I was completely blown away by the scale of the ingenuity, pace, energy and ideas that were showcased yesterday at #YRS2010 – and all of it mostly self taught by these young kids. I was deeply impressed that the Guardian offered to take on the developers (if they wanted the opportunity) and to see how far their idea’s could go. Such practical and commercial experience would be such a boost to these young developers, and I’d hope it would only increase their appetite to go further in this field.

I would love to see Government tap into this rich talent, and not to be bogged down with Change Boards, Project Initiation Documents, Business Cases, Risk Registers etc that goes with most projects/programmes of work. But more importantly I think we need to look at how can Government help support this talent? Questions started formulating in my mind and I don’t know what the answers are, but should we at least start the discussion and see where it takes us?

– Do we need to reconsider *how* we teach ICT within schools?
– What can be done to encourage more events like this?
– Is Government doing enough to keep talent like this engaged in the education system or do we need to consider a different approach?
– Can Government learn from this fast agile approach to development and use it for existing or new up and coming projects?
– Can Government open up more data, or put pressure on those bodies that they supply funding and grants to i.e. Arms Length Bodies, Non-Departmental Public Bodies, Service Operators (Buses, Trains etc), Trading Funds that deliver services to the public – make it part of the funding regime that in turn these bodies/commercial organisations have to free their data up that is open standard compliant?

Excellent blog post Julia, and many, many thanks to the organisers and of course the young developers for showing me that there is a future out there, but we need to invest, support and nurture our talent and most of all open up the data. That seems to be the biggest hurdle so far. Not just the lack of available data, but the quality or consistency of the data when it is released.

There’s a long way to go, but I think we are on the right track 🙂

Involving more people and at more locations than last year, Young Rewired State reached its climax yesterday with presentations from young coders in London. Besides the teams from London, Brighton, Manchester and Norwich, plus lone coders from Dundee and Reading, crowds arrived at the top floor offices of Transform yesterday to see what the coders had been able to come up with during the week. Judges were Andrew Stott (Government’s Director of Di … Read More

via Julia’s Blog

07 Aug This entry was published on August 7, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Civil Service, Government, Training. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.