Projects January 2021

As the awesome GovCamp 2021 comes to an end I thought it’d be a good time to briefly take stock of the various projects I’m (albeit rather slowly) doing when not working, gaming, running, blogging, doing our podcast, learning BSL, watching TV / YouTube or playing the guitar extremely badly. Yes, I like to be busy…

International Gov Digital Slack

This is a project I’m doing with Steven Talbot from the Canadian Digital Service to see if we can find sponsors to fund a paid-for version of Slack to replicate the success of the UK cross-gov Slack but for civil servants from any government in the world. A number of people are interested but have pointed out that a lot of slacks for different communities already exist so we need to better articulate where this would fit in. Sorry to the people who’ve emailed me about this some time back that I’ve not responded to yet…

Gov Collab Group

A project originally set up by by someone else who then didn’t have time to continue. I ran a session about this at GovCamp that picked up a bunch of potential new collaborators which was great. This one is trying, again, to address that fact that civil servants in different departments have access to different cloud tools (Google Docs, Trello, etc) making cross-organisational collaboration very difficult.

Local gov central services

Another GovCamp session I ran that picked up some health interest. This is about multi-tenant digital services for local government as I described in this blog post. The next stage is to work with the group on some service design on what a “service sharing service” could look like.

Gov Reports — what’s the point

This one is about going through the pile of reports about “digital government” that have come out in the last 10 years or so, pulling out their recommendations and see which were actually acted on. Which organisation is most influential? Is there actually any point in writing another report if no-one is listening?

Virtual printer project

This one got as far as an initial prototype (not built by me I hasten to add) but needs more work before it’s persuasive enough to be productised. This is about extending GOV.UK Notify to provide an API for each service using it that looks to your PC operating system like a normal printer so public servants can easily use Notify to print ad hoc letters. I’m hoping this gets picked up during the potential hack-day (see below).

Revived “Tools for Civil Servants”

The first of two I’m only on the periphery of. This came out another GovCamp session. It’s a promised by someone to start having regular meetups to discuss reviving this previously canned excellent GDS project to look into things like a central directory of civil servants and much besides.

Government Digital Hackaton

Again not organised by me but I’m keen to help out. Riffing on the original awesome National Hack the Government Day this is about running a hack-weekend to prototype some potentially radical new services government could potentially offer.

I think that’s probably enough to be going on with… ;-)