Week 41

I don’t feel like I’ve stopped at all this week.

It’s been busy in the User Needs fort this week. Maslow’s got some pagination. Having paginated the Need API last week, I added some UI to Maslow to browse pages - I decided to use Kaminari’s view helpers to save a bit of time. I also did a bit more work in Panopticon to display some basic information about a need, so that when we’re assigning needs to artefacts in the future we can actually see what the need is, rather than just a need ID. At the same time, there’s been an IT Health Check (ITHC) on Maslow this week, which is part of our assurance process. The initial report suggests there’s no major vulnerabilities to fix, which is good news.

Away from User Needs, there’s been quite a bit of activity around GDS too. As it’s Parliament Week, on Tuesday morning I went down to 1 Horse Guards Road for a handful of talks on how the Cabinet Office supports legislation through Parliament. There were some interesting speakers: Lord Taylor of Holbeach spoke about his role in the House of Lords in supporting the Public Bodies Act, an ‘enabling bill’ which allows for secondary legislation to be passed to change and merge existing public bodies that were created with primary legislation. David Willis from the Constitution Unit talked about the Succession to the Crown Bill, which most notably changed the line of succession to the throne to treat sons and daughters equally.

On Wednesday, we had our monthly GDS all-staff meeting over at the Royal College of Surgeons. Afterwards, the technology clan had a field trip over to the Home Office to visit the Registered traveller exemplar project. The team at the Home Office have been working on an alpha of a service so that foreign travellers who frequently fly into the UK can register to use e-Gates at the border. As the average frequent flyer makes ten journeys a year into the UK, and some as many as once a week, this has the potential to save people a lot of time by avoiding the main border queues.

And finally, I spent a bit of time tweaking the design of Departure Lounge, the dashboard we use in the office to display upcoming GOV.UK releases. Releases are now bigger and the current deploy now has a bit more badger.