It’s been about ten days and it feels a lot longer, but recently we unveiled a rather important beta: GOV.UK. That beta is a “live operational test” of a new single-domain for government. It’s a radically simplified way for people needing UK government information and services, built in-house with a set of publishing tools that lay the groundwork for a broader platform.

This beta came out of the work a team of us did to build alpha.gov.uk, itself a deeply unusual creation for a government website: built by an in house team, ruthless in scope and relentless in user focus, and above all a prototype designed to trigger conversations. The alpha worked: it triggered good, constructive conversations, it helped us identify things that worked and others that didn’t. It paved the way for the creation of the Government Digital Service and to the beta of GOV.UK.

Around the release I’ve been writing quite a bit on the GovUK blog: an explanation of our hosting choices (AWS/EC2), there’s a colophon to list our key tools, a high level overview of how we’re using puppet and provisioning servers, a status update on the APIs we’re building. I also did a little interview for wired.co.uk, answered a few questions for O’Reilly Radar and found myself on stage (at the end of the day, having only had 3 hours’ sleep) at monkigras.

Which is really all to say that there’s not a huge amount more to say here other than to signpost all that content and to say “watch this space” cause we’re far from done!

Oh, and we’re hiring (not just ruby devs)

So, you saw all the gov.uk @govuk news this week, exciting huh! Why not come and join the team? Ruby devs, YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU. Email me.

— Thayer Prime (@Thayer) February 3, 2012

What I’d not explored for a while was the simplest way to implement app-to-app oauth where there’s no UI for user interaction so over the New Year break I pulled something together for another project. It’s all pretty straightforward but not very well documented so I thought I’d better share.

The easiest thing to do if you want to allow an oauth client to work with your app is just to generate the ID, secret and access token for whoever’s responsible for the app and to provide them (securely) for direct use.

In order to do that in the rails app I was focussed on I knocked up a class to help me with that when using the aforementioned oauth2-provider:

and then a few rake tasks for interacting with it:

In the oauth-provider world, any “authorization” can be owned by a resource, which is any other model in your app. In a standard app like our SSO solution that’ll probably be a user, but in the app I’m working on here it’s an organisation that may have many users. You get access to that resource in your controllers with, eg:

And with that I had my API protected using everyone’s favourite standard authentication protocol.

The section on “API-centric architectures” particularly chimes with our approach and the idea of an “outside-in model” resembles what I was getting at in “Building APIs, building on APIs“. I quite like the use of the phrase “outside-in”, and the iterative approach implied in:

In an outside-in model, one would start with easy consumption (read REST) of perhaps “chatty” APIs and then improve upon them. This is in contrast to thinking performance first and ease of use second.

As with anything user-centered this approach does require some sense of who those users are, and as ever that’s going to be the biggest challenge in most cases. To follow through, organisations are going to need to be proactive in understanding the value for others in our systems and try even harder to approach them as outsiders might.

All three are exciting changes, but it’s the last that I sat down to write about here. For several years I’ve been working on building Ket Lai, initially alone, then with James Weiner, and gradually with a wider selection of collaborators. Things were going well, and we were building up a solid base of clients and getting close to having a couple of products of our own to release. But when the call to the public sector came, it didn’t take long to agree that we’d put Ket Lai on the back-burner and jump on board.

It’s a really exciting time to be joining, becoming part of the new Government Digital Service team and working (as tech lead) on the new Single Domain beta. We’ve had some great new people sign up to join us over the past few weeks, building a team I’m really enjoying working with.

For those who want a little more detail I’ve written a couple of pieces for the GDS blog: one about our approach to APIs and another about our platform choices.

I’ve not slept much since then, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly. Apart from my email and twitter clients which are swimming in a deluge of feedback.

There’s a quick post from me on the Alphagov blog exploring the way we’re handling geographic information and place names. A longer post is coming later in the week with an outline of the technical architecture of the site, and a few more will follow exploring more nitty gritty details.

For now, please take a look, and let us know what you think!

As I was writing a few links crossed my radar that felt relevant but didn’t fit in the post itself, so I thought I’d compile them here. None of them have had a direct impact on my post, but there are tangential connections aplenty.

Varnish 3.0 Changes: We’re using Varnish quite heavily so it’s good to see some momentum behind its new version. We were bitten by the behaviour of Edge-Side-Includes with gzip’ed content so I’m particularly pleased that that’s getting some love.

If all you have is a hammer…: Rachel Andrew explains why she uses wordpress rather than one of her company’s CMS products. It’s a very good response, and I’m hoping we’ve exhibited a similar pragmatism in architecting (which sounds overly grandiose, perhaps “piecing together” would be better) Alpha.gov.uk.

What is #devexp?: Adewale Oshineye’s write up of a set of ideas around how to improve the experience of using development tools and libaries: “Developer Experience (#devexp) is an aspirational movement that seeks to apply the techniques of User Experience (UX) professionals to the tools and services that we offer to developers.” It’s a far cry from where we currently are with Alpha.gov.uk tools but I’d hope some of this thinking will be included in any future development programmes.

