The People's Code

by rmason • 10 years ago

569 190 10 years ago

steanne• 10 years ago

Looks like You Don’t Have Javascript Enabled

Code.gov is built on the latest web technology using Javascript. To use Code.gov, please enable Javascript so we can share all of the wonderful open source projects the Federal Government has to offer.

NoGravitas2• 10 years ago

I had to unblock third-party scripts to get anything other than an animated pixel-art gif of an American flag.

kensai• 10 years ago

"The Federal Source Code Policy is designed to support reuse and public access to custom-developed Federal source code. It requires new custom-developed source code developed specifically by or for the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across all Federal agencies. It also includes an Open Source Pilot Program that requires agencies to release at least 20% of new custom-developed Federal source code to the public."

That's really nice, but I think the 20% is too little. It should be at least 50%. They could still keep a critical low percentage secret.

random_rr3• 10 years ago

20% is a LOT! Consider the amount of work it takes to open-source things. It's a huge step forward.

joshdotsmith4• 10 years ago

What do you think takes the most effort to make these projects open source? If this were the policy for all new projects, why would that be difficult?

X86BSD• 10 years ago

The amount of work is kind of moot. If it's tax dollars funding its development don't you think it should all be open sourced?

ben_jones• 10 years ago

Doesn't 20% seem a bit pedantic? I feel like if you throw a requirement like that into a large bureaucracy only bull shit will come out. Like an "Open source web interface" where only the CSS is posted...

desdiv• 10 years ago

I agree that 20% is too little, considering that works by the federal government are supposed to be in automatic public domain[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

autoreleasepool• 10 years ago

You make a great point. Can anyone explain why software is exempt from this?

brainfire2• 10 years ago

The 20% number is part of the initial 3-year pilot program, not necessarily the ultimate goal. That's also the mandatory minimum, with agencies "strongly encouraged" to release as much as possible.

See the policy [0], linked from the launch announcement [1].

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/08/peoples-code

thinkcomp• 10 years ago

How about open PACER?

greglindahl5• 10 years ago

That's a Judicial Branch screwup, not Executive Branch.

Check out the RECAP project. So far, that's the best we've got.

neom• 10 years ago

This is awesome! At work we're trying to help with this at the municiapl level, it's hard so it's really great to see it coming from the Fed. Shout out to Becky Sweger[1] from 18F who has been instrumental in helping move things forward, talking about open data and open code.

[1] https://twitter.com/bendystraw

former_govt2• 10 years ago

I admire the work that 18F is doing, and live in the DC area, even contracted for the government early in my career -- but I can never go back. I just fundamentally disagree with the security clearance apparatus is in place and never want to subject myself to that again. Especially when purely private companies pay more and don't care what you do in your personal time.

Working for the government felt like being a child again.

npiazza833• 10 years ago

Thank you! I didn't have the words to express it but that is it precisely. It is infantalizing in a way that makes ball pits and arcades in startup culture seem tame

bretthoerner• 10 years ago

What was so bad about the security clearance aspect?

greglindahl5• 10 years ago

A few people are a little disgruntled that the government gave all of the information in our security clearance applications/re-ups to China. That's my beef, I'm sure other folks have other things to say.

not_ed_snow• 10 years ago

The explicit and everpresent awareness that you are owned by your employer in your off hours, for a limited sub-selection of possible activities.

In other words, you are not your productivity, you are required to live their moral code in your off hours.

former_govt2• 10 years ago

They want to know deeply personal details about your life, show up at your neighbour's and friends doors to question them, have explicit control over where you can travel on your vacation, deeply care about what you do in your free time, and mishandled all of it -- all in the vague guise of preventing blackmail and sabotage.

The blackmail and sabotage argument, as near as I can tell, is a farce because our enemies and "friends" are engaged in massive corporate espionage. If it were a real concern to them than they would use thier powers to require the same level of scrutiny on the private sector.

In addition to that they say be truthful so you don't have anything to hide to prevent possible blackmail by foreign powers, but in reality it's the truthful ones who don't make it through the process.

