Jeni's Musings

The new alpha.gov.uk website was launched recently, as a prototype for the “single Government website” described in Martha Lane Fox’s report Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution. Apparently the real deal could go live “in about a year”.

The site is lovely, a far cry from the standard government fare. But this isn’t exactly surprising: it’s been developed using modern technologies by a top team with a set of design rules far removed from those usually applied to government websites, a budget that’s not exactly tight and using an Agile methodology. These factors mark it out from the majority (though not all) government websites. And this is part of the point, to illustrate the gap between what we have and what a revolution could bring.

There are three challenges where I am and have been particularly interested to see the alpha.gov.uk approach. These are in balancing:

• simplicity and complexity
• centralisation and distribution
• end-user and data re-user

It is not currently clear to me whether alpha.gov.uk has decided an approach on any of these — whether the way the site works currently is the way that they have decided it should work — or whether these are areas that are still up in the air at the moment. I’m hoping it’s the latter.

I’m beginning to think that ‘to recommend’ is an irregular verb like those that appeared every so often in Yes, Minister:

Bernard: It’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it: I have an independent mind; you are an eccentric; he is round the twist.

Something like: I recommend, you tell people what to do, he engages in premature standardisation.

I’m aware I’ve been quiet for the past few months. This isn’t because nothing interesting has been going on — rather the opposite. It’s been difficult to get a chance to sit down and write about the work I’ve been doing, when actually doing the work has been taking up so much time.

Most of my time has been spent on the new legislation.gov.uk website and its underlying API. There’s so much to say about this project that I hardly know where to start, so I’ll just try to do an overview and we can take it from there. Let me know what you’re interested in.

This week, the Cabinet Office went live with a preview version of hmg.gov.uk/data, available only to those who subscribe to the UK Government Data Developers Google Group. Harry Metcalfe has written a great review, or of course you can check it out yourselves.

Already, though, there are discussions starting on the mailing list about how the data is being made available, and I’m worried that these might distract us from getting things done.