What made me jump from agency to government?

I’m a recent arrival to working in government.

Before now, I worked in digital agencies for many years, for the last few years almost solely for government clients.

I’d avoided working directly in government for many years due to the general opinion of the public service being stuffy, slow moving and overall a little useless.

Since I’ve arrived, I’ve seen that it’s definitely not the case. (Well, at least not everywhere.)

The Single Digital Presence (SDP) project is a great example of innovation in government and something I’m really happy to be working on.

Our approach

Since the foundation of the SDP concept, the focus has been on open source. It was one of the ideas that attracted me to the Department of Premier and Cabinet and contributing back is a big focus for us.

The SDP system is split into three components, Bay, Tide and Ripple:

• Bay — an open-source platform based on Lagoon
• Tide — an open source Drupal CMS distribution built for the Victorian Government
• Ripple — an open source front end library using Vue.JS and Nuxt

What’s under the hood?

Bay

The initial concept for the SDP hosting was using Terraform, an open source, cross platform automation tool that would allow us to automate the management of our Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and websites.

This process would’ve involved writing configuration code, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tooling from scratch.

When we found out that Amazee had open sourced the Lagoon platform, it became the obvious choice.

Moving from VMs to containers is bringing modern architecture to our websites and the configuration in code will set us up to take advantage of future developments in hosting infrastructure. We took a fork of the github repository and we have been working with the Amazee team since November to produce a hosting platform that meets our needs.

The OpenShift Cluster is hosted in AWS across the 3 Sydney data centres for High Availability. Horizontal scaling is set up inside Bay, this allows the platform to automatically increase resources during periods of high load.

We have been really happy with our load and penetration tests so far, but we’re really only just at the beginning of our journey with this new platform.

Recently, the govCMS team announced they will be joining us on our move to use the same platform. This is a fantastic move for government collaboration and will further improve the platform for both agencies.

Tide

Tide is a Drupal distribution built specifically for Victorian Government requirements, with features all based on regular user experience (UX) testing directly with Victorian citizens.

The Tide profile itself is very lightweight, we’ve made a conscious decision to move all of the functionality into modules that are enabled by the distribution, a move that Acquia Lightning has been making since it’s 3.0 release. This ensures the functionality is immediately usable by any Drupal site, regardless of the distribution they use.

We have also decided on a headless approach, ensuring all content on SDP is available not only via the website, but also via an API in order to broaden its potential use cases.

The SDP project will be working closely with other government projects such as MyVictoria and the whole of Victorian Government (WoVG) API to more closely align our approaches and ensure the development community have greater access to resources that can enhance Victorian IT services in the public and private sector.

Ripple

Our front end is powered by Vue.JS, with server side rendering in Nuxt, joining some of the largest companies on the planet, such as Netflix, Adobe and Alibaba.
We’re using the Storybook library to create our pattern library site — you can get a sneak preview here: https://ripple.sdp.vic.gov.au. (Our projects should become open source in the coming months.)

We’re putting a lot of effort into using Atomic Design principles and separating our code into small, easily reusable Vue components. This approach means that our components will be available for anyone to use, with or without Drupal, ensuring Victorian citizens get more value out of the work completed in our project.

Conclusion

After some initial nervousness about dying a slow death in government, I’m really proud to be working on this project.

The SDP project will provide great value for money for Victorians and will be leading the way in digital technology for WoVG.