Communities of Practice
21 June 2021
At CDPS, we realise the strength of a community. We have seen in our everyday life what can be achieved by working together, and sharing what we have, more than ever over the last year.
And the same is true in the workplace. That is why we want to create dynamic and practical communities of practice and of interest that will strengthen public services in Wales.
The first community that CDPS established was ‘Building Bilingual Services’ following a webinar on the same theme.
We held the first meeting back in February and have met every other Thursday morning since.
It is interesting how we’ve found our feet now and have widened the spectrum of topics. In the first few meetings, we talked a lot about the language used, the importance of using clear language and the impact the tone of the English text can have on a translation.
Since then, we’ve had many other interesting sessions including creating Welsh speaking personas for digital teams across the UK, best practice when procuring bilingual digital services and the financial (and time) savings that can be achieved by building a bilingual service from the start, rather than an ‘add on’ at the end.
We also have sessions planned to look at common challenges when building bilingual services that could lead to a Welsh Language Commissioner investigation and a presentation by a company based in north Wales who are creating a meeting platform that could potentially offer live translation.
We’ve also got a steering group now, that will share the role of chairing the sessions and work together on planning future sessions. What this means is that the community members have taken control, and that it has become nearly self-sufficient. And that will be the end result for all of our communities.
The second community of practice that’s recently been established, who first met at the beginning of June, is the ‘Communicating Digital’ community.
In the initial meetings, we shared our existing challenges and what we’d hoped to get from the community. There were some clear themes, but also some great stories about the great work that is already going on.
The group will aim to support other members in their challenges through developing a calendar of regular meetups and also some additional channels for day-to-day conversation to enable sharing of support, ideas, solutions as well providing a ‘safe place’ to share what’s maybe not gone so well – it’s about us working openly and learning from those outcomes and becoming better and better as a result.
Thank you to everyone that is already part of both communities.
If you would like more information or would like to join either community, please email info@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales
