Weeknotes of Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.
May already. How did that even happen? It’s being a bit of a stressful week, and I reckon it’ll be like this for a while. I haven’t been sleeping well lately either. Luckily I’m having some time off soon which I think I need, but it may make things more stressful either side of it. We’ll see.
The service manual content work is ramping up now. The project’s designers, Gwenno, Liam and I have worked on a plan to develop and critique the content with timelines, with the hope that the initial pieces of content around user research will be ready for testing in June. As mention in my previous weeknotes we’re hoping to engaging with the user research and the wider CDPS communities to help us with this.
This week we had a debrief and chat about the community in-person event we ran last week to discuss Welsh-language research. I loved supporting my colleagues running it and getting to listen to people talk about their experiences and thinking around language. I had a brilliant day, and Gabi and Tom did an amazing job at organising and running it all. I’m looking forward to our session next week to try and develop our insights into a series of considerations. You can read about it in Gabi’s last week’s weeknotes.
I had a chat with my colleague Yana who’s looking into developing some principles around research ethics, and I’d love to support with this. It’s something that will hopefully feed into the service manual too.
Tom and I did a talk at a user research community of practice at Welsh Government. They asked us to talk about Welsh-language user research and trio writing, and so we shared our experiences on it, some initial thoughts from the community event I mentioned above, and the service manual. Our aim was to encourage people to be bold and explore, experiment and collaborate - and share their learnings openly! What we’re doing is fairly new in Wales and we’re not going to find a silver bullet that works for everyone, everywhere and all the time.
Bad news: the cost of living project isn’t going ahead in the end. Though the initial conversation with the organisation we wanted to support was quite positive, I guess they didn’t think the proposal fitted in well with their work. Though we tried to communicate that we were flexible and wanted to adapt to them, I understand that ‘cold proposing’ isn’t a great approach. But it’s still quite disapointing and frustrating after investing time and effort, and getting excited about the possibilities.
During a workshop yesterday, we were asked about what allyship meant to us. For me, it’s about understanding your position and relationship to others in terms of power and privilege. So it’s about knowing when to step back to create a space for others. And when to step up to advocate for others when they cannot do it for themselves. Or something like that. I’m still mulling it over.