Now that GOV.UK has replaced Directgov and BusinessLink, and departments are moving to Inside Government, we want to make sure that people visiting links to the old sites get where they need to be. We want them to be redirected to the correct page on GOV.UK, with no link left behind.

This post is about the tools we built to make that possible.

Finding the links

The first thing we needed was a list of everything we wanted to redirect: all the Directgov and BusinessLink URLs (links and Web addresses). This proved to be a fairly significant task – both sites had long histories and various different providers, so a comprehensive list of these URLs did not exist.

Instead, we collected our own lists from a variety of sources, including traffic logs, records of friendly URLs (shorter, more memorable links that redirect to longer URLs), and the results of spidering the sites.

This gave us a total of about 8,000 Directgov URLs and about 40,000 BusinessLink URLs.

Wrangling the URLs

Many of the lists of URLs existed in various spreadsheets, maintained by different people. We needed a canonical source of truth. So we built the Migratorator.

The Migratorator is a Rails app, backed by a MongoDB database. It allows multiple users to create one-to-one mappings for each URL, where the mapping consists of the source URL, status (whether it will be redirected or whether, no longer representing a user need, it is now gone) and, if applicable, the page to which it will be redirected.

As well as the mapping information, the Migratorator allows us to capture other useful information such as who has edited a mapping, tags showing information about the type of mapping, and a status bar showing how far through the task we are.

Checking the mappings

We needed to confirm that the mappings were actually correct. We wanted several people to check each mapping, so we created the Review-O-Matic.

The Review-O-Matic is also a Rails app and uses the Migratorator API to display the source URL and the mapped URL in a side-by-side browser, with voting buttons.

We asked everyone in GDS to help us by checking mappings when they had some spare time. However, clicking through mappings can be dull, so we ran a competition with a prominently displayed leader board. The winner, who checked over 1,000 mappings, won cake.

Confirmation from departments

The Review-O-Matic presents the mappings in a random order, and the way it’s set up means that links within pages cannot be clicked. This is good for getting as many mappings as possible confirmed, but our colleagues in departments needed to check content relevant to them in a more methodical and interactive way. Enter the Side-by-side Browser.

The Side-by-side Browser displays the old and the new websites next to each other. Clicking a link on the left hand side displays what this will redirect to on the right hand side.

The Side-by-side browser is a Node.js proxy that serves itself and the site being reviewed on the same domain, so that it’s ‘live’ and not blocked by the Same-Origin policy. We joked that, in essence, the side-by-side browser was a phishing attack for the good!

Initially it used the Migratorator API for the mappings. However, once we’d built and deployed the Redirector, we could use that instead to populate the right hand side. As well as simplifying the code, this meant we could now see what the Redirector would actually return.

At this point, we distributed it to our colleagues in departments to check the mappings and raise any concerns before the sites were switched over.

Bookmarklet

We used another trick to test Directgov mappings while the site was still live. We created a domain called aka.direct.gov.uk, which was handled by the Redirector, and a bookmarklet. By replacing the ‘www’ with ‘aka’ the bookmarklet allowed us to see what an individual Directgov page would be replaced with.

The Redirector itself

For the actual redirection, we use the open-source Web server Nginx. The Redirector project is just the process for generating the Nginx configuration. It’s written mainly in Perl with some PHP.

Generating the Nginx config requires logic to determine from the old URL what kind of configuration should be used.

For example, the important part of a Directgov URL is the path, e.g. www.direct.gov.uk/en/Diol1/DoItOnline/Doitonlinemotoring/DG_196463, while for BusinessLink the essential information is contained in the query string, e.g http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1096992890&type=RESOURCES. Redirecting these two types of URL requires different types of Nginx config.

This logic, plus the mappings we gathered, make up much of the Redirector project.

The joy of tests

In addition, the project contains a suite of unit and integration tests, including one that runs every night at 5am. This test checks that every single URL in our source data returns a status code that is either a 410 ‘Gone’ or a 301 redirect to a 200 ‘OK’.

For a few weeks before the launch we also ran the daily Directgov and BusinessLink logs against the Redirector to see if there were any valid URLs or behaviour we’d missed. By doing this we found that, for example, even though URLs are case-sensitive, Directgov URLs were not, and users would therefore expect www.direct.gov.uk/sorn to work in the same way as www.direct.gov.uk/SORN.

Going live!

The final task was to point the DNS for the sites we’re now hosting at the Redirector. Now users following previously bookmarked links or links from old printed publications will still end up on the right place on GOV.UK.

The configuration now has over 83,000 URLs that we’ve saved from link rot, but if you find an old BusinessLink or Directgov link that’s broken then let us know.

Traffic through the Redirector is easing off as GOV.UK pages are consistently higher in the Google search results, but it’s been really exciting making sure that we do our best not to break the strands of the Web.

The aim of GOV.UK is to bring all government information and services into one place – that is why we are looking to transition over all our websites onto GOV.UK by April 2014.

However, there were always going to be exceptions to that rule. We wanted to tell you more about why we’ve made them.

Making distinctions between websites

Many organisations work closely with, are strongly linked to or in some cases are partly funded by the Government. That includes many museums (Natural History, British Museum, National Maritime), art galleries (National Portrait Gallery), and National Parks Authorities (Exmoor National Park Authority), and more.

If a blanket approach were taken to websites, then it could be argued that these sites should be made part of GOV.UK, but that doesn’t really make sense. The public rightly sees some of these organisations as having their own separate identity. As such, their organisational effectiveness is enhanced by them maintaining their own websites.

In recognition of this, the Departmental Digital Leaders Network agreed that a set of criteria needed to be drawn up to differentiate which websites should transition to GOV.UK and which shouldn’t.

The Exemption Criteria

So how did Digital Leaders decide who should be on GOV.UK and who should not?

Firstly, the process recognised that the Government had already undertaken a variety of exercises to rationalise its websites, and we agreed that any new process needed to respect and build on those decisions.

Digital Leaders then agreed that the remaining websites should be assessed against two fundamental principles:

Public Benefit: How would the public (particularly the organisation’s customers) benefit from the organisation retaining a website on a separate domain from GOV.UK?

Organisational Success: Whether the website is seen as essential to successfully meeting organisational goals. What is the risk to the organisation’s ability to fulfil its mission if the organisation’s web content is accessed through the GOV.UK domain?

Under these two wide-ranging principles, a detailed set of criteria were developed (summarised below).

