[jystewart]

There's definitely been a lot of good thinking and guidance around the government for a long time.

The real difference here is that the Government Digital Service is empowered to actually build some of this in-house and so the principles are emerging from actual practice. We're also able to get involved in some procurement processes very early on and work with the appointed suppliers. We're also hoping that other people putting them into practice will come back with feedback we can incorporate to make them better and illustrate them more fully.

Getting these principles thoroughly embedded is going to be a long journey, but they're a far cry from being just another good practice document that'll be ignored.

[mjwalshe]

And you might add make sure any charging method is fit for purpose - I am trying to use Companies House data and they are insisting that we set up a direct debit.

HINT! FTSE 100 and FT Global 500 company's do not set up direct debits when they buy services it has to go though our accounts department in the normal way.

[ktizo]

I agree that there has been loads of good thinking around the government, I was just unaware that any of it had managed to filter inside.

While you are at it, can you try and get the whole government onto github so we can fork it ;)

[jystewart]

Not sure about the whole government :)

But we're getting most of our code up there and beginning to convince others that code funded by taxpayers should be released as openly as possible.

We've received some interesting pull requests along the way, eg. https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1

[ktizo]

I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this.

Any chance on getting similar standards applied to the ordinance survey data?