Republished from GDS blog, by benterrett on 28/03/2013 The Design Museum’s annual ‘Designs of the Year’ awards exhibition launched last week. As usual it’s an eclectic mix of architecture, fashion, digital, furniture, products, transport and graphics. Category winners and the overall winner will be decided by a jury and announced to the public on 17 April 2013.   Until July you can visit the show and look at the Shard, Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic Cauldron, the Raspberry Pi, the dresses from Anna Karenina (which have already won an Oscar) and a table which costs £100,000. You can also see how your benefits might be affected by a change in circumstances, read the Dept of Health’s latest consultations, browse the Ministry of Defence’slatest news, discover how to set up a business or find out how government works. That’s because we’re delighted to announce GOV.UK has been nominated in the digital category. You can’t enter these awards; all the projects are nominated by a panel of experts. It’s a great honour to see the Civil Service recognised among such global design talent. A project on the scale of GOV.UK couldn’t happen without the collaboration...

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by Stefany Barker [original story here] In September import•io attended Wall Street Journal’s TechCafe talks with Mike Bracken, director of the Government Digital Service unit (GDS) in the Cabinet Office, and Ben Hammersley, David Cameron’s Tech City ambassador and author of 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then, to gain intimate insight into the government’s digital strategy. Bracken’s job to transform public services into a “Digital by Default” model is no easy task. Hammersley explains that there is a leap in “the way we view the world” between those who “did the bulk of [their] intellectual development before 1989” and those who did so afterwards. Given that most individuals in charge of public policy today fall in the latter category, it is fortunate that Bracken emphasises a tabula rasa approach to digital strategy. When transforming a public service, he asks “What would we do if no other technologies existed, like the phone services?”. Bracken singles-out Estonia’s e-governance as exemplary and explains that the fact that their digital strategy is fairly recent allows for an approach similar to his recommendation. Indeed, Estonia understands...

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