An exemption was made if a website met one or more of the following criteria:

1. Site is due to close - if a website is already due to close before March 2014 (for example, if the organisation itself is being closed or merged) then it makes no sense to waste resource moving it to GOV.UK
2. Separation of powers – several types of organisation have a very clear and separate identity in carrying out their responsibilities.  They may have specific legal duties to deliver and their ability to carry them out would be damaged by their presence on GOV.UK. This includes organisations like NHS, the police, the judiciary, parliament.uk and all of its sub-domains, and organisations that sit on the boundary between government and academia where a move to GOV.UK was considered to have implications on separation of powers (for example, in relation to the Haldane principle for academia), or it was deemed to impact upon the governance of an internationally directed scheme
3. Charities –  they are required by government to be registered, but remain individual organisations working for their stated purpose
4. Funding – if an organisation receives less than 50% of its funding from government (whether through direct funding or statutory ability to charge fees / raise levies, etc), then control of the website clearly sits with the organisation in question
5. Bodies who act on behalf of individuals or consumers -  Organisations who advocate for individual members of the public (sometimes taking action against other parts of government) and whose operational success is determined on their distance from government, eg the Local Government Ombudsman
6. Sector/Industry-led bodies – some organisations have been established to help groups within an industry work with itself for the benefit of the public, eg the Seafish Industry Authority was set up by a Government Act to work with the seafish industry on projects to raise standards and ensure sustainable development.  To do this, it works with fishermen, fishing companies and fish and chip shops, raising money through a licence levy on all parts of the fishing and seafood industry for research to help that same industry. (who, incidentally, run the Fish & Chip Awards!)
7. Commercial – some Government organisations generate significant revenue (over 25% of their income) from commercial activity in a competitive marketplace. Moving these sites to GOV.UK might hurt that organisation’s ability to continue to generate income. A good example is National Savings & Investment (the old Post Office Savings Bank)
8. Responsibility to Devolved Administrations - Some bodies have legal responsibilities to both the UK Government and the Devolved Administrations and this needs to be clear to users. Having these organisations only represented on a UK Government website – GOV.UK – could be misleading and so they have been given exemption

The Exemption Process

Each website was assessed against these criteria and a decision was made by Digital Leaders – subsequently confirmed by Ministers – as to who would transition to GOV.UK and who wouldn’t.

In summary, from over 2,000 government websites that used to exist:

• 1,720 sites have closed as part of rationalisation
• 145 sites have gained a specific exemption
• the remainder (approximately 295) will transition to GOV.UK

Those organisations whose websites are exempt will continue to have a presence on GOV.UK, providing high-level content about the role of their organisationand a link to their website.

As organisations change, the list of websites exempt from GOV.UK will, of course, continue to be reviewed, with the presumption that all information will sit on GOV.UK unless there is a good reason to the contrary. We believe this is important; we want to make government simpler, clearer and faster, and to that end we are only as good as our last user’s search.

Earlier this year James Weiner and Ben Welby wrote about the browsers and devices that we are supporting on GOV.UK. We made these decisions using browser/device data from various sources including Directgov, BusinessLink, central government departments and several other big sites.

Now that GOV.UK has been getting real traffic for a while, we are starting to gather our own usage data. I wanted to share quick snapshot of the data so far. The figures we’ve collected aren’t much different from what we expected before launch.

All of this data is from 11th November to 11th December 2012.

View the data on Github

As expected, Internet Explorer is the top browser with around 42% of the traffic. IE9 is the most used version (22.4%) followed by Chrome (20.1%), IE8 (15.7%), Safari on iOS devices (8.7%) and Firefox 16 (6.4%).

In January around 3% of visitors to Directgov used IE6, this has dropped to just over 1% on GOV.UK.

This data looks at all of GOV.UK. If we extract out just the Inside Gov part of the site, the figures change quite a bit, reflecting the change in audience.

View the data on Github

Internet Explorer is still the top browser but gets a much higher percentage of visits – around 53%. IE8 (not IE9) is the most used version (24.9%) followed by IE9 (19.7%), Chrome (18.2%), IE7 (6.5%), Firefox 16 (6.2%) and Safari on iOS devices (5.8%).

IE6 use is around 1.6% for Inside Gov traffic.

As we know this data is valuable to many people, including those outside government, we are planning to share these figures regularly, as we do with the GOV.UK Performance Dashboard. More on that soon.

‘A day in the life of…’ articles typically go something like this, “8:02: my day starts with a walk over Waterloo Bridge. A flat white later and I’m ready to begin. Some quiet minutes to check emails before studying the wall. Now I’m prepared for the stand-up at 9:40…”

Such diaries are often pointless and mostly boring. Perhaps you’ll agree it’s more informative to read about the key functions of delivery managers instead. Stuff they do each and every day.

What is a delivery manager?

A delivery manager guards the team’s time, to ensure continuous delivery is possible. Team time is precious time.

Developers and other team members are capable professionals in their own discipline, self-organizing and cross-functional. But teams can only complete sprint tasks timeously when they are unhindered. The delivery manager is there to remove any and all things that are hindering or ‘blocking’ them, so the team can deliver the product.

We use a mixture of agile techniques at GDS, borrowing heavily from Scrum to organise teams and sprints. In Scrum the delivery manager plays the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is a kind of ‘servant-leader’ (read that with a big ‘S’ and a little ‘l’), someone who enables the team by removing impediments and building an environment people can work in effectively (things as uncomplicated as ensuring everyone has a space to work and a wall to stand up in front of, on which to monitor progress).

Other servant functions include planning for sprints and organising retrospectives. The delivery manager should also help other product teams and stakeholders to understand the work being done, as no team is an island.

These jobs are neatly summed up by one of the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”.

All stand up

The GOV.UK team during a stand up

It’s the daily stand up where the little ‘l’ in leader comes in. Delivery managers or scrum masters will facilitate a daily stand-up and make sure everyone can make it, but it’s the team who self organise. These meetings are for the team talk to one another, not address the delivery manager – some say it’s the wall that should do the talking, and I agree.

‘Help’, ‘support’, ‘guide’ and ‘facilitate’ are used deliberately. The reason for delivery managers is to manage the delivery of the product, not individual team members. Big Servant, little leader.

Stand ups happen at the same time each day usually in front of ‘the wall’, which Emily will tell you more about next week. Daily and at the same time because, as is recognised in another of the twelve Agile Manifesto principles: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation”. Daily meetings ensure that happens. At the same time, so that team members, stakeholders and other interested parties know exactly when the meeting will take place.

Another of those principles states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”. The team also meets daily so that product work can be reviewed. Regularly. And direction changed if needs be – that’s why it’s agile.

Finally, why stand up? So the meeting is brief!

Each day is different

Every day the delivery manager is both Servant and leader to the team; guardian of its time, protecting its ability to deliver.

Creating the right environment is important and daily meetings in front of the wall are core. Here the delivery manager ensures the team has wall space for the stand up, but to repeat this important point again, the team is responsible for conducting it. We delivery managers enable the work, we don’t impose how it’s done.

It’s been a whole month since the Departments for Transport and Communities and Local Government moved over to GOV.UK. That kicked off a process which will see around 300 departments and agencies joining the site by April 2014.

Today 11 more organisations will be moving to GOV.UK, including big names like the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office.  All this means lots more policies, lots more content, and lots more users for Inside Government.

A big move for some big offices of state

Today we welcome these organisations onto the Inside Government section of GOV.UK:

• Ministry of Defence (along with 5 agencies and other public bodies, and 3 high profile internal MOD units)
• Foreign and Commonwealth Office (along with the Foreign Compensation Commission)
• Department for Business (along with the Industrial Development Advisory Board)
• Attorney General’s Office

You might want to take a look at the posts BIS and FCO have written on their own blogs about the move.

