You may have noticed a couple of blog posts here recently about opening up code. The past few years have seen a lot of code released by teams across government both in the UK and internationally.
That work is regularly getting noticed, celebrated, and helping us do better. It's great to see exchanges like:
UK Ministry of Justice @MoJGovUK ground up rewrite of prisoner visits app. on @github https://t.co/k1HoYsxLpm amazing really.
— Davos/Vegas (@monkchips) January 18, 2016
@monkchips @otfrom @MoJGovUK the best part is we're working on something similar at DWP, and I was able to read the code for tips!
— Glen Mailer (@glenathan) January 18, 2016
As we look at all the activity that's going on it's clear that we could do more to connect the people generating it, to share, learn and collaborate more.
Some amount of duplication is good to help explore ideas and build an open ecosystem but there's a lot of opportunity for teams across government to re-use each others' components and also become more effective contributors to the wider open source community.
So just as we're doing some work to build the open standards community, we're going to be doing the same thing for open source and sharing code.
The first step has been to get more active with blog posts like the ones I referred to, that explore the practicalities of opening up code. Next we'll be running a workshop for implementers across government to showcase some of their work and develop ideas about how we work together better. From there, well... we'll share the findings of the workshop here and let you know.
If you're developing software in government, haven't been invited to the workshop, and would like to come, email architecture-requests@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk and we'll send you more information. Space is limited but we'll do our best.
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If this sounds like a good place to work, take a look at Working for GDS - we're usually in search of talented people to come and join the team.
1 comment
Comment by Richard Prosser posted on
A good way to share code between various Git-based repositories would be very welcome; that seems to be a widespread concern and may well require close co-operation with GitHub developers etc.