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From YouTube: How GOV.UK Changed Government - GitHub Universe 2016
Description
Five years ago a small team in the UK government began quietly pushing code to some open GitHub repositories. A few months later that code was revealed to be GOV.UK, the UK government's simpler, clearer, faster way to provide information and open up services and the start of a major effort to transform government to be digital by default. James Stewart's session will talk about the history of that project, the real and lasting impact it's had both in the UK and internationally, and what was learned about software development along the way.
About GitHub Universe:
GitHub Universe is a two-day conference dedicated to the creativity and curiosity of the largest software community in the world. Sessions cover topics from team culture to open source software across industries and technologies.
For more information on GitHub Universe, check the website:
https://githubuniverse.com
A
Good
morning
such
a
privilege
to
be
here,
thank
you
to
get
hub
for
inviting
me.
I've
been
looking
for
this
conference
for
a
while,
but
hadn't
really
expected
quite
so
many
inspiring
stories
as
you've
just
heard
I'm
from
the
UK
government
digital
service,
we
are
often
known
as
GDS,
so
if
I
say
that
that's
what
I
mean
and
we're
a
team
based
in
London,
very
deliberately,
multidisciplinary
bringing
together
developers,
designers,
writers,
product
managers,
a
whole
host
of
others
to
work
in
teams
to
lead
the
digital
transformation
of
the
UK
government.
A
We've
been
doing
that
for
a
while
and
I'm
going
to
tell
you
the
story
of
how
that's
developed
and
what
it
is
that
we
do
but
I
think
I'm
here,
primarily
because
we've
made
a
real
effort
to
do
as
much
of
this
as
possible.
In
the
open
we
code
in
the
open,
we
tell
our
story
in
the
open.
In
a
way,
that's
been
pretty
new
to
governments
around
the
world.
So
here
it
is
so
the
story
of
GDS
begins
back
in
2010.
At
the
time.
A
The
website
that
you
can
see
on
the
screen
was
the
UK
government's
main
web
presence.
It's
called
direct
gov.
It
was
a
consumer
facing
portal
because
in
those
days
we
used
the
word
portal.
There
was
also
a
separate
site
called
business
link
for
businesses,
and
there
was
also
a
problem
because
there
were
countless
other
sites.
Nobody
knew
how
many
websites
the
UK
government
had,
and
that
was
confusing
for
people
working
in
government,
but
it
was
more
confusing
if
you're
working
outside
trying
to
understand
policies
trying
to
understand
the
services
that
you
had
access
to.
A
From
a
software
point
of
view,
it
was
run
in
a
very
old-fashioned
manner,
though
a
major
updates
and
releases,
maybe
every
six
months
and
the
content
management
system
was
so
cumbersome,
so
full
of
ActiveX
controls
that
it
could
take
two
hours
to
go
from
having
a
piece
of
content
written
in
a
Word
document
to
actually
publishing
that
on
the
web.
But
most
fundamentally
it
didn't
really
meet
user
needs.
It
was
confusing
for
citizens
of
the
UK.
It
was
confusing
for
visitors,
it
didn't
help
them
get
what
they
needed.
A
In
2010,
we
had
a
general
election
and
a
new
government
and
a
new
Minister
for
the
Cabinet
Office,
so
the
Cabinet
Office
is
the
department
at
the
centre
of
the
UK
government
that
coordinates
its
activities.
That's
where
I
work
today
and
a
minister
is
an
elected
official,
usually
equivalent
of
a
Congress
person
who
has
executive
power
over
part
of
government.
A
A
Martha
took
some
time
and
later
published
a
four-page
letter,
titled
revolution,
not
evolution,
and
you
can
see
the
start
of
it
here,
but
rather
than
making
recommendations
to
improve
a
website,
Martha
said
I've,
not
reviewed
Directgov
in
isolation,
but
as
part
of
something
much
broader.
She
recognized
and
the
team
working
with
her
recognized
that
the
opportunity
at
that
point
in
history
was
not
just
to
change
a
government
website
but
to
more
fundamentally
rethink
how
government
works
in
the
modern
era.
A
She
made
four
key
points
and
recommendations,
establish
a
digital
Center
for
government
to
bring
new
skills
and
new
expertise
in
give
them
real
clout
to
make
change
so
that
we're
not
beholden
entirely
to
suppliers.
