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Comment by 0xWTF | Hacker News Reader

Dave Guarino needs to read Seeing Like a State, Seeing Like a Bank, and Seeing Like a Data Structure. And then write his own Seeing Like a Government Website.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-...

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structu...

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Hi! This is Dave. I am in fact perhaps a top 10 fan of James C. Scott. For some evidence of this, please see: https://x.com/search?q=allafarce%20%22seeing%20like%20a%22&s...

This is a really cool idea, and I'll consider it.

(Aside: I own seeinglikeastate.com)

I know Dave personally, and I can assure you he’s read Seeing Like a State! In fact, if you spend more than 30 seconds in his presence he’ll probably give you a copy.

The UK government have one: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

Specifically the “design” section for our current context.

Italy has one too https://designers.italia.it

The UK Government's efforts to make their services digital, easy to understand and workable is such a great effort. The digital department also has many common tools to help such as notifications, forms, payments as integratable APIs instead of each government unit needing to procure this (at great cost) themselves!

My favourite API endpoint on the internet is

https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json

an always up to date list of public holidays, makes automated workload planning and working day delivery calculations so much more reliable in our internal app.

What does the "bunting" key under each event denote?

If true, it displays celebration bunting on the front page on that day. Seems to be true for all holidays except Good Friday and the Queen's funeral (plus one (probably accidental) Easter Monday). https://github.com/alphagov/frontend/commit/5466c5f9ecc896a4...

I wonder why Good Friday doesn't get bunting.

Likely the Good Friday Agreement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement

The Good Friday agreement was named after the day it was signed on, not the other way around.

Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Monday. In Christianity, in symbolises the day Christ died and Monday was the day he rose.

It’s probably because it’s traditionally relatively solemn, given like the Queen’s funeral it commemorates a person’s death.

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