Government Digital Service Podcast

When was the last time you noticed any changes to GOV.UK? We share how and why we’ve updated its homepage and menu bars.   Podcast update note: We have made some editorial changes to the podcast published on 28 February 2022 to improve clarity on the work we are doing.   --------- The transcript of the episode follows:   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. At GDS, we build platforms, products and services that help create a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. And as part of that work, we maintain GOV.UK, the website for the UK government. GOV.UK is used by millions of people daily. The home page alone is used more than two million times each week. We've been improving how people can navigate the site, taking a user-centred and evidence-based approach. We've previously written about this work on the GDS and Inside GOV.UK blog, and this podcast episode will be your latest instalment in documenting how we launched the new menu bar after an extensive A/B test and how we updated the GOV.UK homepage. It will also take a look at what lies ahead for making GOV.UK as simple as possible for people to use. Joining me to explore this today are Sam Dub and Jenn Phillips-Bacher, who work on GOV.UK in very different disciplines, but part of the same team. Sam, would you mind telling us a little bit about the team and then maybe what you do as part of it? Sam Dub: We're a team of 14, which in the scheme of GDS and the scheme of government is relatively small. We bring a whole range of different perspectives and expertise to this work that includes designers, developers, content people, researchers, and our job is to make it easier for people to find things on GOV.UK, and my role as a product manager is about making sure we're working on the right problems in the right way. We're getting to the outcomes for users that we want to achieve. Vanessa Schneider: Sam, thank you for that explanation of the team. Obviously, part of this as well is Jenn. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do as part of the team to our listeners, please? Jenn Phillips-Bacher: I'm Jenn Phillips-Bacher, and I'm a content strategist on Sam's team. My focus is primarily information architecture and findability. So as a content strategist in the textbook definition of it, it's all about getting the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time. And that's why a content strategist is working on navigation. It's all about improving that mode of getting users to the content that helps them achieve a goal. Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you to both of you. While it would be great if we could count on it, but not everyone will have been following the public journey of this work, even though we've blogged about it extensively. So would either of you mind recapping perhaps what's been happening? When did we start changing where users could find our information? Sam Dub: One of the challenges for GOV.UK is that the amount of content published grows every year. And today it's more than half a million pages, and it might just be one page in that half a million that a user needs. And so in order to find that page, there are, kind of, multiple tactics that they'll use. They might use a search engine, they might use GOV.UK site search, or they might browse through the home page, through a menu bar, through topic pages, to find what they need. And work on that topic system, making sure that users can browse successfully is the focus of our team. There's work going on elsewhere in GOV.UK in partnership with search engines, and there is work planned to improve our own search engine. But the focus for our team right now is browse and how we get that topic system, these menus, the home page, the breadcrumbs, and related links at a content page level, all working nicely together. So users can browse to find the stuff they're looking for. What you've seen go live over the last couple of months are the first kind of public steps of some work that's been happening for around the last year and those public changes have been changed to the GOV.UK home page and a change to the menu bar. So that's the black bar that sits across the top of every content page on GOV.UK. And that's more than half a million pages of the site. And that is GOV.UK's primary navigation. And we've, we put those changes live, we put homepage changes live in December and we put several versions of the new menu bar live in the second half of last year. Vanessa Schneider: So it's great that you've outlined what changes are taking place, but why was it necessary? Sam Dub: So the strategy here is about making stuff easy to find, and like, like all good GDS teams, we started with a discovery, and a discovery essentially means validating a hypothesis about a problem. And here it is about understanding what was going on, why people couldn't find things or why people were abandoning journeys on GOV.UK. And in the course of that discovery, we found 3 core problems that users were facing, and they were a confusing information architecture - now this is this is more Jenn's area of expertise and confusing information architecture is not a phrase that a user will come to you and say, "Oh, your information architecture is very confusing". It will be something that you'll notice a user lost within the site and not able to find where they need to be in order to get to the service or the piece of information that they need. So that was problem one. Problem two were issues on smaller devices. So these days, GOV.UK is used most often on mobile, and last year that was, three-quarters of all visits to GOV.UK came from a mobile device, and not all of GOV.UK's pages are optimised for mobile devices. And so that presented navigational problems, and there's a real opportunity there to move from an approach that kind of worked on mobile but wasn't ideal to something that really feels like it's designed for mobile devices, which is where most users are. And the third problem we looked at was an issue of overwhelm. So a lot of users to GOV.UK feel like it's just a lot of stuff. It's the most common phrase that we hear, the most common sentiment in user research will be, "This is a lot. This is too much. I'm not, I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for here". And so in a lot of the design work we've been doing, we've been looking at how to get back to the core principles of GOV.UK that are about a simple, clear experience to make it easy to find things. Vanessa Schneider: Sam mentioned that as a content strategist, you, Jenn, might have some experience with how to resolve confusing information architecture or sort of what kind of problems that can cause. Would you like to maybe speak to that, Jenn? Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Sure. So information architecture is one of those phrases that you'll get a different definition of it, depending on who you talk to and what their experience is. So I think in my work within GDS, I'm thinking about information architecture as being the bone structure of the website. A good information architecture isn't really something that you point to or see. It's something that is that scaffolding that supports the entire information space so that people can find what they need. And, and it all kind of depends on the raw materials that you have. So what kind of content you have, what kind of data and metadata that you have about that content, whether you've got images, video and so on. So I always think about the UX and information architect Louis Rosenfeld. He talks about there being three tracks of information architecture, and this is where it fits in with GOV.UK. He talks about top-down navigation. So that's the things like the global menu and the user interface components you might see on a home page. And what that does is it kind of anticipates an interest or a question that a user might have when they arrive. The second thing is bottom-up navigation, so that stuff, like bread crumbs or related content links or 'you might also like'-type suggestions or any kind of contextual navigation with content - that might mean like titles and page headings, or even links embedded inside of blocks of text. And then the third thing is, is the big one, and that's search. So that's really for handling those really specific information needs. So the information architecture is kind of this interplay between top-down, bottom-up, and search. And it's that whole, that holistic information architecture that we're starting to make some significant improvements on GOV.UK. Vanessa Schneider: Makes sense that we want to take care of this. So, yeah, menus and topic pages, they must play a big role in the user experience from what you've just shared. But making changes to how users interact with them, that would have made a bit of a difference out of the blue, no? How do you test this effectively without maybe negatively affecting users because it must be a bit challenging in a live environment? Sam Dub: So that's a really great question, and I think something that we're quite careful about. We know that for people finding, finding what they need it is a kind of critical task and GOV.UK is part of a whole bunch of essential processes in people's lives. And whilst we want to make stuff easier, there would be significant consequences to making stuff worse. And so we start with quite an extensive process of research before we make any change on the live site. We'll develop prototypes and then introduce those to users in a kind of test scenario in usability research. And a lot of, a lot of ideas often don't make it past that stage. You your your expectations about what will work, they kind of improve over time. But still, there's a pretty high ratio of stuff that when it meets contact with a, with a user, you'll suddenly discover unexpected

Why build a product people won't or can't use? Our user researchers share their approach to understanding needs for government’s single sign-on. ---------   The transcript of the episode follows:   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. In August, we recorded an episode on digital identity and single sign-on as part of our plans to develop one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. You heard from Will and Helena from GDS, as well as Tom from Veterans UK, who shared how we worked with other parts of government to shape this work. Since then, we passed the digital identity service assessment, integrated our authentication component with the first service, and completed research with more than 800 end users. And it's that research that we want to talk about today. Joining me in this are Lauren Gorton and Charlotte Crossland, both user researchers at GDS in the Digital Identity Programme. Lauren, could you please kick us off by introducing yourself and what you do? Lauren Gorton: So I'm Lauren. I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme in GDS, and specifically I work in the authentication team. We look at the credentials that people use as part of the single sign-on. And the first steps of our journey went live in October. So specifically, I focus on the end user aspect of that and focus on the citizen side. Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thanks. Charlotte, could you please introduce yourself and what you do as well? Charlotte Crossland: Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I'm Charlotte, I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme, working in the design for adoption team. We've been doing a lot of research with service teams across government. We're building an authentication onboarding journey, as well as looking at identity materials that teams can use to make decisions. Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thank you so much, both. So, not everyone will have listened to the previous podcast episode or read the blog posts that we've written about this work. Would one of you mind explaining a bit more about One Login for Government? Lauren Gorton: Yes, so One Login for Government is one of the government's major projects at the moment. On GOV.UK there, there are several different sign-ins at the moment, and many different routes users could take. So what we're trying to do is streamline that down, so that in the future, there'll just be one single sign-on for GOV.UK to help improve the journeys for users and reduce confusion for people. That then opens the door to do lots of other cool things in the account space, so that people aren't having to repeat themselves too often in different services, and it helps government to basically join up a bit better. Vanessa Schneider: Great stuff. I can see the importance in that [laughs]. Obviously, this is a loaded question to ask, given both your roles as user researchers. But I was wondering why is user research so integral to that? Lauren Gorton: So there's no point in building something if people won't or can't use it. And the only way we know if we're on the right track is if we actually speak to the people who are the intended users. That's probably important for any organisation or business, but it's especially important in the context of government, given how important government services are if people can't access them, that can have a huge impact on people's lives. So we can't really afford to build something which people either can't use or won't use. [For] the citizen side of the research, our approach is to gather insights at all stages of the projects and from as representative a sample of people as possible. One thing is that we're not reinventing the wheel. There have been other government projects that have come before us who've done work on sign-on services. So there's a lot of existing research and insights that we can sort of learn from as a first step. So we, we initially did some very extensive desk research, including research artefacts from Verify, Government Gateway, recent COVID[-19, coronavirus] projects, and, you know, getting lessons learnt from peers in the NHS, who are working on the NHS login at the moment as well. So it's kind of given us a running start, really, to see what worked well before us and what didn't work so well. And we then built on top of that with our own research. So for a variety of different techniques, things like doing interviews with people and conducting surveys, testing our journeys as we develop them and iterating them. And since May, despite the impacts of COVID and issues that we had with research - we obviously haven't been able to go out and actually talk to people face-to-face, we've had to adjust how we work and do everything remotely - but despite that, yeah, we've managed to speak to over 800 end users, as you mentioned, since May. On top of that, it is really important to call out that once something's live, it's not live and then done, so now that we're live with the first steps of authentication, we've also got thousands of users who are now going through the live service and we're getting insights from those people as well. So relying a lot on our feedback form and also the analytics that runs for our service to better understand, "OK, so these are real people, using it in a real-life scenario: how is it working for them, and working, we keep improving it." So it's kind of that balance of we're doing a lot of the research with people to help prep them, optimise before we go live. And then as it's live, we're still monitoring it and trying to improve. Vanessa Schneider: Well, there's a lot of work going into it, I can see, and it's really heartening to hear that you're taking on the lessons from the past. And actually, that probably relates to the work that we're doing with other departments because they have existing identity solutions, don't they, Charlotte? Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, absolutely. So our approach from gathering insights from service teams in government has been a bit different from doing research with end users - it's a bit of a different dynamic. The real key to this is collaboration. So like other government platform products our users are peers working across government. I've been working with a range of roles, from product people to service owners, researchers, designers, developers, even data [analysts], both across central and local government. And it's been really fundamental to tap into, again, the existing work that's there; digital identity is a well-trodden area across government. It's a fundamental, it's been creating a space of trust and being as open as possible with teams and departments. It's important that we take aspects of that into our approach, not only internally within the programme, but taking that approach externally across government. Yeah, if the whole team is supporting and involved in that session, we have the capabilities and materials to produce really rich, UR [user research], building up that trust and developing relationships is far more important because they're the teams that are building and developing the services themselves in their everyday lives. Vanessa Schneider: Obviously service teams will have also conducted user research for their services with end users. How did that integrate into sort of your knowledge base? Lauren Gorton: Yes, so that was a part of the desk research that we did, kind of, in Discovery Alpha. We went through hundreds of different documents to, to try and understand that. But, as well, we've also since had sessions with teams so, the basic digital service, so they have a really good component for certain aspects of the authentication journey. So we're trying to make sure, again, we're not reinventing the wheel. So if things have worked for, for their end users, it's going to work for [our] end users as well. So we've been, we've met with them, tried to understand the component, looked at some of the data behind it and have applied that, aspects of that, to our own journeys as well. Vanessa Schneider: Neat, and obviously, this could be really interesting for folks, depending on how long we're going to be in these unprecedented times or with the future of work being maybe more remote working: How was it conducting user research while maybe not having direct access to people? Lauren Gorton: Good question. So, yeah, that's, that's been difficult. I think it was definitely for user researchers, just in general. It's hard if, you know, you're not in the room with them. And something that user research just needs well to do is to have, like, a good rapport with the participants. And it can be hard to try and build that up remotely and so, you know, reassure people and calm them down remotely over a video call. So, yeah, there are different frustrations to it, particularly if someone runs into an issue in the middle of a session. We can see the screen and what they're doing. But if they go onto a different device because they want to search something on the mobile phone, we can't see what they're doing and we can't help them, so that's caused challenges as well. So it's been a big challenge for communication, I think. But there are, there are positives to it as well. It's quite nice to have a video call with someone, they dial in, you run the session, if it goes well, and then you can just dial off, that's the session done. You can go, go grab a coffee, [laughs] to then try and absorb what you've just learnt. So yeah, there are nice things to it as well. Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, definitely echo Lauren's point around that interaction, and no matter who you're researching with, whether it's citizens or service teams. It's really difficult to get that rapport up online compared to in-person, where you can read people's body language, their tone, it's a very

The Government Digital Service (GDS) talks how to start a career in tech. According to a Tech Nation Talent report, young people could be wrongly counting themselves out of a fulfilling career because they’re worried about things like their skills background, where they came from or their lack of “network”. We asked 3 of our developers to respond to the report’s findings, and hopefully put some of those myths and misconceptions to bed.   --------- The transcript of the episode follows: Louise Harris: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, and our last episode of 2021. Today, we’re going to be talking about careers in tech. Now chances are, if you’re a regular listener, you’re probably already working in a digital, data or technology role. Maybe in government. Maybe in the public sector. Maybe somewhere else entirely.    But hopefully you’re aware of, and are sort of bought into, the long-term career opportunities, flexibility, creativity and satisfaction that a job in tech can bring. But unfortunately, according to a Tech Nation Talent report - that’s not the case for everyone. They surveyed a thousand 15 to 21-year-olds and tuned into almost 80,000 Reddit conversations to understand what young people in the UK thought about a career in tech.   In that research, 32% of men and 45% of women worried they didn’t have the right skills to pursue a tech career. And 24% of women and 21% of men said that tech careers weren’t for - and I quote - “people like them”. People in the UK feel that there are barriers standing in the way of them getting into tech. And they’re potentially counting themselves out of a great career as a result. Which is bad news for them, and bad news for all of us too.   Because diverse teams are better. Teams that reflect the society they serve are more effective. And teams where you can bring your whole self to work are - frankly - happier teams to be a part of. And that’s what we’re trying to build here at the Government Digital Service.   So we decided to dedicate this episode to anyone who is thinking about starting a career in tech - whether they’re 22 or 62 - but who’s maybe been put off by a little voice (or a loud one) telling them they shouldn’t or can’t.    Joining us now are senior developers Rosa Fox, Iqbal Ahmed and Kelvin Gan. They’re going to reflect on what the research found and hopefully, put some of those fears to bed. So Kelvin, Iqbal, Rosa - over to you.   Iqbal Ahmed:  Hi to everyone I'm Iqbal and I'm a senior frontend developer at GDS, which is at the Government Digital Service and joining me today, we have Kelvin and Rosa, who are both senior developers as well. We're here today to chat about some common misconceptions about pursuing a career in tech. I've just been handed a list of things that people, particularly younger people, seem to think about tech careers, and I'm excited to find out what the three of us think about these sort of myths or preconceptions that people have.    So the first one we have is “I don't have the skills to work in technology”. So Rosa, what do you think about this common preconception?   Rosa Fox:  Well, firstly, I think that there are many different jobs underneath the umbrella of technology. So it's not just coding skills. So at GDS, we have jobs such as being a developer, where you do do coding. But we also have designers, project managers, delivery managers, performance analysts, content designers. So, those jobs all require lots of different skills, and you probably already have a lot of those skills. So it could be things like breaking down problems, communicating, being creative, helping other people. And so I'd say you probably already have a lot of the skills. And if you feel like there are some skills that you don't have yet - yet being the keyword - then there's always options to learn.    What do you think Kelvin?    Kelvin Gan:  Totally 100%, I agree with that. I think as well the main thing with a lot of people is that learning on the job as well is a big thing for us, like we have apprenticeship schemes, so you can join us as an apprentice. We put you through a bootcamp as well. So Makers Academy is a London-based bootcamp. And you spend, I can't remember how many weeks, 12 weeks or something like that with them and you get taught on the job and you’re mentored by us as well. We've got a mentorship scheme within.    You’re not expected to know everything on day one. I mean, even I as a senior developer, like I've ok doing this for over a decade and every day I'm learning something new, like it's totally OK to turn up and go like, I need help. I need to learn this. And I also know people who switch careers later on in life, so they want to learn coding. They just do it, you know, you can teach yourself as well. A lot of people we've been working with have taught themselves. Yeah, I don't think you need to worry too much about it.   Iqbal Ahmed:  Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I'd say probably one of the big things I would say is like, just try different things out and just see what you enjoy. And I think like, you know, if you do enjoy it, then just get stuck in and just try and learn what you can then. Definitely, as Kelvin was saying, yeah, once that you get into the job and you get stuck in and you kind of get a real feel for it and just the learning, you’ll just learn really quickly, just pick things up really quickly. So, yeah, thank you for that.    So onto the next one. A common myth is “I don't know anything about tech. I’ll never be able to get a job”. So Kelvin, what do you think about that?   Kelvin Gan:  I-I don't think people nowadays really know nothing about tech because we're using tech every day quite honestly, like you've got a phone; you’re using tech you're on, I don't know, whatever social media of the day is, whether it's TikTok or something else. You know you are interfacing. Sorry, interfacing is such an icky word [laughs]. But anyway. [laughs]. You are using tech every day. You just don't really know it. And if you are in- if you enjoy using tech, that actually is the spark. That's the beginnings of it, you know. And more than anything, it's really about curiosity, like you’re using tech and you kind of thinking: ‘how does this work?’ But the other side of it is: ‘how do people use tech?’ ‘How do people benefit from using tech?. And actually that’s like product thinking, for example, like, how can we–or design thinking you know; how can we deliver services to people that are useful? Will make things better for their lives? That kind of stuff, it’s not just about learning the ins and outs of the technical aspects of how things work.    What do you think Rosa?   Rosa Fox: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think yeah, you mentioned like phones and social media and technology. And technology just powers so many things; like the way that we consume music and videos, banking, gaming medicine, the energy industry. I read the other day that apparently there's a 100 million lines of code in a new car. So there's probably so many ways that you're using tech without even realising it. So I think whatever your interest is, there's probably a way that it intersects with technology somehow. So that could be quite a fun way to get started.   Iqbal Ahmed:  Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think I've worked with colleagues that have done, had a degree in fine art. Someone else had a degree in history. You just get like so many people just coming into so many ways to get in. And the team was saying earlier, like apprenticeships and we’ve got these Fast Stream sort of opportunities as well. There is loads and lots of ways to get in there. So yeah, yeah, yeah, tech is everywhere.    So, yeah, so next one we have is that we have to do lots of unpaid internships or work experience in order to get tech jobs. So what do you think about that, Rosa?    Rosa Fox: Well firstly I think you should never have to do unpaid work, and I think it's, you know, it doesn't create a very good balance in society for people to have to do unpaid jobs because obviously you need a certain safety net to be able to do that in the first place. So if that's not an option for you, then I'd say, don't let that stop you and don't give up. You know, you might be able to find apprenticeships or junior positions or ways that you can learn on the job. I'd also say there's a lot of things that you can do to kind of teach yourself - you could go to maybe technology events. There are lots of free meet-ups that you could go to. There's loads of resources online that you can learn from.    And also kind of maybe looking for someone that can give you a bit more advice about tech careers, even like messaging people on LinkedIn or social media and asking them some questions because often people are quite you know, flattered to answer questions about themselves, and about working in tech. So you know, they might know of some openings for you know, for ways that you can learn skills, hopefully whilst you're still getting paid as well.    Iqbal Ahmed:  Kelvin, what do you think?   Kelvin Gan:  Yeah, I totally agree about not doing, not even having, hosting unpaid internships because that's just exclusionary, and it's not really what we're about here at GDS. But again, you know, hammering home the thing about apprenticeships, they’re a perfect way of getting started, and we're really behind it at the moment. We've got new apprentices starting just early next week, in fact. And I know a bunch of them from years gone past have gone on to graduate into junior roles and have also been promoted into mid-level roles. And they're just great and they really enjoy it as well. And then others have gone on to work somewhere else you know. We put that investment in because we want to put back into society as well as, you know, getting good people through the door to come and work with us.    And again yeah, like Rosa was saying, there’s loads of meet-ups. A

