GovCamp Cymru 2025 – working in the open

My notes and reflections from the session about working in the open.

I went to my first ever GovCamp Cymru on Friday, it was a great event. Thank you to the organisers and volunteers for making it happen.

I went to 3 sessions, here are my notes from the first session on working in the open, that was pitched by Monika. I really loved this session. Thank you Monika for pitching it. (By the way you should definitely subscribe to Monika's blog).

Here are my notes from the session…

• The conversation focused a lot around weeknotes and sprint notes and whether teams have permission to do this in public (or not)
• It was suggested that this might be one of those things where we can ask for forgiveness rather than permission
• Some people publish personal weeknotes too, but there can be nervousness around this
• Nia and Monika suggested joining Cymru Ddigidol Slack to share weeknotes and 'working in the open' best practice
• Also worth joining the UK government's cross-government Slack (if you can)
• Heledd's team in Natural Resources Wales (NRW) were mentioned as a great example of a team working in the open
• Matt Jukes was mentioned a couple of times as an advocate for working in the open, Matt has written a lot about working in the open, this is a good place to start: Make things open reading list
• 'Work in the open' is point 9 on the Digital Service Standard for Wales so it's definitely something we should be doing
• We could work more with comms teams, they can help facilitate sharing things publicly
• Someone (Osian, I think) pointed out that working in the open isn't just about writing weeknotes, it can be about creating guides or sharing code on GitHub, or inviting people to watch show and tells
• Nia mentioned that one of the benefits of working in this way is that it enables the capturing of organisational memory
• This reminded me of design histories, which are a great way to "document and share design decisions", this design history tool from X-GOVUK is one way to publish them

Somewhere to publish unofficial community resources?

It made me wonder if we need a place to publish a collection of unofficial community resources for people working in the Welsh public sector. Does one of these exist already? If not, where could it be? I'd see this as somewhere that compliments the Cymru Ddigidol Slack and enables people working in Wales to share things more widely.

It would be great to have somewhere for sharing things that are useful across the community, but not owned by any particular organisation. It could be a GitHub repo, a website or a blog (or a mix of all 3). I'd be happy to put some technical effort into making this happen, if people think it's a good idea (and if others would be able to help supply me with content and resources to put on it?).