As budget shrink and IT expenses rise at equally alarming rates, governmental agencies at all levels are facing crisis. Some have been fortunate enough to afford innovations to promote efficiency, but many others are left to take on their challenges without guidance, funding, or support. There are over 21,000 local jurisdictions in the United States, and some times, it seems there are over 21,000 solutions to the same problem. We think there has to be a better way. Our public agencies a need way to work together to take on their common challenges, to leaverage each other’s IT investments.

Enter Civic Commons.

Incubated as a 2011 Code for America project, working in conjunction with Open Plans, Civic Commons will help government agencies share code, best practices, and innovations in IT. Government technologies are already public resource; we will help turn them into reusable and remixable public goods.

How?

Cataloging Open Civic Apps

To start, CivicCommons will catalogue existing projects like the DC App Store or the Federal IT Dashboard. These projects are already open sourced to some degree. Our team is in the process of identifying their licensing, installation processes, and code repositories and is eagerly seeking public contribution. We want to create a robust and constantly updating list of available solutions.

The long-term goal is to develop the app catalog into an open ‘Civic Stack’ — a streamlined collection of software that cities can use to run core services. The stack will have open data and apis like Open311 to encourage development and innovation, and so allow any developer to create a solution that’ll make life better for citizens anywhere.

Building a Knowledge Base & Community

As these projects are catalogued, we will engage city officials, developers, and thought leaders to build knowledge base for cities to open their code to each other, including everything from procurement policies and best practices to cost estimators and evaluation criteria. We hope to make it simple for governments to share, find, and implement open source technology.

Following the catalogue, our next big milestone is cultivating ‘civic hackers.’  Similar to Sunlight Labs community, this will be a marketplace of developers who can implement open source city solutions.

Interested? Good, we need you.

Get involved in CivicCommons.  Become a partner organization or advisor; share your code; or join the discussion!

Illustrations by Jane Kelly and Sam Silver. Produced for Urban Omnibus