We take you from A to B as we find out how the GOV.UK Design System and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working to help make maps in public services better. You can help us to make our podcast even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.   The transcript of the episode follows: ---------   Louise Harris: Hello, and welcome back to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Louise Harris. I'm the Creative and Channels Team Leader at GDS and your host for today. Before we dive into the episode, I've got a quick favour to ask: if you are a regular listener to the GDS podcast, please take a second to fill out our quick 2 minute survey to tell us why you tune in, what you like and what you don't. You can find a link in our blog post and the show notes for this episode. Anyway, on with the show.    Today we're going to be talking about maps, more specifically maps in public services. Here at GDS, with a little help from our friends, we've started to explore how to make public sector maps more consistent, easier to use and accessible for users. Sound good? Well stay with us because there are lots of opportunities to get involved in this work. Whether you're in central or local government, wider public sector or even outside. To get us from A to B on this interesting topic, I'm pleased to welcome Imran Hussain, Community Designer for the GOV.UK Design System, and Cathy Dutton, Head of Design at Defra. Cathy, Imran, welcome to the GDS podcast.    Imran Hussain:  Hi Louise, thank you.    Cathy Dutton:  Hi Louise.    Louise Harris:  It's great to have you both. So I've introduced you to our listeners, but you don't need an introduction to one another because you go way back. Is that right?   Imran Hussain:  Yeah, we do. We used to work out Defra together, not so long ago actually. Before I came to GDS. So I was the Communities Lead at Defra and I worked with most of the communities in the user centred design space and with Cathy being the Head of Design. We got to work together quite a lot. And it was lots of fun and it's sad that we don't work together anymore. So it's absolutely brilliant to be on this podcast with her again.    Louise Harris:  Cathy, I hear on the grapevine that GDS sort of semi poached Imran over from Defra - have you forgiven us yet?    Cathy Dutton:  Yeah, almost. It helps, we-we still get to work together. So it's all good.    Louise Harris:  So you've both decided to join forces and try and unpick this kind of a sticky challenge of making maps that are used in our public services more accessible, more consistent and, well, just, better. Imran, I'll start with you because I think you and others in the GOV.UK Design System are gonna have a big part to play in coordinating these efforts. But for those listeners who maybe don't know much about the Design System or design in government in general, can you give us a quick kind of whistle stop tour into what the GOV.UK Design System is, what exists to do and what your role as a Community Designer involves?    Imran Hussain:  Yeah, of course. So the GOV.UK Design System is a suite of tools that helps teams in government quickly build usable, accessible services for GOV.UK. You can find it in more than 3,000 repositories on GitHub, and they use different elements of the Design System. On GOV.UK alone, it's used on over 7,000 individual services. But there's many more outside of it as well. So, yeah, it's vastly used and really, really popular, and we kind of need it in government. My particular role is Community Designer on the GOV.UK Design System team: I work with the community. I kind of create space for collaboration to happen, which is really important because we're a contribution based design system. So most of the ideas for components and patterns and things like that come from the community and the community actually build a significant part of those patterns and components as well. So we just kind of do the finishing touches on the team.    Louise Harris:  So that, to me, sounds like it's almost as much about the people as it is about the tech or the design stuff. Right? So it's about creating that environment where a sense of community can really take root.    Imran Hussain:  Yeah, that's that's absolutely, really important.    Louise Harris:  Thinking about this maps work, is that something that's kind of come up from the community?    Imran Hussain:  Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's completely come from the community. And it just came about because it kept coming up on Design System calls. It kept coming up in our forums, people asking about what's the best practice with how to do things maps-wise. And we keep getting help desk tickets around maps as well. We-we've got 2 levels of users on the Design System team. We've got you know, the end users, which are the general public that will use these maps, but our primary users, I guess you could say, are designers and user researchers; and yeah, whether they're interaction designers, service designers or content designers across government who use these components and patterns. So it, it clearly came up as a need and we didn't have the relevant components and patterns to be able to serve their needs at the time, so we-we started this collaboration. And it-it was Cathy that really kind of kicked it off because they, they came up with some things and just kind of said: 'hey, where do we share this?' [laughs]. So now we're creating a space where everyone can share things.    Louise Harris: Oh, that's really cool, Imran. Cathy, it sounds like maps is something that Defra's been thinking about beforehand.    Cathy Dutton:  Yes, so maps is something that comes up in discussion in Defra a lot. We have weekly drop in sessions that are often around like how we can do maps better. They've been a lot of our services, like flooding and farming, and we did our first accessibility drop-in session last week as well. And the whole top--a lot of topics were about how, how we can make maps more inclusive. So because we speak about it a lot, we try to start documenting some of the stuff we talk about so we don't just repeat the same conversations. And I think it was last summer we started to create our own version of like what mapping standards could be or the beginnings of map standards and guidance - really high level stuff, just like when to use a map, some of the findings we've got, some of the best practise bits - and we, we put them on GitHub. And then for me, that's been really useful because part of my job is speaking to all the designers. So whenever we have someone new join or whenever someone gets in touch and says like: 'we're doing a map, where do we start?', I can kind of point at the, at the standards. And that's how we got involved really. I think I came to one of Imran's calls on a Friday and was just like we have this thing, how can we share it across government because it's not a pattern or component? Or how can other people in government input and improve it for us?    Louise Harris:  And how has that been then? Being able to tap into that wider community across government and see you know, this-this baby that you've been creating in Defra, how has it been watching that grow?   Cathy Dutton:  It's been really good so far actually. The mix of people on the panels that Imran's put together has really helped because we've got, like our efforts were mostly from interaction designers, service designers and content designers. So it's been good to get people from different backgrounds, software development, data specialists and get their input and see what, where they're coming from when we talk about maps. That's been really useful. It's been really good for our designers as well. There's a few Defra people on the panel. So just getting them exposed to like different ways of thinking or different, different, what's the word I'm looking for, constraints around mapping or how we do good maps has been really helpful.    Louise Harris:  And have there been you know, themes coming through in terms of what teams are kind of struggling with when it comes to maps?    Cathy Dutton:  I think so, yeah, there's one particular one in Defra that, we, we kind of go to shape tools quite early and trying to make a shape tool on a map like draw like something out, a position on the map is really hard to make inclusive and accessible. And so that seems to come up quite a lot and could be one of the biggest challenges. We've tried to just start saying it in a different way to see if that maybe helps and just say like a lot of stuff in Defra is: 'can I do this activity in this place' and just trying to find different ways that people could do that. But if we do need a map, obviously it's useful to have standards.   Imran Hussain:  And we-we've just been talking about standards recently, and there was a few different areas that came up like Cathy said, because we've got that really multidisciplinary steering group. We talked about: we wanna include features on architecture, what technology, user interface, data visualisation and accessibility. So those are the different areas that have come up already in terms of any sort of standards or principles that we will design.    Louise Harris:  There’s already quite a lot of energy and interest in exploring this issue. Do you have sight of your end, end goal at this point?   Imran Hussain:  For, for me, it's always based on what the community want to do. So we asked the community and we've put the steering group together, and what people want is really practical things that they'll be able to use in their work. So it's nice to have, you know, the things that Cathy mentioned about getting people together, getting them to learn from each other, we do absolutely want that to happen. I think people want to have real, tangible products or things that they can kind of use. So in a, in a, we've got like a short term and long term aim that we've been talk

Wondered how to migrate a 24/7 product to a serverless platform? We chat about initial user research, developing DevOps skills and the benefits of GDS's approach to this type of tech project.   --------- The transcript of the episode follows: Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, I am joined by Jonathan Harden, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, and Kat Stevens, Senior Developer and co-Tech Lead on GOV.UK Pay.   GDS has many products that rely on our expert site reliability engineers and their colleagues to maintain and improve their functionality. Such as GOV.UK Pay - one of GDS’s common platforms that is used by more than 200 organisations across the UK public sector to take and process online payments from service users. Jonathan and Kat recently completed a crucial reliability engineering project to ensure that GOV.UK Pay continues to operate at the highest standards and provide a reliable service for public sector users and their service users.    We'll hear more about that in a moment, but to start off, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Kat, would you mind starting?   Kat Stevens:  Hi I'm Kat Stevens, I’m a Senior Developer on GOV.UK Pay. I've been working at GDS since 2017. And before that, I was a developer at start-ups and small companies.   As a co-Tech Lead on the migration team then, I'm kind of jointly responsible for making sure that our platform is running as it should be. That our team is working well together, that we're working on the right things and that we're, what we're working on is of a high quality, and is delivering value for our users. So it's like balancing that up with software engineering, making sure that you know, that we're being compliant. It's very important for Pay.  Software [laughs] engineering is so broad: there's like security, reliability, performance, all of those things. So yeah, it's kind of thinking about everything and---at a high level.   Vanessa Schneider:  I'm glad somebody's got a high level overview. Thanks, Kat. Jonathan, would you mind introducing yourself too?   Jonathan Harden:  Hi, I'm Jonathan Harden, and I am Senior Site Reliability Engineer on GOV.UK Pay. I've previously worked for a major UK mobile network operator, in the movie industry and for one of the UK's highest rated ISPs.   So all of GOV.UK Pay's services run, have to run somewhere. Being a Site Reliability Engineer means that I'm helping to build the infrastructure on which it runs, ensure that it is operating correctly and that we keep users’ cardholder data safe and help the developers ease their development lifecycle into getting updates and changes out into the world.   Vanessa Schneider:  Hmm..exciting work. So you both worked on a site reliability project for GOV.UK Pay. Can you please, for the uninitiated, introduce our listeners to the project that you carried out?   Kat Stevens:  Yeah so recently, we finished migrating GOV.UK Pay to run on AWS Fargate. So previously Pay was running its applications on ECS EC2 instances on AWS. That's a lot of acronyms. But it basically means we were maintaining long-lived EC2 instances that were running our applications. And that incurred quite a high maintenance burden for the developers on our team. And we decided that we wanted to move to a serverless platform to kind of reduce that maintenance burden. And after researching a few options, we decided that Fargate was a good fit for Pay, and we spent a few months carefully moving our apps across to the Fargate platform whilst not having any downtime for our users, which is obviously quite important. Like Pay is a 24/7 service, so we wanted to make sure that our end users had no idea that this was happening.   Vanessa Schneider:  Jonathan, how did you contribute to this migration?   Jonathan Harden:  So obviously, I've only been here for three months, so and the project has been going on quite a lot longer than that. But this is the kind of task I've been involved with, uh, several times now in the last few years at different companies. And so when I joined GDS, it was suggested that I join this project on Pay because I'd be able to contribute really quickly and, and help with the kind of the, the long tail of this migration.   So a-anybody else that's been in an SR- that works in SRE capacity will know that when you do these kind of projects, you have like the bulk of the migration where you move your applications, like your frontend services that users actually see when they go to the website and the backend services that processes transactions. But then you also have a lot of supporting services around that. So you have services like: things that provide monitoring and alerting, infrastructure that provides where, where do these applications get stored when they're not in use and like where do you launch them from. And there was, there was still quite a bit of that to tie up at the end. And the team, it's quite a small team. As a lot of SRE and infrastructure teams do tend to be. And so when I started, I joined that team and I've been helping with the, the, these long tail parts of the migration. Like in a lot of software engineering, the bulk of the work is done very quickly and the long tail takes quite a bit of time. So, so that's the kind of work that I've been helping with in the last few months.   Vanessa Schneider:  Great. Kat, as co-Tech Lead, what was your involvement in the migration?   Kat Stevens:  Let’s see where to start. So when I joined the Pay Team, which was around October  2020, we were in the early stages of the, of the project, so we'd made the decision that we needed to migrate and that involved things like analysing, like co-cost benefit things. I-It doesn't sound that exciting, but it was actually quite cool looking at all the different options. So, for example, it meant that we could keep some of our existing infrastructure. We wouldn't have to move our RDS instances for, for example. We could keep our existing security group, subnets - all that kind of glue that holds all the application, like infrastructure together.    Then there was quite a lot of planning of how we would actually do this, how we would roll out the migration application by application. We've got around a dozen microservices that we were going to move one by one. And figuring out what good looked like. How would we know that the migration is successful. How do we know whether to roll back a particular app.   So for the actual rollout of migrating sort of one application from EC2 to Fargate: we basically did DNS weighting. So we could have both run--versions of the app running alongside each other, and then you can have 5% of the traffic going to new apps, 95% to the old app. And you can gradually switch over that weighting and monitor whether there are any errors, whether like the traffic suddenly dips and things aren't getting through. So that was all part of the plannings. Like what, what stages would we reach to say like, that yes, we're confident that this change has been positive. And like having a whole, like overview view of what's happening when. Estimating things as well - that's alway, always pretty, [laughs] pretty difficult. But we, as the more apps we did, the quicker we went and we sped up on that. So that was good.   And yeah, there's a whole bunch of other things we, we had to get involved with over the last few months as well. So that's things like performance-testing the whole environment to, you know, we wanted to have confidence that the new platform would be able to handle like the high levels of traffic that we see on GOV.UK Pay. Also we wanted to look at how we would actually deploy these apps. Having more confidence in our deployments, moving to continuous deployment where possible. So while those things weren't like directly impacted by Fargate, doing this migration like gave us the opportunity to explore some of those other improvements that we could make. And yeah, I think we've really benefited.   Vanessa Schneider:  That makes sense, it's always nice to not just keep things ticking over, but making big improvements, that feels really rewarding, I think. Can you give us an impression of what the situation was before the migration maybe?   Kat Stevens:  On our previous infrastructure, we were running ECS tasks on EC2 launch types - so those are sort of, relatively long-lived instances that we had to provision, patch, maintain. And the developers on the, on the rest of the team, and I--we're not necessarily infrastructure specialists, but when developers on our support rota would end up spending sort of like maybe 5, 6, 7 hours a week just maintaining our EC2 instances, we kind of realised that something had to change [laughs]. And use it, moving to a serverless infrastructure, it's just completely removes that burden of having to provision and make, roll our AMIs, our machine images. We, that just doesn't happen anymore. And we've freed up our developers to work on features. And yeah, the, the infrastructure burden on Pay is just so much less.   Vanessa Schneider:  Oh, that sounds really helpful. I’m not sure if migrations are an every-day kind of job for site reliability engineers or software developers, so I was wondering if there’s anything that stood out about this process, like an opportunity to use new tools, or a different way of working?   Jonathan Harden:  So yeah, it's fun to work with new tools. But there, there, you get to--part of working here, and something I've seen in the time I've been here already, is that we don't rush into those decisions. So it's perfectly possible to see the, the new hot thing in the industry and rush straight for that without a good understanding of what are the trade-offs here. Everything has some trade-offs. And here at GDS, w

