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This week at GDS

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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.


Filed under: GDS, Week notes

The Future is Here

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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.


Filed under: Digital Strategy, GDS, Innovation, Social Media

Standing on the shoulders of giants

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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.


Filed under: GDS

To Identity and Beyond

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There’s been a fair amount of speculation as to who else would join the supplier framework for Identity Assurance. We are happy to confirm that the eighth successful supplier is PayPal.

As a founder member of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) which provides a structured conversation between the Cabinet Office on behalf of the UK Government and a market of providers committed to interoperability, PayPal adds their high profile and expertise in the online transacting space. They join the recently announced suppliers that includes The Post Office, Cassidian, Digidentity, Experian, Ingeus, Mydex, and Verizon.

Of course, this is just the beginning of the process. The real work of realising our ambitions for identity assurance services can now begin. We’re working closely with departments to develop an identity assurance process that can be adapted and reused right across government, benefiting users and and service providers alike with a simpler, faster, better and safer way to access and transact with government services.


Filed under: ID Assurance

How much? Publishing the cost of government transactions

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Francis Maude, Minister for Cabinet Office: “Governments talk a lot about delivering value for taxpayers. Yet most of the time they aren’t very clear about what they mean. Now taxpayers can judge value for themselves.” Today the Cabinet Office has published an update to the Transactions Explorer tool. This now includes data on the cost per transaction for 44 of the biggest services the Government offers its citizens.

Francis Maude

Taken together, there are over a billion transactions through these 44 services every single year. That’s over 88% of the transactions handled by central government. We now know that these services cost over £2 billion a year to run.

Making this data public is a big step forward for transparency. The UK Government has never done anything like this before. And as far as we know, no other country systematically tells its citizens how much they pay for the services they use – services like paying car tax, applying for a passport, or filing a business’s annual returns. This data sets a baseline for service performance. And the public can, and should, judge our progress on improving against this baseline.

It is no coincidence that those who have made the biggest strides online have some of the lowest costs. Doing things digitally is simpler, better, faster, and cheaper. Popular online services, such as driving test bookings, have already reaped some of the benefits gained by moving away from expensive paper and phone based processes.

We’re now at the beginning of a radical transformation of some of government’s biggest services. The digital strategies published last month were a statement of ambition shared by the whole of government to grasp the web’s potential for delivering services in a more effective and more efficient way.

This is no small task, and there is a long way to go. The huge range in service costs shown in the Transactions Explorer, and the missing data points in some services, illustrates the scale and diversity of this challenge. Some will have further to travel than others. But by shining the sunlight of openness and transparency on service performance as we have today, the users of government services will be in a stronger position than ever to hold their public servants to account as this transformation unfolds.


Filed under: Digital Strategy, Performance

Government transaction costs – the story behind the data

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Last July, GDS published a full list of all the transactional services that the Government offers to citizens and business, along with their annual volume of activity. It was the first time the Government had ever done this.

Today, we released an updated version of the Transactions Explorer, and with it, another first. Data on cost per transaction – how much it costs the Government to deliver each individual use of a service – has been collected and published for 44 of the biggest public services.

One of the most fascinating things revealed by the information in our first Transactions Explorer release last year was the sheer range of things the Government does. From paying tax to arranging burials at sea, the tool showed that citizens interact with public servants in a multitude of ways.

That diversity is reflected again in the data we’ve published today. Across the biggest services in Government, the cost of a single transaction ranges from over £700 to as little as five pence. Such big variations seem strange, until you consider the difference between applying for a passport, with all the security checks and sophisticated printing that entails, and submitting a standard tax form.

Transactional services provided by the DfT, its agencies and sponsored public bodies

Transactional services provided by the DfT, its agencies and sponsored public bodies

But complexity doesn’t tell the whole story. Digital is a big part of it too. Services where transactions are completed using digital channels generally cost much less – for example, booking a driving test costs £6.62 by post, £4.11 by telephone, but just £0.22 online.

Making the collection of this data easier is a big priority for us. We are continuing to develop the Performance Platform, turning it from a tool to display data on GOV.UK into a platform that gives Departments the ability to monitor the performance of their digital services in real time. We’ll be testing this with some of the transformation projects that were trailed in the digital strategies published last month.

Measuring service performance is important, but actively using that information to drive decisions is essential. The digital by default service standard that we are launching later this year will put a service’s ability to measure and track performance at its heart. It’s all part of data driven design, and iteratively improving services based on user feedback.

And as ever, we’re interested in your thoughts on how to improve the presentation of this data, and what else you think it would be helpful to see. Please email us, or comment below.


