DWP signs ‘unacceptable’ £420,000,000 contract
Chris Chant, at the Institute for Government, Thursday 20 October 2011: I think it's completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can't see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and [...] Read on »
Coming up in WordPress 3.3
The next version of WordPress, version 3.3 is on the horizon: a second beta release came out a couple of weeks back, and a first release candidate is due in the next couple of days. So what is there to look forward to? Hear it from to Andrew Nacin, one of the core developers, at a recent New York meetup. Read on »
Unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable
Even a few days after their initial publication, I'm still slightly stunned to read the comments of Puffbox's best pal Chris Chant, now back in his role as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, at the Institute for Government earlier this month. It is unacceptable at this point in time to not know the true [...] Read on »
22 more well-paid GDS jobs up for grabs
In addition to the five Government Digital Service product manager roles I mentioned at the end of last week, I've also had my attention drawn to several other roles being advertised on the Civil Service jobs website: Two creative leads (eh?), with salary package up to £80k Two technical architects, £90k 12 developer positions, with [...] Read on »
Russian infiltration on No10 website
The Downing Street website, redesigned this summer, uses a few fonts from the excellent (and free) Google Fonts service. Among them, the PT Sans and PT Serif fonts. They're really nice, and I'm considering using them myself on a forthcoming project. I've just discovered their back story via the Google site: PT Serif™ is the [...] Read on »
GDS hiring product managers
The Government Digital Service has posted a job advert, seeking five 'world-class' product managers, on a 24-month fixed-term basis. I can't see any detail on what the five 'products' actually are; but there's a lengthy application form, posted online in Word format only, allowing you plenty of room to explain why you're suitable to manage [...] Read on »
Government publishes ICT Strategy implementation plan
Following on from March's publication of the new government ICT strategy, the Cabinet Office has published its implementation plan - a long and detailed document, full of specific milestones, risks and nominated Senior Responsible Owner, leading to projected savings of 'around £1.4bn of savings within the next 4 years' (according to the press release). 'Our plans [...] Read on »
Matt WordPress vs Dries Drupal
If you have any interest in WordPress and/or Drupal as a technology, or open source more generally, I urge you to find at least half an hour to watch this video from a recent conference in Houston, Texas: Drupal's Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress sharing a platform for the first time ever. Fascinating stuff. Read on »
Civil Service website moves to WordPress (at least for a bit)
I'm grateful to the GDS blog for pointing out something I'd missed last week: the relaunch of the main Civil Service corporate website, on none other than WordPress... albeit as an interim measure. the coincidence of impending changes to Civil Service recruitment processes and the end of the existing hosting contract for the site provided [...] Read on »
GDS defends bespoke approach
I seemed to cause a bit of a stir a couple of weeks back, when I challenged the decision to develop a new Government [web publishing] Machine from scratch, rather than basing it on an existing third-party platform. My blog post got quite a few comments; and there were some interesting exchanges on Twitter too. [...] Read on »