Our Collecting Information From Users team and a guest from the Home Office share how we’re helping people in government to create accessible, affordable digital forms. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.   Today, I’m chatting with colleagues about our work supporting teams across government that collect information from users using online forms, paper forms or a combination of the two. We've been partnering with other government organisations to investigate how they're currently collecting this information and what kind of help they might need. Because right now, almost all of the forms on GOV.UK that have been downloaded around 7,000 or so times are PDFs or other document-based forms. Usually they are inaccessible, hard to use, and on average teams spend 8 minutes more on processing the information they collect, compared to online forms. This is bad for users, and also bad for government, as it’s inefficient and misses opportunities for using the data for analysis. Worse, these kinds of forms are growing by approximately 6% every year and we estimate it would take the existing form-building service teams more than 70 years to convert just the existing PDFs into HTML forms.   So I’m joined by Harry Voss, Senior Product Manager, and Moyo Kolawole, Senior User Researcher, from GDS, who are part of a team working on a solution that will make it much easier to digitise existing forms, and make it simpler for people in government to create new digital forms - even if they don’t have technical expertise. I’m also joined by Suzanne Mycock from the Family Policy Unit in the Home Office, who has been contributing to the research our team is conducting.   To kick us off, Moyo, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?   Moyosore Kolawole: Sure. Hi I'm Moyo Kolawole. I'm a Senior User Researcher on the Collecting Information from Users team at GDS.   Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you. Harry how about you, would you please introduce yourself?   Harry Vos: Yeah, sure. Hey, folks, I'm Harry Vos, I'm a Senior Product Manager at Government Digital Service. Um, I've been around for like 4 years or something, err, and, err, yeah I’ve been looking at forms and how people collect information from members of the public and businesses, err, since December. So I've been really lucky to be working with some amazing people across government. Thanks for having me.   Vanessa Schneider: No worries, thank you. And finally, Suzanne, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?   Suzanne Mycock: Hi there. My name's Suzanne Mycock. And I'm a Guidance and Forms Editor. I work on the Guidance Rules and Forms team, part of the Family Policy Unit within the Home Office. Err, our team manages 3 of the main tools needed to implement policy, all of which are vital for caseworkers and customers. So that's coordinating secondary legislation, managing guidance and managing application forms.   Vanessa Schneider: Suzanne, as I mentioned, there is a mountain of work to be done to improve forms, but maybe it would help listeners if you could start us off by explaining how the process of creating or editing forms works for you?   Suzanne Mycock: So for us it tends to be led by policy teams, so if a policy changes or if a new policy comes into play, sometimes they'll need a, a form to to support the work that they're doing to collect information from end users or applicants. Now, it's not just a case of a policy team coming to us and saying we need a form, we need a paper form, can you go away, create that for us? It’s kind of bigger than that, because it depends on a number of factors.   Many of our forms are now on GOV.UK, they’ve been digitised and, um, that they sort of stand for quite a number of the forms that we used to, we used to be responsible for. Um, that number has has shrunk. But as you just said a few moments ago, we are sort of being asked to create sort of bespoke forms, um, for low usage routes, really, or forms that may not need to be around for years and years. It might just be to suit for a short term policy or a, um,  intermediary policy.   So what happens is a policy team will come to us and say that they need a form. Um, we will then take that to a board and it is up to the board then to decide whether the form will, um, exist as paper or whether it will be digitised on GOV.UK. Um, and as I say, err, that decision basically comes down to the cost, the usage and how long that form would be needed for. So it's kind of, it's all kicked off by policy and rules changes and policy changes. And then if it's decided that, yes, it's it’s suitable to go, err, on a paper, paper form, the policy team will come to us with a basic set of questions that they want to ask, the information that they want to extract from from the applicants. And we will then go away and we'll put that onto, um, our software.   We'll try and build them a form as best as we can that meets accessibility needs, because that obviously is our number one priority, making sure that everything that we produce or try and make sure that things that that we produce going forward is, um, now and going forward, should I say, is as accessible as it possibly can be. Although we do have, sort of, some legacy forms, um, that are based on paper and can only be printed out and filled in by hand.   The, the work that we have on forms tends to come in sort of peaks and troughs so we can be extremely busy on forms, um, or we can have no work to do on forms for, for a while, because as you're probably aware, we don't just work on application forms, we sort of cover a wide spectrum of work than than just application forms. But it tends to be driven largely by things like policy changes. Now, they tended to happen a couple of times a year, but just recently we've sort of had, sort of several changes, um, throughout the year. So, um, we've sort of had a few, a few peaks this year and sort of late last year, err, for various reasons.   But again, it depends on the sort of the, the extent of the changes, because sometimes they're very minor and it could just be changing one question, err, which takes no time at all, or if it's a case of building a brand new form, um, that can actually take with some of the software that we use, um, believe, err, to like, can take a good sort of three days to, to build and pull the accessibility text behind that.   And the reason it takes so long is, is partly because the, the software that we currently use is no longer supported. So it's becoming slower, more clunky, more difficult to work with, and, um, it's very unstable. Err, so that sometimes means that if it's not behaving like it should, it can take us a little bit longer. Err, and of course, it depends how long the form is as well, so if it's a brand new form sometimes it can just be a couple of pages. Other times it can be a 40-page form. Um, so it, it depends on, on those different factors, really.   Policy are the ones who inform whether, whether a form is needed. Um, and policy teams will work with legal representatives, obviously, to make sure that the content of the, the forms is, um, sort of legally upstanding. Um, but it will also work with operational staff to make sure that the, the form is capturing the kind of content that they need to be able to process application forms. Um, and then decisions are also made by the senior management team when it goes to the board to decide on whether it's going to be paper form or whether it's going to be purely, um, digitised. So it's, um, it can be a very sort of fast moving environment, err,  depending on sort of the, the nature of what it is we're involved with, because obviously we've been involved with some sort of high profile areas.   Vanessa Schneider: I'm actually curious to hear what you think works about this process and what doesn't.   Suzanne Mycock: I think for, for simplicity purposes, the process works quite well. People know, err, where to go to, to, to ask about forms or to ask for changes or new forms. Um, so I think that works pretty well. People know, um, where they can get that information from.   When people do want changes to forms, it's quite a, err, cost effective way of, of making those changes because we don't have to go to a third party and ask them to make those changes. We can actually physically do it on our team. So it's a cost effective and easy way to make and maintain forms.   I like to think that we are sort of continually striving to make sure that we produce accessible forms, um, accessibility to, to us is obviously ensuring that a, a product is available and can be used by everyone. Um, so that would mean that people with certain conditions or disabilities can access exactly the same information as everybody else and that it is easy to access and to use. And it is something that we are aware of, um, and we want to get better at, at doing that.   We try to talk to specialists. So, um, accessibility specialists in the department and sometimes in other government departments as well to sort of try and glean best practice from them. Um, we are aware of our responsibilities under the accessibility regulations, which is why really we’re, we’re keen to get involved with this project, because the more we can do, err, to make our forms accessible, the better, because we just want to create a service or a product that is going to work for everybody and to take our responsibility seriously. So whilst we may not be 100 percent there, I think we've sort of certainly got the, the ethos on team to to and have the desire to want to be there. And we are happy to engage with anybody who can help us get there. So, um, I, I think we're, we’re doing OK, but we could do a lot better.   Vanessa Schneider: That makes sense. I w

We discuss lessons learned when it comes to digital identity, the importance of cross-government collaboration, and how other service teams can get involved. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.   Today, we will expand on our plans to remove unnecessary complexity by developing one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. An easy way to prove their identity just once, that also gives them control over who has access to their data and why.   I'm joined by Will Myddelton, Product Manager, and Helena Trippe, Senior Service Designer, both in the Digital Identity programme here at GDS, as well as Tom Stewart, Assistant Head of Modernisation at Veterans UK, that have been working with GDS to test their technology and processes. So let's start with you Will, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?   Will Myddelton: Of course, Vanessa. Hi everyone. I'm Will, I'm a Product Manager on our Identity workstream. And what that means is on Digital Identity, we've split the work into 3 streams. We have one for authentication, we have one for identity, and we have one for managing data. And my work is to lead the work on our 3 teams that are thinking about the identity part of that puzzle. And as a Product Manager, really, my role is to set the direction that we're going in. And the way that we really do that is by building a shared understanding between all of the different teams so that we all understand the problem that we're working on, with the goal that we can work as the wonderful autonomous human individuals that we are.    Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thank you Will. Helena, how about you, would you please introduce yourself?   Helena Trippe:  So my name is Helena. I'm a Service Designer in Will's team and in the Digital Identity stream. I have been in the programme since, for-for a year now. And it's really, really fantastic to see the excitement growing both within the programme and also across service teams for the work that we're doing. And it's growing in momentum all the time.   And my role within the team has really been to act as a little bit of a glue. We're a multidisciplinary team: we have User Researchers, we have Interaction Designers, we've got Business Analysts and trying to make sure that we are feeding in a lot of the learning back into the product development as we iterate and learn from service teams.   Vanessa Schneider: Great. Thank you, Helena. Finally, Tom, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?   Tom Stewart: I'm Tom Stewart. I work for Veterans UK, a pillar of Defence Business Services, part of the Ministry of Defence. I'm the service owner for a service called the Armed Forces Compensation and War Pension Scheme. Essentially the, the service is: if you are, if you are a service person or you were a service person and you have an injury or a condition that you believe is attributable to your time in the service, then you may be entitled to some form of compensation. And we're, we're digitising what was previously a bit of a paper heavy service. I run, I-I lead a little multidisciplinary team. And my role was the, the kind of overall responsibility for the development and the, the operation and the, the continuous improvement of the scheme.   Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic. Thank you, Tom, for introducing yourself as well. So there are people who might not be following GDS's work within the digital identity space, it's hard to believe, Will and Helena, but can you tell me about what your team has been working on?   Will Myddelton: Anyone that's been working in government over the last 10 years knows that GDS has worked on a product called Verify for a long time, and Verify came from a really good place. It is a real common need of service teams to be able to check the identity of their users. We knew that right after we made GOV.UK right back at the start of GDS and Verify was started to address that need.   The pandemic was a, a really big event for digital identity in the UK. Verify usage shot up. But at the same time it magnified all the problems that there were. And so in last year's spending review, the government committed money back to GDS, which given some of the reputation we've got for doing digital identity in the past, but we're really honoured to, to be trusted to do this, to tackle digital identity from the centre of government once again.   And so what we've been doing since really 1 April - like that's when our, our funding settlement came in and we've got a year of funding - is we've really been trying to work out what the right approach to tackle digital identity this second time around is.   And we've had to be really open with ourselves and with the people that we speak to. And believe me, people around government are open with us about what we've got wrong with Verify. But we've also had to be open to the fact that there were some things that we got right in Verify that we're going to continue. So since 1 April, we've done a discovery period on identity and we did twin discoveries, one into the needs of end users and one into the needs of service teams.   And then from June until where we are now, we've been in an Alpha. And so what we're doing in our Alpha is experimenting with different ways that we can do digital identity better at GDS for the whole of government; and particularly how we can, this time round, design a digital identity product based on the needs of service teams.   Because my observation from having worked on Verify in 2015 and then having worked on, like, the next generation of platform products that we made in GDS - like I was involved in the Notify Alpha and Beta and I worked on Pay and I worked on all those Government as a Platform Products - is that by the time we started those, we'd changed our stance on how we thought about developing products for the whole of government.   By the time we came to 2015 and did all those Government as a Platform products, we had to instead develop things that were so good that services wanted to use them. And we developed a number of ways of thinking about product development for platforms that are going to be used by service teams across government in that 3 years, 2015 to 2018.   And so really why I'm here and what we're trying to do in our Alpha is, we're trying to apply those techniques to a very, very complicated and slightly overwhelmingly complex space of digital identity. We're trying to design a product that solves digital identity for the UK users of government services in a way that service teams will adopt because they love it.   Helena Trippe: And if I can add a little bit of the how, I guess, in terms of how we've been delivering that: we started very early on, even in Discovery stage as, as we've moved into the Alpha, kind of honed that a little bit more, to work very collaboratively with service teams, engaging them early on and trying to really put things in front of them so we get their feedback quite quickly and working iteratively to, to make sure that we can test their expectations. We can understand kind of how they understand identity, what are their mental models around it, that we can also start testing how we are communicating these things to really get feedback really quickly and iteratively and kind of engage them throughout the process. So that's, that's kind of something that we started through the discovery and are continuing to do that through the Alpha. And I believe we'll continue to do and, and grow as we, as we move on.   Will Myddelton:  We're, we are trying to make it easier to access government services where every user has a single set of credentials, typically username and password, that they can use to access any government service in the future so that users don't have to remember lots of different passwords, but also so that like new and exciting things can happen with the future of digital services, where we can start to think about sharing data more easily between services.   And so a key part of that: digital identity is no longer a standalone thing for us. Digital Identity is really a feature of your login to government or your GOV.UK account.   So at the point at which a service like Universal Credit knows that, it needs to know that you are who you say you are to pay you our money, the idea is that you will be logged in with your account, you will do an identity check that will allow Universal Credit to pay out money to you. But then that identity check result will be saved so that every other service that you use after Universal Credit doesn't have to go through the same process. So there's a huge user benefit there, which means you don't have to do this very difficult process again and again.   And there's actually a huge government benefit there, which is that we can start to design services that expect you to be who you say they are, which, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you so much for sharing with us, yeah, what, what you are working on. I was wondering, why is this work important for government service teams?   Will Myddelton: That's a really good question. So...like with all the platforms that GDS makes for government service teams, we've got 2 sets of users and the really obvious one is the end users. And it's really important that we get the identity journeys right for them. But the less obvious one and the one that it's always taken us a while to work out how to design for are service teams around government. So we've done maybe 50 different interviews and research sessions so far with service teams about identity over the last 6 weeks.   And I think there's, there's kind of a few big reasons: one is that it makes identity checks easier for their users. C

We talk coding, solving common problems once and share some of the exciting challenges our developers, engineers and technical architects are working on. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Louise Harris: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Louise Harris and I head up the Creative and Channels Team at GDS. In this episode, we're talking about our wonderful technologists. The Site Reliability Engineers, Technical Architects and Developers who work in multidisciplinary teams to engineer solutions to our complex architectural needs, evolve our infrastructure and tooling to keep us resilient and online, and develop digital products and services used by millions of people across the UK, and that are emulated by governments around the world.    Technologists are a mainstay of how we help government transform and tackle complexity for users. Think about GOV.UK: it's actually 50 front and back end applications that are independently hosted and maintained that enable us to host over a million pages, deal with millions of visits a day and fend off regular Denial-of-Service attacks. But thanks to our technologists, all our end users see is a single site they can access day and night to get the information they need from government.    Tackling that kind of complexity is not always easy, but it's definitely worthwhile. And it's what GDS is here to do. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Himal Mandalia and Louise Ryan to talk about the important role GDS technologists play. Louise, Himal, why don't you introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us a bit about your roles.   Louise Ryan:  Hello, I'm Louise Ryan, I'm the Lead Technical Architect and Head of Technology in Government as a Platform. I joined GDS just under 4 years ago and I joined us from the private sector where I worked in a digital agency as a Technical Architect.   Himal Mandalia:  And I'm Himal, I'm Head of Technology for GOV.UK, and I joined about 5 months ago, and I've been working in digital circles for about 6 years as a contractor in several roles, including Developer, Technical Architect and a Technology Advisor.   Louise Harris:  So, Louise, it sounds like we've been lucky enough to have you at GDS for a couple of years now, and Himal, we've recently lured you over from another part of government. What is it that appeals to you both about working at GDS?   Louise Ryan:  Oh wow. Such, such a big question. There's so much to like about GDS and working in digital in government in general, really. I always like refer people to the GOV.UK Design Principles and the Service Standard. So if you take a look at that, it's all about doing things the right way, about doing things for everybody, having a multidisciplinary team focussing on what the actual problems are, not solutionising. Building services, not just websites, so we continuously improve things. All sorts of that stuff, but also the tech we use is really cool as well. So it's, it's pretty modern stuff: lots of Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery and lots of automated testing. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for a long, long time, but this is a, you know I think it's a brilliant place to work and I love it.   Louise Harris:  And Louise, just, just for our listeners who are maybe less familiar with Government as a Platform, or what we call GaaP, can you just run us through a bit what it’s all about?   Louise Ryan:  So Government as a Platform [GaaP], is a suite of digital services designed to meet common needs which can be quickly integrated into-into other service teams services. This helps reduce duplication, variation and it-it enables other digital teams to build their digital solutions much quicker, much faster, much more efficiently.   In terms of what the various services do, Notify is, is an extremely busy service. It's used by, I think around 4,700 other services. That's around 1000 organisations across the public sector using it. So it's scaling at around 120 new services joining every month. So that is, that's pretty big. So in, in, in terms of the last year, they've seen a-a 25 fold increase in volume of messages. And so that was a massive scaling challenge for the team that they, they just really smashed out the park. They're mostly hosted on the PaaS, which is really cool, and it's kind of asynchronous architecture so there's a lot of queues helping us process messages. You know it enables us to scale and enables us to retry when things break. So it's,it's good architecture.    [GOV.UK] Pay take payments, take card payments for your digital services. It also, you can also use Apple Pay and Google Pay to pay for stuff. I think one of the main selling points of Pay is how much we care and test about the, the journey, the paying experience for people who use assistive technologies. So we really put a lot of effort into making sure it works really well for everybody. That's built mostly on Fargate, and, and uses some you know, it's got to be PCI [Payment Card Industry] compliant, so it's a, it's a complex, necessarily complex architecture. It scales really well and it's been used by, I think, over 550 large services now, and it's processed over a billion pounds.   [GOV.UK] Platform as a Service: you host your, you can use Platform as a Service to host your web apps in the cloud without relying on, without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. So you can build your app in Python, Ruby or Rust or pop it in a container and then push it up to PaaS. And there you go, you've got a running app in the cloud. Also provides a bunch of backend services you can use. So backend services means databases like PostgreSQL, things like ElasticSearch or queue services like simple queue service from AWS. That's, that's the scale of this is, is, is very impressive. It's being used by just over 121 organisations and between the two regions in London and Ireland that it's hosted in, it's hosts, it's running around 2,800 apps at the moment. And they're processing an amazing amount of incoming requests: so we've got an average of around 300 requests per second coming through those pipes. So that's quite cool.   And then we've got the Design System and the Prototype Kit Team. The Design System look after GOV.UK frontend, which is that set of styles, patterns and components that other teams use to build their frontend. What's really important about those patterns and components is that they've been researched extensively and tested extensively across a vast array of digital devices and operating systems and with real people and with assistive devices. So we can be sure that they're, you know they're, they're working. So obviously we do that once so service teams around the country don't have to keep doing that work. It really is an open source project as well, the Design System. It actively seeks contributions from the design and frontend communities a-across, across government. And that's, that's really cool. And it's yeah, it's used quite. It's, GitHub tells me it's, it's in use by over 2,600 other repositories.   Louise Harris:  That must be so cool to be involved in work that’s being forked off, and used in so many other contexts. Is it safe to say that there’s some stuff that you can get done at GDS that maybe you can’t get done elsewhere?   Louise Ryan:  Yeah, I think it is. We are at the centre of government, being part Cabinet Office. If we're not going to do it in the centre, then it's not just gonna magically happen elsewhere in government. Those tools exist so other service teams can-can really benefit from having things done once really well in the centre so they don't have to keep reinventing that wheel. They can-they can just get started really quickly and benefit from all that work that we've done really well just once.    Louise Harris:   And it's not, it's not just teams kind of in and around the UK government that are getting to benefit from that approach either right? Some of our code has also been forked by international governments to do their own thing too. What do you think are some of the sort of GDS led technology success stories out there?    Louise Ryan:  Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's lots of examples of this happening. So take, for example, Notify. That's been forked and used by the Canadian government and the Australian government to create their own notification platforms. And, you know, t-t-that doesn't just-just happen and then stop. We continue to collaborate with those teams working on this platforms so we can all learn from each other. And it's not just about the tech either - that's really important thing. So obviously Notify have developed a whole bunch of operational practices and services around the service itself. So we share, we share those as well and you know, help people figure out what works, what doesn't.   And it's not just Notify. So PaaS. PaaS works with, that's Platform as a Service, they work with their equivalents in-in Australia and, and the US government to share best practice. And then you've got the wonderful Design System that's been forked by a lot of countries. And not just other countries, but other authorities within-within the UK. So, for example, my own council, Wiltshire Council, they forked the Design System and used it to build their own website. But in terms of other countries. I think it's used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the Netherlands. So, yeah, massive, massive success stories of-of re-use of our, of our hard work.   Louise Harris:  Wow, so lots to be proud of. And Himal, I guess same question to you - what is it that drew you to GDS?   Himal Mandalia: I think GDS is sort of interestingly positioned right at the centre and, and being sort of highly visible, like it can be an exemplar of what good, sort of long live teams, services looks like. So all of the things that are articulated in th

Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson share how the GOV.UK roadmap contributes to GDS’s mission of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. For those of you who tuned into last month’s episode, you’ll know that GDS has launched its new strategy centring around 5 core key missions:   GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services;   Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments;   A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone;   Common tools and expert services;   and Joined-up data across departments.   Today I am joined by Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson from the leadership team of the GOV.UK programme to hear more about how their roadmap objectives are contributing to making GDS’s mission - of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone - a reality.   Ross, could you please introduce yourself?   Ross Ferguson: OK, thank you. So I'm Ross Ferguson and the Deputy Director for Portfolio Delivery within GOV.UK. And this is actually my second tour with GOV.UK. I started as an Associate Product Manager when GDS was first set up. GOV.UK was the first product that I worked on and I later worked as the Head of Product Management for GDS. And then after a little overseas tour, I was very pleased to return to GOV.UK in January and, yeah, very excited to be back and to be working with Rachel.   Vanessa Schneider: It's good to have you Ross. Thank you. Yes, Rachel, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners, please?   Rachel Tsang: Of course. So my name is Rachel Tsang and I am Deputy Director for Governance and Assurance on GOV.UK. Like Ross, I am, I sort of boomeranged back to-to GOV.UK. So I was, I did a previous role and then stepped away to do something else. And I'm really, really thrilled. I think that's a, it's not a necessary condition to working on GOV.UK that you come back. I think it is testament to like just how much people enjoy working, working on GOV.UK. Before that, I so, I joined government as a Social Researcher and did a range of roles in different government departments and yeah, have settled here in GDS.   Vanessa Schneider: Thank you. So as mentioned at the top of the episode, the GDS strategy strongly relies on GOV.UK as outlined in GDS's first mission, which is to establish GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services. It'd be really great to hear from both of you how this mission influenced the update to the GOV.UK roadmap.   Rachel Tsang: So I think fundamentally our mission for GOV.UK is to provide a joined-up, personalised, and, and proactive service - we-we blogged lots about that recently. And we-we've evolved continuously since GOV.UK was first created in 2012. And what we're looking to do now is really a big step change in-in our offering for GOV.UK. Fundamentally, it's-it's about changing our offering to continually innovate to meet changing needs. I think that that is the crux for how we're feeding into the wider GDS strategy and vision.   Ross Ferguson: Yeah, absolutely. I think departments, GDS with GOV.UK and, you know, spend control standards alongside departments has done a really, really good job over the years of bringing services that were previously paper-based and office-based, online. And a lot of them are really great in isolation. But we know that the people who use GOV.UK don't experience them, don't want them in isolation. They don't, it's not a nicely compartmentalised linear process. You know, they-they want them in combination. So really, the next maturity step for Government Digital has to be that these services are joined up. Which means that departments need to coordinate with one another.   GDS is in a great position and GOV.UK is a great platform for, for enabling that join-up to happen in a coordinating sense but also in in a public experience sense: that there is one domain that the public knows they can go to to get the guidance, to get access to the services. And, you know, that's what they would expect in all other walks of life when they're transacting with lots of, you know, utilities and and and entertainment. So it's perfectly reasonable that they should expect that from government, and government is perfectly capable of doing it. So that's work that we want to really accelerate this year. And, you know, it is a big undertaking. So it's something that will continue in the, in the years to come.   Vanessa Schneider: Yes, speaking of joined-up services, I'd like you to listen to a couple of interviews that we recorded with colleagues in the different GOV.UK teams that are working towards the objectives of the roadmap. So first we’ll actually be hearing from Tina Mermiri, who shares about the work done to connect insights across GOV.UK to enable those joined up services. This is so that government understands its users and users understand the government.   [Start of vox pop]   Tina Mermiri: I'm Tina Mermiri, the Head of User and Data Insight for GOV.UK. I set out the data and the insight strategy for the programme, and I oversee all the work within data science, performance analytics and user research. So as a team of experts, we have 3 wider objectives and that's understanding GOV.UK users and their needs; that's facilitating data-driven decision-making internally and across wider government; and it's also monitoring the impact of the work that we deliver and the products that we ship. So with performance analytics, we're looking at how people, or users engage with the site, what content they're engaging with and how we can optimise their journeys.    Then we complement that with the user research to understand what their issues are. We get feedback from them. We're actually looking at why they're trying to do certain things that are, that are failing and how we can optimise those journeys as well. And so what the data science community does is go into a little bit more detail with some of the more complicated techniques whereby we might want to look at some of the data that we've got behind the scenes and create some models and scores and look at something like related links and surface them on the site for users that have done something similar to other users and make their journeys easier. So it's all going back to optimising the journey, making it as smooth and frictionless as possible with the power of data behind that.   We're using Google Analytics to power a lot of this data. And Google Analytics has a cookie consent. So we will only track people who have opted in to tracking, which means that our data is not 100 percent representative of all our users, but it's pretty indicative of what they'll be doing. It also means that we hash out any personally identifiable information. We don't actually track that and don't use it for any of our analysis. And we've worked really, really closely with the privacy team to make sure that, you know, privacy is at the heart of all the tracking that we do and all the consequent analysis that we conduct around it. So personalisation, the way that we're looking at it is two-fold. On the one hand, it is without any personally identifiable information. So it is just looking at common journeys and similar content that's being consumed by different users at aggregate level. So that's the one way of doing it where we don't collect any other personal information and we don't personalise it based on their background or any of the demographics, we don't even track that right now. But it is about that journey and other similar journeys. And then on the flip side, we will eventually be trying to do a little bit more personalisation based on people who hold accounts with us, where they will, again, share some of their information with us as part of their account. And that is information that they will have opted into as well. And we will hopefully use that to personalise further, based on, based on their location, for example, and other similar attributes that we want to start building on.    The nature of the data that we collect and making sure that that's representative is, is very, very important. So we could do a lot of really clever stuff with it. But if it's not in a good place, then the output-- if the inputs aren't reliable, necessary, then the outputs won't be as reliable either. So we're spending a lot of time on revisiting the way that we collect some of the data, the way that we cleanse the data, the way we make sure that it is reliable and ready for us to use. So that's one thing that we're investing in quite heavily. And we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions without, like, probing, leading wording. We need to make sure that we're able to differentiate between attitudes around, let's say, GOV.UK or what they're trying to do and wider government. We need to make sure that our data is representative across all our very, very wide range and diverse users.   I think the work that we're trying to do and the opportunities that it opens up for users and to make their journeys easier is, is, is really impressive.   [End of vox pop]   Ross Ferguson:  Tina's a...and her crew, you know, clearly, clearly know what they're talking about. She was, she was giving great insights there into, you know, just how important the data usage is going to be to powering the sort of whole journeys work that we’re wanting to do, the personalisation. It's all, it's all dependent on us making, you know, proper, proper use of that, of that data. I think that she, you know, she did talk well about the tooling that we're starting to bring in to help us with that. We are, we're definitely stepping up the rec

Tom Read, CEO of GDS, sits down to chat about his first few months and what’s next, taking us through the GDS strategy for 2021 to 2024. Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer for GDS, and that's Tom Read.    Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I know that you joined GDS back in February, which in these times feels like an eternity. But could you please introduce yourself and what do you do to our listeners?    Tom Read:  Sure. And thank you for having me. So I'm Tom. I'm the Director General and Chief Executive of the Government Digital Service. As you said, I've been here just over 3 months now. So effectively my job is to set the strategy for the Government Digital Service, work out how it aligns with ministerial priorities, how much money we've got, what we're currently working on, and then keep out of people's way as much as possible and let people get on with delivery. That's sort of what I'm here for, I think.    Vanessa Schneider:  OK, I hear it's not your first rodeo at GDS: do you mind sharing how this experience is different?    Tom Read:  Yeah. So I was, I was at GDS from for about 2 years in 2013 to 2015. Back then, I mean, everything was quite different. I worked in Liam Maxwell's area, which was the sort of, the more, the tech area than the digital area, and I was brought in to run a technology transformation programme in the Cabinet Office itself, plus DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport]. It was great fun, really good fun.    How is it different? I don't know. It's... GDS back then was was smaller, much more sort of a scrappy start-up. It had this sort of triumvirate of real heavy hitters in Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell and the Minister, Francis Maude, now Lord Maude. And so it had a really, it sort of felt very much on the bleeding edge and it was very much going out and trying to push down some doors to get people to-to let it exist and let it really make a difference. I think a lot of that spirit is still, still here in GDS. But there's a little thing I've written in-in our new strategy, which is we're not in start-up mode anymore. And I think that's it's quite important to recognise, we-we've, we've done that phase and now we're sort of maturing a little bit. So it's slightly different. But the spirit is the same.    So after 2015, I basically I did 2 years of just like super intense work, like it was just, you know, really, really fun. So much fun but incredibly tiring. And I basically sort of said, right, that's, that's it. That's my little tour of duty in government done. And I-I went off and joined a consultancy and about 3 months in working for the consultancy, which was a lovely place, really lovely place, great people. I suddenly thought, ‘ack, I'm not done, actually. I-I-I really miss government already’.    So later that year I applied for a few roles and I was successful in a role as the Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Business, as was. And I'd worked there with amazing people like Emma Stace, Mark O'Neill and other people, it was just - Andrew Greenway - it was, it was a really great team. And we really started to create a digital movement in that weird department because it's like a small policy department with loads of arm's length bodies. And it was good fun and we really got going.    And then there was the machinery of government change. So energy and climate change came in, education went out so universities and things went out to education. And I don't know if any of our listeners have been through machinery of government changes, they're like mergers acquisitions in the private sector. I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I thought that there isn't space for, for 3 directors in what was to become BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy].    And so I started to look around government and it happened. There was a vacancy coming up at the Ministry of Justice [MoJ] working for Sir Richard Heaton, who I worked to when I was at GDS, he was the Perm Sec[retary] of the Cabinet Office and one of my all time sort of heroes in government. And so I was sort of managed moved across to MoJ. And that's where I've been for the last 4 and a half years. Up until now, by a long way, the best job I've ever had in my career. It was just this incredible, meaningful work of helping some of the most vulnerable people in society to fix their lives and get an education and get their lives back on track. It was brilliant. So yeah, I've been, I've been in a few departments.    Vanessa Schneider:  Well, they tend to say, don't meet your heroes, but it seems to have worked out really well for you. I also wanted to give a shout out to Emma Stace because the Department for Education Digital and Technology team has just launched their first podcast episode with Emma in it.    Tom Read:  Oh, awesome. Oh, well, fantastic. Well, listen to that one. She'll be amazing.    Vanessa Schneider:  [laughs] But also listen to us!   Tom Read:  Obviously listen to us!   Vanessa Schneider:  So it's clear to me, just listening to you that you're passionate about digital government, always coming back to it as well and looking at your resume in general. But I was wondering why that was. What is the power of digital?    Tom Read:  What is the power of digital? That's a really good question. So the thing that's unique about digital teams in government, but also outside government, is we just have a relentless focus on users and how they work. And I know a lot of bits of government do that as well - it would be a bit insulting to policymakers to suggest we're the only people who do that.    But any bit of digital design, whether you're working for a supermarket or a retailer or a bank or government, you have to design around how users use things because otherwise they don't use them. And then you're wasting everyone's time, right? In government, I think we've used digital, now more the word data, user needs, these sort of things, kind of as stalking horses, they're, they're ways of expressing designing things around how users work. And I just think that's a great opportunity.    I also think government itself is fascinating because some some bits of government have been around for hundreds of years and some bits have been around for a thousand years. And without being simplistic, some of the processes haven't changed very much in that time. And so you can stick a website over it. But really, you need to look at the whole, you know, policy through to what outcomes you're trying to get, the process, and then digitise that. And I think that's really missing from how we talk about digital in a lot of cases.    Vanessa Schneider:  So, you mentioned obviously that you've been here for 3 months and some people make a big deal out of it - the first 100 days somebody has spent in a new job, especially in a leadership position. Is there anything that you're keen to share that you've learnt in this time, or maybe you found something that surprised you?    Tom Read:  Yeah, I mean, just so much. It's quite weird hearing it's been 3 months actually, because, in the nicest possible way, it feels like a lot longer. And I do mean that in a positive way. I've learnt a lot. There's, there's a lot. GDS is a funny place because everybody's got an opinion about GDS just anywhere in government. And beyond actually, everyone's got an opinion about what's good, what's bad. There's a whole set of people on Twitter who seem to spend most of their lives just commenting on what on what GDS is doing. And it's really peculiar. And so coming in, or sort of back in, but, but into this role from a department has been fascinating.    So it's sort of off the top of my head, a few things I've I've learnt. One is I think the, GDS is just completely full of, like, super intelligent, incredibly civic-minded people who care. And I think, yeah, I don't want to go on a soapbox rant about this, but that's probably the thing that people really miss when they're judging GDS, is just how much people care about, you know, service design and, you know, the underlying technology and content design, accessibility, all these things that really matter. It just, it really infuses everything when you're speaking to people. And there are people who have been here for like 7 or 10 years who just still have the same absolute passion for improving public services, which is amazing. I mean, I've got a short attention span, so a lot of respect for those sort of people.    On the, on the, sort of, the more complex side. I think, the first, we still sort of hark back quite a bit to sort of the first 5 years of, of GDS, which I don't think is uncommon in a sort of quote unquote start-up. You hark back to the early days - I was speaking to a friend who works at Monzo recently. And he was saying everyone still talks about when there were 30 of us and we were trying to build from scratch. We're not like that anymore. So I think, I think a lot of people still look back at where we had all this support and we were crashing down doors and building things. And it was busy and we were on stage a lot. And then there were 5 years of much quieter GDS over the last 5 years - still doing very important work, but taking much more of a collegiate view. And I think one of the things I've been puzzling through over the last 3 months is how do you get the happy balance between those 2? I think maybe we need to get back a little bit into the setting direction and pushing delivery as well as working together.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah I mean, I think one of the things that people remember when

