A proposal for more Service Standard transparency by using the GOV.UK service footer

Vicky Teinaki

• Where we are now
• A new idea for Service Standard transparency
• The footer
• The service assurance history page
• Phases and standards
• Design is easy, governance is hard
• Let me know your thoughts

Where we are now

Currently services have a phase banner that says the phase and gives a feedback link - this was important in the early days of GOV.UK but now maybe less so. Meanwhile:

• for government designers wanting to reuse patterns - it's hard to figure out if a beta service has been in beta for 6 months or 4 years
• the increasingly decentralised Service Standard reports model (from GOV.UK only to various places) makes it harder to independently understand what the state of a service is - particularly if a service did not meet a beta assessment but still had to go live
• it is hard to find out where a service's open sourced code is, if at all

A new idea for Service Standard transparency

I have a lot of interest in situating information at the point that it makes sense - I like the accessibility statements on the bottom of each government service, and links in other websites from the footers to changelogs and code bases. The footer is the place for nerds, but also a place for verifications and accreditations.

I have mocked up a few scenarios that consider both phase and iteration of Service Standard. I have not considered examples that are exempt and don't use GOV.UK Frontend.

Theey share the following ideas and guesses:

• Move phase banner to the footer- based on guess that this is now more for government than the public
• Move feedback into a link in the footer - based on guess that this is still findable
• Add open sourced code link - based on guess that this is useful for government technologists
• Contextualise the phase in relation to the Service Standard (or previous iterations) - based on guess that this is useful for government and could even be of interest to the public
• Create a 'service assurance history' page similar to the accessibility statement that summarises reports and dates and links to reports - based on guess that this will help with transparency, even if showing that many reports are not published

The footer

This option using the existing GOV.UK footer component and:

• puts a second level of government transparency for assurance history and code - thanks Ed Horsford for that suggestion of putting both source code and assessment history on the same second level rather than source code as part of existing links
• added 'get feedback' to the first line of public-facing links - thanks Joe Lanman for the suggestion of feedback being more of an active phrase

The service assurance history page

This is positioned for transparency purposes much like the accessibility statement page, but with an ethos of collating basic information and linking to service assessment reports.

It should have all important service assurance events on it (for example service assessments and reassessments, or whatever equivalent happened), and for each assurance event:

• what phase the assurance event was for
• when it happened
• who ran it (CDDO or, before 2021, GDS; or the department if it was internally reviewed)
• whether the service met or didn't met the standard (or if it was Red, Amber, or Green)
• a link to the report, or a note as to why it is not published

There might even be value in explaining what the Standard was and giving a way to contact the CDDO if someone noticed irregularities with the phases.

View example service assurance history page

Phases and standards

The footer and service assurance phase needs to flex for services assessed to:

• Service Standard (discovery after June 2019)
• Digital Service Standard (discovery between June 2015 and June 2019)
• Digital by Default Service Standard (discovery before June 2015)
• Technology Code of Practice (for bought solutions - this may or may not be a thing)

It also has to allow for:

• unusual assurance cadences - for example Covid or Brexit RAG assurance processes
• source code not being publicly available - either as it is not yet online as an alpha or because it is still in the process of being made publicly available

Services that are assured to the Service Standard (discovery after June 2019)

The most likely starting version to be released is beta for the Service Standard as well as live, though there could be value for this in alpha.

Services that were assured to the Digital Service Standard (discovery between June 2015 and June 2019)

Live is likely to be the most common example - though there may be examples in beta (more about this in design is easy, governance is hard)

Full set of phases:

Services that were assured to the Digital by Default Service Standard (discovery before June 2015)

Live is likely to be the most common example - though there may be examples in beta (more about this in design is easy, governance is hard)

Full set of phases:

Services that were bought using the Technology Code of Practice

While I think these are going to have their own branding as they are bought not built, there may be need for bought solutions to show that they went through the Technology Code of Practice.

This is unlikely to have phases but could show them if required.

Design is easy, governance is hard

The biggest challenges with this solution would be:

• retroactively adding histories for services
• missing or unpublished reports
• documenting non-standard phase progression, for example a service not meeting an assessment but continuing to the next phase anyway, or a service staying in beta for a long time

There could also be similar challenges with the open sourced coding link for those departments that still do not code in the open.

This transparency would take effort and could be painful - I'm not underestimating the work involved. However, better scoping some of the information as for digital government governance purposes this could help a lot with transparency.

Let me know your thoughts

Add an issue on Github - or talk about this upstream on the GOV.UK footer component issue.