I wonder why the gov.uk team are getting so much publicity(?) In the last few years.
As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
Irrational fear, I know, but I cant shake off the startup-vibes I'm getting when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
gov.uk got started, in part, because the 2009 financial meltdown left a lot of good startup designers and engineers with not enough to do (and made civil service jobs more attractive for a bit!)
It’s likely part of their efforts to be more transparent, work with other governments and better support departments without having to be in 50 places at once. It’ll also help with recruitment.
Doesn't it make a lot of sense to be open about how a public service is built and delivered, maybe much more so than any for-pay service in fact?
It's a very broad topic to cover so I'll be terse with evidence/examples only. UK government provides a lot of open data and APIs for the country [0], [1]. They are free and pretty much not throttled. They have a license [2] for a lot of this data which is formal but nearly as free as John Carmack's legendary hacker-friendly "have fun" license [3]. There is also a lot of historical Ordnance Survey data and historical legislation data from the National Archives. And of course, you can see the openness in how they have built gov.uk, as blog articles appear on HN about it quite often.
There is also a lot of government infrastructure provided to local governments, such as gov.uk Notify [4] or a freely available NHS website CMS (which is why many NHS websites work the same). There is a guide [5] mostly intended for government services but free for others to use on building accessible, secure and quite good-looking websites.
Most other governments I lived under are either technically behind UK or they have very advanced tech capabilities in certain branches of the government only (such as the armed forces) but keep it out of the public eye. Ultimately, I think it is the culture of welcoming everyone's participation in technology that makes UK gov so forthcoming and open with their tech and data. Doing this is seen as kind and civilised, which is how governments want to be seen. Of course, there are still areas of improvement in how UK gov provides data, as there always are in everything.
Finally, I should mention you can find many BBC technology outreach programmes from the early days of home computing. They are all over YouTube if you search for "BCC home computing". There was and continues to be a lot of techno-optimism in the country. It is one of the admittedly not many things that persist from the pre-austerity times.
[1] https://www.api.gov.uk/index/#index
[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...
[3] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/README.TXT (before GPL became popular, id software code was distributed with this readme that said "Have fun")
Salaries play a significant role.
Unlike a lot of other countries, private sector salaries for SWEs suck in much of the UK, and gov.uk (in reality part of the Civil Service), GCHQ+MoD, and BBC can pay fairly competitively and give a fairly decent pension compared to private sector gigs.
That said, I'd disagree with NHS IT - it's almost entirely outsourced to regional MSPs who suck (and I say this as a former vendor who's helped sell products those guys use in NHS environments)
I mean, unless the next PM is Zombie Thatcher, this seems like an excessive level of privatisation.