To celebrate Earth Day 2021, we spoke to people working in different digital roles in government about how product teams can contribute to greening delivery. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I'm Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.    Today we will be talking about how product teams can play a role in greening delivery. While digital ways of working often mean moving away from paper-based processes, there's still plenty that can be done by professionals in the public sector to contribute to environmentally sustainable practice. The government has recognised the role it can play and set out its ambition in the 2011 Greening Government ICT Strategy. The strategy provides a vision for a sustainable digital delivery and ways of working.   Last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is also known as DEFRA, published the newest iteration of the strategy covering the government's approach until 2025. In it DEFRA identified opportunities across the government estate to deliver energy-saving benefits, for instance, in server utilisation and software design, or to include sustainability criteria in procurement.    In today's episode, on Earth Day, we'll explore this important issue and hear from colleagues who are taking steps to make their delivery more green. Joining me now are Adam Turner and Emily Labram. Thank you both for being here today. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do to our listeners? Let's start with Adam.    Adam Turner:  Hi, everyone. Yeah, Adam Turner. I work for DEFRA. And for my sins, I am in charge of sustainable ICT across all government departments. So to, to make that happen, basically I-I-I write the strategy and I chair the cross-government group. So manage the governance to make this kind of stuff happen and help and advise departments on delivering all that goodness.   Vanessa Schneider:  Brilliant. Thank you, Adam. Emily, how about you?   Emily Labram:  Hi everyone, I'm Emily Labram. I'm a Lead Product Manager at the Government Digital Service. Right now I'm working in digital identity, which means I'm helping make it easier for users to access government services online. And previously I worked in the world of infrastructure at GDS, so I got very interested in how sustainably we were hosting our services. And that's where I also met Adam and worked with him on improving the sustainability of our hosting.   Vanessa Schneider: Perfect, thank you.    So Adam, at the top of the episode, I shared a bit of information about the Greening Government ICT Strategy, but would you mind giving the listeners an explanation that's not quite so amateur?   Adam Turner:  [laughs] Not amateur at all, Vanessa. Yes, so the tagline for the strategy for the new one that we published in September 2020 for the next five years is: responsible and resilience. I don't actually use the word sustainable or green in the title at all, but basically what I'm trying to say through the strategy, what we are trying to say, is that all our ICT is is delivering goodness. It's part of the solution to the climate crisis and not part of the problem.    So within that, we have broken it down really into 3 key areas. So this is around firstly net zero ambitions, obviously tied into government ambitions for net zero by 2050. So it's linking your ICT sustainability targets with your departmental or organisational sustainability targets.   The second one is around circular. So everything around what we would used to have called waste, but now we more commonly talk about resources. Because if you're using less of the world's resources and you're using, for example, remanufactured ICT and you're taking ownership of that stuff potentially at end-of-life and thinking about where it goes, then you've got more control over the system.   And then the third one is around that kind of social aspect. And, yes, much of this is in the procurement space. But there's also a need to understand this from a design perspective as well. The Prime Minister set out a statement on modern slavery last year that highlighted ICT as a high-risk area. So we need to make sure we're squeaky clean in that area.    Vanessa Schneider:  That definitely brings it much more to life. Your [laughs] examples seem much more practical than sort of the high-level stuff that I mentioned, so thank you for that.    Yeah. So, Emily, as a Lead Product Manager I believe you are, and an advocate for sustainability, I was wondering where you see the opportunities to improve sustainability in your area of practice.   Emily Labram:  Yeah, so a couple of years ago, I started to wonder what the role of Product Managers and digital teams was in bringing down our emissions in line with our net zero targets. And I realised that actually getting a working knowledge of where emissions actually are when it comes to building and running digital services was the first step.   I realised that because services are called digital [laughs], and because they're hosted in 'the cloud', that it's quite common for Product Managers, especially people like me who didn't have a technical background, misunderstood that digital services and the cloud are something almost immaterial. That was the first shift that I made when I started realising that actually [laughs] to host a service, keep it up and running, involves these vast data centres. They are very real, they are very material, and they are kept running by electricity and water [laughs]. Electricity which you know could be produced in any number of ways, some of which could be by burning fossil fuels. And all of that was something of a kind of revelation [laughs] for me a couple of years ago.    And I do think that that started to get complex pretty quick [laughs]. But just to get started by thinking, all right, let's get a working knowledge of the sorts of emissions that my job actually produces was a good first step.   Vanessa Schneider:  Oh ok, interesting. We actually spoke with Mohamed Hamid, or Mo, from the Chief Digital Information Office in Cabinet Office, and he has some more insight into server space and the impact it can have on the environment."   [VOX POP STARTS]   Mo Hamid:  So my name is Mohamed and I'm a Lead Infrastructure Engineer at the Cabinet Office. What that means is I look after the connectivity and the backend of infrastructure that supports the services that we offer to our users. So for us and for me, our users are, are the Cabinet Office staff that consume and use laptops, IT infrastructure, wireless connectivity, internet, access to the internet from offices and then things like-like the VPN, for example.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great, so we're discussing how to green delivery in different parts of ICT within government, so I was wondering where can it go wrong - is there something such as "overengineering" in your line of work perhaps?   Mo Hamid: That's a great question...for me you know, just over-engineering: it is possible. In today's world, there's a big drive to move things to the cloud. So traditionally you'd have your data centres on sites in the office somewhere and you'd have a server room and that's where you would host things like email or applications. But however, there's a big trend to moving offsite to the cloud. And often what I find, and from experience is: the, you know, looking at it from a green environmental perspective is often not thought about and the reasons for that is varying. But one of the reasons would be that isn't really thought of with the requirements. There's all--the requirement seems to be, 'yep, we need to shift, lift and shift, migrate into the cloud'.     ‘Do I just simply migrate all the servers and create virtual machines in the cloud in the very same way as I would do in a physical server room?’ No, you wouldn't do that. You would make use of the cloud tools that are out there and and finding out you know, how do I make use of those tools to better serve the users and the environment.     So to delve even further, what that means is: so in the traditional server room, you might, you might have a lot of servers running and some storage behind that, and that all requires power, and that's all producing CO2 gases, somewhere in the lifecycle there. You, you, you don't need to just have servers running all the time in the cloud. You can only have it running at a minimum level. And then when demand increases, for example, you can then spin up more servers. So this is, we're talking about scaling here. Do I need five servers running 24/7, you know, 30 days of the month all the time? Probably not. You probably, you know, at night time, your demand may decrease.     Vanessa Schneider:  Having flexibility in a contract so that you can scale up and down is quite handy. Is there any other sort of best practice advice that you have to pass on to anybody else who might be working in infrastructure engineering and is listening to the episode?     Mo Hamid:  Yeah, sure. I mean, I mean, I don't think I can cover everything, but I think one of the things you need to look out for - and it's best to do this from early on - is to not use tools that will get you locked in to one particular cloud provider. Perhaps in the future you may want to migrate from cloud provider A or to cloud provider B, or you may want to host in A and B together simultaneously. So being locked in one isn't a good thing because you-you-you might have other players in the future, or we might have a player that are more, more, are more green.   Number two, when you're designing your your IT, or your infrastructure, whatever you're looking to-to provide, security I think also plays a part. Not just because you want to protect your-your services obviously, but also from-from your services being used for other malicious things.    So I had a f

The GOV.UK Platform as a Service team provides insight into how the service works and how it helps public sector organisations to host digital services. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about GOV.UK Platform as a Service. GDS has a reputation for creating best in class digital products and services for government, and GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or GOV.UK PaaS for short - is one of them.    GOV.UK PaaS helps public sector organisations to secure and swiftly host their digital services without worrying about infrastructure. It’s currently used by 131 organisations, runs 1,652 applications and recently celebrated passing its live service assessment, providing a joined-up experience across channels.    Joining me are Clare Barnett and Mark Buckley. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners?   Clare Barnett:  Yeah. Hi, everyone, I'm Clare. I'm a Senior Researcher on GOV.UK PaaS. And my role involves spending most of my time with users of GOV.UK PaaS, understanding what they need from our platform, understanding how current features work and what we can do to improve them, and also understanding how we might need to develop the product in the future to help meet needs that we're not currently catering for.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great, thanks, Clare. Mark?   Mark Buckley:  Hiya, I'm Mark Buckley, I'm Product Manager on GOV.UK PaaS. And that means that a lot of the user needs and things that Clare identifies and other folks on the team, I help to prioritise in order to iterate and hopefully make that product better.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great. So both of you mentioned GOV.UK PaaS and I also gave an introduction at the top of the episode but I’m sure [laughs] our listeners would value hearing from an expert what GOV.UK PaaS actually is.    Mark Buckley:  So GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or as we abbreviate it to PaaS as it's quite the mouthful - is a cloud hosting platform essentially, where service teams around government and public sector can use us to host their applications and digital services in the cloud. So whether that's a service living on GOV.UK like the Teaching Service or a simple informational website such as technical documentation or something like that, they can host their app, those applications on our platform.   The platform side of it, and is doing this sort of hard work of connecting and running the infrastructure that underpins the World Wide Web. So is akin to the plumbing in a house. So, yeah, we take care of that so the service teams don't have to.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great, thanks Mark.    Clare, as a user researcher, can you tell us why should people use PaaS? Does that come up maybe in your work?    Clare Barnett:  Yeah, it absolutely does. And, you know, I'm talking close all the time and I'm always hearing: one of the things that we hear is how we can improve the product. But we're always hearing the good stuff as well and why people use us. And I mean, essentially PaaS is there to help teams avoid unnecessary overheads.   So it means that they don't have to run the infrastructure themselves and they don't need to have Web Ops capability in-house, which means they can focus their time and budget on running their service. And what we hear from our users is that using GOV.UK PaaS, it means that they can avoid procurement blockers, it's much easier to-to use us than it is other commercial services because they don't have to go through long procurement processes.   We also offer a great developer experience, which we've spent a lot of time developing and improving over the years. And we're trusted - we hear from a lot of users that the fact that PaaS is developed by the public sector for the public sector is a really good thing for our users. It helps avoid lock-in with expensive suppliers and it feels much more collaborative as well. And overall, we're offering teams much better value for money than, than some of the commercial providers out there.   Vanessa Schneider:  Do you ever have people coming in thinking they know what PaaS is and you've got to clear up a couple of misconceptions?    Clare Barnett:  I mean, I think we have people who maybe think they can use PaaS in a slightly different way to the way that they, they do. But I mean, I would say some of the common misconceptions are that: it's only for developers. And actually that's not true at all. We do have a number of designers using GOV.UK PaaS to host their prototypes. So yes, we-we do have some misconceptions, but we're able to clear those up quite easily.    Mark Buckley: Yeah, I-I suppose more often than not, we get misconceptions the other way, as in they don't know what PaaS is or aren't clear on sort of the benefits or the purpose for us.   A lot of teams we hear from: 'oh, well, it's only for, available for central government. It's made for central government by central government'. But that's not the case. We've done a lot of work over the years in opening up those contracts and focussing on the-the needs of not just central government, but the wider public sector. So we have teams and services from the devolved administrations, Northern Ireland Assembly use like pretty extensively, local authorities use us, NHS use us, College of Policing use us there - so we have representation from right across the public sector.   And I suppose another kind of misconception   is that GOV.UK PaaS is only suitable for very simple services, such as, as I mentioned earlier, sort of a static website or something like that. But again, that's not true. We have quite we're a, we're a very flexible and powerful platform actually. And some of the services that folks might know: so the Document Checking Service is running on GOV.UK PaaS and GOV.UK Notify, which is, over, certainly over COVID, has become pretty much the UK's notification platform that also runs on GOV.UK PaaS. So we-we have the kind of full spectrum of services living quite happily and running reliably on GOV.UK PaaS.   Vanessa Schneider:  I imagine that listeners know maybe of the word cloud, cloud hosting - because we do have a sizeable audience in the Digital, Data and Technology space. I'm sure they also know that there's commercial providers in this instance. So what motivated government to create this tool rather than just relying on external providers?   Mark Buckley:  GOV.UK PaaS, yeah, is not the only Platform as a Service offering or cloud hosting offering that is available to public sector. Indeed, there is a somewhat confusing overlap with G-Cloud where you could procure different types of cloud hosting provider potentially. But we as a GOV.UK PaaS is a Platform as a Service which when it comes to cloud hosting and that type of thing, is different from Infrastructure as a Service, which is generally what private sector infrastructure providers would provide.    And if services or teams decide to use that, they will have to stitch together and do all of that kind of plumbing themselves because there's sort of more raw materials. And in-in doing that, will have to hire and recruit significant web operations capability. Because we are a platform, we've done all that, built it once with the needs of government at its heart. So to-to fit with the-the kind of M.O. of the rest of the government as a platform products. So GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay and our ourselves: we built it once so that it can be reused and across the public sector, so that there isn't that same duplication of effort. And cloud infrastructure and hosting is not a simple kind of area and takes a lot of investment. So it's, you know, the, that we've provided or invested a lot in that is beneficial hopefully to other service teams.   Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, definitely build once, use many, it's a favourite phrase in-in our organisation.    Right. So obviously, you are working on the product itself. I was wondering if you maybe in user research, hear about the kind of challenges people have been able to overcome thanks to GOV.UK PaaS or whether you've got a particular case that you'd consider a success story.   Clare Barnett:  Yeah. So we-we hear a lot of the time that teams are able to move a lot faster when they are using GOV.UK PaaS. So they're able to deploy faster. Just generally it kind of helps their internal processes. We take away a lot of the work that otherwise they might have to do themselves.    So some research that we did recently around users evaluating PaaS for use. One user actually said to us: ‘largely all of the effort is offloaded onto ourselves’. So they see the value for money in that the-the service doesn't really feel like very expensive at all. You know we're taking away a lot of the work that-that users would actually have to do in their teams, that's being placed on us.   On top of that, the support that we offer is really comprehensive. So whereas if a team was using a commercial competitor of ours, they might be paying quite hefty sums to have a support model in place. With GOV.UK PaaS, they get all of that included and they get access to 24/7 support. So it-it really is-it's the speed at which people are able to operate and the fact that they can reduce their team size, they don't have to have web ops capability. And the fact that overall that these things combine to help them save money and get bet-better value for money in the long term.   Vanessa Schneider:  If someone is curious to find out more, maybe take their own time and to look at information, where can they go?   Clare Barnett: Yeah, so if you'd like to find out more about PaaS and how it works, then you can go to our website, which is cloud.service.gov.uk for more information. If you're already using PaaS, then you can contact our support channel, and ag

We hear from DWP, Defra, and MHCLG about their role in the cross-government response to help clinically vulnerable people during coronavirus. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service and we will be joined by several guests.   You'll be hearing from Sally Benson from the Department of Work and Pensions [DWP], Martin Woolhead from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA], Kate Nicholls from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and Nick Tait from GDS. As you can tell by this long list of participants, the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service involved a lot of people working for a lot of departments - it was truly a cross-government effort.    But you might not be clear on what it is. In March 2020 as a critical response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, GDS rapidly built the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service, also known as VPS, to provide support for clinically extremely vulnerable people in England, who had been advised to shield. The service was stood up over one weekend and then continuously iterated to support emerging policy and user needs.   The service enables clinically extremely vulnerable people to register their personal details and support needs, which are securely stored, validated against NHS shielded patient lists for eligibility and securely transferred to frontline service providers. During the period of national shielding from 23 March to 30 July, that is wave one of shielding, the Vulnerable People Service facilitated more than 4.2 million deliveries of essential supplies, support with basic health and care needs, as well as providing priority supermarket deliveries.   Joining me now are Kate Nicholls and Nick Tait. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners? Let's start with Kate.   Kate Nicholls:  Sure. Hi, I'm Kate Nicholls. I've been working in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as part of the shielding programme, particularly on the Data Policy Team. So we work really closely with GDS on the kind of ongoing development of the Vulnerable People Service.    Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing. Thanks for joining us Kate. Nick, would you mind introducing yourself?    Nick Tait:  Absolutely. Hello everybody. My name is Nick Tait. I'm the Service Owner for the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service here in GDS. And I've been with the programme since 5 May 2020.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you. So both of you work for parts of government that have been instrumental in the development of the service. I was wondering how you came to join the teams that were working on this?   Nick Tait:  It was pretty much born of necessity really and, and practicality. As you said in your introduction Vanessa, there were a, and there remain, a lot of interested parties, a lot of stakeholders, too much for any one department to do, given the, the nature of our response to the emergency that we found, we find ourselves in. And the 2, as far as GDS and MHCLG were concerned or are concerned, we're the 2 main players: we represent the policy and the delivery of said policy as far as the digital service goes. And furthermore, as the project has progressed, it's become expedient for us to get closer to both policy makers and, and people they know - so relationships with local authorities, for example, are best facilitated by colleagues at MHCLG.    Vanessa Schneider:  Kate, I know that you joined the MHCLG team working on this a little while into the VPS [Vulnerable People Service] being set up. How did you experience that?   Kate Nicholls:  It was actually a really great time to join because all of those kind of key relationships between GDS and MHCLG had already been established. And when I joined the team, it already really had that kind of “one team” feel. So I-I'd come from a completely different job elsewhere in government policy. And I came here and it was just, yeah, this kind of efficient machine [laughs] that was just like achieving things every single day. So, yeah, it was, it was a great kind of feeling joining in with that.   Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing. Both of you touch on relationships being established, being really valuable. Do you think you've experienced anything on this scale where you've had to tap in so many departments working on the same project before? Or do you reckon that this is, and I dare use the dreaded word, unprecedented?   Nick Tait:  M-my experience of a civil servant, there has been nothing quite like this. And for me, the fact--sure, I've worked on other programmes where there are perhaps as many stakeholders, but not at this pace. We have excellent governance practises in, processes in place. But they happen at 2 weekly cycles. But you know, at-at the working level of getting the job done then to really hone in on where those key relationships are, that's something that we have had to do in order to respond at scale. And, and I should add that because there are so many stakeholders, we have Engagement Leads on the project whose main job is to consult with local authorities or with DWP or with the food and medicine supplies and so on and so forth. So it-it multiplies out. But yeah, nothing quite like this before. I think it's fair to say.   Kate Nicholls:  Completely agree with Nick. So I've worked on teams in the Civil Service before where there's been, you know, a degree of close working with departments. But I don't think the kind of level that we've got to where, you know, you could just pick up the phone and speak to anyone on the GDS side if you're in MHCLG and, and vice versa. And it's just kind of, it's just right there at your fingertips. I think that's something I've never quite experienced before.    Vanessa Schneider:  I'm, I'm really glad to hear that went [laughs] well then.What was it like working with colleagues in departments like Department for Health and Social Care [DHSC] and external organisations like the NHS, who may be structured differently because of their work being so focused directly on the public?   Kate Nicholls:  Sure. Yeah, so we've, we've worked really closely with NHS Digital (NHS D) because they sort of provide the shielded patient list, the SPL, which is basically the kind of the heart of the whole project.    So while GDS have built this wonderful registration system, the people that that's targeted at are the people who are identified clinically by doctors and other clinicians to be extremely vulnerable. So we've had to kind of, similarly to how we've done with GDS, we had to build up really good working relationships with them, have sort of regular meetings, joint governance, and really kind of create that kind of “one team” feel to make sure that, that the right sort of data on those who are clinically extremely vulnerable is flowing through our system, is flowing to local authorities, you know, whilst also keeping patient records safe, secure and, and sort of operating legally. So that's kind of the challenge of what we've have to do with NHS D. And I think by building up really good working relationships with them that's how we've managed to kind of overcome that and, and use that data in a way that hasn't, you know, really happened with patient data ever before in the past.   Vanessa Schneider:  Nick, was there anything that you could add about either the working relationship with DHSC or NHS Digital?   Nick Tait:  So my, my experience around DHSC, the one that I'd sort of pinpoint is, is their involvement at the overall, overall programme steering board - where we have had regular contact with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer [DCMO]. And having, having senior stakeholders as, as embodied in DCMO to go, and there is all of this happening helps frame our work a little bit more, and then that comes down to, to working level, where it is the nuts and bolts of the all, all important shielded persons list, which, as Kate says, is, without which we'd be scrabbling about.    Vanessa Schneider:  So we actually talked to Martin Woolhead from DEFRA, which is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, regarding the Vulnerable People Service. And he also shared with us a little bit about the working relationships between the departments.    [CLIP STARTS]   Martin Woolhead:  I'm Martin Woolhead. I'm Deputy Director for Food for the Vulnerable in DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. My role essentially is overseeing policy and work on food for vulnerable people. So that ranges from work with food charities and local authorities to essentially get and look after food needs for vulnerable people.    One of the things I think constantly cropped up throughout the process was that, for example, on what we did on food supply, MHCLG could also have done that, you know MHCLG as programme owners, and working on this across government and leading it, could also have essentially contracted with food suppliers to deliver the, the packages of essential supplies that were delivered. The reason it wasn't done in that way was simply because of those relationships and the urgency that we had. So because we had the existing relationships, DEFRA was able to kind of work specifically on that bit and get it done quickly.   So, so where DEFRA worked on food supply because of its existing relationships, other departments had relationships with others. So in regard to the supply of medical supplies so medicines and things, DHSC led on that element because they had the relationships. And so with MHCLG convening, they were able to kind of use the relationships that other departments