I've come to the conclusion that it's really just about having an excuse deny employment to "people not like us."

fritzo• 10 years ago

Then after collecting your deeply personal information, they let it leak through poor security practices. This has happend to me and to other members of my family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

qwertyuiop9243• 10 years ago

Most of the code looks fairly dull and single-purpose. Except NASA's code, as you may expect. Trick and OpenMCT both look at least interesting, and OpenMCT in particular could be used as the basis for many an interesting web-based project.

tzakrajs• 10 years ago

OpenMCT instantly caught my attention and seems like a solid foundation. Cool stuff, but I am not surprised since it is NASA/JPL.

uabstraction• 10 years ago

I've already seen OpenMCT integrated with Kerbal Space Program. It looks like a great platform for real-time sensor data visualization. I'd love to hook it into a drone and violate some FAA regulations :)

joshdotsmith4• 10 years ago

I really like the work of folks at 18F, USDS, CFPB, et al.

Bearing in mind that I'm ecstatic to see this collection of projects and someone clearly put a lot of time and effort into this already, I do have couple points of hopefully constructive feedback here:

- Please list all of your repositories and feature ones that you think deserve special recognition. Seeing all your repos is a 4-step process otherwise: click on the project, click on the link, click on the acknowledgement that I clicked a link, click on the organization name on GitHub. [1]

- Some information on contribution policies, pulling in your README.md, etc would be helpful on this site. [2]

- When I click on the link to go to your repo, I know I'm clicking a link that leaves your site. You even say so. "But you probably knew that already." Don't hijack it, please. [3]

- The activity feed doesn't provide much value in its current form. Most of these GitHub events are completely without context. [4]

EDIT:

I've since opened the following issues on https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/code-gov-.... Anyone who has feedback, definitely let them know (kindly!).

[1] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/code-gov-...

[2] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/code-gov-...

[3] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/code-gov-...

[4] https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/code-gov-...

myowncrapulence• 10 years ago

I really hope this sort of promotion of innovating in the tech sector remains growing.. with the current political climate, I doubt many sectors (besides military/finance) will see governmental spending growth in coming years.

stomato• 10 years ago

If you're a US citizen, vote for someone that will keep it going. Some have promised to undo a lot that the current administration has done, and this might be part of that.

I'm not aware of any free code from Trump so far, btw.

Also, when his campaign has tried to code, they fail:

http://qz.com/762424/trumps-campaign-donation-website-used-o...

"A programmer named Shu Uesugi, an engineer at a California company called EdSurge, discovered a major flaw with the way Trump’s website was using jQuery. Instead of downloading the open-source code from GitHub and running it off a server they controlled, the developers who built Trump’s website simply ran the code off GitHub directly, Uesugi found.

While the code’s location might seem like a minor detail, running it off GitHub meant that the person who controlled the code on GitHub could change the code at his whim, and those changes would take hold on Trump’s website. Since GitHub is for open-source projects, it also meant that any user could submit a request to modify the code and impact Trump’s website, if the change was approved by the plug-in’s author, a developer in Lisbon named Igor Escobar."

Then Igor tweeted about how he could have modified it: https://twitter.com/igorescobar/status/766367306662440960?re...

ncallaway• 10 years ago

I'm impressed with how quickly they responded to [3], but unfortunately the answer was exactly what I expected on this one.

We fought the law and the law won unfortunately. We're hoping to get more leeway on this in the near future from the legal team. Stay tuned!

Lawyers. The answer is always lawyers.

icc972• 10 years ago

Getting a quote from The Clash from the US Government, that's actually pretty awesome.

flippyhead• 10 years ago

Lawyers. The answer is always lawyers.

The law is just software for people.

