Directgov

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

~ the last words ~

you cannot be nostalgic for a government website unless it was your government. directgov was britain's and i have never once had a reason to load it. it goes in here anyway, because it is one of the very few things on this site that died of a successor rather than of neglect.

it went live on 1 april 2004, replacing a thing called ukonline.gov.uk. the premise was that a citizen should not have to understand how the state is organized in order to use it. before directgov, renewing something or claiming something meant first working out which department owned that particular function, then finding the right page inside that department's own website, every one of them designed by a different agency to a different standard. directgov put the tasks in one place and sorted them by what you were trying to do rather than by who administered it.

it worked at the scale governments work at. by september 2007 it had taken a hundred million visits since launch. through 2008 it was running above fifteen million visits a month from roughly eight million individual people, and by the end of 2009 that was closer to twenty million. ownership kept moving around the machine, through the central office of information and the department for work and pensions, before landing back at the cabinet office in 2010.

turkey got its own version of this idea, e-devlet, in december 2008, and i have used that one plenty. that is as close as i come to a personal memory of directgov. what i recognize is the problem it was built for, which is the same everywhere: the citizen wants one door, and the state is arranged as a long corridor of doors with different signs above them.

~ the record ~

~ the letter ~

in october 2010 martha lane fox, one of the founders of lastminute.com and by then the uk government's digital champion, sent francis maude a letter titled directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution. it is short and it is not polite. the argument was that improving directgov page by page was the wrong ambition, and that the whole thing should be rebuilt as a single service with the authority to pull the department websites in behind it.

maude agreed. the government digital service came out of that letter, an alpha went up in 2011 to prove the idea could be built, and on 17 october 2012 gov.uk replaced both directgov and business link on the same day. the old address stopped being a destination and became a redirect.

~ the next chapter ~

what outlived directgov is not a website, it is a method. gov.uk's plain-language style guide and its refusal to let departments run their own front doors got studied and copied well outside britain, and the government digital service model that spread out of london through the 2010s traces back to a portal that had already been running for six years and was judged not good enough.

directgov earns a grave for the unfashionable reason. it was not killed by a fashion cycle or by an acquirer shopping for a team. somebody wrote down exactly what was wrong with it and then built the replacement, which is the ending almost nothing else in this graveyard got.

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