We look back at what happened over the past 12 months at GDS, highlighting work on accessibility, the coronavirus response and more. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, we are looking back as fondly as we can on 2020. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this was a momentous year and we have many reasons to be proud of what our organisation and our colleagues have achieved.    What better way to reflect on the year than to ask a couple of my colleagues to put their knowledge to the test? We're going to see who has been paying attention to GDS happenings in 2020. Please welcome my guests Louise Harris and Kit Clark.   Louise Harris:  Hey, Vanessa, good to be here.   Vanessa Schneider:  Great to have you on, Lou. Do you mind telling us what you do at GDS and to spice things up a little bit for the end of the year, maybe a fun fact about yourself?   Louise Harris:  Sure. Well, of course, we know each other very well, Vanessa, because I have the pleasure of working with you in the Creative Team. But for everybody else, I'm Lou and I head up the Channels and Creative Team at GDS. I'm a relatively new starter - I'm one of our lockdown joiners because I joined in May 2020. In terms of a fun fact, it may surprise some of you given my accent to know that I'm a fluent Welsh speaker.   Vanessa Schneider:  You sou-I-do you sound very Welsh? You know what? We've got to put it to the test. Can you tell me what the team is called that you work for in Welsh?    Louise Harris:  Ok, this is something I think I can do. So I'll give you my intro again in Welsh. Louise Harris dw’ i, a rwy’n gweithio yn y Tim Creadigol a Sianeli yng Ngwasanaeth Digidol y Llywodraeth.   Vanessa Schneider:  Ok, anybody who knows Welsh, you've got to contact us and tell us if she got it right or not. Kit, would you mind introducing yourself?    Kit Clark:  Sure. My name's Kit, I'm an Engagement Manager within the Strategic Engagement Function. An interesting fact I suppose about myself, is that my uncle composed the Eastenders theme tune. So that's something I always, always bring out in introductions.   Vanessa Schneider:  I was warned that your interesting fact would be amazing. And I think it does live up to that disclaimer. I think that is a very, very fun fact indeed.   Louise Harris:  I was not warned that your fun fact was going to be as good Kit, I'm so impressed by that. What a claim to fame.   Vanessa Schneider:  I think I might just start with the quiz. Of course, if you're at home, you can play along if you like. Just make sure to keep score as you go, as I'll be sharing the answer after each question.   So let's start with the first question of the quiz.    Here it is: what was the most popular GDS podcast episode in 2020? So what topic do you think was in the most popular episode? I'll take that as an answer.    [horn noise]    Louise Harris:  I'm presuming that we're excluding this episode from the list of most popular ones, so it's the most popular one before this one, right?    Vanessa Schneider:  Yes. I'm afraid we don't have any foresight, so it'll have to be one from January to November.    Louise Harris:  OK, well I think we've had some really great guests and different people from across government this year. The big one has got to be the GOV.UK response to Coronavirus and setting up the Coronavirus landing page - I think that was such a big achievement, both in terms of the work that was done to get that product up and out, but also for you folks over here on the podcast, because I believe that was the first remote recorded podcast that we did.   Vanessa Schneider:  Hmm. Any thoughts, Kit? Any competing offers?   Kit Clark:  Not too sure. I know that accessibility's been quite a theme this year, and I believe that was in January. But I also know there was a couple of celebration ones - there was one looking at two years of Local Digital Declaration. So I think I might I go, I think COVID's a great shot but I'm going to go different and go accessibility.    Vanessa Schneider:  Alright. So there are some pretty solid guesses with both of you. Well done. I can reveal that the third most popular episode was in fact our accessibility episode. Good hunch there Kit. Second most popular was about the GOV.UK Design System. But indeed in first place, most popular episode this year was on the GOV.UK response to COVID-19.    Louise Harris:  Wahoo!   Vanessa Schneider:  Points go to Lou on that.    Vanessa Schneider:  Alright. So GDS has run a lot of stories this year. My second question is about the blog and which post attracted the most attention?   [horn noise]    Louise Harris:  This is a really tricky one because I think we've had so many good stories go out this year about the work that GDS has been doing across government. And of course, so much of what we do is used by our colleagues in the public sector. So there's often a lot of interest in what we have to say, which is great.   I mean, a big moment for me this year was our Global Accessibility Awareness Day celebrations where we were joined by thousands of people who came together to talk about digital accessibility and the work that we needed to do. So I feel like maybe the wrap up blog that we did about that, which had all of the links to the training webinars, I feel like that might be pretty popular. And even if it wasn't the most popular, it was definitely my favourite.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, I, I can reveal to you that the third most popular post this year introduced GOV.UK Accounts.    Louise Harris:  How could we forget? That was such a big story.    Vanessa Schneider:  Well, you might want to hold onto that thought. It could just help you later in the quiz. Our second most popular post described the launch of our online Introduction to Content Design course. Content Design, hugely popular. I think we might have done a podcast episode about that. Finally, I can reveal our most popular post in 2020 explained how GOV.UK Notify reliably sends text messages to users.    Let's go on to our next question. As a bit of a preamble GDS leads the Digital, Data and Technology Function in government, which is also known as the DDaT Function. And we believe firmly in user-centred design, hint hint - keywords. So there are several job families in DDaT, but can you tell me how many job roles feature in the user-centred design family?    [buzzer noise]    Kit Clark:  There's seven.   Vanessa Schneider:  You seem pretty sure about that. On a dare, could you name all of them?   Kit Clark:  I hope so because I've had some training on it relatively recently. So in the user centred design family, there's the user researcher, content strategist, the technical writer, and then there's the content design, graphic design, service design, and the interaction design.   Louise Harris:  Wow, hats off Kit. I had a feeling it was like about seven roles, but I don't think I could have named them.    Vanessa Schneider:  I am, I am very impressed. You gotta make sure that that team doesn't poach you away from us now. For those of you following along at home, you can find out more in the DDaT Capability Framework which is hosted on GOV.UK.    And as it happens, we actually spoke to some content designers earlier in the year. So we're going to play a clip.    ---------- [clip begins] Laura Stevens:  So GDS is actually the home of content design in the government too as the term and the discipline originated here under GDS’s first Head of Content Design, Sarah Richards. And why do you think it came out of the early days of GDS?   Amanda Diamond:  So really good question. And I think it is really useful for us to pause and reflect and look back sometimes upon this, because it's not, you know, content design, as you said, it came from, as a discipline it came from GDS.   So really, it only started to emerge around 2010, so 2010, 2014. So in the grand scheme of things, as a discipline, it is very young. And so it's still evolving and it's still growing. And so back in the early 2000s, before we had GOV.UK, we had DirectGov. And alongside that, we had like hundreds of other government websites. So it was, it was a mess really because users had to really understand and know what government department governed the thing that they were looking for.    So what GOV.UK did was we brought websites together into a single domain that we now know of as GOV.UK. And that was a massive undertaking. And the reason for doing that was was simple. It was, it was to make things easier for users to access and understand, make things clearer and crucially to remove the burden on people to have to navigate and understand all of the structures of government.    So back in the early days, GOV.UK, GDS picked I think it was around, I think it was the top 25 services in what was known as the Exemplar Programme. I think things like that included things that Register to Vote, Lasting Power of Attorney, Carer's Allowance. And so I think through that process, we, we, we discovered that it actually wasn't really about website redesign, it was more about service design.    And that's where content design and service design, interaction design and user research kind of came together under this banner of user centred design because you can't have good services without content design essentially.  [clip ends] ----------   Vanessa Schneider:  Alright on to our next quiz question. So at GDS, we like to talk about “build it once, use it often”, and are responsible for a number of amazing products and services as part of our Government as a Platform or GaaP offer. Many of our products have been put through their paces during the coronavirus response and have hit some impressive milestones in the last 12 months.    I'm going to award 2 points in to

The GOV.UK Pay Team explain how the government’s payment service works, and hear from those who use it across the public sector. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Laura Stevens:   Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS.   For this month's episode, we're going to be taking a look at GOV.UK Pay. GOV.UK Pay is the government's payment platform, letting service teams across the public sector take payments quickly and securely.   It's hit a few milestones this year as it's now used in more than 400 services in around 150 organisations. These services include applying for a Blue Badge, sending money to someone in prison and further afield in many British embassies around the world as part of the apply for an emergency travel document service.    And since it started in 2015, GOV.UK Pay has processed more than 10 million payments to the total value of more than £537 million. And today, we're going to hear from users of GOV.UK Pay from central and local government, and we're also talking to Miriam and Steve from the GOV.UK Pay Team to hear about the product, its features and where it's going next.   So welcome, Miriam and Steve. Please could you both introduce yourselves and what you do on GOV.UK Pay. Miriam, first, please.   Miriam Raines:  Hi, I'm Miriam Raines. I am a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  And hello, I'm Steve Messer. I'm also a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.    Laura Stevens:  I gave a brief introduction to GOV.UK Pay at the start, but I was hoping that you could both maybe explain a bit more about what it is and how it helps service teams across the public sector. So could you describe a bit more about the product, please?   Steve Messer:  So the GOV.UK Pay is like a part of the Government as a Platform programme. And the basic idea behind that is that service teams across government and local government have to do a bunch of the same stuff in order to move users through transactional services. So loads of people have to pay for things inside of a service, people have to apply for things, they have to receive emails - that kind of stuff.   And there was an idea a while ago to turn those common problems and solve them with like components, common components. And that's where the products from Government as a Platform come from.   Miriam Raines:  And there's sort of 2 parts to Pay: there's the bit that the paying user would see and they're one of our key groups of users. So these are the payment pages that will ask for your card details and give you sort of helpful guidance and helpful error messages, make it really easy to pay, they're really accessible, they're designed in line with the Service Standard and Design System and they're intended to be really easy to use and we're really regularly user testing those to give a sort of consistent, trusted, experienced for users who are paying online across the public sector.   And then there's the other part of Pay, which is for our other group of users, which is sort of public sector workers. So that is civil servants in central government and arm’s length bodies, it is police teams, it's finance people or digital teams in local government or the NHS. And this allows you to set up and manage your services, to take payments to really easily see what money you've had come in and make, issue refunds and track cases and applications and transactions.    Again, very much designed to be as simple to use as possible. We don't want to make this something that needs like a whole lot of training. We want to be really intuitive.    Laura Stevens: Ok, so how does GOV.UK Pay work with a service?   Miriam Raines:  So you can plug Pay into your service. So if you've already got an existing online service, you-your users are on that service, they're paying for their licence, they're paying for, they're, they're making their application. At the point in which they're ready to pay, they're transferred over to Pay, it should look really seamless for that user, and it doesn't feel like jolting that they're going somewhere unexpected. That user can then really easily pay and is redirected back to that service. So that's when we do it in a sort of fully automated, integrated way.   And we've also got options for teams that don't have digital services to really be able to take payments online instead of taking payments via a cheque or expecting someone to call up and pay over the phone, which we know can be time consuming, it could be quite expensive to handle those, you're much more restricted on the hours that you're able to manage those payments. So we've got those 2, those 2 options for different users.    Laura Stevens:  And can you describe some of the services it's been used in?    Miriam Raines:  Yeah, we've got sort of a whole range of services. We've got some really big central government services right through to, so you mentioned, ours, we're open to local government, to NHS and police forces as well. So at sort of big central government level, we work with DVLA, we work with the Passport Office, so if you're making a digital application for passport, you'd be paying on GOV.UK Pay. We work some national services like Blue Badge. So we support a, lots of local authorities to handle Blue Badge payments. Right down to some really like small services that don't see a lot of transactions: we can have like yacht racing certificates. If you want to pay for an image of Field Marshal Montgomery at the National Archives, you can pay for that using Pay. It's quite, quite a variety. It's absolutely fascinating seeing all the things that government handles money for.  Laura Stevens:  So you mentioned there how some of the people who use it are from health and also from local government and central government, and I’ve got here as a brief history, we started off in 2015 with central government departments, then opened up to local government in 2017 and then in 2018 the health sector started using GOV.UK Pay.    But I also wanted to talk about some of the successes that have happened this year, 'cause this year has been a big year for GOV.UK Pay. I see from Steve's weeknotes - every week there seems to be a new headline. So I just wondered if you could just take me through some of the highlights from this year in GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  Yep. So I think it was a couple of weeks ago, so maybe mid-October when we had our 400th service go live, which was a good milestone. I think compared to last year, there were, I think there was something around about 100 live services. So we've seen a massive increase over the last 12 months, which is fantastic. It's good to see that the product is being used and talked about, but you know, it does mean that we have to work a bit harder now. So many more needs coming up, but that's fine, that's what we're here for.    I think we've also just before then, so I think it was around about September, we passed a milestone in the value of payments that we've taken and we've now taken well over £500 million from users and passed that on to government departments. So you know half a billion pounds moving through the product is quite a big milestone because you know, a lot of people on the team remember when the first quid went through.   But it's also it's, it's, it's exciting to see the benefits that it can generate as well. So in our economic model, we know that it can save service teams, tens of thousands of pounds in procurement costs and the time that's associated with that.    Miriam Raines:  I think we've also seen, we've able to sort of respond quickly when teams have needed to get set up with services that related to sort of COVID support. You know we are one small part of that massive thing that those services are handling, but if we can make just even the payments bit of it that bit easier and take that burden off the team when they've got all these other things to work on and get people set up really quickly, that's felt really valuable.   Steve Messer:  There was another episode just after the lockdown got lifted as well where like, no-one was applying for fishing licences because everyone was inside obviously. And then all of a sudden the, the, the break of the stay at home order was announced and people could go fishing again. And the number of fishing licence applications went from 0 to up to something like 2,000 per minute or something like that, within an hour. And it was just, it was fascinating to watch the dashboard just go, 'bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep' and you know things start happening. It was, it was a very cool.    Laura Stevens: And yes Steve, you actually set that up very nicely as well, because we're now going to hear from the Environment Agency and they are talking about fishing, so you've clearly got some friends over there. ----- Haroon Tariq:  I’m Haroon Tariq. I'm the Delivery Manager for the I Want to Fish Team, who are responsible for digital service that enables anglers to purchase fishing licences and submit catch returns.     Laura Stevens:  Can you tell me a bit more about what the service provides?     Haroon Tariq:  So the I Want to Fish Team looks after the service, which allows anglers to buy fishing licences which are legally required by law and also to submit catch returns, which basically means that if you go fishing for salmon and sea trout fishing, then we need to know where you fished, where you've caught, et cetera. So that's what I help look after.     Laura Stevens:  And so I wanted to just give our listeners some context for this service for anyone who doesn't regularly fish, and because the numbers involved are quite big, aren't they? I've got here a million licences are purchased a year.   Haroon Tariq:  That's right, yeah, so so about kind of a million licences get purchased a year. I mean, just to give some context, in England alone, angling is worth 1.4 billion

