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GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

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Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#41

Post by bfirsh »

(Reposting a comment from yesterday for background)

This is part of a larger government initiative to curb outsourcing of IT projects. Traditionally these sorts of things would be built by large software companies at enormous expense to the taxpayer. Gov.uk has been built by a (relatively) small in-house team, by people who genuinely care about what they are building. They embrace the fact that they are building tools for the good of society rather than just satisfying a contract.

Also as a citizen, I love that I can open a pull request on my government's website ( https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1 ). We've got the ball rolling in opening up government data on the internet, but this is a great example of how technology can enable citizens to get involved in government.

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#42

Post by 7952 »

sycren wrote: post #32
Nursie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's important that recorded information about my interactions with my government doesn't cross borders and escape from the data protection laws in the UK and the EU. If it was a traditional software system that actually ran on the servers owned by the government then that would be fine. With GA, at the very least Google get to know when I visit the site, and likely which pages I visit, simply through the req…

Is there not a separate deal for Governments and Educational Institutes with Google to negate this?

It's called the EU safe harbour certification. I'm not sure how rigorous it is.

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#43

Post by debacle »

Pwnguinz wrote: post #40
arocks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. But for an entity like the UK govt having plentiful resources, it would be sheer laziness to go with a solution like Drupal due to ease in initial setup. Besides, most Drupal sites look sort of kludgy in appearance.

You do realize the "appearance" of a site has nothing to do with the underlying stack, right? A Django site can appear like a Rails site can appear like a Drupal site can appear like a ... You can argue for differences in behaviour, sure; but appearance?

I disagree. Drupal makes it hard to do easy things, creates a lot of unnecessary HTML, and makes it very hard to do things not The Drupal Way.

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#44

Post by intranation »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #38
npongracic wrote: post #34

This is great... except it looks like an empty domain page. The design is horrible.

I liked the old design with search first and foremost. They should bring that back.

It didn't test well:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/03/why-weve-chan...

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#45

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Nursie wrote: post #17
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty important point IMO. Why couldn't they use a local analytics system? Perhaps partner with one of the OS analytics like Piwik? Edit: Um, I just looked, they don't appear to be using GA but a local system already?

Err... Still there when I look at the page source for the front page at https://www.gov.uk

Yep, it's there, forgot to allow scripts (I use NoScript) before using Firebug to check the scripts! Doh!!

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#46

Post by ripperdoc »

Nursie wrote: post #2

Awesome. Except for loading in google analytics. I'd really rather that my interactions with my government were not reported to a US based megacorp.

For what it's worth, one of Sweden's major newspapers recently did an investigative article about the use of Google Analytics in so many websites belonging to banks, government institutions, political parties, etc. It's now being investigated by privacy authorities. http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/webbsidor-avslojar-ditt-besok-for-g...

Re: GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

#47

Post by Flenser »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #29
Nursie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err... Still there when I look at the page source for the front page at https://www.gov.uk

Edit: Ignore this, its wrong. I was looking in the wrong place. Should have been http://gov.uk . I've just (17:10 utc) at the source for http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ and http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-st... there is only one occurrence of the string "google" in the page, and that is is link to a font called 'cabin': http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cabin:bold type='text/css' m…

"We track usage of the site with Google Analytics, using their API heavily to build dashboards"

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

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