GovCamp Cymru 2026

My notes from this year’s GovCamp Cymru unconference in Cardiff.

A manicured green lawn, autumnal trees and buildings in the background.

Use the Welsh you have

Heledd and Jo welcomed everyone and set things up for the day. One of the slides encouraged people to "use the Welsh you have". I thought this was a nice way to encourage everyone to try a few phrases, like "bore da" (Good morning) or "Benjy dw i" (I'm Benjy).

As a Welsh person who doesn't speak Welsh, I always get nervous using Welsh around native speakers. So seeing this early on definitely made me feel less intimated.

Familiar faces

It was great to see and catch up with old team mates and internet friends at the event. I felt like I knew more people there than last year. Probably a sign that I've worked in too many places!

Sessions

I found it really hard to pick sessions this year! I often wanted to be in 3 different places at once.

These are the ones I picked:

Bilingual from the start
Lets talk about racism in the workplace
What is blocking UCD and digital people from doing their best work?

Session 1: Bilingual from the start

There were some great conversations in this session about bilingual design, focusing on content design and translation.

But, as an English speaking interaction designer, it left me wondering what I could do to help bilingual design.

Liam covered a few graphic design concepts which I found really interesting, and I'd love to start collating these things into a resource somewhere (unless it already exists?).

For example:

Choose fonts that support welsh characters. Welsh includes diacritics (like ŵ) and digraphs (like ch) which may not always be supported in the best way by fonts designed solely for English use.
Welsh content is typically longer (20% longer?) so test designs with translated content earlier.

It made me wonder if we're lacking good interaction design patterns and components for creating bilingual prototypes?

For example, GOV.UK are starting to codify the language navigation pattern.

I'm going to spend some time researching this and seeing what's out there. Please send me anything you've seen.

Bilingual resources

Here are some other general bilingual resources that I made a note of during the session.

Session 2: Lets talk about racism in the workplace

I found this session very difficult to sit through and I guess that’s the point.

Here are a few notes that I wrote down:

Anti-racism is something you have to demonstrate with action, don't just co-opt the label
It's a muscle that you have to practice using, to get better at it
White people must call out racism (and other discrimination) when they see it in the workplace

Anti-racism resources

Some links to follow up on. I'm going to start with buying one of the book listed below.

Session 3: What is blocking UCD and digital people from doing their best work?

This was the busiest session I attended, and it obviously struck a chord with people.

Here are some of the themes that I remember:

we need the space and time to iterate services
teams need authority to make decision for themselves
we should work more openly and learn from others
consider making service assessments mandatory in Wales
don't procure software before you've understood the problem

This all felt very familiar, and these kind of themes have been covered before by many people, including the excellent Transform Wales team.

I sensed some optimism though, or at least an opportunity, to try and influence senior leaders.

With a new Welsh Government, and new budgets and strategies on the horizon, perhaps now is the time to help shape things for the better?

I guess the action for myself is to catch-up with the latest goings on Digital Public Services Wales and Digital Health and Care Wales.

Official GovCamp Cymru links

Last year’s conference

I also attended GovCamp Cymru last year. Read my post from GovCamp Cymru 2025.