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GovDev Midlands 2026 Recap

On Wednesday 21 October 2026, we followed up the Northern edition of our GovDev conference series with a visit to Nottingham for GovDev Midlands. Hosted and supported by Kerv, we had another fantastic event bringing together public sector professionals from across 32 different organisations.

View from over the shoulder of speaker into seated crowd.

We kicked the day off with a keynote from Connell Sharp about the way Stack Overflow incrementally delivered user facing changes to their comments section. This included an exploration of their work rebuilding their existing monolith application, as well as the approach they take to testing changes and getting feedback. Connell highlighted how Stack Overflow could run multivariate testing of changes and challenge hypotheses with the data gathered. It was the perfect talk to kick us off with insights into how things are done outside the public sector.

Speaker delivering the keynote talk.

This got us started and after our keynote we jumped into our invited 20 minute talks. These included a talk from the DVLA on their innovative Digital Driving License project, the UK driving license implementation of the mobile driving license (mDL) ISO standard. We also heard from DfT’s data engineering team about their use of infrastructure-as-code to simplify their deployment of cloud infrastructure and from Kerv’s Mike Chappell about their work applying AI to deliver for the public sector.

After a nearly two hours of talks it felt like a good time to feed our attendees, so we broke for lunch, kindly provided by Kerv. Lunch at a conference is always a big deal in my opinion, if you have a rubbish lunch at a conference it usually makes the day a disappointment! Gratefully, Kerv put on a great spread for us and it was great to see lots of conversations happening between attendees from different organisations.

The clock struck two and it was time to start our unconference hour. This offered attendees a choose-your-own-adventure session, they could join one of two lean coffee’s to discuss whatever they wanted or could sit down for a fireside chat (without the fire) with Steve Smallbones, Chief Engineer from GDS. This aimed to give attendees a chance to raise their voice about their experience and get perspectives from others across government.

Participants write topics on post-it notes during lean coffee.

After all this unconference-ing we had a coffee break before heading into the final session of the day featuring one of my favourite formats: lightning talks. These ten minute talks were open to submissions from anyone across government allowing us to bring together a really interesting selection of talks. These included a confessional from an introvert in tech, a pitch for an engineering academy for government, a story about data leaks between architectural layers, how software engineering is potentially neuro-inclusive by design and more.

These talks ran back to back, so there is a real quickfire feeling to the session and we rounded it out with a panel question and answer session to give the audience a chance to ask any questions. I really enjoyed the variety of topics we had this year and really appreciate all the speakers putting themselves forward.

Speaker giving a lightning talk with cross government software engineering banner behind them.

Question and answer session.

And with that the final GovDev event of 2026 came to a close. We were incredibly pleased with how the day went and delighted to build on the success of GovDev North in September. We hope you enjoyed it as well and look forward to running more in person events in the future, so make sure you sign up for community updates below.

Thank you

A massive thank you to everyone who came and made the day as good as it was! The event wouldn’t have been possible with the support of Kerv who provided the venue, key conference admin and fantastic refreshments, we’re really grateful for their support. Thank you to Anoop Hothi our event photographer who helped us capture the event so beautifully. Thank you to Connell for giving our keynote and all the other speakers for their fantastic talks. To our “minions”, thank you for giving up your time to help out on and before the day and OCTO for supporting the event with crucial funding.

People talking during lunch.

What next?

So you came and enjoyed yourself? Why not get more involved in the community by doing one of the following:

Alex Coleman, Cross Government Software Engineering Community