My six-year-old daughter soldered her first circuit board on a Saturday afternoon in our kitchen. She was crouched over a magnifying lamp, tongue poking out in concentration, melting lead-free solder onto the pins of a resistor. The board she was building was a replica of one of the most consequential machines in computing history: an Enigma cipher machine.
We had just come back from a family trip to Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Britain's codebreakers, and I had made the (perhaps optimistic) decision to buy an Enigma-E kit from the Crypto Museum — an electronic replica that my children and I could assemble together. My son, eight at the time, handled the more fiddly components. My daughter took on the larger ones with the quiet determination that only a six-year-old can muster. Between us, we got it working.
I think there's something important in that sentence: we got it working.
Not "I explained how it worked." Not "they watched a video about it." We soldered it, we tested it, we debugged it (there were a few cold joints), and we typed messages to each other using the same cipher mechanism that Alan Turing and his colleagues spent years learning to break. I must admit that my understanding of the rotor wiring is still fairly superficial, but there's a difference between reading about something and holding it in your hands — and my children now have an intuitive grasp of substitution ciphers that no textbook could have given them.
After we'd assembled the electronics, I designed and built a custom wooden case for it — laser-cut from basswood, with brass hinges and a buckle lock, engraved with the Enigma logo. The design files are all published openly (naturally) in case anyone else wants to build one. It sits on our bookshelf now, looking rather handsome, and occasionally gets brought out to encrypt messages at dinner parties. (I am aware this makes me sound like a very specific kind of person.)
And yet.
The thing that has stayed with me from this project is not the Enigma itself. It's what Bletchley Park represents — and what it teaches us about how we should think about technology adoption today.
The Bletchley Park Problem
Bletchley Park worked because it lowered barriers. It brought together mathematicians, linguists, chess champions, crossword enthusiasts — people who had never worked in intelligence, who had no security clearances, who in many cases had never met each other. The organisation gave them a problem, gave them resources, gave them space to experiment, and then (crucially) got out of the way. The result was not just the breaking of Enigma, but the invention of the modern computer.
It seems to me that this is exactly the model we should be following in public sector digital transformation, and it's the thinking behind what we're building with the National Digital Exchange.
One of NDX's offerings is NDX:Try — a platform that gives local government organisations free cloud sandboxes to experiment with. No procurement. No cost. No six-month approval process. You take a two-minute quiz, pick a scenario (council chatbot, planning application AI, FOI redaction, and several others), and within fifteen minutes you have a working environment to explore. Everything is isolated from production. Everything is cleaned up automatically afterwards. Over 50 organisations are currently using it.
I think the parallel to Bletchley is more than superficial. The single biggest barrier to technology adoption in local government is not capability or ambition — it's access. Teams have ideas. They know what problems they want to solve. But the gap between "I think we could use AI for this" and actually trying it is filled with procurement exercises, business cases, cloud platform requests, and approval chains that can take months to navigate. By which point the energy has dissipated and the team has moved on to the next crisis.
NDX:Try is designed to eliminate that gap entirely. The same way Bletchley gave brilliant people a problem and the tools to solve it, NDX:Try gives government teams a hypothesis and the infrastructure to test it. Perhaps that sounds grandiose for what is essentially "here's a free AWS sandbox" — but I think the principle is the same. We learn by doing. Barriers to entry matter. And making things hands-on changes understanding in a way that reading a business case never will.
From Kitchen Tables to Council Offices
My daughter didn't learn about cryptography from a lesson plan. She learnt it by burning her finger on a soldering iron (mildly, I should stress) and watching an LED light up when she got the wiring right. The councils using NDX:Try aren't learning about cloud adoption from a strategy document. They're learning it by deploying a chatbot that answers residents' planning queries, and seeing what works and what doesn't.
However, I believe the real value goes beyond individual experiments. When every NDX:Try use case is shared openly, we start building a collective understanding of what works in local government technology. The council in Dorset that built a document processing workflow doesn't just solve their own problem — they create a reference implementation that every other council can learn from. (This is also why we've been building semantic search over 24,500 UK government repositories — so that teams can actually find each other's work.)
We are, slowly, building the kind of collaborative infrastructure that Bletchley Park had by necessity and we have lacked by default.
The Rotor Turns
The Enigma machine on our bookshelf has three rotors. Each time you press a key, the first rotor advances one position, changing the entire cipher. Press enough keys and the second rotor advances. Then the third. The machine's complexity comes not from any single component but from the interaction between them — each small movement changing the behaviour of the whole system.
I think that's a reasonable metaphor for what we're trying to do across UK public sector technology. The leaderboard catalogues what's in the open. The SBOMs reveal what's inside. The semantic search makes it findable. NDX:Try makes it tryable. No single piece is transformative on its own. But together, each small advance changes the landscape for everyone else.
My daughter, for the record, has moved on from soldering to an interest in KPop Demon Hunters. But she still occasionally asks to send an encrypted message. I think that's the point — once you've built the thing with your own hands, you never forget how it works.
Perhaps we should give more people the chance to build things with their own hands.
Links
- Enigma-E project on GitHub — laser-cut case designs, build photos, open for reuse
- NDX:Try — free cloud sandboxes for local government
- National Digital Exchange
- Bletchley Park — genuinely worth a family visit
- Enigma-E kit — from the Crypto Museum
(Views in this article are my own.)