Headed up by Mike Bracken, the director of digital at the Government Digital Service, the network consists of a representative from each government department and aims to establish how the public sector can ensure the success of its digital by default policy.

Rachel Neaman, selected Digital Leader for the Department of Health, this week about the network's first meeting where she hailed it as a "very real opportunity [to] take the varying customer needs and multiple contexts for the full range of government services and identify the areas for collaboration, for rationalisation, for reducing duplication and for following a set of common, agreed principles, always starting with the user".

However, the blog also highlighted how the network's first meeting was a face-to-face affair that involved digital leaders working from flipcharts and post-it notes.

Clive Longbottom, analyst for , questions whether a government board that is promoting the use of new digital tools should be sharing ideas and working in such a traditional manner.

"Why did they have a physical meeting? This could have been done far more effectively using digital tools - communication and collaboration tools that would have taken ideas and automatically captured them, rather than the joys of Post It notes and pens," said Longbottom.