You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube – how the pandemic permanently changed our approach to public services

COVID-19 put huge pressure on public services; speed, flexibility, security and scale became critical.

Public service organisations needed new services that could support massively increased demand.

Those who work in the open and could leverage the cloud were better prepared:

Reusing what works and leveraging common components allows digital service teams to respond to citizen needs in a matter of days, and at scale. Community collaboration is an important tool for building trust – We are all in this together: Governments don’t compete so they can collaborate. Open source reliability gives governments confidence for future use of open source tools. Open Government Solutions, a curated catalogue of open source and public resources published by government agencies and other public sector organizations around the world.

We’ve built a community that we shouldn’t lose.

Call to action: Government should be open by default. Saying it isn’t enough – build incentives and restrictions that hand-in-hand will drive action. Fight the myths.