The People’s Code
whitehouse.gov
The People’s Code
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Re: The People’s Code
#2I wonder to what degree this applies to the DC city government and if it can be made useful for municipalities generally.
Re: The People’s Code
#3Putting the code out there for other agencies to use is great, but getting them to actually use it will be another battle. Reuse is tantamount to taking away someone's budget, and therefore, status. The occurrence of two different groups implementing very similar things entirely separately happens more often than you'd think. And I'm not convinced they want to talk or work together, because bureaucrat/military officer X doesn't want to lose budget/people.
Re: The People’s Code
#4I think this is great. Maybe the code won't be reused, but it adds another dimension to governmental transparency, which is always a good thing. Furthermore, any code produced by the government is effectively being produced for the American people. We should have access to the code to use as we see fit.
I wonder how this will affect bids for government software projects? Will companies be upset that they have to open-source their software? Regardless of whether an individual agency will use it, I can see the initiative saving time and money, since programmers will know they can just find what they need in a repository. If there is one thing you can count on, it's programmers and government employees being lazy.
Re: The People’s Code
#5I wonder to what degree this applies to the DC city government and if it can be made useful for municipalities generally.
I doubt it directly applies to DC government at all. But they have their own program: http://open.dc.gov/
I think a lot of progressive cities are already way ahead of the federal government on this one.
Re: The People’s Code
#6I wonder to what degree this applies to the DC city government and if it can be made useful for municipalities generally.
The DC municipal government actually has a Github organization (https://github.com/dcgov) and has been attempting to pilot open source development (http://open.dc.gov/open-source-guidelines/) throughout the city. I helped write that document, which was inspired by/borrowed from 18F policy. Take up has so far been limited, though some agencies have been using Github Pages.
Re: The People’s Code
#7As helpful as this may be, the real transformative code is often proprietary. As others have mentioned here, not everybody will use every reusable component, whether it be because of ignorance, larger system incompatibility, or simply turf protection.
We should look into solutions for intellectual property that are based on an information economy instead of an industrial economy.
Personally, I think it would make sense (perhaps more for pharmaceuticals than software) to significantly shorten the time a patent is valid and/or strip the protection of monopolistic production rights, and instead allow the free market to sell the product at the lowest cost it can be made at, as long as there is a royalty fee. How the fee is determined, I'm not sure yet.
Still, it's clear that our IP system is creaky, overcomplicated, and is tilted too far in the direction of big business, lawyers, and patent trolls, instead of the actual inventors and consumers.
Re: The People’s Code
#8I think this is great. Maybe the code won't be reused, but it adds another dimension to governmental transparency, which is always a good thing. Furthermore, any code produced by the government is effectively being produced for the American people. We should have access to the code to use as we see fit. I wonder how this will affect bids for government software projects? Will companies be upset that they have to open…
I'm thinking this will probably not extend to the majority of code produced. Intuitively, I'm guessing the military produces the most code of any branch of the government. And I'm not sure i believe that we should all have access to that code to use as we see fit.
Re: The People’s Code
#9The cool part of this is it seems like there's a bunch of API's on here. Perhaps that means I can submit pull-requests to get features that perhaps previously that government would not have had resources to develop.
A good example, there's a recall API: https://github.com/GSA/recalls_api
this is cool, I want to use it... I have an eCommerce website where I sell food. It would be cool if I could be proactive in pulling items from my product catalog. The issue is there is no UPC in the API, so there's no easy way to correlate my products to recalled products. A cursory look at the source code shows me the source:
http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/StayInformed/RSSFeeds...
if you open that up, a lot of the items have the UPC codes in there. This gives me the ability to parse the details, and add the fields I need.
Re: The People’s Code
#10Putting the code out there for other agencies to use is great, but getting them to actually use it will be another battle. Reuse is tantamount to taking away someone's budget, and therefore, status. The occurrence of two different groups implementing very similar things entirely separately happens more often than you'd think. And I'm not convinced they want to talk or work together, because bureaucrat/military office…
Even if every bureaucrat and official says, "my group is a snowflake and needs a bespoke system", opportunities will arise to change a project from completely out of scope to "possible if we leverage this open system". That's the hook that consistently pushed open source into business IT.