This is guide that aims to give an overview of Dissemination - what it is, and what it does.
If you view the production of statistics as a pipeline, then Dissemination is the the end of that pipeline. Dissemination ensures that ONS provides value to society by making the statistics ONS produces available to those outside the organisation.
Understanding how Dissemination fits into the wider organisation can help to better understand the part we play.
We are part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which is part of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA).
The UKSA is an independent body, which has a statutory objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that ‘serve the public good’.
The public good includes:
- informing the public about social and economic matters
- assisting in the development and evaluation of public policy
- regulating quality and publicly challenging the misuse of statistics
The collective goal of the official statistics system is to mobilise the power of data to help Britain make better decisions.
The UKSA consists of three principal areas:
- the Government Statistical Service (GSS), which is the cross-government community of all those involved in the production of official statistics in the UK
- the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority and the largest producer of official statistics in the UK
- the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) which is the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority. It assesses official statistics for compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics, reports on system-wide issues and on how statistics are used, celebrating when the standards are upheld and challenging publicly when they are not.
A visualisation of these departments in the form of an organisational chart can be found here, and the statistical system flowchart can be found here
Dissemination is part of the Digital Services (DS) directorate of the ONS. Digital Services is responsible for all systems, devices and technology that supports the ONS. Our purpose is to enable the ONS through delivering critical digital and technology capabilities.
Digital Publishing are the primary internal stakeholders for the dissemination services and as such we work closely with them. They are part of the Communications directorate and are responsible for the content policies, operations and promotion around the dissemination of statistical analysis and datasets with a focus on upholding and improving the quality of the content the ONS produces. The main areas of operation involve content and editorial work; preparing content for publication on the ONS website; social media promotion; digital design; data journalism; and various other “digital” and “publishing” things.
The main aims of Digital Publishing can be summarised as the following:
- Continuously improve the user experience of our website, including how we publish open data
- Future proof the organisation’s digital publishing capability
- Develop new content products that extend the impact of our data and analysis
- Support publishing operations and policy
- Understand our online communities to make sure we are driven by user needs
- Measure the impact of our online presence
In Dissemination we focus on designing, developing and supporting the Dissemination Platform which provides the capabilities for both data and content dissemination. We are a collection of product development teams working on a range of projects, from improving and advancing existing products, through to creating new systems and tools that will transform how the organisation works.
Work within this division generally involves the ONS website, content management systems, data management systems, public APIs and publishing platforms.
Our teams operate under a DevOps model where all of our engineers are equally responsbile for supporting, iterating and maintaining the products we develop.