Rewiring the State — Eoin Mulgrew, 10 Downing Street

The cabinet office was about to spend one and a half million pounds on an outside law firm to analyze the UK statute book. One engineer embedded with the in-house legal team for two weeks instead. The tool now lives with that team and can be run whenever they want. Eoin Mulgrew from the Number 10 data science team uses that as a typical example, not a headline one. The talk covers what it actually takes to run a small insurgent technical unit at the center of government: market rate pay, a 0.7% acceptance rate, recruiting exclusively from outside the civil service, and an unusually direct mandate to go into departments and ship. The demos include a policy simulation tool, a delivery red-teaming PMO, two public dashboards that had never existed before, and a public service that went from idea to live in two months. The closing argument is a photo of a recent Harvard dropout and YC founder standing outside HMP Wormwood Scrubs holding the keys, two weeks into the job. Speaker info: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoinmulgrew/