One of the (many) things that makes me feel like a dinosaur at work is my stubborn commitment to the principle of ‘make things open, it makes things better’. I mean I literally had it tattooed on my arm.

My advocacy and support for it is starting to feel unhelpful though as it is clear that it is a relic of past ways of working and that any stated support for it from the ‘powers that be’ is paper thin at best and a cover for a culture of essentially shadow-banning at worst.

The ‘Blueprint for modern digital government’ may have reaffirmed a commitment to ‘working in the open’ but the reality (at least in my most recent few roles) is a process with more obstacles than Ninja Warrior – getting a blogpost published somewhere official at all requires real commitment and resilience (plus a willingness to forgo any personality in the output) and speaking at even a beer and pizza meet-up has more restrictions than…well honestly I can’t think of something appropriate to put here. Multiple sign-offs, questions about audiences, rules about (no) Q&As. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

This angst-fest was triggered by Jonty posting about the trend towards teams across Gov shuttering their open repos on Github. The whole ‘coding in the open’ (rather than ‘open-source coding’) was always a bit of a fudge and never really created the kind of re-sharing culture that was hoped for (though there is a push for this happening again) but it is important for all the reasons Dave wrote almost a decade ago.

I understand where it is coming from – even if I don’t think it is the right move. In a world where stories of AI hacking breaks through to the mainstream media then a (over) reaction is inevitable. Even if it seems unlikely to be effective and as likely to be counter-productive.

I’m also aware that maybe it isn’t quite as bad as it looks – some of it is hopefully temporary and some of it reflects orgs being MoG’d out of existence or similar. Still the trend is clear.

Additionally I suspect the fall of Twitter and the failure of anything to really replace it (many of us bet on Bluesky and I suspect we’ll go down with the ship – and it is definitely sinking!) means that the network that made the open agenda powerful for a moment in time is now too fragmented or distracted or AI obsessed to really push for a change in direction.

People are still out there weeknoting or blogging, spending their free-time at unconferences [lots of them] or meet-ups and generally contributing to the commons so all is not lost…but it still feels like the end is nigh.

That said I’ll be blogging here – regardless of having nothing interesting to say – until the bitter end so onwards I guess 😂