As James and Ade announced in December, I'm doing some work to connect practitioners in government around the use of open standards as we develop APIs, and our overall approach to data and digital services. That will complement other emerging work to bring together practitioners, particularly those working in fields related to data.
As part of pulling together that community, we’re going to be organising a kick-off workshop on the 18th of February at GDS’s offices. This will be run as an unconference event for developers, engineers and technical architects working with open standards. We will be focusing on API standards, Data standards and Web standards.
We want implementers to join us – engineers/developers, systems designers and architects who are working with technology standards as they are building platforms and systems across government.
If you're not familiar with how an unconference works, please see the wikipedia article here. Please come with ideas for sessions that you'd like to see. Some examples might be: API authentication standards; emerging web standards for security; data schemas for open data. The format of the sessions will be directed discussion and notes will be taken and published. If you propose a session please be prepared to lead the discussion as well.
The goals of the workshop are: share best practice knowledge across groups; engender and initiate a longer-term community around these topics; learn from your colleagues about projects utilising standards and about how government works with open standards organisations.
We will be publishing the outcome of the sessions.
Event Schedule [Please Note Updated Schedule]
12:15 Registration Opens
12:45 Prompt Start & Welcome
12:50 Lightning Speakers
- Linda Humphries, GDS: “The Open Standards Principles”
- David Rogers, MoJ: “Data Principles”
- David Illsley, GDS: “API Authentication Standards”
- Umer Ehsan, HMRC: “HMRC APIs Platform”
- Paul Downey, GDS: “Introducing Registers”
- Dan Heron, GDS Better Use of Data Team: “Building data science products with Registers client libraries”
- Mehmet Duran, Home Office: “Data and APIs at the Home Office”
13:45 Agenda Setting
14:00 Breakout Sessions (x3)
15:00 Breakout Sessions (x3)
16:00 Breakout Sessions (x3)
17:00 Wrap-up
17:30 Adjourn to Pub
The event will take place in rooms at Aviation House. If you are working for a UK government department, please register for the event and come join us!
If you’re interested to join some discussions early, please join the #tech-standards channel on the cross-government Slack and chime in on our issues registry on Github.
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If this sounds like a good place to work, take a look at Working for GDS - we're usually in search of talented people to come and join the team.
