No, the <i>Government Digital Service</i> (<a href="http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/</a>) GitHub account.<p>They're building a new, single Government website, currently in beta at <a href="http://www.gov.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.gov.uk</a>, to replace the current <a href="http://direct.gov.uk" rel="nofollow">http://direct.gov.uk</a> and other government websites.
There's also the US Government's Github including the White House:<p>* White House: <a href="https://github.com/WhiteHouse" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/WhiteHouse</a><p>* Other Federal Agencies: <a href="http://gsa.github.com/federal-open-source-repos/" rel="nofollow">http://gsa.github.com/federal-open-source-repos/</a><p>Some state and local ones are listed at:<p>* <a href="http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Public_Software_Repositories" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Public_Software_Repositories</a>
Now I'm not bashing anything by this comment, but I'm surprised they built it in Ruby/Rails.<p>It doesn't really match the traditional integration paths that they're going to have to deal with across direct.gov.uk and I'm genuinely not sure it'll scale up that high if they are pushing people down that route.<p>We all know what happens once a year when we have to do our tax returns and that's all on a huge Java EE cluster apparently.
I am utterly utterly overjoyed seeing this, even with caveats.<p>Government has been described as the engine of a lawn mower and the brakes of a Rolls-Royce - so it's good to see the brakes off for a while.<p>I do worry about those brakes though. In the design principles they disparagingly refer to an article on beekeeping as not a core focus for government (you did not know Ron Paul was a RoR guy did you?).<p>But beekeeping is on the live site because it represents a constituency of the live governemnt. Although they are under the cabinet office and so theoretically able to say no, I think hoping you can slim down government through web design is a bit - optimistic.<p>Dirctgov started off as optimistic as these guys - and what is not on github is the decision making process - when their mailing list is world readable as well as their code then we shall have open government<p>till then, the beekeeping lobby will have it's way - eventually.
I wonder what the legal background of this is. My understanding that every work created by the UK government is protected by crown copyright which is only waived in certain very specific cases (and this is not listed amongst those). Can anything under crown copyright really be considered open source?<p>(It doesn't say anywhere that it is, by the way, although there is a BSD-style license).