ONS Digital

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up

So what’s been happening?

Over the last couple of months, there have been a number of changes to staffing and structure of Digital Publishing to allow us to focus on the future of the ONS website. Alan Smith has now taken up the role of Head of Digital Content, leading the Design, Editorial and Data Visualisation teams to manage the transformation of the ONS product portfolio. In particular the development of new statistical products which meet the expectations of our online users. This role will also bring together inter-related and complementary skills, creating a centre of excellence for innovative digital products. Alan’s appointment enables Matt Jukes to concentrate fully on his new role as Head of Digital Transformation. Matt will lead the transformation of the ONS digital publishing services, particularly the new website and open data developments (including API provision). In addition, he will be working to ensure the services are meeting the needs of users through user insight and web analytics.

In other news

We had a busy week in the Digital Content team with short stories on What does the UK pharmaceutical industry look like today? and How UK wages have changed over the past 4 decades. We also produced infographics showing the Comparison of regional house price indices before and after the financial crisis which had a lot of interest on twitter and on the Patterns and trends of people in an inter-ethnic relationship 

In social media the Compendium of Statistics Interactive Content  proved to be the most popular shareable content on twitter, coming top of tweets during the month of June.  We have also had a lot of social media chatter on today’s release of the interactive map showing how the economic gap between the regions has widened in recent years 

Work is still ongoing to prepare us for the launch of the new release calendar at the end of the month. This includes a demonstration at DEFRA and supporting communications on the publication hub and the GSS Website. We also kicked off presentations to ONS staff about what the move of the release calendar to GOV.UK means for them with good attendance.

Tickets for the Graphical Web 2014 conference are now available, with early bird registration extended to 11 July. The programme brings together a range of internal experts to share their knowledge and experience on Visual Storytelling – using new technology to produce compelling visual narratives on the web. The event will be of interest to a broad range of attendees, from graphics professionals right through to data journalists keen to understand the potential of new technology to enrich storytelling on the web.

@statshan presented at the Young Statistician’s conference, taking them through the work we are doing to improve our content on Wikipedia and the wider work on communicating our statistics through more accessible formats. She also attended a TeachMeet focusing on improving the way lessons are delivered, where she learned about plans to improve literacy in maths and how our resources might be used.

We resurrected Digital Cinema Club, a monthly offering of inspiring short talks from the world of digital and beyond. This month – The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think

We also bid farewell to Martin Nicholls, who has successfully led our editorial team to help widen the reach of our statistics through short stories and content syndication with the likes of buzzfeed. Together with our head of design, Martin has been communicating the importance of data storytelling, helping our statistical experts to understand the merit of communicating in Clear English  and using different formats. He moves to a media facing role in our media relations team and we wish him the very best.

and finally…

Highlights from this month s Digital Publishing newsletter for staff include; how DEFRA have been using analytics data to understand what people want from their statistics and to build a more agile service; The Great Content Cull – Why we need to be reviewing, editing, and deleting the content that we once thought was up to scratch; and as ONS uses a new data visualisation tool to analyse its social media channel see how Tableau is helping Departments understand how policy content is being viewed on GOV.UK. You can also view the latest data visualisations from the Guardian datablog including all you need to know about civil partnerships, our very own interactive on where people move to and from in England and Wales, and the #WORLDCUP in tweets