This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 8 July 2016, and what we plan to do next. As usual we’ve divided the work up into lists of what we’ve been doing to keep GOV.UK running, and what we’re doing to make it better.
Running and supporting GOV.UK
To keep GOV.UK accurate, available and secure, to support government publishers and to meet the most pressing needs of end users, we’ve:
- worked with the Cabinet Office and Number 10 to update content following the Cabinet reshuffle and the addition of new departments
- interviewed more candidates for Content Designer roles across teams
- published guidance and forms for part-time students who want to apply for grants for the 2016 to 2017 academic year
- made it easier for publishers to see which content has errors by sending them a monthly broken links report
- added an ‘unpublished’ column to the Whitehall Publisher CSV export, making it clear if content is unpublished or in a draft state
- updated Whitehall Publisher so publishing can be scheduled in British Summer Time (BST)
- supported the changes to department portfolios by providing information for publishers about tagging policies
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- tested a way to improve the quality and speed of our internal content review process
- got closer to finishing the content improvement work around Council Tax and business rates
- successfully deployed the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) finder. It’s the first finder we have put live using the rebuilt Specialist Publisher
- published new introductory content on starting a business and getting help and support to complete phase 1 of a content improvement project with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
- published reworked content on getting a copy of military service records to complete phase 1 of a content improvement project with the Ministry of Defence
- spent 3 days in Bristol working with Environment Agency content designers to improve content on preparing for and dealing with flooding
- started improvement theme work with the Office of the Public Guardian to help rationalise the content for Lasting Power of Attorney and to simplify the user journey
- made our new taxonomy structure more flexible by making it possible for topic pages to have multiple parent categories
- moved the management of the new taxonomy the new 'Content Tagger' application, simplifying the responsibilities of tagging applications
- completed 24 contextual research interviews talking to people who work in schools and colleges, so that we can understand more about their needs
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- publish the improved Council Tax and business rates content
- move onto the next finder that will go live using the rebuilt Specialist Publisher - Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB)
- make some Publishing API performance improvements, this means we’ll be able to migrate formats quicker
- make sure the Publishing API uses consistent terminology for redrafted items
- implement our approach to handling GovSpeak in the Publishing API so that publishers can control things like contacts and attachments consistently across publishing application
- continue to support the changes to department portfolios by tagging content to new organisations and emailing subscribers to let them know about the changes
- work on a tool to help us tag content in bulk to the new taxonomy so that we can speed up the re-tagging process
2 comments
Comment by Duncan Bell posted on
Hi Hemita. I'm really interested in the contextual interviews with schools. Could you put me in touch with whoever was leading on this? Thanks.
Comment by Keith Emmerson posted on
Hi Duncan,
I've given the relevant team your email address - they should be getting in touch soon.
Keith