alpha.gov.uk

» see alpha.gov.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In November 2010 Martha Lane Fox handed the Cabinet Office a report titled "Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution". Its argument was that the British government's sprawl of websites, running at about £128 million a year, should collapse into one domain. The Government Digital Service was assembled to find out whether that was even possible. What it built was alpha.gov.uk, a prototype of a single government website, put online in public on 11 May 2011, a day later than planned.

The homepage was a search box with example queries sitting underneath it, prompts like bank holidays, and behind it a few dozen pages written as answers to questions people actually had. It drew over 100,000 visits inside two months. Nearly a thousand people left structured feedback and roughly three thousand more said something about it on Twitter.

On 29 July 2011 Tom Loosemore published the wrap-up post and the experiment was formally over, though the prototype itself stayed online for months afterward. In replay, the last day the working prototype answers is 25 January 2012. GOV.UK's beta launched on 31 January. By 5 March the address was serving a single page whose first line read "The alpha.gov.uk prototype has now closed."

~ the case file ~

~ twelve weeks and 261 thousand pounds ~

Those are the two numbers the whole thing rests on. Twelve weeks from a standing start to a public prototype, at a cost of £261,000, set against an annual web publishing bill of £128 million and a claimed saving of £64 million a year if the single domain happened. The build came in at about two tenths of one percent of the annual bill it was proposing to cut.

The second objective in the wrap-up post is the one that outlived the site: to build a government website using open, agile, multi-disciplinary product development techniques, shaped by an obsession with meeting user needs. The point of doing it in public was that people could tell you it was bad while you were still able to change it. All but a handful of the team that built alpha.gov.uk were full-time civil servants at GDS within a year.

~ the notice that replaced it ~

Turkey had already settled the single-domain question by then, without a prototype. e-Devlet Kapısı opened at turkiye.gov.tr in December 2008, thirty months ahead of the British alpha, and it arrived as a working service portal with nothing experimental attached to it. Watching the UK debate the feasibility in public therefore read oddly from here. The part that did not exist locally was the part the British made the centerpiece, which was publishing an unfinished government website and inviting the country to complain about it.

The closure page is 1,385 bytes. A heading in Gill Sans, four short paragraphs and a screenshot of the homepage. Underneath that, links to the wrap-up post and to the plans for the beta, then a line of small print noting that The National Archives had taken its own copy on 4 October 2011. The last paragraph thanks everyone who helped out by providing feedback on the alpha.

That page came and went through 2012 alongside intermittent 404s, and today the address returns HTTP 410 Gone under the title "410 - Page Archived". That is the British government's standard code for a page that was here and is not here now.

~ what the prototype was actually for ~

Nothing about alpha.gov.uk was meant to survive. Its job was to be an argument you could click on, and it won: the beta went live on 31 January 2012, GOV.UK replaced Directgov and the Business Link services on 17 October 2012, and all 24 ministerial departments had moved across by 1 May 2013. The prototype is the only part of that sequence that got a closing notice, because it is the only part that was ever supposed to end.

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