When I blogged about the GDS launch, before Christmas, I noted that how it did things was at least as important as what it was actually doing, and possibly moreso. Within the first 24 hours of the new gov.uk beta site going public, we have a perfect example of this.
The gov.uk team have an account at Github – which, you won’t be surprised to hear, is where all the cool coding kids hang out these days. For the benefit of those of a certain age, Git is neither randy nor Scouse. It’s a ‘version control’ system, which lets multiple people work on the same code file(s). The GDS team are using it for their own benefit; and they’ve made the account public, so other people can see what’s happening, work out how it can be fixed or improved – and then submit amended code for potential inclusion.
David Mann picks up the story:
Matthew Somerville, a notorious polymath (and former civil servant) found an issue with our bank holidays page. … He downloaded the code for that particular page from our open source code repository, and then corrected the code and uploaded the changes to GitHub. He submitted a pull request (ie he proposed that we include his changes). After careful testing and checks, we have now included his contribution into the GOV.UK code and the change will appear on the site soon.
And here’s exactly how it happened, over at Github.
A certain amount of perspective is required. Matthew is a pretty special case; and the code change in question was trivial (in code terms, rather than legislative terms). But let’s revel in the fact that it happened. An Outsider spotted a problem, wrote a fix, sent it in, and the Cabinet Office activated it.
This is what progress looks like.