As a 2013 Presidential Innovation Fellow, I saw how hard the Obama administration was working to make the Federal Government a more open and transparent entity. It's not easy! There are so many agencies and a lot of people with differing opinions about the value (and effort) of making things open and transparent.
This platform, built by 2015 and 2016 Presidential Innovation Fellows, members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and many others, is a collection of custom-built code that was written for the Federal Government and making that code open-source so that other agencies and people anywhere can share, reuse, and contribute to that code. I'll let the makers chime in with more details!
@jasonshen as a contractor for the USGS working on web mapping applications, I agree. The team I work with works with so many different federal agencies outside of the USGS, and nobody can ever agree on anything ever.
To me, the most incredible part of this is how much time/$$$ it's going to save gov agencies when building software. It's really mind blowing how awesome this is.
In "startup land", we're constantly reusing and contributing to as much open source as possible. It's saves huge amounts of time & we can get way more done with less people.
Prior to initiatives like code.gov (digital service, 18F), they'd have multiple departments working on projects / not sharing code. Essentially spending money on building the same/similar software over and over again in different parts of the government. Imagine writing a new cloud/deployment pipeline each time you have a new project. Or a new html/css framework for every website. It doesn't make any sense.
Reuse is going to be a HUGE time/$$$ saver. Love it.
They do! https://github.com/NationalSecur... - We're building out an API that will have a more comprehensive collection of repositories. What we have right now is a smaller, selected list.
One of my favorite examples. https://github.com/18F/analytics...
Instead of every city making their own analytics dashboard. They reuse this code. SAVING YOUR TAX $$$.
COOL RIGHT?!
inspired initiative. as someone who spent 10 years in and around government IT systems, i'm super excited that you've gotten the federal government to embrace open source. i'm sure it wasn't easy, but this opens the door to better policy collaboration and ideally better services for end users. i'm biased, but hoping this has meaningful impact on the VA for veterans who need support when they come home :)
GA
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