Civil Servants as Builders: Enabling Non-IT Staff to Develop Secure Python and R Tools

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07203v1
• Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2025 06:56:22 GMT
• Title: Civil Servants as Builders: Enabling Non-IT Staff to Develop Secure Python and R Tools
• Abstract summary: Almost no scholarship addresses a growing middle ground: technically skilled civil servants outside formal IT roles.<n>This paper introduces a limits-aware, open-source and replicable platform that enables such public servants to develop, peer review, and deploy small-scale, domain-specific applications.<n>Unlike low/no-code approaches, it preserves and enhances civil servants' programming skills, keeping them technically competitive with their private-sector peers.
• Score: 0.9790236766474201
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Current digital government literature focuses on professional in-house IT teams, specialized digital service teams, vendor-developed systems, or proprietary low-code/no-code tools. Almost no scholarship addresses a growing middle ground: technically skilled civil servants outside formal IT roles who can write real code but lack a sanctioned, secure path to deploy their work. This paper introduces a limits-aware, open-source and replicable platform that enables such public servants to develop, peer review, and deploy small-scale, domain-specific applications within government networks via a sandboxed, auditable workflow. By combining Jupyter Notebooks, preapproved open-source libraries, and lightweight governance, the platform works within institutional constraints such as procurement rules and IT security policies while avoiding vendor lock-in. Unlike low/no-code approaches, it preserves and enhances civil servants' programming skills, keeping them technically competitive with their private-sector peers. This contribution fills a critical gap, offering a replicable model for public-sector skill retention, resilience, and bottom-up digital transformation.

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