Collaborating on policy

Today we’ve published 40 policies on a dozen topics, taking our total up to 72 policies on 25 topics now live on Inside Government. It’s a hefty jump.

In our previous release there were several examples of policy information from DCLG and DFT appearing side by side on shared topics (such as policies from both departments contributing to economic growth).

With this release we’ve gone further, introducing a number of shared policies where different departments are working together to achieve the same outcome. This has meant working with policy teams across multiple organisations to produce a single policy document that describes a cross-government approach.

Government’s policy on Afghanistan is one example. Producing this policy page involved experts from MOD, the Cabinet Office and FCO, supported by people in those departments’ digital teams who had already helped to shape what policy would look like on GOV.UK, working together to draft a single, clear document for people interested in everything the government is doing on this issue.

It’s been really exciting to see that take shape over the last few months, and Janet will be telling you more about that process in the next few days.

A bit further to go

In most cases, today’s release marks the full migration of content from each organisation over to GOV.UK. But we’ve got more work to do to bring across all the content from the FCO – namely their popular travel alerts and mainstream information, and the hundreds of multi-lingual sites about the UK government’s presence, activities and priorities around the world.

Until then, information about what FCO is doing internationally can still be found from this page and travel advice remains here.

6 down, 18 to go

Next up – more of the same. We’re aiming for the end of March to move another 18 ministerial government departments over to GOV.UK, and we’re already working with the next wave of departments to make sure everything’s ready.

We’ve previously introduced the Finance team and the Hosting and Infrastructure team, and shone the Spotlight on procurement. Now we invite you to find out more about the work of the Transformation team. 

Meet the Transformation team – video transcript

Mike Beaven (Transformation Programme Director, Government Digital Service):

The Transformation team really operates as an internal consultancy that goes out and works with departments to help them look at transactions they’re trying to transform. We’ve worked with probably every department in government now to different degrees. So we’ve got ten full-on transformation projects on the go and we’ve worked through about 200 different propositions that have been brought to us. The fundamental shift is stopping designing things from the inside out and designing things from the outside in. What are you trying to do and who are you trying to do it for? – that’s the first question of any session with any department we start working with. That’s the fundamental thing, so who do you serve basically?

SME Day, Sept 2012 (Small to Medium Enterprises)

Louis Hyde (Head of Digital Supplier Solutions, Government Digital Service):

The SME day was all about showing success stories with using SMEs to other government departments. There are incredibly talented SMEs out there and our biggest hurdle is getting them accessible to government.

Mike Beaven:

We’re currently working to build a new framework which is very simple, has very light terms and conditions, has very short term contracts and is dynamic, and that should mean that the actual business of finding out about work and then bidding for that work will be much simpler and much more accelerated, and will also favour smaller organisations.

Agile in action – Student Loans Company

We’ve had some hugely positive experiences with people like Student Loans, who really want to work with us.

Tom Meade (Digital Team Leader, Student Loans Company):

SLC is very committed to delivering a much better service for users and they’re very much committed to delivering in an agile methodology.

Gordon Simpson (Chief Information Officer, Student Loans Company):

We have a large building in Glasgow. The third floor is now allocated to an agile project delivery approach.

Lucie Glenday (Business Transformation, Government Digital Service):

And there’s a real buzz around SLC that there is this one floor that’s doing something different and exciting.

Tom Meade:

As we’re the first large transactional system that’s being built with GDS, we’re benefiting a lot from the design concepts that they’re using in the GOV.UK transformation, but also they’re learning quite a lot from our experiences in building for a transactional system.

Lucie Glenday:

It’s just exciting to watch, to see a business starting to transform itself in that way.

A few relatively quiet weeks have been building up to a busy five days at GDS. More releases, an office reshuffle and some special guests all combined to make sure we don’t go quiet in the run-up to Christmas.

The big focus of the week was the move of more departments over to GOV.UK. BIS, MOD, FCO and the Attorney General’s Office joined DCLG and DfT, along with several other organisations. It’s terrific work, and huge thanks to the teams both here and in those departments to make sure things were ready for the 6am switchover yesterday. Very nicely done.

That release leads directly into a bit of work the GOV.UK team have been doing to get Travel Advice ready for release next year. They’re also working on Welsh-language versions of some of GOV.UK’s most popular pages, which we’ll tell you more about next week. Alongside that they’ve released updates to the child maintenance calculator and been talking to the content and analytics teams about making some improvements to page slugs.

All of that took place after a bit a of a reshuffle. Tony Singleton and his team have been poring over desk plans for a couple of weeks, making sure there’s space for everyone to work together on projects old and new in 2013.

Over the past year we’ve been working closely with Liam Maxwell and the IT Reform Group within Cabinet Office, and I’m delighted that they are now part of GDS. Liam will be taking on an important new role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for HM Government. Each department already has its own CTO or someone very close to that role, and after Christmas Liam and I will write more about how we will deepen collaboration with them.

We’re also entering the final stages of work on the Assisted Digital strategy, as well as the Departmental Digital Strategies. As with the move to GOV.UK, it’s been humbling to see colleagues throughout government work together to produce a roadmap for service design over the coming years.

And just this morning we had the pleasure of welcoming Sir Tim Berners-Lee into GDS. He spoke to some of the developers who have been working on GOV.UK about a few of the gritty problems they’re facing, like how best to expose data for other services and how to continue building capability across government. It was an informal chat, but still invaluable to hear from someone who helped create the Web all of our services are part of.

Finally, I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to Norm, who proved an excellent Master of Ceremonies at the GDS Christmas Quiz on Tuesday. Well-dressed too…

One year on from the official launch of the Government Digital Service, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we’re doing and how we and the rest of the Cabinet Office fit together.

For the past year we’ve been working closely with Liam Maxwell and the IT Reform Group within Cabinet Office, and I’m delighted to share the news that over the coming weeks they will be merging with us here in GDS. As part of the merger, Liam will be taking on an important new role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for HM Government.

The CTO role

In GDS, we have created a network of digital leaders. These are senior operational leaders in their departments, able to identify and drive through the creation of new digital services. These operational leaders (often the Chief Operational Officer, or COO) need the support that a CTO can provide so they understand the technologies required to achieve the change we need across the government’s digital estate.

Each department already has its own CTO or someone very close to that role. Together with the COO they form a powerful combination to achieve our transition to Digital by Default. Liam will lead the CTO council and CTO executive in government, providing the effective communication as well as the technical and business vision that operational leaders need for digital transformation.

Better technology in government

As Liam said when he visited GDS last week, the future of technology in government is not IT, it’s digital. That’s why the IT Reform Group will now become part of GDS, bringing with them their impressive track record;

. saving close to £600m by working with departments to disaggregate black box contracts and realign technology programmes around user need

. the Open Standards Policy demonstrated a commitment to Open Standards creating a level playing field for Open Source and open, competitive markets for tech in government

. using effective, dynamic procurement frameworks like the Cloudstore, which have, for example, seen SMEs quote £50k for what a System Integrator has quoted £4m.