GDS colleagues and the BBC’s Matthew Card discuss Black excellence, offer advice to young Black people interested in a career in tech and share how allies can help. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I'm Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Like previous episodes, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we're all working remotely now.    Today's podcast topic is Black Excellence in Tech as part of the GDS celebrations to commemorate Black History Month. The GDS Black Asian Minority Ethnic Staff Network at GDS have planned a calendar of events for the third year running. This year, many of the events are themed around Black excellence. To learn more about this, particularly in the tech sector, I'm joined by 3 guests: Samantha Bryant, Matthew Card and Chuck Iwuagwu. Sam, could you please introduce yourself to our listeners?    Sam Bryant:  Hi, everybody. I am Samantha Bryant, or just Sam, and I am an Associate Delivery Manager on the GovTech Catalyst Team, and also one of the co-founders and co-chairs of the GDS BAME Network.   Vanessa Schneider:  Awesome. Thank you, Sam. Chucks. Do you mind introducing yourself?   Chucks Iwuagwu:  Thanks Vanessa. Hi everyone. My name is Chucks Iwuagwu. I'm Head of Delivery in GOV.UK. And before becoming Head of Delivery on GOV.UK, I was Head of Delivery on the Verify programme.   Vanessa Schneider:  Great. Thank you, Chucks. Finally Matthew, could you please introduce yourself?    Matt Card:  Hi, I'm Matthew Card. I'm a Software Engineer, also a Senior Leadership Team Advisor at the BBC. I also run a motivational platform called Release D Reality, and I've started a Black tech network group as well.    Vanessa Schneider:  Fantastic. Thank you, Matthew. So from what it sounds like, you all carry out important roles in digital, data and technology areas of your organisations. Would you mind sharing how you've gotten to the positions in your careers that you are in currently? Let's kick off with Sam, maybe.    Sam Bryant:  Ok, so I didn't come into the Civil Service thinking that I would land a tech role. And my initial idea, plan wasn't to be in the Civil Service for ages, but having found a tech role that is a non-techie tech role, I literally like found my niche, and that really encouraged me to stay in the Civil Service for longer. So I moved from the Cabinet Office to Government Digital Service, where I developed and progressed to being an Associate Delivery Manager. And I absolutely love the role. And also because I'm super passionate about D&I [diversity and inclusion], I formed the BAME Network here at GDS.   I would say the most important thing about my role was just like being surrounded by like-minded people. So at GDS, there are a lot of people who are in the tech organisation but not necessarily holding tech roles. And so before I became a DM, I was able to liaise with different managers in GDS, get an understanding for the work that they do, and it really aligns with my natural skill sets. And because I had a natural love for technology anyway, it, those two things aligned. So that's how I became an Associate Delivery Manager.    Vanessa Schneider:  That's really cool to hear. Do you mind sharing if you've had any experience outside of the public sector, outside of the Civil Service maybe?   Sam Bryant:  I have, but not in a technical role. So I've worked for, I would call them like e-commerce tech companies like Groupon. And prior to that, I did some teaching, like all of my other jobs prior to this were very diverse and not necessarily aligned with what I do right now. But I also did a degree in English, which is really helpful when you're in a tech role, because communication is key, whether we're thinking about how we make our communications accessible, and when when we think about how we communicate with all stakeholders or how we communicate tech things to non-techies.   Vanessa Schneider:  That's really great to hear, yeah. It's, I think it's probably really important to hear also that you can do a variety of things before you come into the tech sector and that it's not, you know, a waste of time, perhaps. Chucks, do you mind perhaps sharing with us how you came to GDS and to the position that you are in now?    Chucks Iwuagwu:  I'm a bit like Samantha in, in the sense that I didn't set out in my career to work in, in tech and certainly to work in IT project management and in delivery leadership. This might surprise you, but my background is in biochemistry. I-I did a Master's in pharmacology and subsequent degrees in, in, in chemistry and, and making, manufacturing drugs, and got involved in clinical research. But it was actually my work in clinical research that led me to tech. I was involved in a clinical research project, and was particularly involved in writing specifications for the development of the application, the IT system, that we used in clinical research. And that was what sort of introduced me into business analysis and working with developers and those who write codes. I just made that transition from working in that sector into - I really enjoyed, you know, creating, you know, applications, IT systems. From then on, I moved to work initially for the health department in Scotland for NHS National Services Scotland. And then through that to several local authority. And, you know, ended up in GDS exactly about a year.   I-I became an agile enthusiast about 11 years ago, became a scrum master 10 years ago, and started working in agile scrum and have been working in agile delivery, scrum, kanban, different flavours of agile, for about 10 years. I was, just so people know, I'm an independent consultant, and working as an independent consultant in an agile space have enabled me to meet some of the cleverest people I've ever met in my life.    Vanessa Schneider:  That sounds like a really wonderful experience. Well, finally, we turn to Matt, obviously we've heard from perspectives from people who work in the Civil Service, but the BBC is obviously also a very big institution in British lives - so it'd be really cool to hear how you wound up working there as you do now.    Matt Card:  So what, I, so I did the traditional route. I started out not knowing what I wanted to do. So I took a like a gap year and I was just working in retail for a while, and then I decided to go back to university and I picked, I wanted to do comp-something in computers. I found myself on a computer all the time trying to work things out. So I thought let me go and learn how to work, to do stuff. I did a sandwich course - so one year was out in, in the real world. And then I came back, completed the degree, and then I found a job in London at a, a small company. And then I got made redundant out of my first job, cried my eyes out, you know, because, you know when you get your first job and you're like, 'oh, this is amazing'. Because I didn't know what to do before I found out what I wanted to do. And, you know, so I thought, I thought this was it. And then I got made redundant.    And then I was looking for another job, and then I found the BBC - it was really interesting because I didn't actually want to work at the BBC because I, of the perception of what I thought it was going to be like. So I went for the interview and it blew my mind - it was like 'wow' - because it was so different, it was like all open plan, like loads of floors and you could look out on the, on the whole building and everything is like, 'wow, this is amazing'. And then the second interview that I had the, the person who interviewed me just said, 'oh, so tell me, what's your favourite site?' And I was like, 'wow, this is a really interesting question'. So I was like YouTube - ‘cause it was 2009 so it's like YouTube was massive - and I was like just everybody can share their content, it's just amazing, you know? And he was like, 'right. It's a really good answer'. He asked me some other questions, and then I got the job, and I've been at the BBC ever since. I went, I started in London and I moved up to Manchester with the BBC, and I'm here now.     Vanessa Schneider:  That sounds like it was a really positive experience. Do you think that doing your degree was something that made you more successful in your career?    Matt Card:  Yes and no. I think that my skills outside of, of the computer science field has really helped me. Like because, as I said, I worked in retail for a very long time, so my customer service skills really helped me because, at the end of the day, the users are customers, right? You just have to explain and you have to have difficult conversations with people to say, 'you can't have that right now'. You know that's got nothing to do with tech - that's just you can't have that right now. So, so it's, it's more about conversations and, and learning to talk to people and dealing with, dealing with personalities as well. That's, that's was really important.   Vanessa Schneider:  Brilliant, thank you so much for sharing. So a question to both Chucks and Sam, do you think there are any kinds of supports that you've had in your life that were a factor in you being successful in your current jobs?     Sam Bryant:  So is there anyone who has supported me in my life and helped me to be successful? I would say well, initially my parents in terms of installing values into me that have made me want to be the best version of myself, who have, they've made me feel like nothings impossible to achieve.    They helped to install values in me, make me bold, confident and just positive. And they made me a nice young lady who's good at communicating. And then along my career journey, I would say there have been a few people in GDS who have really encouraged me, especially along my journey to becoming a Delivery Manager - so I'm always thankful to them. An

We invited experts from GDS and the ONS to explain the importance of data standards as part of the Data Standards Authority launch. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Alison Pritchard: Hello and welcome to this month's episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast. I'm Alison Pritchard, the Director General at GDS - before taking up appointment at the ONS [Office for National Statistics] as its Deputy National Statistician and Director General for Data Capability.    So I'm delighted that, although I'm moving, I'll still be part of the wider digital and data transformation agenda through ONS’s digital and data services, and our work on data governance boards.    GDS is responsible for the digital transformation of government. As part of that, we’ve set a vision for digital government to be joined up, trusted and responsive to user needs. We're focussing on 5 pillars to get that done, one of which is data - the focus of this podcast.    Government holds considerable volumes of data in a myriad of places. But often this data is inconsistent, incomplete or just unusable. If the government is going to realise the benefits data can bring, we'll need to fix the foundations. And one way of doing this is by focussing on data standards.    GDS is leading a new authority, the Data Standards Authority (DSA), that focuses on making data shareable and accessible across government services. The metadata standards and guidance we published in August were our first deliverable. They cover what information should be recorded when sharing data across government - for example in spreadsheets - to assure it's standardised and easy to use. It's a step in quality assuring how government data is shared. Our focus on standards is one part of the bigger picture around better managing data to assure better policy outcomes and deliver more joined-up services to citizens.    That's all from me. I'll now hand over to Vanessa Schneider, the podcast host, who will be speaking to technical leads from GDS and ONS about how we take this work forward. Enjoy the discussion.    Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you Alison. As Alison said, I’m Vanessa Schneider, Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS and your host today. Joining me are Rosalie Marshall and Tomas Sanchez. Rosalie, let's start with you. Can you please introduce yourself and what you do?   Rosalie Marshall: I'm Rosalie. I'm the Technical Lead for the Government Data Standards Authority. That involves a lot of recruitment, looking and getting work streams off the ground relating to data standards, and just looking at the data standards landscape in detail.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you, Rosalie. Tomas, could you please introduce yourself?    Tomas Sanchez: Yes. So I'm Tomas. I'm the Chief Data Architect for ONS [Office for National Statistics]. And I'm responsible for a bunch of things related to data architecture and data management. So one of those things is the ONS Data Strategy. And amongst the various things that my division in ONS does is best practices around data.    One of the things that we work on is data standardisation. So apart from that, I'm also quite keen, and responsible to talking to various departments across government about all the things that we do with the aim of, you know, being on the same page of best practises and so on. And this is how we got in touch with the Data Standards Authority and other streams in central government.   Vanessa Schneider:  You mentioned that your area covers data standards in government. What does that entail?   Tomas Sanchez: So basically, the whole point of standardisation is to make sure that everybody uses the same things, particularly related to data. And it is, it is good that ONS is trying to do this. But we cannot do this by ourselves. Doing this in a coordinated way through, sort of, central authority like the DSA is very helpful.    While ONS has its own standards, to do what we need to do in ONS, there is, we need to agree amongst the different departments of what it is that we are trying to standardise, and the scoping of this and what things we’re doing first and we are doing second and so on is part of what the DSA is about.   Vanessa Schneider: Rosalie, so you work as part of the DSA. How do you work together with Tomas on this issue?   Rosalie Marshall: So, yes. So this is a joint actually endeavour between the Government Digital Service and ONS. So we're actually partnering up on the Data Standards Authority. So while we are at the central point in GDS, we are working very closely with ONS and actually a number of our team members will sit within ONS.    The good thing about being virtual is that we've really been able to work very tightly together and department lines haven't played much of a part.   Vanessa Schneider: So, as Rosalie mentioned, the Data Standards Authority is very new. Would you mind sharing with the listeners how it came about? What kicked it all off?    Rosalie Marshall:  So the Data Standards Authority was kicked off about roughly at what was probably just over a year ago now in terms of idea. So that was done by DCMS, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, who at that point looked after data policy for government and they worked with a number of departments on this bid, including, it was mainly actually GDS and ONS. So we've been working together now for a while on what this should look like. And since March, it's become a reality.   Tomas Sanchez So when I joined ONS in 2017, apart from looking internally at the office to see what we should do internally for better practices in terms of data management, we also thought that it was very important to look across government and see what other people are doing so we can learn from others and hopefully maybe others can learn from us eventually.    One of the things that we did is setting up the Cross-government Data Architecture Community, which was just a community of practitioners around data architecture and data management, which of course included data standardisation, amongst other things. Apart from this community, we also got involved in a number of forums in central government, looking at data and data usage and data infrastructure and other things, such as, for example, the Data Leaders Network. And it was within these conversations within central government that we got in touch with DCMS and GDS, who were also thinking about how to work on data foundations and data infrastructure for government to enhance data sharing, data interoperability, and just how to use data better in government.    And it was that way that the idea of creating a central authority in charge of fixing one of the fundamental problems of data, which data standardisation tends to be. So as Rosalie mentioned, we worked quite a long time with them for various reasons. Listeners might remember that there was supposed to be a spending review in 2019, which never happened. So that gave us a lot of time to think about how to go, how to, how to do this. And eventually we did put a bid for the budget this year, earlier this year.    And then that's how the Data Standards Authority got funded and the rest is history obviously.   Vanessa Schneider:  So looking to the future of the DSA, what are your immediate next goals? I know that you've put out pieces of guidance, for instance.   Rosalie Marshall: So the big ones are, we've got an API catalogue that is trying to, it's not a workstream that is actually setting a standard in data, but it's helping us with our journey on standards because we need transparency of where data exchange is taking place.    I think it's important that we mention that, you know, we are looking at data flow as a priority. There's a lot that you can do within departments in terms of governance. But really, we're looking at that boundary and the data exchange that is happening between departments and how we can improve that.   So as a first off, you know, we are getting the API catalogue into a service or product that is really worthwhile for departments to use. We want to make sure that there's a lot more uptake of that catalogue on there to increase transparency of development taking place, but also so we can understand the standards that are being used by APIs. So that's one workstream.   So one of the big work streams that we got off the ground is relating to metadata standards. And that was a very entry level piece of, very entry level standard, in some ways. We're recommending that we follow schema.org and Dublin Core and also csv on the web. So that's a recommendation that we are now working with departments further along on their metadata journeys. We got a workshop coming up on the 2nd October that we'd like as many people to join as possible to understand where everyone's at.   We're also looking at standards in relation to file formats and doing some work there. And then I think there's 2 areas which probably Tomas is best placed to talk about and that’s around what we're thinking about at least. So it's it's probably too early days, but at least we can share some of the thinking that we're doing around some of the identifiers and also data types as well.   Tomas Sanchez: So Rosalie, mentioned about identifiers, I think the overall concept is that something that we call reference data that people might know with different names, like master data or code list or typologies etc. So there are multiple names of, for those.   But essentially the idea from this is that there are lists of items or entities that people refer to all the time. So we think there are datasets, for example, many datasets contain address information. So the idea is, so there is only one valid list of all the addresses in the country. So if we will have a reference set of addresses that everybody can refer to, then it will be easier to link datasets amongst themselves that are talking about those addresses, right?   And you can make

