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