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Government Digital Service Design Principles

gov.uk

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Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#21

Post by ed_blackburn »

Massive kudos to whoever it is in a position of authority, be a politician or a senior civil servant for allowing a modern dev team to grow and cultivate a culture that works. Too many people in authority are motivated by fear of failure, blame apportioning and self-interest meaning their aversion to risk is so high, nothing happens, so nothing goes wrong.

I really hope that because this is associated with the cabinet office other teams elsewhere in govt. can draw encouragement from this team and use it as an example.

Excellent to see the source open and hosted on github. Such code is rarely made publicly despite it not being confidential.

Will the govt. sit up and notice that small focused team with a remit can deliver. Or will the next system change mean a complicated procurment process for a large consultancy who will hive the work off shore to the cheapest sub-contractor and deliver nothing but spend millions of tax payers pounds.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#22

Post by lifeisstillgood »

UK-AL wrote: post #13
rmoriz wrote: post #6

Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad. The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something. They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of mo…

Java EE servers run some of biggest throughput web services in the world. But your saying its a bad choice?

J2EE ecosystem and the Open Source ecosystems have little overlap - if that is your first choice, it is likely your sympathies for all other decisions, technical, methodological and organisational, will not be in line with common practise in the OSS world.

In other words, they hired the wrong guys.

Liam Maxwell and folks at GDS are hitting all the right notes so far.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#24

Post by lifeisstillgood »

ed_blackburn wrote: post #21

Massive kudos to whoever it is in a position of authority, be a politician or a senior civil servant for allowing a modern dev team to grow and cultivate a culture that works. Too many people in authority are motivated by fear of failure, blame apportioning and self-interest meaning their aversion to risk is so high, nothing happens, so nothing goes wrong. I really hope that because this is associated with the cabine…

@liammax and @MTBracken (twitter) are "UK CTO" and director GDS, and currently the leading lights in this one.

One thing to note is the Open Source software, in guidance handed to all government departments, should be preferred over proprietary software. (link in here somewhere http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism)

In addition the "G-Cloud" - a online catalog of pre-vetted service providers, has 80% SMEs on it and a govt buyer can simply sign up online for a Saas service there and then with a govt credit card, legally

I feel that Open Source in government will have serious network effects globally, so getting this right now for the UK could lead to a very long tail / virtuous circle for UK devs in the future.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#25

Post by glomph »

bapbap wrote: post #17

Can anyone with some knowledge of the GDS explain how they seem to be doing such a good job? It just seems impossible that someone somewhere in Government got something right for a change and brought this team in and let them get on with it. - I know Government projects get a lot of flak, rightly or wrongly but they always seemed to be awarded to companies like Capgemini who would spend £100's of millions achieving m…

They have been allowed to just link to the old government websites for lots of things so they didn't have to create a feature complete drop in for the old site(s). I think this has made it much easier easy to make a nice looking site.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#28

Post by Nursie »

If anyone from gov.uk is reading this, do you fancy answering the question I posed when the site was launched but never received an adequate answer to?

Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics?

You are shipping all the data about all my interactions with my government off to a third party in another country. Another country that we know has not got the same legal data protection requirements, and one which has now been exposed as having massive internal spying problems.

And no, telling me "google aren't allowed to use the data" and then opening an outsourced helpdesk ticket with another US based company does not cut it.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#29

Post by anu_gupta »

piqufoh wrote: post #26

Great idea, lets hope it catches on. Unfortunately it seems like parts have been translated into 'trendy' - for example > Government should only do what only government can do. uh, what?

If you had continued to read the rest of that paragraph, you would have seen this:

> If someone else is doing it — link to it. If we can provide resources (like APIs) that will help other people build things — do that. We should concentrate on the irreducible core.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#30

Post by jpswade »

Nursie wrote: post #28

If anyone from gov.uk is reading this, do you fancy answering the question I posed when the site was launched but never received an adequate answer to? Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics? You are shipping all the data about all my interactions with my government off to a third party in another country. Another country that we kno…

This extends well beyond boundaries and governments. Google Analytics has become an industry standard.
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