ONS Digital

Prynhawn Da / Good afternoon and welcome to another round-up of the work of Digital Publishing at ONS.

So what’s been happening?

Over the weekend we attended Hack the Government day where staff from Digital Publishing and the wider ONS got to see firsthand how the development community approached our data. It was the first time we had been involved in something of this scale and proved to be a real learning curve. It was well worth it though to get a different perspective on things and it has inspired us to do something of our own in the future.

In other news.

We launched a new online metadata training course which will help staff with publishing responsibilities. Currently, our users struggle to find relevant content due to the metadata summaries being complex, unsuitable or unclear. For example; the detail in the description just repeats the title or gives more weight to the previous release, or too many key words are entered which impacts on search results. Refining the descriptions so that they are more concise (like a tweet), compelling and have the most essential information up-front (frontloading) will help search engines both internally and externally return the results users are looking for.

We worked on some interesting facts and figures to support social media activity around International Women’s Day and have a couple of interesting stories on smoking and inflation due out this week. Building on the work we have done with Wikipedia and Buzzfeed, we met with teams at QI to discuss how we can work together to widen the communication of our statistics. The editorial team also visited the Office of Rail Regulation to chat about the possibilities of data storytelling.

In social media, we are working with our HR team to develop a social media strategy in a bid to overcome some of recruitment issues ONS is facing, as well as preparing a presentation for the next GSS Presentation and Dissemination Symposium later this month.

We have also been in discussions around the development of a user persona type for the open data/developer community inspired in part by working with Rewired State on National Hack the Government.

and finally

Following an increased interest in the use of infographics to support statistical stories, and ONS’s growing experience of communicating data, we will be hosting an event which brings together a number of case studies on data storytelling. If this is something that might interest you or your organisation then keep a look out for details next week.