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Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Environment Agency, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England, Animal and Plant Health Agency

Making guidance the right length

Posted by: Ben Clancy, Posted on: 20 November 2015 - Categories: Defra content design

When producing Defra’s Smarter Guidance for GOV.UK, some people ask: ‘how long should we make this guide?’ The shortest guide I’ve seen was a single url. The longest was 40,000 words. These examples don’t show the acceptable range of a …

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Comfortable with risk

Posted by: Alexander Coley, Posted on: 18 November 2015 - Categories: Defra digital, Open data

...set as open data. The open data risk assessment is a series of checks used to ensure datasets are safe to release as open data. For example, where we need...

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Food, Glorious Food; Data, Marvellous Data!

Posted by: David Lee, Posted on: 4 November 2015 - Categories: Open data

Last night the Secretary of State for Environment, Elizabeth Truss, launched Great British Food: a five year campaign celebrating British food in this country and around the world, tearing down outdated stereotypes about a bland British diet and showing off the …

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Environment Agency metadata on data.gov.uk – making it count

Posted by: dataenvagency, Posted on: 4 November 2015 - Categories: Open data

  Hi, I’m Claire Hainsworth.  I work in the Data, Mapping, Modelling and Information team at the Environment Agency. Over the last few weeks, I’ve carried out a wholesale update of our metadata records on data.gov.uk. Why did we do …

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User needs: how they lead to better guidance

Posted by: Jonathan Richardson, Posted on: 2 November 2015 - Categories: Defra content design

Would you read government guidance if you didn't have to? "Of course not," says the average citizen. That's why every new page that the Smarter Guidance team creates has to have a user need. If there's no need for someone …

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