Week 86

On Search and Browse this week, we’ve been ironing out a few bugs with email alerts and the latest feed. We’re planning to turn both features on this coming week to support the HM Revenue and Customs transition to GOV.UK. However, every sub-topic will get them at the same time, so if you’re interested in motorways, consumer protection or even large yachts, then real soon you’ll be able to subscribe to receive any updates by email.

We’ve also spent much of the week writing reusable scripts to make it easier to retag content to different topics. We’re doing this because we need to merge two large education topics together to support the Ofqual transition. We’ll be finishing that up in the next few days and, now that we have the scripts, in the case that we don’t have capacity to perform similar changes in future, other product teams will be better placed to help out.

On Monday, Giles interviewed me about some of the history of GDS. It was a good time to reflect on a busy three years. We noted that the organisation is so big now that we hardly know what we’re all doing, and were proven right when we left the meeting room to stumble across a wall about the history of GDS which another team had been putting together.

This week’s Leadership Academy session was really good. The theme was communication and there were some good things about diplomatic language, body language, writing good feedback, and asking the right questions. We also had a good discussion about digital etiquette.

And I went to the Science Museum’s monthly Lates event on Wednesday. The event was brilliant (and so is the new Information Age bit).