WIRED:The model for the UK's new government-wide system should be an inspiration to Ireland
TOM LOOSEMORE has a mischievous grin, of which I am not sure I’d want to be on the receiving end again. More than a decade ago, we were both involved in scurrilous data hooliganism in the UK in the cause of democracy. We wired a website to a fax machine and programmed it with the fax numbers of every British member of parliament. Then we entered in a postal-code database, so voters could find out who their MP was and instantly send them a message that would be deposited on their constituency headquarters desk.
It hardly sounds revolutionary – it sounds almost Victorian – but Loosemore and his band had no permission from the parliamentarians to do this, and threw the whole thing together with a few pounds. We kept the fax server under a desk in a Westminster flat so we could use free local calls to save money.
When the MPs found out, many were furious, but there was nothing they could do. Without money or an axe to grind, we were responsible only to their constituents. And the constituents loved it. I think Loosemore enjoyed the calls from MPs, who complained they were unable to do their work because of all the demand from their voters to give them the best. The grin would come out in full force then.
These days, Loosemore has gone from poacher to gamekeeper. He's now the project leader of gov.uk, a site that aims to be a frontend to all of the UK's digital services. But the website is a more ambitious than just a portal. It has a – relatively – small budget for a government IT venture: just under £2 million. And he's putting it together more in the line of a hungry start-up than a cabinet department.
The site launched last week as a “beta”. It had been built in under six months, to a deadline, and within its budget. For an early stab at a government-wide system, it looks good and works well, guiding its users to such bureaucratic tasks as getting a new driving license or what to do when someone dies.
It certainly looks very different from a civil service site.
Under the bonnet, things are different too. Instead of using the usual government contractors, Loosemore's team used open-source software, like Apache, Ruby on Rails, JQuery. The code for the site was also opened up for wider view, on github.com, a popular code-sharing and review site.
Within hours of the site opening, another public-minded coder, Matthew Somerville, submitted a bug report, and a code fix to solve the problem. The site exposes the data it uses to build its answers as an application programming interface, or API, which lets other sites use the same data in other ways.
Many see gov.ukas a leap forward for government IT projects, bringing them into the 21st century. It's going to be a heck of a lurch though.
Governments were some of the first adopters of information technology, and now there’s more than 50 years of data and “cruft” to be engineered around. Any mischievousness in Loosemore’s team has to be tempered with the realisation that the solutions built today need to last just as long. And, of course, that people’s lives and livelihoods may depend on them getting the right government information.
But gov.uk's code and "agile" development model are hardly inventions of their small team. These are best practices used by giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google.
In perhaps its bravest step, gov.ukhas used Amazon's cloud computing power in preference to bought-in, dedicated or contracted computer hardware. Some of the team's agility comes from dodging the endless specification and procurement procedures of a more traditional development model, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for outside business and the local IT industry to get a look in.
In fact, in a world where most government IT is stuck with a tiny set of trusted providers, we may be seeing novel opportunities for innovative businesses to get a foothold in the public sector.
Gov.ukused Google- and Amazon-hosted resources, but if they were good enough, it could have used the products of innovative British tech startups, too.
The same is doubly true for Ireland. The State doesn't have quite the legacy the UK's public sector IT infrastructure suffers from, but it could certainly do with a shake-up. And with Dublin still carrying a sizeable number of agile, eager tech entrepreneurs with exactly the skills that made gov.uk, the same trick could be pulled off here as well.
You can't just sling a key service server in a flat these days, but anyone could start rewiring gov.ie. Exciting tech startups have been tempting good coders and designers away from public projects for 20 years. Wouldn't it be good for the country if that flow reversed itself?
