West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

Long-standing and costly barriers to deep Public Sector collaboration stand to fall once we share a common vocabulary to describe all our User Interfaces!

We strongly believe in the benefits of defining User Interface content declaratively in an open language – one that is decoupled from any frontend technology that will subsequently render it. After hitting limitations in existing languages… and being unable to find an alternative that satisfied our requirements, including:

  • Great user experience
  • Rich validation
  • Advanced components (gazetteer lookup, maps etc.)
  • UI component grouping/nesting
  • Conditional visibility
  • Extensibility

…our year-long discovery phase led to the development of the QScript language (and supporting open source tooling).

For our next iteration of QScript, we intend to take the Adaptive Cards open standard (as published by Microsoft) and heavily extend it to incorporate the many advanced facets of our discovery phase.

This work can greatly assist in Public Sector interoperability and collaboration initiatives.

We envisage this work to be of use to any organisation, and seek contributions from any sector or Department.

Our next iteration of QScript will require improved developer resources, better graphical visualisation/editing tools, community development and the establishment of appropriate governance structures for a QScript foundation or similar.

 

Discovery evidence

We have a strong 15-year history of producing declaratively-rendered UIs. Forerunners to QScript have enabled us to orchestrate 3 million submissions from over 4,000 users via 150 declaratively-defined User Interfaces. Due to the close-proximity of our user-base, our User Research to-date has been of an iterative, evolving nature – but we now capture these requests as User Stories. The QScript project features an online playpen to improve the prototyping process and design engagement. QScript represents our third major iteration and forms a core component of our open source Tymly platform.

As per Government Best Practice, QScript was developed entirely in the open, on GitHub:

https://github.com/wmfs/qscript

(please note QScript was until recently known as “Viewscript”)

We have Tweeted about our discovery milestones:

https://twitter.com/TymlyJS/status/988756902631878656

Blogged about the disruptive potential of declarative approaches:

https://tymly.io/blog/the-reckoning/

We’ve fostered a wider discussion in our discovery work, via GDS, here:

https://github.com/alphagov/open-standards/issues/51

GDS have been incredibly supportive of our work (we presented to them in June):

https://twitter.com/edent/status/997041101600157696

However, it has been apparent the Central apparatus required for us to easily/effectively engage with a wider audience on this topic is limited. For us, this is the appeal of the Local Digital initiative.

  • Digital and agile awareness
  • Introduction to user research
  • Introduction to service design
  • Introduction to digital business analysis

Other training requests

Technical Writing (inc. Explainer-video creation) Open Source Community Governance