Aug 29
We were very pleased to be able to offer a two week internship as part of the scheme being run by the Social Mobility Foundation. Lily, who has been with us for the last 2 weeks reveals some of her preconceptions, but also how Whitehall doesn’t always look like Whitehall.
We’re doing a lot of user testing over the summer, and Sarah Prag has a quick update on a couple of things we’ve already changed based on what we’ve learnt so far.
E-petitions is the very first product delivered by GDS and last week it celebrated its first birthday. Pete Herlihy, product owner for e-petitions reviews the year in numbers.
The delivery of digital consultations within government is something which has been under much discussion recently. Ade Adewunmi, Digital Strategy Advisor invites you to take part in an online discussion around what consultation means and how we could make it better, for both those inside and outside government.
Yesterday the new Trade Tariff tool on GOV.UK was released as part of the wider ‘international trade’ release. Matthew Ford, Ruby on Rails developer from Bit Zesty explores the tool in more detail.
In the spirit of iteration and continuous delivery today we are releasing a number of new tools and content items, and as usual we’d like your feedback. Neil Williams, Product Manager at GDS explains the latest release on GOV.UK.
The transactional services list we published two weeks ago was the first time Government had attempted to gather data on all of its services together. Clifford Sheppard, Data Analyst, explains why categories were chosen to manage the data and some of the stories hidden inside.
Search is right at the centre of GOV.UK. It’s the main focus of the homepage and it appears in the corner of every single page. Many of our recent and upcoming apps such as licence finder also rely heavily on search. So, making sure we have the right tool for the job is vital. Recently we decided to begin switching away from Solr to elasticsearch for our search server. Rob Young, a developer at GDS explains in some detail the basis for our decisions – the usual disclaimers about this being quite technical apply.
