Working In The Open
An emerging set of practices for transparent, accountable and humble digital public services.
Why work in the open?
- You don't know what you don't know and who you don't know. Working in the open means you can rely less on hierarchical routes to connect with other people with a shared interest in your work.
- Digital is different. Digital services are highly mutable. They can change radically user-by-user and over time. Working in the open is a digital approach to providing transparency to digital services.
- Institutional memory and documentation. New starters to a team can understand past work more quickly and external parties can understand what decisions have been made and why
- Showing how public money is being spent. Digital practice can be as opaque as digital services. Showing your workings means it;s clear what public money is being spent on.
- Building trust. The absence of information about how digital services really work, and why they work the way they do, creates space for myths and guesses.
- Sharing your recipes. There's probably another team somewhere doing something similar. Help them get a head start. It's nice to be nice.
Patterns for working in the open
- Public show and tells
- Project or team website
- Design histories
- Example user journeys
- Registers of services
- Registers of databases and data fields
- Registers of projects
- Technical architecture diagrams
- Registers of Lists of risks and mitigations
- Public backlogs and roadmaps
- Documentation
- Status and issues
- Incident logs
- Weeknotes
- Release notes
- Software code