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This is an example of how to run a government IT project. Extremely well run team, excellent programmers and designers and using a lot of interesting technology

by dmytton 14y ago

This is an example of how to run a government IT project. Extremely well run team, excellent programmers and designers and using a lot of interesting technology. That's cool for the tech community but for the majority of the users the biggest benefit is a single location for everything. Direct.gov.uk was still a collection of links to lots of external sites but the goal with gov.uk is to have everything on one site. I think this is a great project. Some background at http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/directgov-a-quiet-history/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/directgov-a-q...

antihero 14y ago
I've always thought a dedicated team of coders, managed and directed well, would be much better for government/educational IT than going with giant corrupt companies. I do hope this goes well.!
- D3 14y ago
  >I've always thought a dedicated team of coders, managed and directed well, would be much better for government/educational IT than going with giant corrupt companies. This is generally true. Most people do not realise that software development is primarily a social phenomenon. The bottleneck in societies, which increases rapidly given an ever increasing society size, is communication. By physically placing management and the techies in different locations the communication slows down. Slow communication means that the wrong problems are being solved and resources are being wasted. Since resources are being wasted, time is constrained which reduces quality. There is a golden middle for the size of an organization. This is something which society at large does not yet recognise.
apaprocki 14y ago
The Presidential Innovation Fellows[1] are attempting to do the same thing w/ MyGov[2] and four other projects. The code for MyGov will be on GH[3]. [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows [2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/mygov [3] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/mygov
glomph 14y ago
But gov.uk just links to direct.gov.uk which then links to external sites....

by dmytton 14y ago

antihero 14y ago

I've always thought a dedicated team of coders, managed and directed well, would be much better for government/educational IT than going with giant corrupt companies. I do hope this goes well.!

D3 14y ago
>I've always thought a dedicated team of coders, managed and directed well, would be much better for government/educational IT than going with giant corrupt companies. This is generally true. Most people do not realise that software development is primarily a social phenomenon. The bottleneck in societies, which increases rapidly given an ever increasing society size, is communication. By physically placing management and the techies in different locations the communication slows down. Slow communication means that the wrong problems are being solved and resources are being wasted. Since resources are being wasted, time is constrained which reduces quality. There is a golden middle for the size of an organization. This is something which society at large does not yet recognise.

apaprocki 14y ago

The Presidential Innovation Fellows[1] are attempting to do the same thing w/ MyGov[2] and four other projects. The code for MyGov will be on GH[3]. [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows [2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/mygov [3] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/mygov

glomph 14y ago

But gov.uk just links to direct.gov.uk which then links to external sites....