Disclaimer I used to work for the Ministry of Justice (UK) as a software developer.
There are two aspects I feel worth mentioning:
1. GOV.UK is not one single unit but rather quite distributed. these styles and standards are created by a central organisation called Government Digital Service, and all the the government departments follow and feedback. There is a design community and one of the ways of collaboration is to use a Wiki https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/GOV.UK-Design-Patterns-Wiki-hk...
2. UK government is a big open source software contributor. Software projects by default are open source on github. It felt really good getting paid for writing open source code when I worked there :)
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source
There are two aspects I feel worth mentioning:
1. GOV.UK is not one single unit but rather quite distributed. these styles and standards are created by a central organisation called Government Digital Service, and all the the government departments follow and feedback. There is a design community and one of the ways of collaboration is to use a Wiki https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/GOV.UK-Design-Patterns-Wiki-hk...
2. UK government is a big open source software contributor. Software projects by default are open source on github. It felt really good getting paid for writing open source code when I worked there :) https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source