_7fvc• 10 years ago

I suggest having a search feature across all repositories.

matthjensen• 10 years ago

I wonder how they will determine which open source projects are included at code.gov. For instance, I contribute to a few projects that are used within government for determining the economic impacts of fiscal policy, and the code is in the public domain. I'd love for them to be included at code.gov, but I'm not sure whether they meet the criteria.

brainfire2• 10 years ago

The general guidelines are in the policy [0], linked from the launch announcement [1], but each agency's CIO is responsible for the particulars at their org. If it's not a new project post-August it won't contribute to the 20% so it might not be reviewed for release without someone suggesting it specifically, I would guess.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/08/peoples-code

initram• 10 years ago

They already have some Swift projects [0], which I think is kind of cool. Not sure I would want to use code named "Bro" or "Conman" though. lol.

[0] https://code.gov/#/explore-code/agencies/DOL [1] https://code.gov/#/explore-code/agencies/DOE

qwertyuiop9243• 10 years ago

Bro is actually already a widely used and incredibly popular piece of software. However, I don't think the main branch is developed by the US government, so this may be the DOE trying to dodge the law.

tommynicholas2• 10 years ago

If there's one thing that deserves a federal massive budget, it's this. If laws and regulations can be understood easily by software, we would remove so many problems the government creates. Complexity would be easier to manage, but also transparency would inherently breed simplicity.

zanny• 10 years ago

Just for an example, HNR Block and other companies built on doing your taxes for you lobby the government to prevent simplification of the tax code, because they profit off its complexity.

The same applies to almost all law. The complexity does not exist without a reason - there is almost always some entity actively funding the continued obfuscation of law for profit.

So don't expect government to ever actively get simpler, because that would only benefit the outsiders rather than incumbents in the industries such laws affect, and those outsiders never have the capital to compete in lobbying and bribery.

tommynicholas2• 10 years ago

Exactly - there are tax code companies you've probably never even heard of like Avalara entering the Unicorn range. The kicker: all they do is calculate sales tax! Actually a cool company, but one that should never exist.

trendia2• 10 years ago

The bigger influence on the tax code is the litany of deductions, which are lobbied for by the wealthy.

The value of a $100,000 deduction is worth $30,000 to a wealthy person, but probably around $1 for H&R block.

edit: fixed

liveoneggs• 10 years ago

is this page 508 compliant? I look to .gov to show some examples of accessibility

masterleep• 10 years ago

Horrible name - the Federal Government of the United States is not "the People".

jmcgough• 10 years ago

I think the idea is that, by making it OSS, it's software that now belongs to "the people".

ryanolsonx• 10 years ago

Only 20% of it by the looks of things ;)

hackuser• 10 years ago

the Federal Government of the United States is not "the People"

I disagree. It is indeed "government of the people, by the people, for the people". You may not like some particular people, and neither do I: Some are dumb, corrupt, or simply disagree with me.

But if that doesn't represent the people of the U.S., I don't know what else could. If they were non-corrupt, all smart and highly capable, and all agreed with me - that would be some other country (in a fairy tale).

It's not government of, by and for me. I want everyone else to have a vote too, even if I disagree with them.

mcv2• 10 years ago

It is indeed "government of the people, by the people, for the people".

In theory at least, and it certainly should be. Often it looks more like a government by the millionaires, for the corporations. But there's increasing attention for turning that around, and this project looks like a small part of that.

gbog3• 10 years ago

And horrible domain name: How come `code.gov` is US-only? How come it's motto is "Help propel America’s next breakthrough in innovation"? If this in not imperialism, I don;t know what is.

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

The gov TLD is US only. Other countries have their own, e.g. In the UK most government sites are under gov.uk.

knowaveragejoe• 10 years ago

Then you don't know what imperialism is. Simple as that.

weka• 10 years ago

Took a look at some of the code.

I see one for Gov of Commerce:

The Commerce.gov API is under active, but not public, development. As such, API code is not currently made available publically. This Github repository will be used to collect and respond to feedback regarding the API and engage with developers interested in using the API.

---

I don't believe that's the correct usage of GitHub. What's the point if you're not going to showcase the code?

greglindahl5• 10 years ago

They said what they think the point is in what you quoted: "to collect and respond to feedback..."

