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

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

digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

100 pointsbfirsh44 comments

Great to see.

But the headline is misleading. There's some cost savings from software licensing, but it appears that the real savings is the transition from in-person services to web services. The article below cites how the "Digital by Default" initiative (which kicked off gov.uk), is partially responsible for the DVLA cutting 1,213 jobs. These are regional offices where people stand in line to get licenses and renew registrations.

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2189527/dvla-cut-213-job...

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.

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?

I've sent site feedback on this issue now.

If I was a twitterer I might tweet about it too, but I'm not so I won't.

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':

Doesn't look like they are using google analytics to me, at least not now.

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

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

@andyjohnson0 - it's in there, around line 29 in the source.

    _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-26179049-1']);

We're also referring to http://gov.uk, which is what the OP link refers to, not the OP link itself.

Thanks! You're right and I'm wrong. I've edited my comment to make this clear.

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

Why is it important to use a local system? What is wrong with using the best system for the job wherever in the world it comes from?

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 requests my browser makes.

I'm not familiar enough with GA to be able to judge how much else is transmitted to them.

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

I honestly have no idea, and the page on cookies does seem to say that they don't allow google to use the data or do much with it, but that just raises further questions as to how they could ever enforce that.

I guess I'm just very suspicious when personal data crosses borders.

EDIT - also wondering what you mean by a separate deal? If the data goes to the US it goes to the US and is then subject to US laws (and no longer subject to EU/UK protections, deal or no.

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

Because US can use the Patriot Act to get cloud data about foreign users. That's why.

Specially considering one of the best analytics services is in the UK, http://bango.com

Easy to disable in your browser, e.g. by using the Ghostery extension.

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...

For the curious, here is the tech stack: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

> The majority of our applications are written in ruby, based on either Ruby on Rails or Sinatra.

> A few components are written in Scala and built on top of Play 2.0

> We’re running Mapit from MySociety which is built on top of Django

Thank god it is not another Drupal based government site!

wordpress this time

To be fair, Drupal et al. are great for throwing at non-technical users and letting them create their own content.

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.

Thank god the people who consistently failed to deliver large websites based around whatever the stack is didn't manage to get involved. The ones I had to work with all seemed to gravitate around education budgets, but I'm sure it's not the only dept (I'm looking at you SchoolsWeb).

So every fad platform you could possibly imagine. I reckon that the savings are up front but will cost a fortune in the long run and there are virtually no staff in the UK who can support it.

Really? Aside from Scala and RabbitMQ I know at least a dozen developers with skill sets in the rest of the technologies, and that's in my very small neck of the woods in the darkest North East England.

Demand is greater than supply in London, which is a big issue. It turns people towards high salary bidding wars, which to be honest offsets the saving.

I haven't noticed a huge shortage of Ruby on Rails devs in London, and the average salaries don't reflect a major shortage either. According to itjobswatch.co.uk, the average Ruby salary is the same as the average Java salary in London.

I also thought the idea of hiring cheap, sub-par developers as a way of saving costs was somewhat discredited by now.

Thats advertised rates. The actual rates are higher or you lose people before you get a chance to offer a place to them.

We employ starting at £50,000 and we still lose 80% of our candidates to better cash sums.

Hello, I'd like to get in touch with you. Would you be OK with sharing your email address please?

Cheers.

I know a few aspects of the .gov redev have been held outside of London, so they might look at that as a possibility.

(I think it's unlikely, most uk.gov seems to be focussed on London, which is natural and annoying)

When I interviewed with the GOV.UK people in January it turned out that the seemingly good salary they were offering was actually about the same as I'm currently paid up here in Leeds. However, the pension element of the compensation was relatively generous.

Yes that doesn't surprise me.

If you've lived in London for a number of years, you'll realise you need real cash up front to survive here as the transport and accomodation costs are sky high.

My rent for the 3 bed terraced house in South West London I moved into on Saturday could get me a 7 bedroom mansion with several acres of ground near Leeds...

> there are virtually no staff in the UK who can support it.

On the contrary, for at least one of the less well-known platforms, RabbitMQ, they are based in London: http://www.rabbitmq.com/contact.html

Saying that you can't get ruby devs in the UK is also not true.

(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.

Great, where's that money gonna go now..

reducing the deficit?

Inconceivable.

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...

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