To
tell
us,
how
is
your
work
in
government
to
fix,
publishing
sort
of
that
plethora
of
websites
I
just
referred
to
to
fix
transactions?
A
Now
Francis
Moore
did
something
that's
quite
unusual
for
a
minister.
He
very
quickly
said
yes,
and
that
gave
us
our
mandate.
That
was
the
thing
that
sparked
the
formation
of
GDS.
It
wasn't
the
first
time
the
UK
government
had
launched
a
new
initiative
about
the
internet,
but
it
was
by
far
the
most
far-reaching.
A
A
Somebody
would
write
a
series
of
progressively
more
complicated
business
cases
in
our
case,
they're
called
strategic
outline
business
cases,
outline
business
cases
and
full
business
cases.
We'd
find
a
supplier
through
a
complicated
procurement
route
and
a
large
project
would
start
with
lots
of
teams
getting
going
up
front,
which
means
everybody
spends
their
time
figuring
out.
Project
governance
that
way
lies
paralysis.
When
you
want
to
make
big
changes,
you
almost
always
want
to
start
small
and
that's
what
happened.
A
A
team
of
just
14
people,
myself
included,
was
assembled
in
an
office
behind
Waterloo
station
in
South
London,
a
handful
were
plucked
out
of
the
direct
gov
team,
but
more
of
us
were
freelancers
or
people
have
been
working
across
the
UK
tech
and
media
scene,
and
we
were
given
the
challenge
to
imagine.
What
could
a
government
website
look
like
if
we
built
it
the
right
way,
so
we
did
some
drawing
on
the
walls
that
was
a
bit
of
a
shock
to
the
system
of
people
who
run
that
building.
A
We
made
some
guesses,
we
wrote
some
code
and
we
threw
away
more
and
we
worked
at
a
scale
that
meant
we
could
actually
collaborate
as
a
team
rather
than
fussing
about
the
governance,
and
after
three
months
this
was
launched.
We
called
the
Alpha
gov
looking
at
it
leaves
me
a
bit
reminiscent
and
also
makes
me
wince
a
little
because
we'd
started
with
this
really
strong
emphasis
on
user
needs,
focusing
on
what
users
need
of
government
and
government
online.
A
But
actually,
in
this
case
our
challenge
was
to
build
something
that
provoked
a
response,
and
we
wanted
the
government
ministers
to
say
I
want
one
of
those
so
showing
a
picture
of
the
shiny
new
Olympic
Stadium
leading
with
imagery
was
really
powerful.
At
that
point,
once
again,
we
kind
of
expected
that
there'd
be
a
pause,
then
that
the
sort
of
normal
machinery
of
government
would
take
over
and
personally
I
was
looking
forward
to
a
holiday.
A
But
two
weeks
later,
we
were
back
in
the
room
that
making
an
impact
had
worked
and
we
were
asked
to
work
out
how
to
scale
this
up,
how
to
make
it
a
simpler,
clearer,
faster
website
for
government
and
replace
what
had
come
before.
So
we
started
to
build
the
team
at
this
point.
We
did
need
more
people
and
started
to
change
and
iterate
and
really
focus
on
those
user
needs
that
we
were
starting
out
to
solve.
A
So
awhile
later
got
that
UK
looked
like
this,
and
just
over
a
year
later,
we
launched
looking
a
bit
more
like
this,
which
is
how
it
is
today.
It's
not
finished,
never
will
be.
It's
always
iterating,
always
changing
and
improving
and
what's
important
here
is
this
gov
before
gov
dot,
UK
no
government
website
no
government
technology
project,
at
least
in
the
UK,
had
been
run.
This
way,
we've
procured
things
we
commissioned
them.
They
were
built
handed
over
and
finished
here.
A
And
that
iterative
approach
wasn't
the
only
thing
that
was
different
about
gov
dot
UK
over
previous
efforts.
Gov
UK
was
pushed
into
being
by
a
series
of
really
major
shifts
in
how
we
think
about
design,
how
we
think
about
software
architecture
and
protects
crucially
how
we
think
about
the
culture
that
goes
with.
All
of
that,
as
I
said
before,
gov
dot
UK
is
hardly
the
first
initiative
to
kind
of
bring
government
to
the
web.
A
You
have
to
go
back
to
1994
to
find
that
in
the
UK,
but
you
could
say
it
was
the
first
attempt
to
bring
the
web
to
government
and
the
timing
of
that
was
important.
