4 items tagged “ukgovernment”
2018
11 barriers to coding in the open and how to overcome them (via) “Terence Eden, open standards lead at GDS, also gave a talk about overcoming barriers to coding in the open”—an intriguing recap of that talk revealing exactly how the UK government have been encouraging a culture of coding in the open and going open source first.
2009
MoD sticks with insecure browser. Tom Watson MP used parliamentary written answers to find out that the majority of government departments still require their staff to use IE6, and not all of them have upgrade plans to 7 or 8. Not a single department considered an alternative browser. “Many civil servants use web browsers as a tool of their trade. They’re as important as pens and paper. So to force them to use the most decrepit browser in the world is a rare form of workplace cruelty that should be stopped.”
2008
Show Us a Better Way. The UK Government’s Power of Information Taskforce are running a mashup competition (a.k.a. “ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated”) with a £20,000 prize fund and gigabytes of brand new data and APIs. This is a great opportunity for the software community to demonstrate how important this kind of open data really is.
2007
Yet when you look at the projects in the UK, these projects are failing. The more they fail, the more it drives [the UK government] down this weird behaviour of only selecting the biggest people - even though they've failed two or three times before.