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption in the US East Region: We’re heavily dependent on Amazon EC2 for alpha.gov.uk so I was glad they published such a thorough explanation of what caused their recent outage and what they’re doing about it.

Alpha Conversation: Richard’s post on accessibility kicked off a flurry of discussion on Saturday morning. Public Strategist pulled some of it together. It’s great to see our work triggering public debates in just the way it should.

Cloud Foundry Blog: VMWare’s work on CloudFoundry is really impressive and if it had come along a couple of months earlier we might well have been tempted to make use of it. As it is, I’m looking forward to playing with it more once alpha.gov.uk settles down a bit.

For the past few weeks we’ve been hard at work on an alpha version of a new “single domain” website for the UK government. From the first time I chatted with Tom about the project it was clear it was going to be something special, and an opportunity not to miss. And so far it’s certainly that. We’ve got a great team working flat out to produce something very special–though I should heavily emphasise that it will be an alpha release–for release early in May.

Hopefully the schedule will allow me to talk a bit more about what we’re working on, or at least about my contributions as Tech Lead. But that schedule’s tight, so I’m not promising anything!

In the meantime you might like to check out Jemima Kiss’ piece on the Guardian PDA blog or Simon Dickson’s piece.

You might also like to follow @alphagov on twitter, check out our team twitter list and/or follow me.

It seems I was far from alone in starting this year’s South By complaining about the size, but then finding that that subsided as the week wore on. It definitely had a very different feel from just two years ago (and even then people were commenting on how big it was). With events spread around town, distance between talks was a very real consideration in choosing what to go to. Or whether to go to anything at all. Most of the central food establishments had intimidating queues.

There was clearly a scaling problem. But as time wore on the usual “must go to panels” panic subsided into a focus on talking to people and enjoying Austin, and the hidden gems revealed themselves. We discovered that our friends had discovered the quality of the coffee served by Matt and his team at Frank, and that hanging around the front of that establishment was a good way to find people. And of course we fired up Foursquare, which suddenly opened up a lot more of what was going on.

(not firing up Foursquare until a couple of days in may count as my biggest blunder of SxSW 2011 – I installed it at SxSW 2009, used it for a while after it launched in London, and then abandoned it a year ago. In its home territory of a huge tech conference it is a useful tool, and the new ‘social atlas’ features are well put together)

Kellan’s point that this was the first anti-social SxSW, where public declaration was replaced by small group sharing, seems to have been borne out, at least in the way Foursquare almost entirely replaced use of twitter for letting people know where you were.

A pivotal moment for me came in the session on Edinburgh, Austin & The Future of Festivals where a comment was made that perhaps SxSW hasn’t grown too big, it’s just not yet big enough. Pointing to the example of the Edinburgh fringe, the commenter appeared to be suggesting a new feel for the event as it began to spill out of the convention centre and a new equilibrium that might follow. I found that a pretty compelling idea, and one that I mentioned to a number of people (including Adam Greenfield, who has subsequently touched on the point on the Urbanscale blog).

For me that chimed with the fact that one of the most interesting events (and one that I missed) was the fringe session run by Etsy on ‘code as craft‘. It sat alongside SxSW, a few blocks from the convention centre, but it wasn’t an official event and didn’t require a badge. Combine that with another pertinent post from Kellan suggesting that AirBnB was the breakout app of SxSW as it provided accommodation when the hotels were overflowing (it worked very well for us) and you do have strong hints at a more distributed SxSW Interactive. It’s going to require a lot of work from a lot of people, some letting go on the part of the core organisers. But as I discovered on my last day in Austin, it’s not at all dissimilar to the way SxSW Music went years ago.

One thing I would love to see–but almost certainly won’t have time for myself–would be some mapping of how people navigated SxSW. It seems like Lanyrd, Sched, and a few others have a whole pile of data that could be combined with twitter networks to give a sense of what patterns there are in how people choose their sessions. I didn’t like the “streams” in the programme at all, but it certainly felt like there were common themes running through the schedules of a lot of people I knew. Anyone want to take a stab at that? It could be useful for next year’s conference programming team.

But the line that really leapt out at me was:

“The very best filter is an empowered, engaged adult.”

(It comes along as part of a response to Clay Shirky’s comment that “There is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”)

It seems to me like a very handy telling of something we don’t hear often enough. In all the chatter about what living in the flow, and what being surrounded by twitter and the like will do to our brains, there’s a lot of taking sides, some discussion of automated filters, but not really enough stepping back and wondering what it means to be an “empowered, engaged adult” in the midst of it. We can entirely disengage, we can build better software, but at some point we always need to fall back on self-awareness and self-restraint to mediate whatever we’re surrounded by.

(it feels quite appropriate to be saying that while on a plane (and hence disconnected) and at the start of Lent)