Tag: open government

Government organizations face challenges that include tight budgets and rapidly evolving citizen demands. They can address these challenges when they collaborate and share resources to accelerate digital transformation. In the UK, 44 local government bodies—called councils—use an open approach to share expertise and pool resources to transform their web publishing platforms using LocalGov Drupal. The GOV.UK Digital Marketplace includes LocalGov Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This post explains how councils used collaboration and shared resources to develop this digital public infrastructure which has reduced the cost of building council websites by up to 80 percent and delivered better services.

It should be simple to build digital platforms that offer people reliable, clear ways to access government services such as healthcare, business registration, and welfare payments. Cloud technology makes it possible for every service to be simple, reliable, scalable, adaptable, and secure. Public sector agencies need to be able to access the cloud, and they do so through public procurement processes. Procurement’s role in supporting modern, digital services for governments is the subject of a report from the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Open Contracting Partnership (OCP).

Public sector organizations around the world share a common concern: how can they make sure their digital transformation maintains data security? The question comes up often when I meet with government leaders around the world in my role as a government transformation digital advisor at AWS. During my time in the UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS), and now in my work with government leaders, I’ve learned important lessons about transforming services securely in the cloud. Read on for some key takeaways.

Nominations are now open for the Future of Government Awards, a new global awards program to recognize the people and projects leading the digital transformation of governments around the world. The Future of Government Awards program seeks to celebrate the hidden public sector heroes who work tirelessly to modernize their governments to improve citizen services. The awards champion innovative technology solutions that the public sector has created and shared—as well as the stories of government organizations that have successfully adapted and reused them. Nominate a public sector digital transformation hero today.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.

Governments are sharing their technology solutions with other governments through open source tools. These tools are helping state, local, and federal governments respond quicker, and at the scale needed, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, one of the challenges governments face is finding out what open source tools are available. To help public sector customers use open source tools better, AWS launched Open Government Solutions, which aggregates open source projects and assets from public sector entities around the globe for governments at all levels to find, adapt, and reuse. During a panel conversation around the launch, government leaders outlined five key reasons why governments are choosing open source technologies to deliver citizen services.