The digital future

The digital future for government is laid out in the Government Digital Strategy. Each department is about to publish its own digital strategy, forming the roadmap for service transformation over the next year. This will create a new generation of digital public services where our ambition for Digital by Default will be realised: digital services so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so.

By merging we’re creating an organisation with a user centric, rigorous approach to technology design and deployment in government. We’re reducing complexity, vendor lock-in and substantially lowering the cost per transaction of public services.

I look forward to working even more closely with Liam and his team.

Last week, Pauline Ferris wrote about the process we went through to decide which central government websites are exempt from the move to GOV.UK. Today we’ve published this list. As Pauline said, this list will change over time. As organisations and their remits change, we’ll amend the list. But what does this mean for those agencies and Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) who aren’t on the list of exempt websites?

Making the move to a single domain

As we’ve said in the Government Digital Strategy, the Government is improving the way it provides information by moving to a single website, GOV.UK. At the moment, we’re focusing on moving departmental information across to GOV.UK.

By April 2013, all Ministerial government departments will have transitioned their corporate information publishing activities to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. By December 2013, they will also be publishing all of their detailed guidance and technical notes on GOV.UK. We’re working closely with relevant professional bodies (especially for tax and accountancy information) to make sure that detailed guidance is accessible and easy to find.

In the new year, our colleagues in government departments will be getting in touch with their non-exempt agencies and ALBs to start planning the transition of their online information publishing to GOV.UK. This next stage of transition should be complete by April 2014.

A consistent experience for users

Agencies and ALBs will still be in firm control of the information that they publish online, using a modern, federated publishing system that we’ve built (and open-sourced) specifically for publishing government information. Businesses and individuals, both in the UK and overseas, will know that they can find information and guidance from almost all government bodies in one place. There will be a consistent design and layout for information published by about 300 different government organisations. And even those organisations that are exempt from moving all their information onto GOV.UK, will still have a presence. Each will have a landing page, briefly setting out the role of their organisation and providing links to their own website for more detailed information.

Most interactive tools and online transactions will stay where they are on agency and ALB-managed websites – this is simply about bringing together information publishing in one place. For example, interactive tools like the Environment Agency’s flood warning service will continue to be operated by the Environment Agency using their own web servers. The same applies to online transactions, such as the DVLA’s tax disc service, which will continue to be operated by DVLA on their own web servers.

GOV.UK already acts as the starting point for hundreds of online tools and transactions that run on web servers operated by government departments. We’re confident that the user journey will also work well for agency and ALB-hosted tools and transactions.

Simpler, clearer, faster

We’ve built up a lot of knowledge about how to move large and complex websites with millions of users onto GOV.UK. We know how to ensure that existing inbound links are redirected to the right place on GOV.UK. We also know that moving about 300 agencies and ALBs onto GOV.UK will have its own challenges. We’ll be testing out the process with a small number of agencies to make sure we get it right before we start the transition process in earnest from April 2013.

It’s going to be a big task, but the end result will be worth it – a single place for government information and a single starting point for government services online. Every department, agency and ALB will benefit from each improvement and each new feature we add to the underlying platform. And of course we will be keeping you up to date on progress here on the GDS blog.

GOV.UK Exempt Websites (PDF) (76KB)
GOV.UK Exempt Websites (XLS) (20KB)
GOV.UK Exempt Websites (CSV) (9KB)

As Mark mentioned in his blog post last week, daily stand ups at GDS take place in front of the team walls. The walls are a great focus for the teams, but they have a lot of other benefits that make them a key part of our day-to-day work.

If you visit the GDS offices one of the first things you will notice is that every spare bit of wall space is covered in drawings, sticky notes, index cards and diagrams. Instead of keeping our ideas, plans and work-in-progress buried in digital tools, documents, Gantt charts and emails, the teams here manage their workflow through their walls. We love our walls and they talk to us.

Walls are a key feature in most agile methodologies. The cards showing the current team tasks, are displayed on the walls. At GDS, for the most part we practise scrum and where necessary we use other methods like kanban. Some teams plan and prioritise their projects using digital tools such as Pivotal Tracker and Trello. Whatever method we use, the walls show our work.

As well as a place to hold the daily scrum, the walls bring transparency to what we do.  They help us to manage and measure workflow, and enable us to spot the bottlenecks.

Being transparent

A huge benefit of using the walls to track our work is that everyone in the office can see what other teams are working on. This encourages open dialogue. We really appreciate it when people from other teams look at our walls and talk to us about what they can see, especially if it overlaps with their own work.

The teams often use online tools to hold information about a project, but they’ll always post information about current and future work to their wall. Being able to look at a wall to see where a task is up to or simply having something to point at during a stand up helps teams to focus and see at-a-glance how projects are progressing.

Managing workflow

There will be several columns on each wall. A development team wall may well have columns called ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, ‘Ready to Review’, ‘To Deploy’ and ‘Done’. As the work gets done, the team will move the cards along the wall in the daily stand ups. The very act of moving the cards gives us a clearer understanding of how tasks move through the workflow. There is nothing better than moving a card to the “done” column (except perhaps stamping the card with ‘DONE’).

Visualising bottlenecks

Cards that don’t move along the wall often depict bottlenecks. If several cards are stuck in the ‘In Progress’ column then perhaps the team is trying to focus on too many things at once. If there are too many cards in the ‘To Deploy’ column there may be a problem with the deployment process. By visualising workflow on the walls we can easily spot problems and focus on solutions.

If a task is completely stuck, we mark it as blocked and leave it on the board. Teams can decide whether to move it along or to leave it for a later date. Either way it will be left on the wall until it can be dealt with.

Measuring workflow

Monitoring how the cards move across the wall gives us useful information about how long tasks take on average to go from the ‘To Do’ column to the ‘Done’ column. This gives us cycle times for tasks, and an understanding of the team’s capacity and capability.

These metrics help us understand how much work the team can take on. Coupled with the metrics we get from our digital tools, we can limit the amount of tasks that are displayed in each column. This will ensure that teams aren’t given more work than they can manage.

The walls keep us informed and keep us focused. They drive conversations with other teams and allow us to be open as we plan and deliver.

Hi I’m Angela, I work in the User Research Team and would like to talk about the range of research we conducted in the run up to the launch of Inside Government

Just to recap, on 15 November the GDS team successfully launched Inside Government, with DCLG and DfT. Those departments have since been joined by MOD, FCO, BIS and the AGO. The remaining 18 ministerial departments will be fully migrated over to the GOV.UK domain in early 2013, with over 300 other public bodies and organisations joining the site by March 2014 .

But let’s go back a few months…

Planning any programme of research starts with understanding the target audience and their user needs. We already had an idea about who the users were. Our insight was based on site analytics, industry data and our own surveys and interviews. Our ‘holistic’ research plan included quick, focussed feature testing, more formalised structured task-based evaluations and wide-scale quantitative insight.

The early days and the ‘agile approach’

To date, our team have reviewed both the beta and live versions of Inside Government involving over 500 external users through a combination of research methods.

Back in the spring, Nick Breeze conducted some task-based user testing on an early version of Inside Government. By the time I arrived in the summer, the designs had evolved. In October, I conducted a quick expert review on the latest designs and followed this up with some guerrilla testing with real end-users from Southend-on-Sea Borough Council.

