards (Head of Content Design): I spoke at a conference in Canada last week. The Ontario.ca do a conference for civil servants and I was talking to them about what GOV.UK does. They are doing something very similar; they have got a project called One Site and it is pulling everything together into one place just like we did on the beta. I met their team, it’s just like having a GDS (Government Digital Service), but on the other side of the water. They are an incredible team, they’re doing amazing things. I shared everything that GOV.UK was doing, so right back from the beta and how we started, which really resonated with them because that’s exactly where they are now, and then they gave me some information because they do things quite differently over there and some of their processes are different. So I took all those and I’ve brought those back and then we’re going to put them into some of the discovery sessions of some of the projects that we’re working on here.

Josh Russell (Digital Market Engagement Manager): The Digital Services Store opened last week, it’s a catalogue of all the companies that are available on the Digital Services framework. It’s all the services you would need for transformation of your online service, everything from development services, through to design, user research and system administration.

Warren Smith (Digital Services Framework Manager): The Digital Services framework is open to the whole public sector and it allows buyers to find suppliers with specific capabilities to help them build digital services that are Digital by Default. It’s got about 184 suppliers on it, 84% of whom are SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises). It’s all about capability, so if you’re small or large, it doesn’t matter.