ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to another round-up of the week’s activities from Digital Publishing

So what’s been happening?

Our social media team was kept busy last week due to the number of high profile releases and opportunities for engagement with topical issues. We kicked off the week tweeting some facts and stats about the Aerospace industry to support day one of the Farnborough International Airshow. which was well received with over 300 engagements (clicks, retweets, follows, replies, favourites). We released figures on inflation and House Prices, with the majority of talk centred around the record annual increase in London House Prices and new figures on police recorded crime

One particular success to note from the week, was our Facebook post containing an album of birth related mini infographics produced by our Design team. This was shared by the One Born Every Minute Facebook page.which saw a spike of ONS Facebook activity. The post’s engagement was one of our highest ever on Facebook, with 2,500 clicks on the post, its links or photos. Furthermore this was shared around by 86 different users.

In other news..

Members of the Digital Publishing management team attended the Open Knowledge (OK) festival in Berlin last week and have shared some of their experiences.

We used the new Economic Forum events page to support the 10 July event, and in so doing identified issues about what data should be uploaded onto the page. These issues will be reviewed alongside policy to inform how we use the page in future. We have also started to explore an easier way for users to access stories that have previously been published on a theme page.

We have almost completed the move of the release calendar to a new home on GOV.UK, following some extensive work with GDS. We have sent a link to all government departments with links to their migrated GOV.UK content for quality assurance and have completed workshops with ONS staff to communicate the changes to working practices.

and finally….

Today (21 July) we released How Well Do You Know Your Area? an interactive quiz game that uses Census data through the NeSS API and the ONS Geography Open Data Portal. There are lots of reasons we’ve built this – one of them is to highlight that you can build web applications using ONS data through our open APIs – so it’s a nice little example that shows people how that can work.  Take a look and see how well you know where you live.