2022 01 05 Technical Catchup

• quickly and cheaply test how we can best affect this problem

Problems:

• over 5k forms on govuk, most pdfs
• WHY are these forms still here?
• forms never get budget - service teams won't get budget to build good forms - we must do this centrally
• Just looking at many teams' forms shows us that no dev or desiner was involved!

Assumption: making a form builder could save time

• How do we get people from typing in questions in a document and sending it to their comms team, from being able to build a form for themselves
• 8% of UK are non-internet users

Tech setup

• Gh team
• Org repo

Questions

• are we building SOMETHING?
• Could we make MOJ forms as a service
• tech choices

notes

• hmrc gform
• https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/07/06/making-all-forms-on-gov-uk-accessible-easy-to-use-and-quick-to-process/#what-has-been-done-before%23
• md and gh-pages
• Xgov Form Builder

Tech choices for backend

The feeling in the team is this is the priority:

1. nodejs, ruby
2. go, python
3. Java

Rationale

Go is deprioritised because in the GSD Way:

Go is an appropriate language for systems programming, like proxying, routing, and transforming HTTP requests. However you should only write these sorts of components if there is no alternative maintained open source tool available.

Tech choices frontend

• sass
• Not SPA, no react, no express etc