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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

The 'Government Digital Service' (GDS, sort of 'tech company for the civil service') continually impresses me.

I've no idea who (even which party) initiated it, but it was just sort of suddenly awesome. Or maybe it just evolved rapidly under great (civil) leadership and was 'always' there just not so great.

Blog has lots of good stuff too, especially articles on accessibility often do well on HN, since that's something they 'obviously' need to worry about, and actually do & do it well.

Often in comments here too (Robin something is a username I recall) - not the sort of crusty 'what's an HN?', 'you can't do that because the Oracle database on our IBM mainframe doesn't support it' department I might've formerly imagined at all.

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Yeah I'm a long time admirer.

Sadly they are encountering resistance though. Some departments would rather spend £X bn contracts with HP, Fujitsu etc. so they can retain more control.

Also they used to publish amazing service status dashboards, showing how many transactions were published, error / success rates, etc. for every digital service.

Apparently these were all killed off recently with no replacement, and no good reason given.

  >> 'you can't do that because the Oracle database on our IBM mainframe doesn't support it'

Oh gawd that's literally my day job... :O

Fortunately I rarely see Oracle on IBM z.

DB2 on IBM z is quite well capable, I'd just like for there to be less artificial barriers between teams involved in the places I encountered it :/

(Funnily enough some of it could be blamed at bright-eyed "modernizers")

credit where credit's due, it was the tories in 2011. Cameron's own initiative, rumour has it.

To the extent you can credit a single person, it's probably Martha Lane Fox, but yes David Cameron gave it a lot of political support.

Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution not Evolution - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/directgov-2010-an...

If that's the US Dept of Digital Services you're talking about, I think it was created by the Obama administration to resolve the rollout of the Affordable Care Act site where people can sign up for various plans. They see to do some cool stuff

The GDS is the model the US dept was modeled after [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service

The comment is referring to the predecessor in the UK, the GDS.

Sort of; the actual founding of USDS happened after the healthcare.gov recovery, but was directly inspired by that and included many of the same people, including the first administrator, Mikey Dickerson.

No, like more people than you might think, I am a non-American with internet access.

(And commenting on an article hosted at civilservice.gov.uk no less.)

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