Suggested Content: How to make the 20% Source Code Valuable

[Kindafearless]

Clear guidance, and examples, of how to ensure that 20% is valuable would be helpful.

Every project has a lot of support code being developed that can be clipped out as libraries, plugins or services.

By pulling these capabilities out and documenting them reasonably well, agencies can benefit from further development on this functionality by the community and other agencies.

[IanLee1521]

Big 👍 to this! I've been trying to figure out myself what "20% of source code" means.

For references, how to calculate the 20% was/is discussed/debated at:

• 20% of code && open source by default?  WhiteHouse/source-code-policy#12
• How is 20 percent of newly-developed code quantified? WhiteHouse/source-code-policy#47
• Software should be "Open by default" not 20% WhiteHouse/source-code-policy#90
• Open Source Code: 100% Code Release - By Default WhiteHouse/source-code-policy#259

[Kindafearless]

To be clear, I'm less concerned with what the 20% means and more attempting to suggest content to outline the "open source recipe".

Open source is only valuable if the project encourages collaboration and attracts interest. Among others, that means each project needs to be:

• properly documented
• designed in a self contained fashion
• useful

The greatest benefit the government will see from open sourcing code is inspiring collaboration. Without releasing enticing projects though, no collaboration will appear.

Open source isn't one of those "build it and they will come" things.

[bandrzej]

@Kindafearless

You are making an assumption that a government agency interrupts "20% of source code" to be that agency releasing a open source project.

Instead, we could see government contribute to existing OSS projects they re-use within larger projects as dependencies or starting points (like frameworks), and modifications to these existing OSS projects add up to the 20%.

[Kindafearless]

Hey Brian :)

Thats a good point, and something I posted on the Source Code policy thread:
WhiteHouse/source-code-policy#261

Both points are valuable, but for those projects that are posted by the government we do want to make sure they attract contributions.

[jbjonesjr]

@Kindafearless raises a good point here. I don't think code.gov wants to dictate to the entire govt how they should architect their software, but by providing an example or notion of how you can architect/extract/refactor valuable open source tools and processes out of a larger app, they can more easily open source valuable content.

Micro-services of course is built on this notion, but even most JAVA or C++ developers will use modularization for things like this. Having a way to highlight these patterns would help improve the usefulness of submissions.

The example I always give to illustrate this is that open sourcing the app Census uses to record the data is not likely useful (who else is doing a census and recording data in the same fashion as the US), but perhaps a service or analytic that calculates census tracts, or assigns canvassers to a selection of tracts would be useful.

Being able to expose that to the code.gov audience should have good value for long term success.

[froi]

We will be moving this conversation/issue to our code-gov repo in the next couple of days.