Mark Hurrell, a designer from the Inside Government team, attended those sessions. He could see see and hear how people were interacting with the site first hand, and then weave the findings back into the designs shortly after. Mark talked about this in his tumblr post on 16th October.

This guerrilla approach to user testing works well. Sessions are informal, focussed on specific features and, with development teams so closely involved, there’s very little need to report back.

Qualitative

We don’t rely solely on any one method of user testing. In November we conducted formal lab-based user testing in London and Leeds. We did this to get a better understanding of how our audience was interacting with the site and to flag up any glaringly obvious issues that needed addressing before launch.

Individual facilitated sessions were conducted with 12 participants, all of whom regularly used the DfT and DCLG websites. Each session lasted an hour and covered specific tasks around; proposition, policy pages, organisation homepages, microcopy, navigation and layout.

In addition to the 12 lab-based sessions, a further 2 participants with visual and cognitive impairments reviewed the site with a facilitator. They used their own ‘assistive technology’. Another 9 participants accessed the site remotely and evaluated the site, without a facilitator, using a questionnaire.

Some of the most heartening feedback the team received was from the research agency conducting the sessions, who said that in their professional experience this was ‘the most positive user testing of any website they had ever seen’.

Overall the findings revealed that:

• the proposition of Inside Government was positively received
• there was a good understanding on who the site was aimed at
• the clean, uncluttered layout was appealing
• for most the global navigation supported a seamless journey across departmental content

However, the research also highlighted areas for improvement too, in particular:

• the type of content showcased on the department homepages (users wanted less ‘PR’)
• the ability to easily locate consultation documents
• the visibility of the links to departments’ homepages

Neil Williams, Mark Hurrell and the Inside Government team have already made some changes to address all 3 of these issues. Improvements will continue in the New Year.

Quantitative

Once the site launched, the Inside Government team were able to assess levels of traffic, demand and engagement to the site.

We also conducted some remote usability testing, or what we call ‘summative testing‘. This allows us to gauge the performance of content, layout and perception with a large representative sample of internet users.

We selected 5 tasks that were not too dissimilar to those used in the lab testing. We measured success and time on completion, click streams and satisfaction. We collected the search terms used and recorded all comments made.

The key findings revealed that:

• 65% successfully found the answer they were looking for, which suggests that 35% did not. That’s a significant learning and one which we’re addressing
• the average time taken to complete each task was 2.1 minutes. This is a useful benchmark to measure future tasks against

Next steps

Inside Government is set to grow, as will our knowledge about our audience and how they use the site.

After the Christmas break we’ll continue to do more guerrilla style testing, working closely with development teams and departments. We’ll be conducting more formal, lab-based testing at the end of January and we’ve planned some summative testing for the Spring. Watch this space.

Today we published the Government Approach to Assisted Digital as part of the Government Digital Strategy. Assisted Digital provision is the help and support we will provide so people who can’t use digital services independently can access digital by default services.

Although we co-ordinated publication, the document was developed collaboratively with Digital Leaders, departmental assisted digital leads, and with organisations working with people who are not online.

Making the strategy accessible

One thing we are very conscious of is that we need to ensure that the 18% of UK adults who are offline, and people who are online but have limited digital skills, can actually access the Government Digital Strategy and Government Approach to Assisted Digital.

We expect that most users will access the publications digitally. The primary audience is people working in government and people working in organisations with an interest in government policy. Generally these people are online – at work if not at home – and can access the information digitally.

If they would like a paper copy, then they can download the pdfs and print them off. Just as we do with GOV.UK, we have made the site as accessible as possible. It has been tested in screen readers and screen magnifiers.

We have made the language as simple and clear as we can, and we have provided British Sign Language translations for the executive summaries and videos.

Spreading the word

But we are aware that for some people who are offline or for those people who have limited digital skills, partnerships and intermediaries are central to the promotion and delivery of the assisted digital strategy.

So we are publicising the document using posters in front line public sector offices, and in organisations where the staff are offline. We found that this worked well with the launch of GOV.UK so we’re doing it again. Thank you to those who helped make this happen.

The posters display a couple of lines of information about the documents, the web address and details on how to request a paper copy by email, phone or post.

We’ve deliberately mixed online and offline options because assisted digital is about having appropriate help and support as well as a digital service, not providing separate channels for people who are offline.

It might seem illogical to have an email address for assisted digital users, but the people who need assisted digital often have a mix of abilities and can do some things online but not others.

We’re keen to find out how many copies of the documents are requested through the assisted digital routes.

We’ll ensure that our findings inform how we publish in the future. Let us know what you think in the comments below or via @gdsteam or @Mark_GDS

In November the Government Digital Strategy set out a shared vision for digital by default government; our digital services must be so straightforward and convenient people prefer to use them. This strategy committed government departments to 14 actions and was written by Digital Leaders representing every central government department.

It was praised at the time, I believe rightly, for both its ambition and its bias towards action. Tim O’Reilly, the open source leader who coined the terms Government as a Platform and Web 2.0 declared: “This is the new bible for anyone working in open government”.

There are many government strategies now lying gathering dust which promised much but delivered little. Often this is due to a lack of ambition, the result of unactionable statements and risk aversion. Not so here.

Today, 18 government departments have published their own digital strategies. They have set the bar high.

These strategies describe how each department will change to become a digital by default organisation, offering digital services that are so good people prefer them. They also contain hard, actionable deliverables, and do not shirk from tackling the daunting task of transforming key parts of the state’s services. From future elections, to tax and social care, there is no ambiguity here.

To get a true sense of the scale of change being proposed,  I recommend reading all 18 strategies.

But if you’re short of time we’ve published summaries of how departments will respond to each of the 14 agreed actions. For example, you can find out how each department will improve its in-house specialist digital capability, or which transactional services will become the first to redesigned as digital by default exemplars.

While all such transactional services are important, it is worth exploring the sheer ambition and potential value some of them will bring.

DEFRA, through its work with Rural Payment Agency and other agencies, is creating a platform for farmland information to meet European legislation and administer millions of transactions. This will transform the way farmers apply for and receive payments, with a new digital service replacing 40 schemes delivered through 4 delivery bodies, each with their own IT systems. The data services created as a by-product could spur innovation in this space for years to come.

DEFRA’s Chief Operating Officer and Digital Leader, Ian Trenholm, has been the catalyst for a new take on a long-troubled service. It’s also good to see agile thinking and SME engagement at the heart of their approach.

HMRC, already an early adopter in digital services, has raised the bar again. From the Minister down, there is a sense of mission, not only to increase digitisation but to make it far simpler, clearer and faster for individuals and businesses to update their tax affairs.

For example, a new digital service will  allow 30 million+ PAYE taxpayers to report changes that affect their tax codes, rather than making a phone call or writing.

And HMRC is forming a new unit, the HMRC Digital Service, which will become the home of the deep digital skills and experience required.

