Gem here! We held our latest Communicating Digital Community of Practice where myself and Ed facilitated a session on working in the open. We had 2 attendees from Digital Health and Care Wales and the Driving Standards Agency. It was a really interesting and insightful discussion on the opportunities and challenges people face when approaching working in the open.
We are going to have a bit of a reset over the summer, numbers have dwindled and it feels like the group needs to reframe. I’m going to send out a survey and also meet with the other community managers across CDPS to align with what everyone else is doing. I really love the ideas and discussion the group brings so hopefully a rest of the summer will give me back some drive and energy to run the community in the autumn.
If you’d like to see what was discussed and the tips shared, catch up on the recording
This week the team had a meeting to discuss governance on the website including; introducing content owners and editors for specific content areas, frequency of reviewing and updating content, rolling out access to the content management system (CMS) across CDPS and training needs on the CMS and content training for editors.
We also had a meeting with Hoffi to discuss the internal and external feedback we’ve received so far from public beta, with some quick amendments to make and others to follow-up on in the future.
Josh (visual designer) held a Hotjar training session for the comms and user research team to find out how we can use our analytics to track user journeys.
We also went through our accessibility audit report from the Digital Accessibility Centre who had tested the accessibility of our public beta website. We have now categorised which improvements we’ll make while in public beta, and also discuss in the future about meeting WCAG 2.1 AAA standards, as opposed to the WCAG 2.1 AA we are currently meeting.
We also started planning for our next show and tell taking place on 5 July 3pm to 4pm where we will discuss usability testing during beta, building the website as a bilingual service, working with the Welsh Government GEL team and the tools to measure the success of the website.
Sign up to our show and tell (open to all)
Shwmae ffrindie, it’s Alaw here,
Both myself and Gem decided to practice what we so often preach, and have a go at pair writing some socials…
We have an enormous amount of social posts to create, write and post during this sprint, so, we arranged a meeting to talk through them all and compose the work together.
How refreshing! Rather than being sat behind screens in our separate homes, racking our brains as we struggle with writer’s block and only receiving an answer from the cat during the many, many ‘thinking out loud’ moments, it was an absolute dream! We bounced off each other, brainstorming and ensuring all our ideas were heard.
It’s so easy to think “no, that won’t work”, or “I can’t write that”, when working alone. But, thinking out loud with someone gives the boost you need to believe in yourself, as well as build on an idea that you once might not have thought was ‘good enough’.
At the beginning of this week we were drowning in socials. In all honesty, I didn’t think we’d manage to get everything done. However, that hour long session has worked wonders. The next steps are so much clearer and we’ve now got the bug for pair writing sessions! I cannot wait for the next :)