The
internet
had
gradually
become
a
basic
resource
that
everybody
relies
on
in
their
daily
lives
and
we
needed
to
act
in
that
vein.
We
needed
to
build
our
products
we
needed
to
respond
to
our
citizens
in
exactly
the
sort
of
iterative
way
that
Chris
talked
about
in
his
keynote
yesterday.
A
A
Often
we've
got
freedom
to
experiment
to
make
mistakes
now
they
could
be
identified
and
fixed
as
we
go,
and
while
some
of
the
biggest
challenges
in
making
government
work
for
its
users
lie
far
deeper
into
the
system
is
no
accident
that
we
started
with
a
website
to
really
reform
the
deeply
embedded
cultures,
practices,
processes
and
technologies
of
a
large
organization.
You
need
to
get
close
to
your
users,
you
have
to
understand
their
needs
and
their
expectations
close
up
and
these
days
the
website
is
where
you
usually
first
meet
them.
A
Even
if
the
actual
change
you
need
to
make
is
somewhere
else,
the
tweeter
just
showed
of
Tom
Luse
Moores
was
five
years
in
the
making.
None
of
us
was
able
to
state
what
we
were
doing
quite
that
succinctly
when
we
started
unfortunately,
but
there
was
another
mantra-
that's
quite
important
in
this
telling
of
the
story.
As
you
may
well
know,
governments
are
hugely
risk-averse
places.
One
of
the
reasons
they're
slow
is
that
people
rarely
feel
empowered
to
step
out
and
take
risks.
A
A
A
Some
of
that
was
about
making
it
easier
to
tell
people
we
wanted
to
recruit
what
was
going
on,
but
just
as
Alvin
was
saying
yesterday,
there
was
also
a
sense
that
it's
the
people's
code.
If
we're
making
government
services
for
the
people,
why
not
give
them
the
code?
Maybe
they'll
help
us
make
it
better,
and
you
might
be
wondering
how
we
got
permission
for
that.
But
the
simple
fact
is:
we
didn't.
We
didn't
really
think
we
needed
it.
A
And
some
of
that
was
about
the
team
being
bold,
but
more
of
it
was
probably
about
the
culture
of
sharing
and
Trust
that
had
been
built
up
around
us.
The
fact
that
we
knew
that
we
had
cover
from
the
management
who
were
really
interested
in
the
outcomes
that
we
came
and
trusted
us
to
discharge
the
responsibility
that
came
with
that
and
so
far
nobody's
told
us
to
stop.
A
In
fact,
we
were
allowed
to
make
it
a
requirement
for
all
new
government
digital
services
across
the
UK
government.
We
have
this
standard
called
the
digital
by
default
service
standard
that
any
service
that
has
more
than
a
hundred
thousand
years
as
a
year
has
to
go
through,
and
one
of
the
points
in
that
requires
teams
to
make
all
new
code
source
code
open
and
reusable
publishers
under
appropriate
licenses,
or
provide
a
convincing
explanation
as
to
why
this
can't
be
done
for
specific
subsets
of
the
source
code
and
that
specific
subsets
is
really
important.
A
A
It's
probably
also
worth
being
honest
that
around
this
time
we
thought-
and
we
were
being
told
that
we
were
alone
in
the
UK
public
sector
and
using
open
source
we
found
out.
We
were
completely
wrong
about
that
as
we
went
around
government
and
we
looked
at
the
systems
that
we
would
be
interfacing
with
and
replacing
we
got
under
the
hood
and
we
started
realizing
that
they
were
full
of
open-source
components.
A
That's
probably
natural,
it's
hard
to
find
any
system
anywhere
in
the
world.
Now
that
doesn't
have
open
source
baked
right
into
the
heart
of
it,
but
the
culture
and
the
way
that
risk
was
managed.
It
meant
people
couldn't
talk
about
that
and
that
had
meant
that
teams
couldn't
find
each
other
teams
couldn't
help
each
other
out.
And
that's
what
we've
been
trying
to
change.
We
made
stickers
saying
look
sideways
to
remind
us
to
look
around
or
what
other
teams
do
most
by
no
means
easy:
there's
400,000
civil
servants
in
the
UK
central
government
alone.
A
So
that's
five
years
of
guff
that
UK
very
quickly
there's
a
lot
more
to
tell,
but
since
about
2012
our
ream,
it's
expanded
quite
a
lot.
