[Bradford] gov.uk site out of beta today

[John McLear]

Prolly the most useful link is the link to their repos: https://github.com/alphagov
For some bizarre reason they have re-invented some already available jquery plugins and other existing functionality (although I'm not sure about RoR stuff as much as others in this community).  Dunno if it's just cruft or they decided they couldn't use already existing GPL stuff cause of a conflict in license or something...
Also interesting is their lack of contributions back to open source projects, probably because for the most part they have forked already existing projects and just modified to suit their use case.   It'd be really interesting to see if they document their "contributions to open source projects" in the form of accepted and closed pull request URLS and/or specific commits.
Another criticism I'd have is that their readme's aren't verboose enough (or qualify as readme's)..  Example: https://github.com/alphagov/EFG -- Perhaps someone from this community would enjoy going through each project and contributing a slightly more verbose README, it would be a relatively low hanging fruit and make the barrier to adoption/uptake much lower for developers.
Until they address these issues they surely can't be expecting contributions from developers/communities but maybe they expect that by keeping documentation internal they wont expose any obvious early security holes.  It's always hard to second guess .gov
Either way it's a huge step forward and in the right direction for Governments but still work to be done :)  I will be sharing my thoughts/feedback w/ my contacts in .gov.


Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:20:15 +0100
From: nick at ngrhodes.co.uk
To: bradford at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: [Bradford] gov.uk site out of beta today

Today can be considered the official launch of www.gov.uk  as it moves out of beta.

There is a jaw droppingly yawn-some opening speech http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/


You can get lots of bland over edited blurb about users first, transparency etc http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/17/why-gov-uk-matters/


And something for the geeks - open source technologies listed: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

As someone who works for the Gov indirectly (under the DoH, but NHS employed), there has been a lot of talk about reducing licensing costs and open source as a term seems quite popular amongst the management as a method of avoid paying  license fees. I have no indication that they actually understand what open source is (they all think open source = free). I just hope its an initiative that that becomes more than a token gesture to satisfy some Ministerial whims and goes on to provide better value to our citizens.


Cheers, Nick.


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