ForumPA Keynote - 5/14/19
Joseph Castle, Director of Code.gov, [email protected]
Session: A Collaborative Public Administration to Create Value
Keynote title: U.S. Federal Source Code Policy and Code.gov
[Slide 1 – Title Slide]
Good morning, Buongiorno. I am honored to be here today and appreciate being invited by ForumPA, the Italian government, and the U.S. Embassy Rome.
In keeping with the main theme of this morning’s session, A Collaborative Public Administration to Create Value, my keynote focuses on my government’s effort to create a collaborative public administration by creating value through the U.S. Digital Strategy, specifically the U.S. Federal Source Code Policy and its associated technology platform Code.gov. I believe my presentation will be beneficial because it describes how governments, with policy and technology, can collaborate with citizens in providing public value.
[Slide 2 – Public Administration]
Being a scholar and practitioner in public administration, policy, and government, I like to examine public administration with a historical perspective. In 1887, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, scholar, and one of the founders of the field of public administration offered, government and its reform “is the object of administrative study [or administrators] to discover, first what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or energy.”
[Slide 3 - Creating (Public) Value]
In 1995, Mark Moore, scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote the seminal book on public value entitled, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, with a focus on the public manager. With collection of empirical evidence, he concluded public managers create public value by exercising entrepreneurial and autonomous collective action through the use of managerial instruments, such as technology for collaboration.
[Slide 4 - Call to Action]
As public administrators, we are challenged each day to consider what we must do and how to accomplish it. As President Barack Obama said, “I want us to ask ourselves every day, how we are using technology to make a real difference in peoples’ lives.” Therefore, I challenge my fellow public administrators in the room to consider how we are collaborating with each other in the public interest and with the public more generally in building, buying, and using technology as instruments for action.
[Slide 5 – U.S. Digital Strategy]
One of the U.S. government’s instruments for action is the U.S. Digital Strategy. Published in 2012, it set out to accomplish three things: 1) Enable Americans to access high-quality digital government information in any format on any device; 2) Ensure government adjusts to this new digital world by implementing new technologies in smart ways; and 3) Unlock government data to spur innovation. Many policies, directives, and laws followed for agency implementation including the Federal Source Code Policy.
[Slide 6 – Federal Source Code Policy]
Published in August 2016, the Federal Source Code Policy directed major federal agencies to do three things: 1) Create an internal policy pertaining to source code mimicking the federal source code policy; 2) Update acquisition language to capture new custom code developed by a vendor or federal employee; and, 3) Create a source code inventory and publish at least 20% of the agency inventory source code as open source software. Finally, the policy called for the creation of Code.gov, a program office for policy implementation and community building, and a technology platform consisting of a website and application programming interface or API.
[Slide 7 – Federal Source Code]
Interestingly, the federal government has a long history of source code creation with open source software consumption. Grace Hopper’s work in the Harvard Computational Laboratory began as the precursor to open source software. She shared and consumed code in collaboration with other government labs and universities, in an effort to build the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL). Today, open source software is consumed by most federal agencies however very few publish publicly. The limited release of code, necessitates the implementation of the federal source code policy and Code.gov as managerial instruments for releasing code not only for government cost savings through reuse but also because it is a public good.
[Slide 8 – Code.gov]
Code.gov is a platform for curating code and directs users to open source repositories. It is also a site for community building. It features code bases from all major federal agencies and a couple smaller agencies who find value in publishing code. It is a 100% open source project allowing for public contributions and offers an open tasks feature, for individuals seeking to interact with their government, and perform their civic duty.
[Slide 9 – Example Projects]
We have many projects featured on Code.gov and a couple really stand out. These include the National Security Agency’s Ghidra and Walkoff both offering code for implementing cyber security, the Center for Disease Control’s Microbtrace offering code for diagramming infectious diseases, the Department of Transportation’s CARMA code for autonomous vehicle programming, the GSA’s US Web Design System for creating consistent and compliant government websites, and the Department of Energy’s Livermore Research Lab’s Lustre File System (LFS) for Linux used by commercial companies including Netflix.
[Slide 10 – Grazie!]
In closing, I hope I have provided you with a better understanding of how the U.S. government and GSA, and governments in general can create public value through collaborative public administration.
Thank you for listening and I will be around throughout the day to discuss further and answer questions. Grazie.