[ZeroGravitas]

I'm proposing that we don't pretend that this is an old, unused site that someone has stumbled across because goverment IT is doing such a good job not breaking old hyperlinks.

It's still in active use and it's still terrible. Those are simple facts that doing the relatively easy job of moving a bunch of PDFs and static web content to a new site are not going to change.

Government IT (in the UK and elsewhere) has been, and still is, totally fucked up. Let's not hide from that fact because it's only by publicizing the sorry state that it's in that things like alpha.gov.uk can get any traction compared with the traditional way of doing things. But even that's low-hanging fruit compared with the regular billion pound disasters that government IT procurement regularly delivers.

[UVB-76]

Nobody is pretending anything. It's the old DWP website. The DWP has a new home on gov.uk, which is much better, and is transitioning — actually rather quickly, given all the red tape that must be involved — to this new site as we speak.

The old website only persists because a few remaining functions have not been transitioned yet. It's rubbish, but it's actively being replaced. Criticising it is pointless.

It's interesting that you refer to alpha.gov.uk. The gov.uk site left the alpha stage and officially launched in October 2012, and as much as government IT projects are usually a disaster, you can't deny gov.uk is a major step in the right direction.

[ZeroGravitas]

Have you got any evidence that it's actively being replaced?

All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not likely to win many design awards either.

It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the simple task of putting information online, but anything past the 20th century web still seems beyond them. Hopefully it's the next step, I don't really envy the people that need to make that cultural change happen. I do however feel it's more likely to happen sooner if we don't pretend that it'll just happen magically by itself.

[anu_gupta]

Well, the GDS team are pretty open and transparent. Why not go take a look a their blog where they go into quite a lot of detail about their plans?

[ZeroGravitas]

I did look actually, the stuff I found all had a strong "content" focus. Which is the obvious place to start but as they say themselves, reflecting on getting every ministerial dept on board and their first six months: "it’s barely the end of the beginning".

I did spot a mock-up of a form for reporting lost Passports, which when I googled for it was a nice 3 question form which after processing your answers used that information to give you a link to the correct PDF form to fill in and post (ok, to be fair it gave some helpful extra contextual info like the relevant countries embassy info, but to be unfair if you ask it about an Adult passport, then want to know about a child passport--because I'd imagine losing your whole families passports at once is relatively common--it forces you to answer the remaining 3/4 questions again).

So, some little steps in the right direction as far as web apps for interacting with government are concerned.