Filed under: Digital Strategy, Performance

This week at GDS

Sprint 13 – the story in pictures

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Just got back from taking photos at today’s Sprint 13 conference, so what was it like? Think of the famous Hokusai wave and you’ll get a sense of the energy that was unleashed at Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall today…

It was a complex event with high profile speakers like Martha Lane Fox and Francis Maude in a large conference hall, 6 break out workshops in smaller rooms (to run concurrently), registration, refreshments area, not to mention the beautiful snowscape of Big Ben in the distance.

So, four hours to cover a dozen speeches, six workshops and capture the feel of the event. These should give you a sense of how it went. We captured loads of video of every workshop and talk, and we’ll be sharing these with you as soon as they are through the editing process hopefully early next week.

Big Ben snow view

Big Ben snow view

GDS team reception

GDS team reception

Martha Lane Fox arrives at reception

Martha Lane Fox arrives at reception

Rachel Neaman in conversation

Rachel Neaman in conversation

Francis Maude and Martha Lane Fox before speaking

Francis Maude and Martha Lane Fox before speaking

Martha's opening speech

Martha’s opening speech

Francis Maude's speech

Francis Maude’s speech

Antonio Romeo of MoJ

Antonio Romeo of MoJ

Martha does Q&A with Ian Trenholm

Martha does Q&A with Ian Trenholm

Sprint 13 logo and people

Sprint 13 logo and people

Emer Coleman social media workshop

Emer Coleman social media workshop

Mark O'Neill workshop on digital delivery

Mark O’Neill workshop on digital delivery

Amanda Derrick workshop on identity assurance

Amanda Derrick workshop on identity assurance

Alice Newton workshop on MoJ's 'You be the judge'

Alice Newton workshop on MoJ’s ‘You be the judge’

Audience

Audience

Stephen Kelly's closing speech

Stephen Kelly’s closing speech


Filed under: GDS

High-resolution images

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Before Christmas, Ben Terrett asked the design team to think of one thing we’d like to change on GOV.UK. My choice was easy; add high resolution graphics to the site so it looks better on high pixel density devices.

Rather than write a report about what I’d like to change, I took the opportunity to get going and actually implement hi-res icons and logos on GOV.UK.

Comparison of low res and hi res graphics

I came across Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent’s hidpi Sass mixin in a talk given by John Clevely from BBC News here at GDS. I decided to approach the solution using media queries. I started with making use of CSS Trick’s future resilient Retina display media query:

@mixin device-pixel-ratio($ratio: 2) {
  @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and (min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and ( -o-min-device-pixel-ratio: #{($ratio*10)}/10),
  only screen and ( min-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and ( min-resolution: #{($ratio*96)}dpi),
  only screen and ( min-resolution: #{$ratio}dppx) {
    @content;
  }
}

At the moment the minimum pixel ratio is set to 2. This means that it only targets Apple’s Retina devices and a few high density Android handsets including the Google Galaxy Nexus, Google Nexus 4, Google Nexus 10 and Samsung Galaxy S III. There are a handful of Android devices with 1.3–1.5 ratio screens, but unfortunately I can’t get hold of any of these devices at the moment to test the site on.

Small and large gov.uk format icons

We’re currently using two separate image files, one normal sized and one double sized. Spriting images isn’t really practical with our current design and mark-up because the elements with background image icons are flexible in size. Duplicate images are not being downloaded on hi-dpi iPhones or Androids. Further testing will reveal if images are being downloaded unnecessarily on other hi-dpi devices.

Google Analytics doesn’t record pixel density ratio by default so we set up a custom variable and we gathered a few days worth of data. This has given us some interesting results.

Ratio OS % of total visitors
1 Windows 23.99%
2 iOS 9.67%
1 Macintosh 5.52%
1 iOS 5.18%
1.5 Android 1.98%
1 Android 1.70%
2 Android 1.42%

Looking at all the devices that report pixel-density-ratio, over 25% have a ratio greater than one, which is 13% of all traffic. This is a surprisingly high percentage.

Strangely there are a few devices reporting a ratio of less than one, including the Samsung Galaxy Y. I can’t figure out if this is a bug or not, because it means that each physical pixel on the device has to show information about more than one pixel, which is in fact the equivalent of showing a zoomed out image.

We’ll keep an eye on the statistics and see how this develops over time.


Filed under: GDS, Single government domain

Cold comfort farm

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It’s been cold and snowy. The weather has impacted on people’s lives across the UK, but has it affected people’s interaction with GOV.UK? Tara Stockford and I did some quick analysis of traffic and trends over the last couple of weeks.

Visitors

Just under 2 million unique visitors came to GOV.UK during 18 – 20 January, a slight drop of 2.4% on the weekend previously. But over the three day period, Friday and Saturday had fewer visitors than the week before, while Sunday had 4.6% more.