Many Government transactions are mandatory, but shouldn’t be seen as any less important. These ‘grudge’ transactions, whether booking prison visits or paying tribunal fees, can hugely affect millions of lives. At the Ministry of Justice,  Antonia Romeo, Merry Scott-Jones and Roger Oldham are already creating a digital team capable of transforming such vital transactions.

Even the services currently seen as leaders can be improved. At DVLA and DSA, service managers like Carolyn Williams and John Ploughman have led the way in delivering digital exemplars such as road tax.

But there is still much to do to create ecosystems for suppliers and to create new space for innovation around the resultant data. The forthcoming integrated enquiries platform at DVLA is, to me, one of the best examples of radical transformation of a legacy business into a purely digital operation, as is their ambition to digitise vehicle logbooks to simplify the process of selling or scrapping a car.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has committed to a particularly broad set of service transformations. Stephen Lovegrove, BIS’s Digital Leader, deserves special mention for listing seven services to undergo digital by default service transformation.

These include Student Loans, Companies House registrations, patent and trademark applications at the IPO and a new digital sergice to make it much easier for people,  often in dire straits, who need to apply to the Insolvency Service to receive statutory redundancy payments when the companies for whom they were working go bust.

There are many more. Non-transactional departments have been quietly achieving great things. The Department of Health has been taking the lead in open policymaking, while at DfID the recent announcement of its Open Aid Information Platform constitutes the best example yet of Government as a platform, and we should congratulate Charles Agnew, Julia Chandler and the team.

Similarly, FCO has produced a bold strategy for digital diplomacy, ably lead by Adam Bye, its Digital Leader.

It will take some time to digest these strategies, and in Government we have much work to do to build capacity, attract the right skills and suppliers and remove some of the existing process obstacles.

But for the first time, Government now has a collective ambition level which befits the expectations of our users in a digital age.  

Today’s launch of 18 departmental digital strategies is a statement of ambition for the reform of public services. Mike Bracken writes about what these plans for digital transformation mean.

These include a full scale digitisation of motoring services at DVLA, a new platform for farm information and agriculture agencies, profound changes to the digital tax products,  digital by default products in the Ministry of Justice and other services from the Land Registry, Student Loans and the Insolvency Service.

Tom Loosemore has selected several of these for further analysis to show the scale of our collective ambition.

The journey to this point started with Martha’s report, and the simple but powerful observation that most interactions with Government are transactional, and it’s at that point where users are repeatedly failed by the state.

This failure to transact creates huge duplication inside Government – the cost of this failure waste is astonishing. It also wastes our users’ time and money, and detracts from their trust in Government generally.

While high-profile policy lapses are occasionally pointed at as examples of how users trust in Government is being damaged, I believe the repeated failure to complete transactions quickly and easily causes sedimentary layers of distrust.

In early 2011 it was simply not possible to start with transactional reform.

Firstly we had to create a digital estate at the heart of Government, then show we could run a cross Government platform. GOV.UK, and the way it was created (agile, with policy and technology specialists working together) created the trust in departments that transactions could be reformed digitally.

The savings from GOV.UK and our ability to create new transactional services for the Ministry of Justice, HMRC, Cabinet Office and for general users such as e-petitions demonstrated that transactions could now be created in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost than that need to produce the documentation required to procure ‘large IT’ versions of the same product.

It was vital that the strategies were both a commitment made in the Budget in April and the Civil Service Reform Plan in June. And underpinning all of this was having a shared estimation of the size of the prize. Publishing the number and type of transactions, their volume and the potential efficiency savings was the final piece of the puzzle.

All these steps, however painful at the time, have raised the belief inside a deeply risk-averse system that profound change is both possible and desirable, both for users and for those administering the public finances.

While this is a huge journey of trust and belief inside Government, we must not forget that we serve everyone, so today we’ve also published the government’s approach to assisted digital giving more detail on how we will make sure those who can’t access digital services are not excluded. Rebecca Kemp, Mark McLeod and Lena Casey from GDS (as well as Felicity Singleton before them) and staff from across departments deserve special praise.

The process of drafting and agreeing such profound changes is never easy. I’d like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to everyone involved across Whitehall, and in particular the Digital Leaders who lead the process in each department and set the standard for collaboration and mutual support. Time and again they have pushed their own departments and agencies, often delivering some difficult challenges and uncomfortable messages to their colleagues. They are the embodiment of cross-government collaboration.

Our Digital Advisory Board has been hugely influential in helping raise the ambition level. Through a combination of personal appearances, working with key departmental leaders and even Ministers, hosting the Digital Leaders and generally adding support at each and every turn, they have been magnificent. Special mention among them to Kip Meek, who gave much of his valuable time to set the course for the digital strategy creation. Rarely can something so complex be made so simple, and to have strategic thinking of that quality on hand is invaluable.

Finally, I’d like to thank the team here in GDS who worked so diligently to coordinate what has been a significant endeavour. Kathy Settle, Tom Loosemore, Sheila Bennett and Andrew Francis in GDS have been unstinting in their efforts to encourage, support, lead and occasionally push departments to raise their ambition statements.

We would not be able to achieve this without the ongoing backing and support from Francis Maude, Richard Heaton and Stephen Kelly, and all our colleagues in the Efficiency and Reform Group and wider Cabinet Office.

That the digital ambition for Government is no less than the major transformation of 23 of our top 50 most used services in the next two years is their achievement.

Now we have to sprint for the line.

In 2011, while gearing up to take on my current role, I discussed with the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, the strategy I recommended we adopt for all things digital. The strategy was to be disarmingly simple: to deliver. Often, iteratively and repetitively.

Here’s my take on why delivery is such an attractive digital strategy in Whitehall. Ministers are inundated with policy directives and advice, most of it of the risk-averse variety. When it comes to digital, the voices of security and the voices of procurement dominate policy recommendations. The voice of the user barely gets a look-in. (Which also explains much of the poor internal IT, but that really is another story.)

There are two inarguable truths about the creation of policy. Firstly, there’s far too much of it, especially in relation to subsequent delivery. A 2009 Institute for Government report (PDF), claims 19,436 civil servants were employed in ‘policy delivery’ in 2009, while each government department produces around 171 policy or strategy documents on average each year.

One of the many lessons in my 18 months in Government has been to watch the endless policy cycles and revisions accrue – revision upon revision of carefully controlled Word documents, replete with disastrous styling. Subs to Ministers, private office communications, correspondence across departments and occasional harvesting of consultation feedback all go into the mix.

Rarely, if ever, do users get a look-in. User need, if referenced at all, is self-reinforcing, in that the internal user needs dominate those of users of public services. I’ve lost count of the times when, in attempting to explain a poorly performing transaction or service, an explanation comes back along the lines of ‘Well, the department needs are different…’ How the needs of a department or an agency can trump the needs of the users of public services is beyond me.

It’s usually the way with all large, rules-based organisations, that more time and effort is spent on internal logic and process than on listening to and understanding real user needs. But in the case of public service provision, it is too often a completely closed loop, the ultimate insider job. There are many better analysts of why this occurs, but a lot is to do with motivation of those inside the system, and Le Grand (PDF) is possibly the best place to start that discussion.

