Recently we’ve talked about the changes and improvements we’re planning to make to GOV.UK, like improving search and browse and making a more stable publishing platform.
There’s another really important component, and that’s getting better at understanding the needs of government users of GOV.UK, and at having conversations with them.
This has already started happening through forums such as the Managing Editors’ meeting with editors across government. Over the next few months, we'll be looking at the best ways to build on work like this.
Helping you contact GOV.UK in the way you need
The Proposition Manager role was introduced to the GOV.UK team last year. It was a way of making sure GOV.UK was listening to the needs of people across government. We’ve learnt a lot over the last year: there were some things that worked really well and others that didn’t. We’re taking advantage of having new members join the team (Peter Ibrahim and I) to take the lessons learnt and try out some new things.
First, we're renaming the team - 'GOV.UK policy and engagement team' seems a better description for what we do than 'proposition managers'.
Second, in response to a number of requests, we’ve created a new inbox for GOV.UK enquiries. It’s the place to send requests for things like:
- visiting the GOV.UK team and seeing what we’re up to
- finding out who to talk to in GOV.UK about your needs, especially if your query spans a number of teams
The new email address is govuk-enquiries@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. It’ll help direct your enquiry to the right person.
Our established lines of contact for content and product changes remain unchanged, so please continue to use Zendesk for these things.
Listening to you better
We want to improve the ways GOV.UK communicates with its government users.
To help do this, our team is now responsible for running various bits of engagement work, such as the GOV.UK Steering Group. The Steering Group is our cross-departmental governance body, which is responsible for taking decisions about the future of GOV.UK.
We’ve recently changed the format of this meeting, placing greater emphasis on collaboration, making the meetings less formal, and incorporating more workshops and fewer updates.
This is a first step towards strengthening the network, but there’s much more we could be doing.
Have your say - come to our workshop on Wednesday
We’re running a workshop with government users to better understand how we can improve our current engagement model and improve how we communicate and collaborate with colleagues across government.
We’re really keen to hear ideas from across government. If you want to get involved, please contact us on govuk-enquiries@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. The workshop is taking place on Wednesday 11 November 2015 at Aviation House, London from 3pm to 4:30pm.
