Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad.
The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something.
They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform)
So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.
J2EE ecosystem and the Open Source ecosystems have little overlap - if that is your first choice, it is likely your sympathies for all other decisions, technical, methodological and organisational, will not be in line with common practise in the OSS world.
In other words, they hired the wrong guys.
Liam Maxwell and folks at GDS are hitting all the right notes so far.
The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something.
They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform)
So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.