The second policy fact is that when it comes to digital strategy, and technology related issues in general, the absence of knowledgeable input from those delivering services is obvious. In 2009, the Public Administration Select Committee criticised the policymaking process in general as hurried, hyperactive, and insufficiently informed by practical experience (Public Administration Select Committee, Good Government, HC 97-I, 2009, pp.21-25). My italics, because it’s this characteristic which is the killer for the digital agenda.

The people who can ‘find the quick do’ as one of my business cards says, would much rather actually deliver than try and influence policy makers. While many digital issues require clear policies, many more do not. What they require is very quick delivery of a working version of the product. Throughout the creation of GOV.UK in 2012, time and again, we encountered issues where it was just quicker, cheaper and more efficient to build, rent or throw together a new product, or at least a minimum viable product, than go through the twin horrors of an elongated policy process followed by a long procurement.

Back in 2011 I took time to meet several previous holders of exalted job titles such as mine. From e-envoys to CIO’s, Executive Directors to corporate change agents, Whitehall has a glittering track record of giving ambiguous but eye-catching job titles to newly arrived reformers, especially in the technology field. I should thank them firstly for giving their time and thoughtful advice. Many of these people I count as friends, and I will spare them all direct references. While many of them banked some high-profile achievements, the collective reflection was frustration with and at the system. As one candidly put it, ‘the strategy was flawless, but I couldn’t get anything done.’ And there’s the rub. Delivery is too often the poor relation to policy.

Since we started the Government Digital Service we have at all times tried to make user needs the driver for all decisions. Delivery based on user need is like kryptonite to policy makers and existing suppliers, as it creates rapid feedback loops and mitigates against vendor lock-in.

Looking at the highlights of what we have delivered, it is notable that delivery of services, whether they be information or transactional, has come before strategy. While I am very happy with the Cross Government Digital Strategy (as Tim O’Reilly said “This is the new bible for anyone working in open government”) and the subsequent response from departments, which has given us all a mandate to transform our leading transactions, I believe that these strategies have real weight because of the reputation for delivery which precedes them.

Image by Paul Clarke

Delivery Highlights

2011
May: GOV.UK Alpha launched
Aug: E-petitions
Nov: Launch Identity strategy
Dec: Launch GDS

2012
Jan: Beta GOV.UK
Feb: Established Digital Leaders across Govt
Mar: Digital Advisory Board set up
Apr: Budget commitments (PDF): Digital Strategies and Cost Per Transactions
May: Social Media Guidelines and delivered alpha service for Office of Public Guardian (Lasting Powers of Attorney) with Ministry of Justice
Jun: Digital Performance Framework and digital throughout the Civil Service Reform Plan (PDF) plus we joined OIX
Jul: Launched the Transactions Explorer
Aug: E-petitions birthday
Sep: Delivered alpha of Student Loans Company service.
Oct: Finalise the Digital Efficiency Report
Nov: Release the Govt Digital Strategy and Inside Government, and launched GOV.UK
Dec: FCO, DfT and AGO join GOV.UK. All government departments release their digital strategies

What we will do in 2013 is to continue to deliver. All Government departments will migrate onto GOV.UK by April, with hundreds of agencies set to follow through the next financial year. Our identity platform will allow third-party validation of users for some Government transactions. An increasing number of transactions will be transformed to become digital by default. Our commissioning and partnership development will continue to open up the supply chain in ways the Government Cloudstore has demonstrated.

Delivery will be more distributed across Government than in 2012, which gives us more challenges to co-ordinate and support across agencies and departments. But deliver we must. Late last year I presented a digital view to Sir Bob Kerslake, Sir Jeremy Heywood and all the other permanent secretaries, many of whom have been very supportive of our digital ambition. As you can see, there is no backing away from the delivery challenge. And we can only do it together, by placing user needs at the forefront of our thinking.

Onwards

You can read a longer version of this on my blog, at www.mikebracken.com

Image by Ana Paula Hirama

Departments’ Digital Strategies showed how far the impact of digital has been within government. For the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the addition of social media tools to the diplomatic arena will be incredibly important, as Chief Digital Officer Alison Daniels explains.

Like many organisations the FCO’s communications teams are well versed in the opportunities social media provides, from distributing and amplifying consular messages to British nationals, to engaging audiences on tough foreign policy issues, to using digital channels to seek views as we formulate policy.

As well as producing the FCO’s Digital Strategy we have been writing social media guidance for our staff. We want to encourage them to make full use of social media in their day to day work.

Social media as a diplomatic tool

At the FCO we have a well-established social media presence. Twitter has been embraced by six of our seven ministers, our Permanent Under Secretary Simon Fraser and many of our Ambassadors and senior officials in embassies around the world.

We’ve described some of the ways we’ve been using social media in these case studies, and we’ve blogged about our social media highlights from 2012 on our digital diplomacy blog.

But in our Digital Strategy we set out our aim of embedding digital more comprehensively across every element of foreign policy work.

Our new guidance encourages staff to use social media. While we don’t expect all staff to use social media in the same way, we do expect them to see it as part of the core diplomatic toolkit, at the very least producing better policy and advice by listening to those conversations relevant to their area of work.

Clear and simple guidance

While working on the Digital Strategy, we learned from feedback that there was a fear of ‘getting it wrong’ and an uncertainty about the use of social media in a personal capacity. So we tackled both those issues.

Our guidance keeps the ‘what not to do’ bit to a minimum, so we encourage staff rather than disuade. We’ve kept the rules as simple as we can: don’t say anything on social media that you would not say on any other public channel. In other words, remember you’re a politically impartial civil servant even if you’re posting in a personal capacity.

When our overseas staff use social media they are still effectively seen as representing the FCO and HMG, even if they don’t mention their job in their profile.

For official accounts we’ve put in place a simple ‘go ahead’, ‘check’, ‘don’t do it’ framework before hitting ‘post’.

Of course we have also had to accept that mistakes may happen. But we are also confident that guidelines, training and examples of best practice will ensure that staff are equipped to avoid making them. If mistakes are made, we’ll deal with them on a case by case basis, focussing on the substance rather than on the medium.

Following the release of Inside Government, we’re releasing a dashboard to track progress and usage.

New departments and organisations will be moving to Inside Government in the coming months. So far there are 17. The dashboard tracks the growth of Inside Government and visualises how the content is used.

To date there have been two major Inside Government releases, with more on the way:

• 15 November – launch with 6 organisations, including DCLG and DfT
• 13 December – AGO, BIS, FCO, MOD and 13 other organisations moved across

As departments and other organisations move to Inside Government, visitor numbers are expected to climb.

As with the GOV.UK dashboard, a range of modules help people understand how Inside Government is being used. But we haven’t simply copied the GOV.UK modules, instead we’ve looked at what would be most appropriate for the type of data and content covered.

Weekly unique visitors

Between the 9 and 15 December 2012 there were 182,000 visitors to Inside Government

The weekly unique visitors module tracks visitors per week to Inside Government. As more organisations join, we’re expecting an increase in traffic over the coming months, but each department is unique so this increase won’t always be the same.

