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Comment by dazzawazza | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of things to complain about in the UK but the digital services bit of the UK government is really well run.

Congratulations on riding out the thundering herd.

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Indeed. They also maintain a site dedicated to the gov.uk web design system, with free resources such as HTML components. https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Wow! The team in charge of digital at UK Govt are rockstars! Simply amazing for a govt agency to be this good!

They surely make some EU countries look like amateurs. It's not usual to run digital services in-house like this in southern Europe, instead all this stuff is outsourced to consultancy firms that deliver unresponsive, buggy sites for absurdly high prices.

That was the usual pattern in the UK too, until GDS. (We used to have world class computing facilities in the past before outsourcing them, but that was pre-Web). Credit to those involved (and to Francis Maude, the Conservative minister who believed in the project and gave them sustained political cover - I am decidedly not a fan of the Tories but that was very good work).

Italian digital team has a similar website. https://designers.italia.it/

But I believe believe most Italian agencies or local governments (around 22,000) don't follow those guidelines yet.

"all this stuff is outsourced to consultancy firms that deliver unresponsive, buggy sites for absurdly high prices." it's a good description for MOST (not all) Italian Government web presence.

That's a cool site. I'm afraid Spain is not even close to having something like that, there's a consultancy firm epidemic here due to our flexible contract laws.

Never give up

Don't remind me... The german COVID vaccinations sign-up page being down every time someone even looks at it the wrong way has been a constant news topic over the last few days.

Also goes for stuff like election software, getting the basics of the basics wrong - not even checking user privilege on admin pages.

Government form pages often just fill out PDFs for you that you have to print, finalize and send off yourself.

Also their infra (or at least part of it) is available in public on github https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-puppet

Best not mention the COVID app.

Plus the search tool: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/26/govuk_tier_postcode_l...

(Worse of all, Auntie Beeb (aka the BBC) has operated a similar tool without issue.)

That didn't have anything to do with the GDS.

That got farmed out to a consultancy with the ear of one of our glorious politicians..

I will shit on gov IT any day of the week but I'm not blaming GDS for that particular fire.

It's good, but in terms of content, it's impossible to keep up with the government's ever-changing position, lack of communication, and lateness to act.

The gov.uk "Brexit checker" is full of out-of-date information and plain broken links.

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