Talks

This was originally posted on the Government technology blog A short while back I was fortunate to speak at GitHub’s annual Universe conference in San Francisco. GitHub is a tool we use extensively at GDS and it was good to be able to talk with other customers, share how we’re using the product, and discuss the future product direction with their core team. I was asked to tell the story of GOV.UK and that’s what most of my talk covered. Starting with Martha Lane Fox’s report, the alpha version of GOV.UK and the story from there. I was keen to emphasise a number of points. ...

Last week I delivered the opening keynote at Salford University’s Future of Government ICT conference. Sadly I was only able to be there for an hour or so and didn’t get a chance to hear any of the other speakers, but it was fun to get a little time there and to talk with a few participants. The talk was trying to jam together an update on what GDS is working with and some thoughts on what’s going on in the tech world more generally. That was a lot to cover in half an hour! ...

I was delighted to join the staff and students at MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. I shared an overview of the Government Digital Service journey The talk was kindly live blogged by Rodrigo, Ed and Erhardt.

Taking two days out of the hectic build up to the full launch of GOV.UK, I spoke at Javazone 2012 in Oslo to share the GDS story so far. You can find a video of the talk on vimeo.

This weekend was the inaugural BarCamp Grand Rapids. I was only able to make it for the day on Saturday, missing the previous evening’s introductions, talks, and trip to Grand Rapids Brewing Company, but it was good to be able to attend, and even better to have it just a short bike ride away. It was a fairly small group that was gathered, so almost all of the sessions ran in a single room. Java developers were in the majority—probably not a surprise given that it was the local Java Users’ Group that put the event together—but those of us working with dynamic languages made sure that those languages got their share of mentions. ...