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By Richard Pope —

Working In The Open

An emerging set of practices for transparent, accountable and humble digital public services.

Why work in the open?

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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