Blog

On 11th September I went to the Local Govcamp Makers Day in Leeds, a group of local government digital types had an opportunity to get creative about local government and democracy. To make things that visualise how new and effective solutions might help fix problems. We were challenged to think of ways to engage citizens in their local…

It’s one of these things where you hear it once, then see it everywhere – in tweets, blog posts or on podcasts: I’m talking about web performance. Web performance means how fast a webpage is downloaded and displayed to the user. There’s a good reason that this is one of the hot topics in web…

On Tuesday, I went to a supplier engagement session run by the Digital Marketplace team. It was great. The government CTO, Liam Maxwell, kicked the session off. Several of the team behind the Digital marketplace, G-Cloud and the Digital Services framework then explained what was going on, and described their thinking. I tweeted most of…

Contrary to the post I read in the SME Insider this morning about work retreats, the dxw retreat over the weekend was all of the fun (and we didn’t jump out of any planes). I guess I’ve been lucky in my working career so far, when I’ve been asked away with work it’s been for…

It’s been a big few days. But let’s not lose perspective. Those who’ve recently left GDS will be sorely missed – by their colleagues, and by many others outside GDS as well. But five years is a long time to be in the machine. On reflection, it’s perhaps more of a surprise that so many…

Personas are a tool that are used a lot in agile development processes. They are authentic representations of different types of users. Through this representation they communicate information about how user behaviour may vary when the site or service is viewed from different circumstances. Personas have been interpreted as tools that encourage developers to ad…