After
we
launched
gov
dot
UK,
we
kicked
off
a
set
of
25
transformation
projects
working
with
8
different
departments
around
government.
We
worked
with
them
to
reimagine
those
services,
things
like
passports,
driving
licences
and
tax,
making
fundamental
changes
to
how
those
services
worked
for
their
users.
A
We're
building
new
modern
components
that
help
us
move
faster.
We
brought
over
200
senior
leaders
in
across
government
with
tech
and
digital
skills
and
in
a
project
called
digital
marketplace
were
substantially
changing
how
people
buy
and
access
services
and
technology
across
government
so
that
we
can
actually
make
use
of
commodity
cloud
services
in
a
way
that
our
previous
approach
just
didn't.
Allow.
A
It
was
great
to
hear
Alvin
here
yesterday
talking
about
code
gov
and
we've
really
enjoyed
talking
to
that
team
and
working
together.
Sharing
our
experiences
and
I
think
there'll
be
a
lot
more
collaboration
there
to
come.
This
is
genuinely
an
international
movement
of
people.
Thinking
about
how
to
do
government
differently
in
a
digital
age.
A
So
that's
a
little
bit
of
our
story.
It's
been
an
incredibly
exciting
journey
for
me
and
I
hope
that
you've
seen
some
of
what's
happening
there
and
and
can
find
similar
stories
I
wherever
you
are
being
in
government
I
have
to
talk
about
something
serious
and
responsibility
and
sitting
in
government
and
making
changes
there.
You
can't
help
but
think
about
the
responsibility
that
comes
with
what
you're
doing
significantly
changing
how
people
are
working
is
not
a
cheap
or
easy
thing
to
do,
and
you
have
to
take
it
seriously.
A
A
We've
had
to
put
a
lot
of
work
into
really
stripping
down
what
we
do
from
a
design
point
of
view
when
focusing
on
accessibility
in
its
broadest
sense
and
for
many
of
us
who
enjoy
playing
with
the
latest
tech
and
using
the
latest
frameworks
and
techniques.
That's
been
a
challenge
because
we
have
to
hold
ourselves
back
from
using
a
lot
of
them
for
our
front-end
and
engineers.
Sometimes
they
worry
that
by
working
on
this
they're
they're,
not
developing
some
of
the
skills
the
markets
are
asking
for,
but
actually
the
opportunity
to
really
understand.
A
A
A
One
of
the
slightly
surprising
projects
that
we
got
involved
with
was
changing
the
security
classification
policy
for
UK
government
documents
and
data.
When
I
started
in
government,
there
were
six
different
levels
of
classification.
You
can
see
them
up
on
the
screen
there
from
unclassified
to
top-secret
and
there
were
all
sorts
of
rules
about
how
you
handled
information
at
each
of
those
levels.
A
There
was
a
strong
message
in
that
that
we
trust
individual
civil
servants
to
understand
what
they're
doing
and
to
take
responsibility
for
decisions,
and
that's
played
out
well
in
many
places,
but
as
you
talk
to
people,
they're
really
struggling,
sometimes
with
the
extra
cognitive
load
that
comes
with
that.
Suddenly
you
have
to
think
about
every
piece
of
information
in
front
of
you
and
what's
safe
to
do
with
it
and
that's
not
easy.
We
have
to
do
a
lot
more.
A
In
our
case,
to
build
up
tools
and
techniques
to
help
people
with
those
changes
and
I,
think
many
of
us
are
working
on
projects
that
have
a
huge
impact
on.
How
are
the
people
work
and
other
people
need
to
think
and
thinking
about
that,
what
you
offloading
on
other
people,
what
efforts
are
you
putting
on
them
in
the
process
of
simplifying
parts
of
their
lives
is
a
vital
thing
to
remain
conscious
of.
A
A
Replacing
legacy
technology
is
not
there's
a
huge
risk
that
we're
just
creating
the
new
legacy.
For
me,
a
technologists
main
job
is
to
reduce
the
cost
of
change.
It's
not
to
try
the
new
fancy
thing,
it's
to
make
sure
that
as
our
understanding
of
our
users
improves
and
as
their
needs
shift,
we
can
respond
to
that,
and
that's
really
because
some
of
the
biggest
problems
that
we
all
face
in
the
future
aren't
technology
they're
problems
that
are
around
systems
and
people,
and
how
do
we
help
people
with
a
changing
world
and
difficult
circumstances?