UK Public Sector GitHub Observatory
Longer pieces that argue something from the data, rather than the per-organisation pages which only report it. Every figure is computed from the same weekly harvest at build time, so a writeup cannot quietly go stale while the estate underneath it moves.
The paper GCHQ wrote about itself
16 August 2026 · gchq culture open source history
In 2016 GCHQ published an internal research paper arguing its own engineering culture was failing, put it on GitHub, and let people outside the agency edit it. The last change was made by the co-founder of GDS.
Ninety-one thousand branch names
16 August 2026 · method practice git
Branch names are the least curated thing a team publishes. They carry ticket systems, project codenames, abandoned rewrites and the shape of how people actually work.
I am not the first person to count this
16 August 2026 · credit method open data
There are at least six projects measuring UK public sector code on GitHub. One of them has already solved the problem I wrote off as unsolvable two days ago.
Does passing an assessment show up in the code?
16 August 2026 · method assessment statistics
484 published Service Standard assessments, joined to the repositories of the bodies assessed. The honest answer is that sixteen organisations cannot settle it.
GOV.UK's founding, in its own commit log
16 August 2026 · history gds govuk people
The people who built GOV.UK signed their work, because git makes you. Fifteen years later the commit log is the most precise record that exists of who turned up, when, and what they touched first.
Everything this site cannot see
15 August 2026 · method infrastructure self-criticism
This project measures GitHub, and quietly assumes that is where government keeps its code. So I went looking for the rest. Universities are running public GitLab; central government has one public forge, and it runs Trac.
Nobody knows how many government organisations there are
14 August 2026 · open data registers method credit
The register says 1,262. A widely-linked open-data copy of it says 26. It has said 26 since March 2022, and it never once failed.
The intelligence community's developers do not exist
14 August 2026 · identity security gchq ncsc mi6 hmgcc
Every UK government GitHub organisation publishes the names and work email addresses of the people who build its software. Three do not, and they are the three you would expect. The fourth is part of GCHQ and does not follow its rules.
The GOV.UK tooling that GOV.UK does not maintain
14 August 2026 · open source supply chain community conventions
X-GOVUK is not part of government. Government services depend on it anyway, and it keeps its repositories in better order than the departments using them.
The repositories that are not there any more
13 August 2026 · deletions method transparency
Every measurement on this site is taken from repositories that are still public. Somebody else has been keeping track of the ones that are not.