The FCDO's digital work
18th December 2015 London, UK
At the start of 2015 the Digital Transformation Unit set itself an ambitious to do list. After the euphoria of celebrating our first anniversary, the year has been defined by hard graft as we’ve worked with colleagues across the FCO to begin work on how to deliver digital services to British people across the world […]
4th December 2015 London, UK
I’ve recently been through an assessment for the legalisation service. Preparing for an assessment is no trivial task, and it’s fair to say at times you spend all day thinking about it, you go to bed thinking about it, you wake up in the night thinking about it, and when you wake up in the […]
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2nd December 2015 London, UK
In October I blogged about our first exploration of Snapchat as a tool to communicate and engage with people on the work of the Foreign Office. I signed off with a challenge to myself to understand how best to measure and evaluate our success on an app with very limited analytical capability and no website for […]
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24th November 2015 London, UK
Last month saw the opening of the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly. For the digital leaders out there, this phenomenon was known simply as “#UNGA.” But this year’s UNGA had a different feel from the previous 69 sessions. It was distinctly digital. Twitter hosted meetings with diplomats and ambassadors at their New […]
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20th November 2015 London, England
It’s coming up to a year since we first updated you on our ambitious plans for digital training in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This time last year we were about to beta test our first set of digital training modules (11 in total) with volunteers from across the FCO. To recap – our curriculum […]
18th November 2015 London, UK
Throughout the alpha phase of our legalisation work we were measuring our work against the digital by default standard, and – inspired by the work of colleagues working onemergency travel documents – we set up a github wiki to document our work and evidence. By the end of the 7 weeks we were ready for […]
12th November 2015 London, UK
In my last post I discussed the FCO’s legalisation service and our plans to build a new digital service. So what have we done so far? After getting our spending controls approval, we used the Digital Services Framework to find development resources and appointed Informed Solutions to work with us. For development we’ve been following […]
11th November 2015 London, UK
A tweetup is where people who are in contact through Twitter meet in person and bring the conversation offline, an example of where the digital and real world come together. Last year, our Embassy was included in the Foreign Office’s innovative project to create maps of Twitter followers. As a digital specialist, I was thrilled […]
10th November 2015 London, UK
Congratulations, you finally got that dream business job overseas! Your bags are almost packed, your cat is in storage and your vinyl collection is at your parents (wait a sec, did you get that the wrong way round?). It’s never simple, it’s always a rush, and here’s another fly in the ointment: you’ve just found […]
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9th November 2015 London, UK
As I clambered over a pile of stones atop a scrubby hillside olive grove in the searing midday Lebanese sun surveying the remains of the home of Lady Hestor Stanhope trying to recall how a degree in archaeology and passion for this kind of outdoor exploration and activity had lead me to working in the […]