To coincide with ‘On Air, Online’ - Learning at Work Week, Joya Snowden, Defra Capability Development lead supporting the Digital Data and Technology Services (DDTS) function, tells us how her team has been developing their learning offer to provide options that can be accessed by colleagues working at home.
To mark Stop Food Waste Day Christina Gyles, one of our interaction designers, shares her passion for reducing food waste and her ideas about what more we can all do.
Emma Cuthbert, Defra content designer, shares her experience of having mild coronavirus symptoms and the impact of the outbreak on her usual working from home routine.
Sustainability has long been a priority for the UK. The issue continues to be high on the political agenda.
But how many of us have ever considered how IT equipment is recycled, or how IT services might be delivered in a more sustainable way?
When people hear the term apprentice some will immediately think of the hit BBC TV reality game show 'The Apprentice’, in which budding entrepreneurs compete for the chance to win a big prize.
The concept of apprenticeships has been around a long time though. And earlier this month Civil Service apprentices up and down the land celebrated National Apprenticeship Week.
It's 5 years, almost to the day, since the Defra digital blog was launched. So it’s a good time to look back at our achievements – and look forward to our future plans.
The Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales are responsible for providing flood warning information to people at risk of flooding in England and Wales. One of the main ways we do this is by sending free automated voice calls. We’ve recently improved this part of the service by switching to Amazon Polly.
Over the past year the Environment Agency’s Flood Information Service has been working with Google and their Google Public Alerts system, to create an enhanced flood information platform. We can now proudly say that we are the first UK authority to push flood warnings through Google’s online notification platform.
We had some super pitches to us as ‘Digital Dragons’ in the ‘Pitch to Prototype’ session (at the Flood and Coast 2019 event). So what next?
Cathy Dutton (Interim Head of Interaction Design) reflects on setting up a User Centred Design Community of Practice (COP) for a small team at Defra’s Warrington digital hub.
