Blog

  • Rewired State: JobcentreProPlus

    On Saturday I was at RewiredState. A bunch of geeks got together to build things. We wanted to show government how it’s done! At the end of the day, we each got two minutes to present what we’d done to each other, and an assemblage of government types. People did some really cool stuff, from…

  • The UKGovWeb Teacamp

    On Thursday, we ran this month’s UKGovWeb Teacamp — a strangely named event that brings together civil servants and contractors working in e-comms and digital engagement with each other, and anyone else who’s interested and wants to come along to talk about government and the web. This month, Jenny came along to talk to people…

  • ConsultationXML Update

    Mark Little kindly reported some bugs in the ConsultationXML distribution. The INSTALL file was missing a couple of salient details: We had also unwittingly left some Javascript in the codebase, which was responsible for displaying the welcome page that you’ll probably have seen in the sandbox. This isn’t supposed to be a part of the…

  • ConsultationXML is now Open Source

    We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and…

  • The Twitter blackout and User Interfaces

    Really good user interfaces are effortless. You understand what’s happening and what to do without thinking about it all. This means that the best, most essential bits of good user interfaces are often, by definition, the things you don’t notice at all. This has really been brought home to me over the last couple of…

  • Comment on the Power of Information Taskforce’s report

    The Power of Information Taskforce have been figuring out how to liberate public sector information, how to facilitate better use of the modern, social web in government, and how to support the efforts of those outside government who are doing worthy things. All in all, they’re a great bunch of people, doing great work. They’ve…