May 10
I’ve recently been embedded with the Inside Government team to work on understanding user behaviour through data analysis. One of my first tasks was to investigate the way that policies are being used and to identify any interesting or notable conclusions. Here’s an example of the format of a policy:
The content explorer provides a very useful snapshot of how the policy content is performing. But I wanted to dig further down into the data.
Apr 30
Today, the offices of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister join every ministerial department on the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. Anthony Simon, Downing Street’s head of digital communications explains more.
If you’re familiar with the format of ministerial departments in their new online home on Inside Government, then you’ll probably notice some differences in the way that content for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister is presented.
Number 10 performs a vital role in communicating news and information about the activity of the Prime Minister, which needs to be reflected online. But it must also acknowledge the rich history of 10 Downing Street, which boasts 275 years as the official residence of each of the UK’s 53 Prime Ministers.
Martha said we needed a revolution.
As of this moment, 10 Downing Street, the Deputy PM’s office, all 24 of the UK’s central government departments and its embassies around the world are now sharing a single, joined-up presence on the web at www.gov.uk/government.
Today marks the end of a 6-month transition led by GDS and involving many talented digital teams, policy experts, project managers and content editors across Whitehall to merge these 26 domains (and a few more besides) into one. Together, we have published over 50,000 pages of web content, weeded out 116,000 pages and files, and redirected 275,000 URLs from old sites to their new home on GOV.UK.
It was a herculean task, and everyone who has worked on it deserves to feel immensely proud of themselves.
As well as reaching the end of that journey, today is the beginning of a new era in the relationship between government and the public.
If we’ve done our job right, most people won’t notice quite how big a change has just occurred. But those of us who are close to the project know just how profound it is.
This week we welcome the Department for Education and HM Treasury to GOV.UK.
DfE is the 22nd department to move to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. The department joins Inside Government with 1,546 publications, 579 news articles, 120 speeches and 15 policies.
With DfE, we have released a new document type, called ‘authored articles’. These are articles published by ministers or officials in the media (for example, Michael Gove’s article in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ about reading). Although this was released to coincide with DfE’s transition, it is something we have long been intending to do and we expect most departments to use it.
Apr 17
Today we welcome the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to GOV.UK.
DWP is the 21st department to move to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. It has joined Inside Government with almost 900 publications, 9 new policies, a host of case studies, and detailed guidance on Universal Credit and workplace pensions.
Today we welcome the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Justice to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.
Mar 28
This week we have welcomed four new departments to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK: Department for International Development, Department of Health, Home Office and Wales Office.
The move of web content from the Department of Health (DH) to GOV.UK has been a relatively calm experience for the DH team. It’s been extremely busy and quite intense at times but I only had one day of actual panic, about two weeks ago.
If I were starting the process again there are a few things I’d do differently, but there are other things I’m really pleased about and that I think we got completely right. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt – or re-learnt – over the past 6 months.
Mar 25
This morning we fully welcomed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on to GOV.UK. There are lots of new features and services but a big focus for our team has been building the new Foreign Travel Advice pages.
Foreign Travel Advice provides British nationals with official FCO advice about safe travel around the world to help them make informed decisions about travelling and operating in a particular country. It has been the main driver of traffic to the previous FCO site and is sure to be a popular feature on GOV.UK.
One of the questions publishers in government departments are asking us a lot at the moment is “Can I embed [insert name of web app here] on GOV.UK?”
In the spirit of “publish, don’t send” this blog post sets out our answer.
The good news (and tl;dr version) is that we are planning to make sure departments can continue to meet the user needs that they have met – up to now – by embedding widgets, apps and badges on their sites. But we almost certainly won’t be meeting those needs by allowing publishers to embed 3rd party code freely on the main GOV.UK platform.
Read on to find out why, and what we’ll be doing instead. Read more
