Across government, departments are beginning to realise not only the value of the data they hold, but also how they can use data science to make more effective, data-informed decisions.
As mentioned in other blogs, one of the first and primary tasks for the Alphagov project was to build a site that provided the information and services users need. So where were we going for the evidence? Within the timescale …
In the past few months this blog has made a few introductions and this will be the last for a while! We are very pleased to announce that Mike Bracken has been appointed as the Government’s new Executive Director for …
To say that no-one wants to visit a government website is an over-simplification. But it's certainly true that the compulsion is significantly different from what drives people to a destination website like BBC News or Facebook, or from something customer-facing …
Just as there are trends in technology, there are fashions in project management and some feel that agile is poorly suited to government and is just a fad. One of the principle objectives for this project was to demonstrate that …
It is always easier to sketch out a page design rather than build straight out or do a detailed mockup - it is lower cost and gives everyone a common thing to frame discussions around. Here are a few of …
The blank slate the Alpha.gov.uk team was handed was a huge privilege, but threw up some unusual technical challenges. Normally when embarking on building web apps you'd expect to have some sense of the corpus of content or the core …
Alpha.gov.uk is a demonstration of what a single central Government site could be. It's not Business Link, it's not Directgov, it's not any specific department or Government agency – but at the same time it represents all of those, and …
We knew very early on that Alpha.gov.uk was going to work best if it had a sense of where in the country (or world) its visitors are coming from. Knowing that means it can provide you with information on where …
It's all too easy to get caught up in the excitement of launching a new site full of interesting new stuff. If you're not careful, you can miss the bigger picture. You can get lost in the wondrous geekiness of …
Within the context of UK Government, there is plenty about the approach we’ve taken with Alpha.gov.uk which is genuinely radical. Yet we are well aware that we are not the only team inside Government who are passionate about an agile, …
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