UK Gov Comms (NON GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT)

UK Gov Comms (NON GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT)

@ukgovcomms.bsky.social

*Not* a government account. A Bluesky account for sharing best practice of government communications in the UK. Run by @bowsy.co.uk.

94 followers46 following422 posts

Pretty much everything related to the Design System has seen extensive reuse - it's a great example. Even if many departments are now using their own fork, presumably because it's difficult to get pull requests accepted from outside of GDS.

steve@visitmy.website

If you look at forks and dependents, you can see the re-use. Will use GOV.‌UK Frontend (the code for the design system) as an example. - github.com/alphagov/gov... - github.com/alphagov/gov... Not listed: organisations who downloaded the ZIP and copied elements of code into their own.

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Pretty much everything related to the Design System has seen extensive reuse - it's a great example. Even if many departments are now using their own fork, presumably because it's difficult to get pull requests accepted from outside of GDS.

steve@visitmy.website

If you look at forks and dependents, you can see the re-use. Will use GOV.‌UK Frontend (the code for the design system) as an example. - github.com/alphagov/gov... - github.com/alphagov/gov... Not listed: organisations who downloaded the ZIP and copied elements of code into their own.

This is very impressive but making code available isn't the same as it being reused. What would be really interesting, if the data is available, is how often the repos are cloned by people who aren't maintainers.

AndreasThinks@andreasthinks.me

In the proudest tradition of utterly failing to relax on holiday, I've updated my "Open Govtech Index": all the government open source repos I could find, classified and tracked, so you can see what government is building (and hopefully reuse some of it!) www.govtechindex.cloud

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This is very impressive but making code available isn't the same as it being reused. What would be really interesting, if the data is available, is how often the repos are cloned by people who aren't maintainers.

AndreasThinks@andreasthinks.me

In the proudest tradition of utterly failing to relax on holiday, I've updated my "Open Govtech Index": all the government open source repos I could find, classified and tracked, so you can see what government is building (and hopefully reuse some of it!) www.govtechindex.cloud

There's no indication at this point how this fits into the soon-to-be-published National Data Strategy from the Chief Data Officer. I've registered for email updates so I guess we'll see. To receive this kind of money projects should be mandated to blog their progress monthly *on GOV.UK*.

In 2026 this is absolutely outrageous. For over 20 years now we've lived in an environment where funding an ongoing to team to create a small-scale MVP based on user needs and then scaling functionality and use has been the proven way to achieve goals. www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article...

civilserviceworld.comCabinet Office writes off £7.7m on abandoned jobs platformDepartment says lessons from scrapped Applicant Tracking System programme will result in a future online recruitment offer that is “cost effective”

UK Gov Comms (NON GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT) reposted

We finally have definite guidance on how to name a service well in German. I wrote it over the summer, and it went live in the #ServiceStandard handbook this week. We still see a ridiculous amount of acronyms and animal names, so I had to write it. ⬇️ servicestandard.gov.de/handbuch/anl...

UK Gov Comms (NON GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT) reposted

Replying to @ukgovcomms.bsky.social

It’s not an alternative to GOVUK Notify, it’s a whole different proposition and layer of abstraction (it uses GOVUK Notify to send SMSes, emails and letters). (That they share the same name is unfortunate and not ideal)