CILIP Government Information Group webinar: “The more you KNOW(vember): sharing the successes of GIG's annual award winners”, Wednesday 12 November, 12pm - 1pm

Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, WP20 Symbol knowledge transfer, CC0 1.0 

To coincide with the KNOWvember campaign across government, CILIP's Government Information Group (GIG) are holding a webinar celebrating the joint winners of our 2025 annual awards. Speakers from the winning teams will share stories of the challenges they faced, how they tackled these and the positive outcomes of their projects, as well as taking questions from attendees. 

The award-winning projects share several themes which will be of interest to the wider community of information and knowledge professionals. Both involved a strong element of raising awareness of good practices in handling information across their respective government departments, and therefore increasing information literacy in their organisations. This was achieved through successfully engaging with staff across their wider departments in ways which were quantifiable, with qualitative impact also recorded. Both achieved successful outcomes against a background of resource constraints. The projects demonstrate lessons which can be transferred to other contexts, and will be of interest to those working in Government Knowledge and Information Management and other sectors. 

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Information Management Team were responsible for implementing the Government Security Classification Policy (GSCP) policy in the Department, with drop down sensitivity classification labels/markings for electronic documents. They have clearly shown an impressive technical ability and overcome significant problems to make the project work successfully. The team reacted to initial negative feedback, testing the technology with a diverse group of users, and quickly produced tailored guidance for the FCDO. The team delivered more than 200 briefings, across all time zones, for the benefit of the department's global staff. They also secured agreement from Civil Service Learning to make the GSCP e-Learning module available on the FCDO's Oracle system to enable staff to record their learning. There is strong evidence that the team were successful in their approach, with the number of unmarked emails and documents reduced by over 90 percent in eight months. The panel agreed that this project was undoubtedly a major contribution and has wider application. 

The Welsh Government (WG) "Year of KIM" project team developed their initiative to promote better awareness of good practice across the WG.  The plan was to re-use or adapt existing guidance where possible, to avoid re-inventing the wheel and save time. With no additional resource available, a combination of intranet articles, a Teams site, and a series of online events were used to engage and educate staff. Success of the project was measured by positive Teams data, increases in the quantity and quality of enquiries to operational IM teams, and qualitative feedback received via a user experience survey. This project could be used and adapted by OGDs and the team are looking to build on this work so that awareness is maintained. The panel agreed that the team should be commended for strengthening working links across KIM roles within the WG, securing senior level support for the initiative, and for the feedback and improved service usage they received. 

You can register for the session via the webinar's page on the CILIP Events Calendar.