Senedd Cymru: MySenedd digital services

The MySenedd Programme aims to help the Welsh Parliament become a world class digital parliament by 2021 making Senedd business information more accessible and providing a more engaging experience for users. The first of these projects, supporting the objective for making services easier and faster for Senedd Members, the people of Wales and staff were the Table Office and TRO projects, developed in partnership with Aspire systems.

The Table Office digital service enables Senedd Members and support staff to submit items of business for consideration bilingually, such as questions to Ministers, statements and motions, using a simple interface on any device such as mobile, tablet or desktop, providing complete flexibility. The status of an item can be easily monitored during its workflow through submission, approval and eventual publication to the online Record, where it is accessible to the public.

The Table Office system integrates seamlessly with another new cloud system called TRO. TRO enables the Assembly’s 47 strong transcription team to collaboratively transcribe chamber and committee debates, providing integrated translation between English and Welsh and allowing them to publish the Record of Proceedings to the online Record instantly.

The Record (record.assembly.wales) brings all Senedd business together online allowing the public to search by keyword, date or Senedd Member, helping to meet recommendations from an independent advisory panel, Digital News Taskforce to improve the transparency of Senedd systems.

For the Assembly, these were the first projects that used Agile principles in design, development and delivery. Users worked closely with Aspire systems to deliver services incrementally, prioritising high value functionality, leading to a solution that met their needs and helped drive the success of the services.

The MySenedd digital service has been shortlisted for the Wales technology Awards 2018!

Challenges

• Complex business requirements and data flows
• Integration with several different systems, including speech recognition software
• A user friendly and accessible system
• Presenting a consistent view of business information both internally and to the public

The Solution

• Bespoke cloud based, .NET, MVC web application
• Designed using mobile first principles, providing outstanding user experience on a variety of devices
• Bespoke APIs to allow data retrieval from other systems
• Integration of automated translation functionality
• SQL Cloud database to store data

Outcomes And Benefits

• MySenedd is helping to drive internal efficiencies, ensuring staff are able to deliver high value tasks in a demanding business.
• TRO has been demonstrated to other Parliaments, though the Inter Parliamentary User group and is seen as a benchmark for Translation systems.
• The publication process is now much simpler, since all transcribers collaboratively working on a transcription can preview and review the complete transcription on screen and publish directly to the website with one click.
• The MySenedd digital services enable the flow of business through the Senedd to be more efficient. A question submitted by an Senedd Member can be tracked through to the meeting in which it was asked and the subsequent debate.
• Presenting a variety of views of Senedd business information is now possible, through the online Record and open data formats delivered through additional digital services.
• The MySenedd services are the first cloud based digital services to be implemented by the Assembly, which provides ease of management and scalability, whilst being able to easily take advantage of improvements in technology in the future.