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Week 179

With whitehall being only one part of gov.uk, it’s important that we work closely with the other teams. To that end, on Thursday Mat Wall, James Stewart, David Heath and Paul Battley from GDS joined Chris and me in our office to thrash out how to make whitehall’s architecture work alongside the rest of gov.uk. We concentrated harder than Steven Gerrard before a free kick, drawing diagrams, playing with code and discussing the Guardian publishing platform. After a long day, we’d drawn out where we are, where we could be and what motivations we could use to get there.

Another whitehall question that keeps popping up resurfaced again, namely what’s the correct distinction between a role (such as the Prime Minister) and a person (David Cameron). We started out having a dedicated page for each role, making it clear what policies and more the Secretary of State for Transport was responsible for. However, some ministers have multiple roles, so how can a user see everything Theresa May, for example, is doing? To answer this, a page for each person was introduced. But which information belongs on the role page as opposed to the person page? We understand the data structure, so know from a logical perspective what we could show, but will this be what users are actually looking for? These and other related questions have been under discussion this week.

Other than whitehall, there have been a lot of other things happening this week. We’re still negotiating about extending our lease (both with each other and our landlord), and we’ve had a lot of hassle dealing with P11 forms, new tax codes and HMRC. We’re also still fleshing out ideas on how to spend our non-GDS time. We’re accumulating a fair few documents in our ideas folder (shamefully none yet from me), so whenever we do have free time there should be plenty to work on.

More things we’ve been doing include trying to translate the GOOS worked example into ruby, fixing up our lanyrd + twitter list thing, and investigating why sauron fails occasionally. Oh, and I completed my unwise mission to move my blog from jekyll to my own sloppy site generation code.

Finally, we’ve all started using a tool called Team Snippets to keep each other updated as to what we’ve all been doing. With some of us working with GDS each day, James A hanging out with all my ex’s, hopefully this will help us keep track of each other.

These weeknotes were brought to you by the Log Lady, Cristiano Ronaldo’s ‘it’s so unfair I didn’t score face’ and recap’s thousandth download.