Introduction

Welcome to the Open Government Coalition (OGC), a network of government agencies working on open source projects together.

Mission Statement

Governments pooling technical talent to collaborate on projects with reproducible, impactful results, saving time and money.

Summary

Governments + Open Source + Cloud + Funding from key sponsors = Useful Projects for All

Features and Requirements

  • Code/Programming: open source and publicly developed

  • Benefits multiple governments at once

  • Can be easily deployed and is well documented

  • Likely deployed to and integrated with existing city cloud accounts

  • May deal with sensitive data or data partnerships

  • Pools our limited and specialized internal tech resources

  • Saves money, quicker time-to-live

  • No RFPs needed - in house solutions

  • Outside organizations can help develop/support/fund/promote/sponsor

Key factors that make OGC projects different than other open source projects are private funding, paying a developer to build and maintain, and using the cloud for ease of replication.

Project Portfolio

This is a curated list of well documented and reproducible projects, which improves their discoverability and fosters collaboration.

1) Waze WARP - CCP Data Tools

Allows traffic teams and others within governments to store, analyze, visualize, and take action on Waze's CCP program data.

Code: github.com/LouisvilleMetro/WazeCCPProcessor

Project Submission Page: OGC Discussion

Collaborating Governments: Louisville, Denver, NYC, Joinville Brazil, (see all 60+ govs)

  • Sponsors: Amazon AWS, Slingshot

  • Promoters: Waze

  • Potential Future Collaborators: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Code for America

  • Constraints: Must be a Waze CCP partner (signed legal agreement with Waze)

See Full Page Details

2) SpeedUp USA - City Broadband Map

Crowd sourced internet speed tests that creates a nation-wide public broadband map better than anything that current exists for digital inclusion efforts.

Example implementation: speeduplouisville.com

Example raw data and downloads: speedupsanjose.com/all-results

Code: github.com/louisvillemetro-innovation/SpeedUpYourCity

Project Submission Page: OGC Discussion

Collaborating Cities: Louisville, San Jose

  • Potential Sponsors: Merit.edu

  • Promoters: NDIA

  • Potential Future Collaborators: Mozilla, Census.gov, Mlab, ISPs

  • Constraints: None

3) IFTTT for Cities - Alerts for Open Data

Customized delivery of services and information for residents based off existing city open data platforms and metadata standards.

Code: github.com/LouisvilleMetro/IFTTT-Smart-Louisville

Project Submission Page: OGC Discussion

Projects in Review

List of projects that are being reviewed to see if they can be included in OGC.

- SQUID - Road Quality through Camera Images

An open source data pipeline and analytics framework for assessing street quality. This approach utilizes the open source Open Street Cam to collect GPS, accelerometer and imagery data to be able to literally see the Ground Truth.

Project Submission Page: OGC Discussion

Code: github.com/streets-data-collaborative

  • Collaborating Govs: NYC

  • Promoter: ARGO Labs

- Open Data Visualizer

Data viz platform for multiple open data portals, using APIs and CSV files for creating visuals, charts, maps for dashboards, embeds, KPIs.

Code: github.com/timwis/vizwit

Collaborating Cities: Philadelphia, Louisville

Similar Organizations

  • Harvard Civic Analytics Network - Inspiration for OGC. Many OGC collaborators come from CAN cities. CAN has a much broader focus and just a few US cities are involved. OGC should have more cities, states, countries and is focused on code projects.

  • Code for America - Helped create the OGC by pushing for tech talent and skills inside of government with brigades and open source. Many OGC participants came from CfA. Big difference is that OGC may work on sensitive data or internal systems integrations that can't be made public, though CfA can still be part of the efforts.

  • Code.gov - At the federal level, but it leverages the power of code sharing and collaboration to help the US Government cut down on duplicative software development and save millions of taxpayer dollars for the American people.

  • Open Mobility Foundation - City led, commercially partnered, open source data standards non-profit that allows collaborative management of the public right of way.

Press

  • How to Create Open Source Projects and Get Private Companies to Pay for It - Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School - Data-Smart City Solutions - “Cities are able to build products they need without having to pay for it, and once something is built, any other city can use it at no cost.”

  • A New Open-Source Framework for Government Projects - Route Fifty - "...this is a new thing: providing the entire infrastructure—through a well-documented process from a third-party company—to build out an open-source tool that’s immediately useful to cities collaborating on coding and deployment."

  • Open Source Traffic Management - GCN Tech - "By working in the open and developing this collaboratively, we’ve been able to develop such a broad range of support from all of these governments that would be interested in the final product."

Connect with OGC

NextWaze CCP Processor

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