Searching for…

Two-thirds of visits to GOV.UK over the last weekend came from searches on Google, Bing etc. Here are the top 10 most searched for keywords or phrases:

Keyword Visits
(not provided)  307,819
jobcentre  72,794
directgov  42,513
jobcentre plus  40,241
cold weather payment  27,272
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130123162536/http://www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc  21,032
universal jobmatch  20,577
job centre  17,923
gov.uk  17,046
cold weather payments  16,545

The previous week, the top weather related keyword was ‘cold weather payment’ at 34th with 3,915 visits.

Doing some deeper analysis on last weekend, there were 2,931 different keywords that included ‘weather’, accounting for 2.5% of all visits to GOV.UK. Here are the top 20 keywords:

Keyword Visits
cold weather payment  27,272
cold weather payments  16,545
cold weather payments postcode  2,157
cold weather payment postcode check  1,653
cold weather payment postcode search  933
cold weather payment postcode checker  818
cold weather payments 2013  696
dwp cold weather payments  559
cold weather payment checker  517
cold weather payment postcode  497
cold weather payments postcode search  442
cold weather  358
cold weather payments checker  306
cold weather payments 2012  291
dwp cold weather payment postcode  228
directgov cold weather payment  219
cold weather payments UK  215
am I due a cold weather payment  206
weather payments  196
cold weather payments dwp  168

Interestingly GOV.UK received relatively little search traffic for school closures or travel.

Most visited pages

However, looking at the page views for content with a ‘winter’ theme over the two weekends the picture is more subtle:

Page Date range Page
views
Increase
/cold-weather-payment/overview 18 Jan – 20 Jan 108201 777.76%
/cold-weather-payment 18 Jan – 20 Jan 68882 573.46%
/cold-weather-payment/eligibility 18 Jan – 20 Jan 29287 762.65%
/cold-weather-payment/what-youll-get 18 Jan – 20 Jan 20463 736.25%
/cold-weather-payment/how-to-claim 18 Jan – 20 Jan 15280 816.62%
/winter-fuel-payment 18 Jan – 20 Jan 16743 130.21%
/cold-weather-payment/further-information 18 Jan – 20 Jan 5171 845.34%
/practical-driving-test-for-cars/cancelled-or-stopped-tests-and-bad-weather 18 Jan – 20 Jan 4268 341.37%
/check-school-closure 18 Jan – 20 Jan 2881 3371.08%
/driving-adverse-weather-conditions-226-to-237/icy-and-snowy-weather-228-231 18 Jan – 20 Jan 3175  533.73%
/clear-snow-road-path-cycleway 18 Jan – 20 Jan  2472 3152.63%
/winter-fuel-payment/eligibility 18 Jan – 20 Jan 7871 33.93%
/travel-disruption-your-rights-at-work 18 Jan – 20 Jan  1994 810.50%
/driving-adverse-weather-conditions-226-237 18 Jan – 20 Jan 2393 220.78%

In addition to sharp increases in page views for the Cold Weather Payment guide, the Winter Fuel PaymentPractical driving test cancellations, Check school closures and other weather related travel content all saw large growth in page views.

Of course, GOV.UK is now the home for a number of government departments and the snowy weather has had an impact on Inside Government too. There has been an increase in visits to /government/publications/guidance-on-community-action-during-severe-weather and /government/news/travel-disruption-across-uk

Site searches

In GOV.UK site search, by far the highest rising search term was ‘cold weather payments’ or ‘cold weather payment’, with a combined total of 4,404 searches last weekend, compared to just 505 the previous weekend.

There were a further 417 searches for just ‘cold weather’; almost all of these users clicked on ‘Cold Weather Payment’ at the top of the search results, so we’re satisfied that they’re finding what they wanted.

Site searches for ‘school closures’, and longer-tail phrases containing that term (such as ‘school closures in wolverhampton’), shot up to 1,113 compared to just 8 the weekend before. But in the search results for just ‘schools’ or ‘school’ (up to 159 from 38), our school closures page was further down the list where users might miss it, so we’ve temporarily promoted it to appear at the top.

When people searched for terms containing ‘snow’ (724 compared to 53 the previous weekend), there were only nine pages where the word ‘snow’ actually appears in the content. We’ve made some changes to help users also find related results about bad weather, disrupted services and winter payments, even if they don’t explicitly mention snow.

Similarly, we’ve tweaked the results for terms such as ‘bad weather’, ‘winter weather’ and ‘heating’ to make sure that users can find information on heating bills and energy-saving improvements as well as practical information about local services. For broad terms like these, we’re less sure what people are looking for, so we’ve aimed for a selection of the most relevant and popular results.

We’ve also spotted some new misspellings in the GOV.UK search logs such as ‘school closers’, ‘wether’ and ‘wheather’, so we’ve added them to our custom spelling list to ensure that users still get relevant results.


Filed under: GDS, Performance




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