This fortnight, the sprint themes for the government section are going to be….
1. Preparing for all ALB consultations to be on GOV.UK
GDS and departments have agreed, in consultation with the Consultation Principles Review team, that all central government organisations' consultations will be listed on the consultations index from this Autumn onwards. We're doing this so that users can find a complete and reliable list of all government consultations on GOV.UK. Organisations which are due to join GOV.UK in the coming year will just start publishing consultations on GOV.UK early, instead of on their legacy sites. For exempt organisations, this will mean continuing to publish consultations on their separate sites, but with summary pages on GOV.UK linking out to them.
In preparation, we're improving the design of the consultation pages, to make it clearer what stage a consultation is at (eg open, closed and analysing responses, outcome). We're also going to allow organisations to distinguish between the two kinds of 'consultation responses' so that users can easily know which is 1. published feedback collected from citizens or 2. the government's response to that feedback. In the past this caused some confusion.
2. Preparing for Official Documents data import
By the end of September, we will be moving all the content from the Official Documents website onto GOV.UK. This requires a number of new features, including re-introducing 'Treaties' as a sub-type of publication and adding a flag so editors can mark documents as unnumbered Act or Command papers.
3. Improving content integrity and reliability
Our final theme contains a few different things that will all contribute to improving the integrity of our content: for example so that when users follow a link to documents that departments have unpublished, they get a message telling them it's no longer available, rather than that it's being virus checked, as here. We've heard complaints about this a number of times through our new 'report a problem' feature at the bottom of each page. We'll also review whether it's feasible to shorten cache times, to improve some of the problems we discussed here.
