Better search for e-petitions – handling misspelled content with a Solr phonetic filter

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Tom

We recently overhauled the search functionality for the UK government's e-petitions site, run by the Government Digital Service, a new team within the Cabinet Office. Search has an important function on the site; users are forced to search for existing petitions which cover their area of concern before creating a new one. This cuts down on the number of near-duplicate petitions, and makes petitions ...Continue reading

Searching for (and finding) open source in the UK Government

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Charlie Hull

There have been some very encouraging noises recently about increased use of open source software by the UK Government: for example we've seen the creation of an Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office, which lists Continue reading

Encouraging the use of open source software in government

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Charlie Hull

I spent yesterday evening at the British Computer Society on the panel of an event organised by the Open Source Specialist Group, nominally discussing the skills required to build Content Management Systems (CMS) using open source software (OSS). We heard a lot about a the fe...Continue reading

Open source in the UK

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Charlie Hull

We've recently been forging links with the UK's larger open source software community and have joined the Open Source Consortium. Another interesting organisation is Guildfoss who have asked us to speak at an event on 9th June at the British Computer Society's offices in London on discussing the skills necessary for buildin...Continue reading

Events: Open source for government and search in Cambridge

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Charlie Hull

We'll be attending the Guardian's Public Procurement Show on June 14th & 15th as part of the Open Goverment stand - with the recent release by the UK government Cabinet Office of a new IT strategy (here are some industry reactions...Continue reading

UK Government IT – a closed shop to SMEs and OSS?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Charlie Hull

There's a lot of buzz currently around the UK government and its approach to IT projects (which has been historically rather poor in terms of delivery, schedules and cost). We've writt...Continue reading