>>obilgi+(OP)
"while it’s right we should provide information about VAT it’s not necessary for us to provide information about keeping bees http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121015000000/www... "

LOL, I've heard some bad stuff about the OneGov team, but this is great.

>>obilgi+(OP)
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052

>>obilgi+(OP)
Related link about some of the technologies used on gov.uk.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

>>obilgi+(OP)
Been exploring the gov.uk site, and I'm very very impressed. Unlike the Manchester.gov site[1], there's an excellent information density yet a very lightweight feel. Maybe it's my preference for text-based designs over icon-based ones, but I feel like I can find what I need incredibly quickly.

[1] http://www.manchester.gov.uk

>>obilgi+(OP)
Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad.

The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something.

They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform)

So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.

>>widder+33
The Manchester site's still pretty decent though. Unlike http://cardiff.gov.uk.

>>cheery+r4
They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov.

>>jackfr+n9
As another example, the app behind what powers the Design Principles, which is what this post links to, is here: https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles.

>>bapbap+rb
This report started it all: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-propos...

>>obilgi+(OP)
Obligatory link to the moronic Daily Mail article about gov.uk:

"And the award goes to boring.com! Government website beats off 100 others to be named world's best design" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310191/And-award-go...

>>ed_bla+Bc
@liammax and @MTBracken (twitter) are "UK CTO" and director GDS, and currently the leading lights in this one.

One thing to note is the Open Source software, in guidance handed to all government departments, should be preferred over proprietary software. (link in here somewhere http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism)

In addition the "G-Cloud" - a online catalog of pre-vetted service providers, has 80% SMEs on it and a govt buyer can simply sign up online for a Saas service there and then with a govt credit card, legally

I feel that Open Source in government will have serious network effects globally, so getting this right now for the UK could lead to a very long tail / virtuous circle for UK devs in the future.

>>_mulde+sh
> the only option open to them is to design their own in-house (In UK for that matter) version of Google Analytics to do their own analysis.

They could just install Mint on their own servers. Problem solved.

http://www.haveamint.com/

>>mbesto+rk
Of course it's personally identifiable. AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak and more recently Netflix http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf tried to anonymize datasets and failed. With a website, you can geo-locate the IP, cross-reference with timestamps, and probably ID more than half the users. Someone tested how hard it is: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/de-anonymize-cellphone-da... With 4 location datapoints + timestamps, you can differentiate 95% of people.

>>obilgi+(OP)
These guys are doing an incredible job. Liam Maxwell is smart and has a background in startups. I got the privilege of listening to him speak a couple months ago. Wrote up the experience here: http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/

>>obilgi+(OP)
Hi just read the first comment as I got to dash off. I would say - ditch Google Anlaytics and use something open source like http://piwik.org

>>obilgi+(OP)
More like these here: http://principles.adactio.com/

>>Nursie+je
gov.uk uses _anonymizeIp[1] so you do get some privacy there.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

>>Nursie+je
"Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics?"

I'd like an answer to this too from the .gov.uk team.

Ironically enough, their service design manual (which is excelllent and a fantastic resource) has a very good section on analytics tools [1]. Some quotes:

"When deciding which analytics tool is most appropriate for your service, you should consider the following...who owns the data (it should be your organisation!)

Does the solution meet the EU privacy directive and the European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection?

- where is collected data held?

- do data centres meet EU/British data security standards?

- how long is data held for?

- what will happen to the data on termination of the contract- can you export it?

- what access your vendors employees have to your data"

Did they evaluate Google Analytics based on these guidelines?

[1]https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/analytics-...

The full list of topics in the service design manual https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/browse

>>itneve+xk
Here's some raw data: http://www.data.gov.uk/

They're working on releasing more, plus APIs, etc. It takes time.

>>itneve+xk
"First, give us the data"

Here you go

http://data.gov.uk/