Top policies

Top policies viewed on Inside Government

The top policies module looks at policies which have received the most views over the last week. The results can vary depending on press coverage, public interest and if a new department or organisation has recently joined Inside Government.

Content engagement

weekly content engagement

The content engagement module plots views to three types of Inside Government content (Detailed guidance, News and Policies) against their estimated engagement level.

The criteria used to define ‘engagement’ is outlined in the paragraph below. Our product managers and analytics team worked together to define the criteria for these formats. They looked at existing data, feedback from user research and drivers for publishing. Engagement metrics will be used in conjunction with other testing and feedback. Our criteria for determining ‘engagement’ will be refined as we learn more about how Inside Government is used.

Detailed guidance format

An example of Detailed guidance is Changes to the driving licence and categories.

An engaged user will be one who arrives at a detailed guidance item, spends at least 30 seconds on the content; or clicks on a link in the body of a page including related detailed guidance and also including anchor links.

News format

An example of News format on Inside Government is Cash boost to tackle local pinch points.

An engaged user will be one who arrives at a News item, spends at least 30 seconds on the content; or clicks on a link within the body.

Policies format

An example of the Policies format is Boosting private sector employment in England.

An engaged user will be one who arrives at a Policy item, spends at least 30 seconds on the content; or clicks on the main body of a page, including tabs, but excluding anchor links on first page.

About ‘usage’ not ‘page views’

Much of our content is spread over several web pages. For example, a single policy may have three or more pages. We’re often interested in how the content is used, not the number of times any one of its pages was viewed (although that may also be of interest).

Web analytics tools don’t always detect that two pages are related, but we do, and that’s what we’re tracking. To do this, we’re measuring ‘views’, where a ‘view’ is counted once regardless of how many pages were actually visited. It’s not the same as a page view, and for good reason.

Data feeds

Here are the json urls for the data driving our new dashboard:

• weekly visits to Inside Government
• top policies by visits
• content engagement metrics

Note on these urls: these are the internal urls we use, and they are are subject to change. ‘Content engagement’ in particular is an evolving concept, and our ‘engagement’ criteria for this may be updated as we learn more about actual usage.

Looking forward

Future iterations will see new modules added and further iteration based on user and departmental feedback. You can see the current version of the dashboard at www.gov.uk/performance/dashboard/government.

Lots of bits of GDS are going to be working with lots of bits of government during 2013. We’re getting bigger, getting more scattered and it’s important that we let each other know what’s going on. One way we’re going to do this is to grab a quick video with Mike every week. We were going to just stick it on our wiki, then we thought – why not share it on here? It’s not going to be of interest to everyone but if you’d like to know what we’re working on – click play.

The future of UK Government Digital Services is here. On January 21st 2013 at Sprint 13 we will show the best of digital from across government, all packed into one morning.

Who is this for?

All those working across Government and its agencies to deliver our digital ambition statement: Digital Leaders, Government and Agency Board Members, Officials, Policy Makers, Ministers, Press and External Digital Thought-Leaders.

Why Should I come?

• To find out how other parts of Government are delivering on our digital ambition
• Understand the digital ambition across all of Government
• Practical answers to the questions that we all face in delivering the Government’s Digital Strategy
• Demonstrations of new and beta digital services
• Pick up tips on how to find new digital suppliers and attract and retain digital skills
• Hands-on workshops on Identity, Agile, Open Data and Social Media
• Learn about non-Government examples of digital transformation from our Digital Advisors, board members from major brands such as M&S, Lloyds, BA and Amazon who can help develop your leadership capacity and avoid common mistakes in the transformation journey

You will have the chance to listen to major speakers set out the digital future for Government including keynote speeches from:

• Francis Maude – Minister for the Cabinet Office
• Martha Lane Fox – UK Digital Champion
• Stephen Kelly – UK Government COO

It’s a quick event, less than 4 hours, and it’s all delivered in Ignite style format – rapid presentations, open Q&A and ability to network freely. It’s a private event for Government, but we will be using social media to report on the highlights.

Why Sprint?

It is 17 years since we started to deliver online services, and many of our services are some way from being digital by default. (Digital Efficiency Report). We have 2 years, or 400 days, to deliver fundamental transformation of our mainstream services, including digitisation of tax, agriculture, justice, health, and transport. So we need to Sprint.

We will be running subsequent Sprint sessions on suppliers, skills, development and product/services management through the year, and we will meet again to celebrate our achievements next January, for Sprint 14.

Book your place, attendance is limited to 300.
Follow us on Twitter at #Sprint13 and keep an eye on our site at digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sprint-13 to see the major speeches, interviews and add your feedback.

We are shocked and saddened by the death of Aaron Swartz. Some of us at GDS were fortunate to have met him; others were involved in the many projects he worked on; all of us are in some way indebted to his legacy. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee said, ‘we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.’

Here in the UK, it inevitably brings back the pain six years ago of losing Chris Lightfoot, another brilliant and passionate polymath whose capabilities and achievements extended far beyond his years. Many of us in and around GDS have waited years to apply the techniques and analysis that Chris pioneered at e-democracy charity mySociety, and we are fully aware that the opportunity that we have been given is in part as a result of their work outside of Government.

Aaron and Chris were remarkable individuals, inspired and inspiring, cut from the same rare cloth. We should also mourn as citizens, because Aaron and Chris embodied an unbridled eagerness to apply the toolkit of the internet age in the service of civil society. In the words of our friend Tom Steinberg, head of mySociety, Chris ‘did much more than simply master varying disciplines: he saw and drew connections between fields… and mixed them up in meaningful and often pioneering ways.’

Underpinning that desire to connect was a belief that the internet could and should be used in specific, concrete ways to empower the public and make government more responsive and accountable:

“The canon of Chris’s writings and projects embody the idea that what good governance and the good society look like is now inextricably linked to an understanding of the digital. He truly saw how complex and interesting the world was when you understood power as well as networking principles in a way that few have since.”

Aaron Swartz was one of those few.

Much of the work we do, and the way we do it, drew inspiration from the work of Aaron and Chris. The Open Government Licence for instance (which simplifies access and sharing of public data) would not exist without the pioneering work that Aaron helped push forward at Creative Commons. Meanwhile Chris Lightfoot developed the core of the first No10 e-petitions service, the inspiration for the current e-petitions service.

So we should mourn as professionals, because Aaron and Chris spent their lives asking hard questions of governments and technology: questions, driven and backed by data, that deserved answers. The health and relevance of governments depends upon a willingness to listen carefully to voices like theirs and to ask equally hard questions of ourselves.

In the UK, boundaries are being redrawn; the UK Civil Service is beginning to open its doors to those who once pushed from the outside. Progress is being made but still, more than anyone, more than ever, Governments need Chris and Aaron and their like, and when they pass it is right we should mourn their loss.

>> About this post:

Many people contributed to this short post. We are in their debt. I wasn’t entirely sure that this was an appropriate post for our blog, so I’ve also published this at mikebracken.com. I understand this may seem the wrong place for these sentiments but we also believe in openness and we think that government departments should behave as though there are humans in them. This is from our human side. I apologise in advance if anyone thinks I made the wrong call. That decision was all mine.