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I lead open source projects for the United Kingdom National Health Service, specifically for NHS Wales Digital Health and Care. The UK is investing significantly in open source and publishing widely about the importance of open source.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/open-source/

If you're technical and curious, I'm currently porting the UK NHS design system from Nunjucks to more implementations, including vanilla HTML CSS TypeScript, and my personal favorite Svelte Tailwind Daisy UI. Claude Code is churning on it right now.

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/public-good-design-sy...

AMA. And we're hiring. Feel free to message me.

5 comments

Does the UK have any FOSS funding programs like the Sovereign Tech Fund or the NLnet Foundation?

https://www.sovereign.tech/ https://nlnet.nl/

OpenUK is a good starting point: https://openuk.uk/

TLDR "OpenUK is a UK not for profit organisation committed to develop and sustain UK leadership in Open Technology, being open source software, open source hardware and open data, across the UK. OpenUK promotes businesses, projects and people, who use Open and strives to collaborate across all existing organisations for Open by creating a clear and loud voice for the Open Communities in the UK; influencing UK Legal and Policy to make the UK a great place for Open business and by promoting education and learning in skills in Open Technology."

Similar to what the French gov does with its DSFR, Design System FR.

React implementation : https://github.com/codegouvfr/react-dsfr

Main website : https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/version-courante/fr

Yes with a twist: the French government design system is purposefully reserved for the use of French government websites. I believe that a great design system will be flexible and more akin to user principles first, then implementation interface components (e.g. we need 200 or so components for one of our medical apps), then skinning such as look and feel and themeing.

As one example I'm very keen on coding techniques such headless components as by Bits UI which provides headless components for Svelte. If anyone here wants paid work to code components like these by Bits UI, come work with us. <3

Why not use the existing gov.uk design system (https://design-system.service.gov.uk/)?

Good point. We do use the existing GOV.UK design system, because it's the basis for the NHS.UK design system. Broadly, there are medical-related design aspects that use specific system quality attributes processes such as clinical compliance and formal research to help guide the look and feel and accessbility.

If you are looking for OSS support for things like libre office, graphics, bluetooth, WSI, upstreaming, kernel and more, Collabora is a UK based company that can help~

Also Codethink (UK) and Igalia (global, but HQ in Spain). More in the FOSSjobs wiki:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Are you hiring in the UK exclusively?

Yes because the work includes frequent in-person teamwork.