We said we’d continue to grow communities that support design and delivery of good digital services and identify, develop and promote tools and guides for practitioners
CDPS has established or grown 2 very active communities of practice in 2021-22: Building Bilingual Services and Communicating Digital. Membership is made up of several hundred people from Welsh Government to local councils, digital agencies, universities, charities, third sector and UK government departments with a Welsh presence.
From these fortnightly or monthly meetings, good practice frameworks are emerging that CDPS communicates through blogs and webinars.
5.5.1 Community of practice: Building Bilingual Services
Membership: around 180 people
Sample topics
- Accessibility of bilingual digital services
- Bilingual chatbots
- Building bilingual digital services in Canada
New approaches to service development are emerging from these meetings and are reaching beyond Wales. They are also relevant to the wider community of bilingual nations, such as Canada, that CDPS is forging links with.
One of these approaches is ‘trio-writing’, an extension of the more established ‘pair-writing’. In this technique, a Welsh speaker joins a pair made up of content designer and subject matter expert. The 3 create accessible, user-centred service content in both Welsh and English on the spot.
Through this and other approaches, the community is seeking to move away from simple translation of content from English to Welsh. Instead, the aim is to design content from user needs in Welsh from the beginning. Given the 2 languages’ different idioms (expressions) and structure, translation alone is unlikely to meet user needs fully.
5.5.2 Community of practice: Communicating Digital
Membership: around 160 people
Sample topics
- Agile communications
- Online tools for collaboration
- Peer-to-peer support
This community innovates by applying Agile and user-centred thinking to communications. Its sessions have proved fertile ground for technique sharing. For example, other members picked up on a content publishing model that CDPS demonstrated using the workflow tool Trello as something they would try.
5.5.3 Community of practice feedback: a ‘brilliant’ forum
Our lively community meets generate enthusiastic social media commentary. Participants have tweeted:
‘This is always a brilliant forum for discussion and sharing ideas, and if you’re communicating in the digital sphere in Wales it should be right up your information superhighway’
‘Sesiwn ddifyr iawn heddiw gan Dr Llion Jones. Wedi dysgu llawer mwy am be all Cysgeir a Cysill ei wneud / Great session with Dr Llion Jones about Cysgeir and Cysill – lots of useful tips’