May 31
As Sarah Richards has already said, the citizen beta of GOV.UK is as much about radical simplicity in words as it is about design and back-end innovation. In a few murky corridors, clarity is still considered heresy. Alan Maddrell, Content Designer for the Government Digital Service explains how we’re achieving clarity. Read more
May 30
The Government Digital Service assisted digital team has been up and running for a few weeks now and we wanted to share some of our early thoughts. Read more on assisted digital
May 29
Pete Herlihy, product owner for e-petitions talks about recent developments, sharing the code base and opening up the data.
This week we delivered on earlier commitments to share e-petitions data and to release the code base. Whilst not as visible as other recent changes we have made, these are two very important developments. Read more about e-petitions getting trendy
May 29
Last week some members of the UK Identity Assurance team were invited to the White House to share, learn and collaborate with some of the key individuals and organisations in the US wrestling with the challenges of identity in cyberspace.
Chris Ferguson (Cabinet Office Deputy Director and UK Government lead on Identity Assurance) was invited to speak at the Colloquium on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) alongside luminaries from the identity world, officials and politicians such as Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cyber Security Coordinator, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Gene Sperling, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Jeremy Grant, Chris’s counterpart in the US who leads implementation of the NSTIC. Read more about the ID Assurance team’s visit to the US
As more and more government services are being provided online, it is becoming increasingly important to have a simple and user-friendly way for users to assert their identity in order to access these services. This access should be consistent across government, secure and able to preserve users’ privacy. A cross-Government approach to identity assurance took a major step towards market this week with the issue of an Invitation to Tender for one of the Government’s key digital services.
May 23
An understanding of how cookies work is the first step in helping people to make informed decisions about the impact of these technologies on their online privacy. Read more about cookies
Today Cabinet Office announced the publication of guidance for civil servants on the use of social media as well as guidance for Departments to overcome the technical barriers to civil servants accessing the internet and social media channels.
GDS was pleased to welcome a group visit from the Norwegian Government last week. The following is a guest post from Heather Broomfield, Open Data manager at Difi - the Norwegian agency for Public Management and eGovernment.
Last week a delegation from Norway visited GDS to see how they are realising their goal of ‘delivering their digital products that meet peoples needs’. Prior to travelling we were all familiar with Martha Lane Fox’s DirectGov 2010 report and particularly liked the ‘Revolution not Evolution’ motto. We wondered to what extent this was being realised. In GDS change is in the air from the second you walk in the door, it didn’t take us long to realise that something really different was happening here. A few hours in the building made it clear that this revolution is actually taking place. ‘Revolution not evolution’ is not just a fancy line in a public document. Read more about Norway’s visit to GDS
‘I love this site! …This is perhaps the finest example of a government website in the history of the Internet.’
Member of the public‘What idiot thought a single web site was a good idea? The separate ones are bad enough.’
Civil servant
These are genuine comments at the extreme ends of the feedback we received for the Inside government beta. Over the six weeks of the beta we received a lot more in between, and we were grateful for every last item of praise and criticism.
This post is about how we captured that feedback, what we learned from it and what we are going to do as a result. Read more about feedback for the Inside government beta
Today we’re publishing a series of Good Practice Guides (GPGs) for potential providers of identity assurance for government services. They can now be found on the Cabinet Office site.
Read more about the Good Practice Guides
