Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg

Welcome to my first post for the Digital & Data blog.

As Chief Digital Officer for Welsh Government, I am lucky enough to have an oversight of the work going on within all areas of Welsh Government on a very diverse range of digital, data and ICT projects.

Why blog and why now?

We want to tell you about the work we’re doing around digital, data and ICT. There have been a number of developments during this first year that I would like to share with you – and they don’t relate to Wales’ football team’s great achievement in the Euros! We have been developing digital skills in Welsh Government, improving and rationalising the websites, and developing a number of online services for businesses, farmers and the people of Wales. Historically we haven’t been great at telling you about these projects so we thought we’d change that.  Also, there are a lot of new developments on the horizon that I think you would like to hear about. We want to be transparent and tell you about the work we’re doing, even if it’s not finished.

By telling you more, the intention is for you to be better informed about our work and how it will benefit you. We also see this as an opportunity for you to engage with some of the projects and give your views on developments.

Our hope is that by sharing our experiences that others working on similar projects will be able to learn from what we’ve done.

A focus on data

My colleagues will be contributing their stories, but I wanted to use this first blog to focus on the first Welsh Government Open Data Plan which was published in March.

The essence of the plan was for us to improve the open data standard of the data we publish as Welsh Government, to look for new data to publish and to promote open data more widely.

We have made progress – in June the Chief Statistician, Glyn Jones, spoke at Digital 2016, and announced the development of improved content on StatsWales.

We have organised a new data forum within Welsh Government to look afresh at the non statistical data sources we hold. Much of the data is published already, but we are considering the best options to group the data sources and to improve the standard of publication from an open data perspective.

We are also planning the development of a single catalogue of all our data sources to help users, and considering options for developing a common gov.wales publishing platform for all our non statistical and place based data.

Get involved

We’re really interested to hear your thoughts about our blog and the projects featured. We’d also like to hear if you’re involved in digital or data projects, particularly if it’s a similar project to those featured and you would like to collaborate with us.

On that note, we have had good feedback on the Open Data Plan, but would like to hear from you on some specific issues:

• What data should we be publishing?
• What is your interest in open data?
• What do you think the opportunities for sharing an open data platform are for other public bodies in Wales?

You can do this by leaving a comment below or sending us an email.

I hope you will find this blog interesting and will keep an eye out for our next posts from some of our projects.

Caren Fullerton – Chief Digital Officer, Welsh Government