GOV.UK- a truly open and collaborative platform
Those of you who heard Chris Chant’s infamous unacceptable speech will have heard the horror story of the £20,000 bill to change a single line of code.
A simple comment in our customer feedback channel yesterday afternoon showed just how GOV.UK is transforming the way government does digital. We accepted our first user-contributed code submission to the GOV.UK codebase.
Matthew Somerville, a notorious polymath (and former civil servant) found an issue with our bank holidays page. On our GOV.UK Get Satisfaction feedback page he said that the Scottish bank holiday on 3 January is in fact New Year’s Day, as the date of the Scottish bank holiday on 2 January by law cannot be adjusted as a ‘substitute day’.
He downloaded the code for that particular page from our open source code repository, and then corrected the code and uploaded the changes to GitHub. He submitted a pull request (ie he proposed that we include his changes). After careful testing and checks, we have now included his contribution into the GOV.UK code and the change will appear on the site soon.
According to Wikipedia:
“In production and development, open source is a philosophy, or pragmatic methodology that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details”
This simple code change should not be underestimated. Open source and open standards are not just central to the Government’s ICT strategy, but provide the backbone of GOV.UK.
As Mike Bracken says, we are not just improving the online experience for users but demonstrating real innovation and cost savings for government. In the old ‘unacceptable’ world, how much would this simple change in code have cost?
Written with Jordan Hatch
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Day 2 of GOV.UK- more iteration | Government Digital Service
- A quiet revolution in UK government IT: open source ousting big-vendor lock-in « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting
- Government as a local platform? | bm.wel.by
- BITTER GRITTER: Beware Inferior Private Sector Product « The Dan Slee Blog
- BITTER GRITTER: Beware Inferior Private Sector Product « The Dan Slee Blog
- GOV.UK beta | nicepaul.com
- That was the local government week that was « We Love Local Government
- Moving on from W+K – Roo Reynolds
This is quite simply brilliant. Kudos to everyone involved – keep up the great work!
Just for (boring) clarity, the 2nd January bank holiday can be moved if it needs to be (by Royal Proclamation); that wasn’t needed this year, as the 2nd was a Monday, and the law on bank holidays automatically moves the New Year’s Day holiday to the 3rd if the 1st is a Sunday.
I’ve written up some interesting discoveries starting from this fix at http://www.dracos.co.uk/scribblings/bad-bank-holidays/ – did Scotland not have the correct New Year’s holiday last year?
From £20,000 to 3 minutes in a web browser (2.5 minutes for the fork-fix-request, 30 seconds for the pull approval).
I love the use of pull-request best-practice — on a branch… named “fix_scotland” :)
Comparing a simple content change to a totally spurious and inaccurate claim of £20,000 for a single line change is a bit disingenuous isn’t it.
Hmm – I doubt a minor change like this would have cost the (so far unattributed) 20K. Also as an aside, “After careful testing and checks” this was put live (so the dev was free as open source, but govt still needed to perform due diligence before merging and putting live).
If this was outsourced IT, the testing and deployment time would be billed by the hour, the cost of which would lead to much gnashing of teeth. With an internal cost tho, despite the huge advertised salaries for GDS jobs (plugged elsewhere on this site), the real cost of even a very minor change such as this is invisible.
I love the concept…well done gov.uk….hoping to follow in your footsteps here in Ireland