I can see why you might not like it, or not agree with it, but it's not like they didn't say it!

toomuchtodo3• 10 years ago

My feedback would be a FOIA request for commerce.gov's API code, and a PR to add it to their repo.

johncolanduoni• 10 years ago

I'd give them a pass since they do put a lot of other code up. It makes sense not to fragment the community, and more to the point I don't think keeping a precisely one-to-one relationship between repositories with code and issue trackers is that important as long as it leans heavily in the code direction.

Otherwise yeah, I'd say they should host their own damn issue tracker.

jknoepfler• 10 years ago

This is a great idea. I feel like the big picture isn't open source code for government, but open source APIs for interacting with the government. In the medium-term future, I think we should push for a system where all government documents that ought to be a matter of public record are managed in a publicly readable versioned source repository like, like a federal git server.

Other things that I'd like to see in publicly visible git repositories:

- federal laws and regulations (particularly regulations, standards, etc.).

- procedures (rules for federal processes)

- all documents for making requests of the federal government, with mechanisms for getting those requests to the right place.

JustSomeNobody2• 10 years ago

Absolutely![0]

[0] I know this doesn't contribute to the conversation and is frowned upon, but I had to exclaim when I read this.

mars4rp• 10 years ago

Where is the IRS code?

officialchicken• 10 years ago

Under the Department of Commerce - unsurprisingly - there is nothing from IRS.

A bit more surprising and entirely missing from the list (no source code):

* Department of Education * Department of Health and Human Services * Department of Housing * Department of Interior * State Department * Department of Transportation

And not really expecting anything from: * Department of Defense * Department of Homeland Security

xenophonf• 10 years ago

DHHS:

https://github.com/HHS

There are more if you know where to look. Some of the GitHub organizations are in their infancy, like NIAID's:

https://github.com/niaid

Others are only semi-public; these generally consist forks of software they use or private repos used for external collaboration.

I'm working on getting some of our stuff open-sourced. When it's written by contractors, the intellectual property rules can get complicated. Convincing a contractor to publish code their consultants wrote for a government project, no matter how minor, can be a tricky bit of advocacy. Sometimes they have really skewed ideas surrounding IP that must be overcome before this can happen. (Best case, our code will likely end up hosted by Internet2 or a similar foundation.)

CiPHPerCoder6• 10 years ago

https://github.com/samilliken/openDCIM/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...

https://github.com/USEPA/E-Enterprise-Portal/search?utf8=%E2...

Looks like the US Government is oblivious to the risk of PHP Object Injection.

https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/04/securely-implementing-de-...

It looks like they're publishing code that, in particular, is vulnerable to CVE-2015-2171.

https://github.com/samilliken/openDCIM/blob/d3e137294179e392...

Alupis5• 10 years ago

You should send in a pull request, or file a bug report in the repo.

CiPHPerCoder6• 10 years ago

I'm not on their payroll, and I'd already fixed the CVE upstream over a year ago, so no.

sandGorgon• 10 years ago

The one project that i would love to see opensource is the FBI Sentinel project.

A lot of countries have broken infrastructure for law enforcement. Just like USAID, it would probably be more efficient to give software that can be adopted.

The sentinel project captures millions of man hours of wasted... and ultimately successful product development - all focused towards law enforcement collaboration. It would be good to have that.

amluto• 10 years ago

In case any code.gov website people are looking: there's an unfortunate bug: when the site is first loading on a slow network, you can see all the agency names and click them, but they all show text like "No repositories found." This made me think that this was a brand-new project that hadn't done anything yet.

Also, the little department logo images shouldn't have alt-text. That alt text of the department name overlays the actual text of the department name and just makes it even less accessible when the image isn't there.

(I suppose the lesson for web development in general is to test on a slow connection.)

manish7• 10 years ago

This is awesome initiate by US Gov.

idlewords• 10 years ago

Why does this simple landing page have to be over 600K and require Javascript?

breakingcups• 10 years ago

This is a step in the right direction, a thank you to the people who helped make this possible.

rayiner• 10 years ago

Interesting that someone approved the communist reference (or that people didn't perceive that as a communist reference). It's not the 1980s anymore I guess.

pvg• 10 years ago

Do you mean 'people's'? That would make 'the people's house' as a way to describe US executive mansions and legislature buildings communist references as well.

