Lessons Learned from Code.gov: The U.S. Federal Government’s Open...
summary
Federal policy (2016 Federal Source Policy) creates Code.gov and an OSPO with a 20% open source pilot and a platform that ingests agency JSON to a harvester API pointing to GitHub, but the pilot requirement is later dropped and the program loses funding and sponsors. Engineers over‑engineer the site with many npm packages and heavy devops, while measurable ROI proves elusive despite peaks of ~7,000 repos and successes like US Web Design System (≈$100k saved per site) and LLNL’s SPAC package manager. Leadership, acquisition language (FAR), and simple metrics are decisive.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Code.gov introduction
- 1:07Open source policy rise
- 6:26Government OSS roots
- 8:56Federal OSS mandate
- 13:07Code.gov three pillars
- 14:10Community pillar lessons
- 17:41Platform dev pitfalls
- 19:46Code.gov platform & API
- 21:51Executive leadership role
- 23:15Measuring impact and return on investment
- 26:25Code.gov trajectory
- 28:53Final thoughts & Q&A
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