In this episode, we talk about content design, its origins at GDS and how it’s helped government to better meet user needs. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Laura Stevens: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS. And for this month's episode, we're talking about Content Design. We're going to find out what it is, how it helps government and where you can learn more. And to tell me the answer to these questions are Amanda Diamond and Ben Hazell. So welcome both to the GDS Podcast. Please could you introduce yourselves and your job roles here at GDS. Amanda first.    Amanda Diamond: Yeah, hi, Laura. I'm Amanda Diamond and I'm Head of GDS Content Design and Head of the Cross-government Content Community. I joined GDS in 2016, so August 2016, in fact. So it is 4 years exactly that I've been at GDS. Last year I went on loan to Acas as their Head of Content to help with their digital transformation. And prior to that I have worked in journalism. So I started out as a journalist. Prior to GDS, I worked at Which?, the consumer association, as their Deputy Editor for Which? magazine, Deputy Editor for their travel magazin, and I helped launch and run their consumer rights website as their Consumer Rights Editor.     Ben Hazell: Hello, I'm Ben Hazell. I'm a Content Product Lead here at GDS on the GOV.UK programme. I currently work on a team dealing with Coronavirus Public Information Campaign. In the recent past, 5 months ago, I was working on the EU Exit Public Information Campaign. And prior to that, I've been working on the means of publishing and production for content on GOV.UK, looking at workflows and providing the tools and data that help people manage the content on GOV.UK. Prior to that, like Amanda, I was actually in journalism. I worked on a big newspaper website for about 9 years.   Laura Stevens:  So thank you both for introducing yourselves. And I want to start with the first of my questions which is, what is content design?     Amanda Diamond:  I don't mind starting, and that is a great question, Laura, and one that I love to answer. So basically and I'll tell you for why, people often confuse content design with different things, mainly comms. They also think that content design is just about the words. And of course, words are really important and content design is you know concerned with words. But it's not the only thing when you're talking about content design.    So content design could be a map, it could be text on a button or a sign. It also includes things like charts or graphs. Content design is about packaging up the right information in a way that makes it easy for people to understand at the point that they most need it.    So for me, I often tell people that content design is at its core: problem solving. And what do I mean about that? Well, I mean that it's about asking the right questions to get to the best solution for your audience. So the best solution for your users. So asking questions like, well, what do our users need to know? What do they need to do? And what evidence? - it's all about the evidence - what evidence do we have to support what we think our users need to know or need to do? Because there’s a big difference between what we think our users need, and what they actually need. And that can often confuse things. And we also ask things like, how can we make the overall experience better for our users? So before Content Designers even put like a single word to a page, what they need to do is like dedicate a lot of time, a lot of effort to understanding the problem in the first place so that we can give people what they need.    Ben Hazell:  Yeah, and I definitely, I agree with all of that. There's no doubt that there's a fair chunk of writing in what we do. But it's also about use of evidence, about research and about iteration, about constant improvement. And I think a lot of it comes back to being humble about understanding that it's not about what we want to say, it's about finding out what people actually need from us.   We're trying to make things simple. In my teams, we often talk about making information easy to find and making sure information is easy to understand. And making things simple - that's not dumbing down. That's actually opening up and being able to process complexity and distill it down to what other people actually need to know and can act upon. That is both important and rewarding. And it's often the kind of fun puzzle and it can be as much about what you're getting rid of and pruning down to find the shape. So perhaps I could compare it to sculpting. You know, the thing exists in the centre of the marble and you just keep chipping away to get to the beautiful thing that people need.   Laura Stevens:  I did enjoy the sculpture one as well because Amanda you're coming to us from an artist's studio as well. So clearly there's something in this recording.   Amanda Diamond:  And interestingly, my other half, he -it's not my studio, my artist studio, I’ll hasten to add, if only! It’s my partner’s and he is a sculptor by trade. So yeah, full circle.    Laura Stevens: So now we know what is. Let's go back in time a bit. So GDS is actually the home of content design in the government too as the term and the discipline originated here under GDS’s first Head of Content Design, Sarah Richards. And why do you think it came out of the early days of GDS?   Amanda Diamond:  So really good question. And I think it is really useful for us to pause and reflect and look back sometimes upon this, because it's not, you know, content design, as you said, it came from, as a discipline it came from GDS.   So really, it only started to emerge around 2010, so 2010, 2014. So in the grand scheme of things, as a discipline, it is very young. And so it's still evolving and it's still growing. And so back in the early 2000s, before we had GOV.UK, we had DirectGov. And alongside that, we had like hundreds of other government websites. So it was, it was a mess really because users had to really understand and know what government department governed the thing that they were looking for.    So what GOV.UK did was we brought websites together into a single domain that we now know of as GOV.UK. And that was a massive undertaking. And the reason for doing that was was simple. It was, it was to make things easier for users to access and understand, make things clearer and crucially to remove the burden on people to have to navigate and understand all of the structures of government.    So back in the early days, GOV.UK, GDS picked I think it was around, I think it was the top 25 services in what was known as the Exemplar Programme. I think things like that included things that Register to Vote, Lasting Power of Attorney, Carer's Allowance. And so I think through that process, we, we, we discovered that it actually wasn't really about website redesign, it was more about service design.    And that's where content design and service design, interaction design and user research kind of came together under this banner of user centred design because you can't have good services without content design essentially. All services contain words or images or artefacts, content artefacts, workflows, journeys, and so you need a content designer to help build these. So I think that's kind of where it, where it sort of emerged from.    But really, fundamentally, with a relentless focus on putting the user at the heart, heart of everything, rather than always relying on what government wants to tell people and what government wants to, to push out to folks. It was a sort of like a reversal of that and a relentless focus on what folks needed of government and what folks needed to, to understand and learn to do the things they need to do as a citizen.     Ben Hazell:  I felt what I could add to that is perhaps my journey into content design and how I came to understand what GDS was doing, because in the late 2000s, kind of 2008, 2009, a lot of my work in newspapers was around search optimisation. And that was quite a big change for that industry, because instead of everything being based upon some kind of monthly reports of sales figures and editors who had a kind of supernatural knowledge of their reader base, suddenly you actually were presented with almost real time data about what people were looking for and interested in.    And sure, there were all the criticisms about tons of stories about Britney Spears all of a sudden, but what it actually came back to was you could see what people wanted to find out from us and we could start to model our online content around what people's expectations were. And it opened up a really interesting era of kind of experimenting with formats, experimenting with the ways in which news content was produced.    And from there, I started to kind of get quite interested in what I could see GDS was doing and they were winning awards at that time for user centred design because it was taking that evidence base about what people actually need for a variety of digital mechanisms and applying it to create not just pieces of content, but structures of content that better serve people. And of course, it was wonderful to move from the media over to somewhere like GOV.UK, which is not beholden to advertising.   So it was that combination of the availability of digital data and being able to more effectively get to what government wanted to happen, because this is also all about not just about making things simpler for users, but making things simpler for users has great benefits for government. If you make things easy for people to do, you reduce any burden on support services, you increase the level of compliance, they're happier. It's more cost effective for government.    Amanda Diamond:  I don't have exact figures, but I, I do know that savings in the millions h

The Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream is one of 15 Civil Service Fast Stream schemes. Hear from current and former participants reflecting on their experiences. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast.   My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Like last month's episode, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we're all remote working right now. We're going to be talking about the Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream experience at GDS. The Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream, also known as the DDaT Fast Stream for short, is one of 15 different schemes on the Civil Service Fast Stream. Applicants can choose up to 4 scheme preferences when they apply. As a DDaT Fast Streamer you're participating in a four year scheme with both six month long and year-long placements.   GDS is one of the organisations in which Fast Streamers are placed. So we will be hearing from colleagues across GDS with experience of being on the DDaT scheme.   Clare Robinson:  I'm Clare Robinson. I'm a Fast Stream Performance Analyst working on GOV.UK. So that means that I look at the performance data that we have available and try to understand what it is that users are trying to do on GOV.UK, where they're going and what it is we need to do to make their journeys better.   Vanessa Schneider:  Do you think that the Fast Stream has lived up to what your expectation was before you applied?    Clare Robinson:  What I've really loved about working for government is the fact that people don't have another option, like there is no, there's nobody else that can give you a passport. We have to do it. And that confers on us a really different expectation because we can't ever decide that something is too hard. We have to do the best we can for everybody. And that was probably the thing that really defied my expectations. I came in thinking that it would be all about implementing government policy. And actually some of that is true. But most of it is about providing citizens with things that they need from government. And that's really a different mindset, perhaps, than I really expected to have.    Vanessa Schneider:  Do you mind going a little bit into detail about the different placements that you've had before arriving at GDS?   Clare Robinson:  So I started as a delivery manager in Bristol working on licencing and permitting services. My role was to make sure that we were delivering those projects on time when we needed to. So I learnt a lot from that, I learnt a lot about agile, so how to manage people in a really productive and sort of continuously improving way. And I learnt a lot about myself, like what I how I work, what I like, what I find more challenging. That led me to my next placement where I went to the Department of Transport to be a User Researcher. And that was really great 'cause I was working on a whole just a massive range of projects.   And then I got to go on a secondment. So this is sort of an interesting feature of the Fast Stream is that you can go out to, often to charities or other partners. But I actually chose to go out to industry 'cause that was like I really wanted to take that opportunity just to see how digital services work from kind of a more commercial side. And so I got to go and be a Co-creationion Consultant at Fujitsu. And the kind of work I was doing that was really interesting because I was running what are called design-thinking workshops, which are very much, very much in some ways follow some of the user-centred principles that we have in government, and in GDS - it's all about starting like what do users need?   It was really interesting to see how a sort of commercial enterprise used user-centred thinking and design-thinking to sort of challenge both themselves, and the customers that they working with to kind of co-create like solutions to complicated business problems. So that was that was really interesting.   Vanessa Schneider:  We often hear that GDS has that perception of being different to the other sort of areas of Whitehall. Have you found that to bear out?   Clare Robinson:  I think the biggest difference, I think, is how how much acceptance people have of kind of agile methodologies, and sort of uncertainty. I think we have to embrace the unknowns and we have to embrace the idea that we're not going to get things perfect the first time round.   Vanessa Schneider:  I was wondering, is there anything that you would change about your experience so far?   Clare Robinson:  There’s quite an emphasis on leadership and leading teams, but I think that that can sometimes, people who are perhaps more introverted, who perhaps have more technical skills, I think that can leave them behind or leave them with a sense that they're not doing the right thing. I think that I've been really lucky that I've had two really fantastic managers on the Fast Stream who have really helped me understand that that's not the case, and actually that leadership looks really, really different in different places. But I think that sometimes the Fast Stream can put quite a lot of emphasis on showing rather than doing, and I think there are people that are working to change that.    And I think particularly I've been thinking about like what, when we talk about leadership, we often have a model in our mind. And that model is often, often white, it's often male, it's often went to a Russell Group university. And I think that that is a model that we all need to challenge.   Jordan Testo:  Hi. I'm Jordan Testo. I'm a DDaT Fast Streamer currently placed at GDS, working in the EU Transition and Future Relationships Team as the Digital Portfolio Coordination Advisor. Previously I've worked as a, a Product Owner on the tax platform at HMRC. I've worked as a Service Manager at the Home Office and I've been a Programme Delivery Manager at the Ministry of Defence working in Cyber Defence.    Vanessa Schneider:  And what caused you to apply to be on the Fast Stream?    Jordan Testo:  Finishing university, I fancied a challenge. I previously did an industrial placement in the Home Office whilst at university, and I thought, I want to go into the Civil Service. So why not give the Fast Stream a go and develop my leadership skills and see what I can do?   So I'm currently coming towards the end of my second year. Currently the DDaT scheme is four years. So I've got another two placements - so the first two years are six month roles, switching every six months, and then the final two years are two year-long posts. So come October, I will be leaving GDS to another department, which as of yet is unknown to me. We find out in about three weeks, four weeks’ time where we'll be moving on to.    Vanessa Schneider: Do you get any choice in that matter or is it very much predetermined?   Jordan Testo:  We get preference forms, so we put in the departments which we want to go to work for, job roles around the DDaT Framework and other areas that we want to develop personally as well. And all those developmental points are looked into as well as what previous job roles I've done. And the matching team then put, match me to a place in which they think benefits me the most in what I want to get out.    Vanessa Schneider: Is it different working at GDS compared to other departments?     Jordan Testo:  GDS, it is a total different way of working. It's a lot more accessible, there's a lot more openness in terms of the software we can use, the types of communication methods. But GDS is just, it's such a different place. And what I quite like about it is there's less of a hierarchy as such. Everyone works together to get the job done rather than some of the departments I've been in where it's quite hierarchical. But yeah, I quite enjoy this.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, so obviously it's great to hear that you're having a positive experience at GDS, and with the fast stream. But are there things that you've sort of found a bit more challenging?    Jordan Testo:  The challenging element of the Fast Stream is moving around every six months. It's been hard for me to let go of some departments, mainly because of the work I've been working on, and I start, I get to the midpoint where we've got a really important milestone or got to important sprint and then I have to go, and I never see the result and not seeing the fruits of their labour as such. Hence why I’m looking forward to having the year-long posts.   And I think if someone asked me, what do you think of the Fast Stream, I say, just do it. Apply. See how it goes, because it's just totally worth it. I think that even if you don't get onto it, the application process is really interesting and a really good experience to do. If you get onto it, the Civil Service and the public sector world is open to you. You have a chance to go around different departments, work on different programmes, work with different people in different subject areas, and you build up such a knowledge of overall government - it's, it's priceless, really.   Maxwell Reiss:  My name is Maxwell Reiss. I'm a Product Manager on the GOV.UK programme, and I'm on the Civil Service Digital Fast Stream.   Vanessa Schneider:  So you are currently a Fast Streamer or have you finished the Fast Stream?   Maxwell Riess:  I am still currently a Fast Streamer. But I am, I am very much an outgoing Fast Streamer. I'm in my third year of the programme and I've just recently, within the last couple of weeks, been offered a permanent role at GDS.   Vanessa Schneider: Well, congratulations to the job offer. Is it normal for a Fast Streamer to be offered a job before the scheme finishes?   Maxwell Riess: It does happen. It is, it is very, it is normal. Yeah, I'll go as far as to say it's normal. I think of my cohort

We discuss the Local Digital Declaration, how it started, how it connects people and helps local government organisations build digital services and platforms. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Laura Stevens: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And today we’re going to be talking about the Local Digital Declaration. This is a set of guiding principles that help support local authorities, of all sizes and capabilities, to deliver great digital services and platforms that meet the needs of their users. And since it launched 2 years ago, 223 public sector organisations have signed up to it.    And to tell me more about the work the declaration has done is Lisa Jeffrey and May-N Leow. So welcome both to the podcast, please could you tell me who you are, where you work and how you’re involved with the Local Digital Declaration.    Lisa Jeffery: So yeah, I'm Lisa Jeffery. I'm a Regional Relationship Manager for Government Digital Service, GDS, I'm based in Leeds. And we're here to help open doors and raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to do so to support digital transformation. I started working at GDS in May 2018, and that's just a couple months before the Local Digital Declaration launched in July 2018, and I've been involved ever since then really over the last 2 years.    May-N Leow: Hi everyone. I’m May-N Leow, and Head of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. So almost a year now at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and yeah, Lisa is a fantastic champion of, of the declaration and we love working with her and GDS.   So I’ve actually seen it from both sides. So when I was working in the council in Southwark, we were co-signatories of the declaration, we also applied for the funds - so I have that perspective of what it feels like to be in the council. So yeah, it’s been really fantastic seeing it from both sides of, of the pond.   Laura Stevens: So I described the Local Digital Declaration briefly in the introduction. But I’d like to hear a bit more about it. It’s a set of 5 principles - could we talk through them?   May-N Leow: So it's, it’s, as you say kind of Laura, it’s, we’ve got 5 principles in the declaration, and it's based around the GDS Service Manual as well as the Technology Code of Practice.    But the key things for us is that obviously we want users and citizens need to be first when you know, designing a system and offering good local services. And the second one is around fixing the plumbing - so we want to fix the hard, complex problems. It's not very sexy but it's completely vital for delivering good services. And then we want to design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information and data and that's even more critical from COVID and what we've learned in the crisis response. And then the fourth one is to kind of demonstrate leadership in creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation, making sure that it can actually happen. And then lastly, working in the open whenever we can so as many people can learn from, from each other.    So those are kind of, the 5 principles we have in the declaration.   Laura Stevens: So the Local Digital Declaration is a joint initiative from GDS and MHCLG. And can you describe for me who is it for?    Lisa Jeffery:   So it's aimed primarily at local authorities and other public sector organisations that meet the requirements of signing the Local Digital Declaration.    I think the Local Digital Declaration is a, is a great example of what can be achieved if, if we all work together. It's co-written by 45 different organisations, so it's really about shared ambition for the future of public services in the internet age. And it's now been signed by 223 different organisations.   Laura Stevens: And can you describe some of the councils who have signed it? Sort of, are they big councils, are they small councils, who’s signed up?   May-N Leow: I think it's all across the board. So we have obviously your big city, metropolitan kind of councils right through to your county and district councils. Obviously there are other organisations, other than councils, that have signed up to the declaration, so we're pretty much approaching that three quarter mark of, of all councils in England, which is you know, great and shows the level of ambition that, that councils are, are showcasing in terms of wanting to deliver like modern, amazing services to, to their citizens and community.    Laura Stevens: And I know you, both of you referenced this in the introduction, I wanted to go back in time a bit, looking back to 2018 because it's obviously its 2 year birthday coming up very shortly. So could you tell me, perhaps Lisa from the GDS point of view and May-N from when you were working Southwark Council point of view, why was the Local Digital Declaration created?   May-N Leow: Yeah. And, and I would say certainly being on the other side when the Declaration was being created, it was, it was, the need born out from it's kind of like a place, one place can state what does good look like for local services and what the ambition looks like for local services? And certainly in, again, in, in Southwark, I used it as a mechanism to drive forward a lot of things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise - so saying here's the declaration, we’ve committed to it, you know other organisations have committed to it and this is the bar that we should try to kind of meet. So using that to say you know, we need to have user research, we need to do-build services in that user-centered way.    Again I could not have done without the Declaration, without kind of the Local Digital Fund. So certainly being a council officer, having something like that, it's just such a powerful mechanism to not only showcase what's possible, what we should be doing but then, but then also sort of say to senior management, this is what we're committing to so let's do it.   Lisa Jeffery: And at the beginning as well, we did, we did some roadshows. I think it was really important that we got out and about around the country when, when we could, and that we could understand each other and work together across local and national government.    Laura Stevens: You mentioned there about the roadshows, and you mentioned there about how you, it showed you what good looked like specifically for local councils, how important was that creation and collaboration between local and central government?   May-N Leow: I mean, I-I think it was crucial to make something like this actually work, because you, you need both perspectives of organisations from a council side, what central government is trying to achieve, and other organisations like LGA [Local Government Association] as well, that kind of fed into the, the declaration.   So it's, it’s not really that MHCLG kind of holds the declaration or is responsible for it, we're just kind of like keeping it for, for the sector at this point in time. And it's very much like a shared commitment and an ownership of, of the declaration. So I think it was really crucial that it was co-written and co-published.   Lisa Jeffery: Yeah I-I think I'd agree. As in there's, there's, it's more like a movement of course, than a mandate. So I think we're all on a journey to improve public services and to make things better for people fundamentally - so collaboration and building capability and community and being human centered and understanding how we are connected, are all enablers to that goal really.    Laura Stevens: And Lisa, so can you explain a bit about your role as a Regional Relationship Manager? Because I know since you've been here for 2 years, you’ve made about, over 40 visits in person to councils?   Lisa Jeffery: Yep. So as a Regional Relationship Manager for the Government Digital Service, GDS, based in Leeds, we’re here to sort of open doors to GDS, raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to support digital transformation. And since the launch of the Local Digital Declaration, I’ve made 40 visits in person to local authorities and I've also met with many more local authorities through communities and events like LocalGovCamp, where the Local Digital Declaration had a launch.   It's been really helpful to connect with local authorities and to learn with them and to visit them in their own context. And I've seen the value of that and joining up services, people and places to act as an enabler for collaboration.   Laura Stevens: May-N, I know your team is the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. Can you talk about your work there and also how you saw it from the other side at Southwark?   May-N Leow: Yeah. So currently we've got a number of projects that we're funding via the Local Digital Fund.    So we’re funding basically projects to solve common challenges that councils have. So we're currently in round 4 of our funding, so we do it in a stage kind of way, and some of the rounds are open so councils can apply with completely new challenges or new ideas, and some of our rounds are closed - those ones, those rounds are to allow our funded projects to kind of progress to, to the next stage.   So we've actually funded 23 projects so far and 100 distinct councils have actually worked collaboratively together on those projects - so we've, we've definitely shown via the fund that you know councils can actually come together and work on common challenges. And like to be completely frank, I, when, when I was still there, I was a bit dubious about this myself, ‘cause everyone knows it's hard - like yeah, everyone wants to kind of share and collaborate together but you know, everyone's got their own day jobs, it takes