OliverJones2• 10 years ago

How about open source code for some makes and models of voting machine?

The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA#Licensing_and_disseminat... But it's not listed here. (It's also kind of complex. "wget; tar x; ./configure ; make" probably won't get you a running instance. Still.

mi100hael• 10 years ago

Voting machines are products produced by private firms. Getting them to publish the source code is about as likely as getting Apple to publish the source for iOS.

trendia2• 10 years ago

Actually, with monopsony it's rather simple:

"If you don't publish the code, then we will have to use paper ballots."

sfsinger2• 10 years ago

That used to be true. The market is being disrupted by new open source models. Cost of election tech should drop precipitously.

sametmax5• 10 years ago

That would not improve things.

A voting system must be able to be checked by any citizen at any moment.

Most of the citizen can't:

- understand a complex code.

- ensure the machine is running this code, easily, conveniently or quickly.

- ensure the machine is not, or will not be hacked, by software or hardware mean.

- ensure the program does calculate the votes correctly, with no bug.

- do any of this in an autonomous and spontaneous way required to make a check healthy.

bbatha• 10 years ago

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Opening up code in voting machine would be leagues better than leaving it closed source. At least other experts in the field could verify it.

Its also not like every citizen today can or understand all of the vote counting procedures with paper ballots, even when just constrained to their ballot.

godelski2• 10 years ago

Most people can't understand the code in openssl. So we shouldn't use it? Let's just make all cryptography closed source then. The average person doesn't even know what an elliptic function is.

The point is that there is a large amount of people that do. They check. Not every citizen needs to check, but it is harder for there to be an error or to hoodwink someone if there are more eyes on the code. Essentially why opensource cryptography is good too.

Essentially, it can easily be audited.

elwell• 10 years ago

The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain

This was programmed by humans?

http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=...

http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packag...

Was released after obfuscating?

xmnr• 10 years ago

I've been thinking about this in the past few days, and decided to make a petition about it.

https://wh.gov/iervT

tl;dr lets develop public-domain voting systems so we can audit them.

ayh• 10 years ago

Great so we all have access to useless software code.

pdkl955• 10 years ago

Why the subsidy to Google? Sending tracking data to Google isn't appropriate for a government site.

    <script>
      /* i='GTM-M9L9Q5' */
      /* ... */
      src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i
      /* ... */
    </script>
    <!-- ... -->
    <noscript>
      <iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html
                   ?id=GTM-M9L9Q5&gtm_auth=GTM-M9L9Q5"
              height="0" width="0"
              style="display:none;visibility:hidden">
      </iframe>
    </noscript>

Also, requiring Javascript in a single page application is a terrible design for this kind of site. Almost all of this can be static pages or traditional web frameworks. Requiring Javascript made the download much larger than necessary, slowed down the page load time a lot, and forced the page to reflow multiple times as the data arrived. A wide variety of web frameworks could have rendered and cached static pages instead of massively over-engineering the site as an "app".

dnissley• 10 years ago

Looks like the US government makes widescale use of Google analytics, so it's hardly inappropriate: https://analytics.usa.gov/

pdkl955• 10 years ago

Pointing out more instances of a problem doesn't make the problem "hardly inappropriate"; it indicates the problem is more widespread.

jonknee2• 10 years ago

Just a wild guess here, but I bet they're using Google Analytics for the same reason everyone else uses Google Analytics--to see what their audience is looking at.

Also, requiring Javascript in a single page application is a terrible design for this kind of site.

Good luck making a single page application without Javascript! It is all in 25 requests and 668KB, not the lightest site, but that's actually less data than the homepage of Google is today. It's also properly setting expires headers so future page loads are very quick.

pdkl955• 10 years ago

I know why they want analytics; I'm asking why they are giving out live tracking data to a single private company. This free data is effectively a subsidy.

Good luck making a single page application without Javascript

The bad design decision was making it a single page application in the first place. This should be a static site, or very lightweight (and easily cached) framework.

25 requests and 668KB

That's an obscene amount of bloat. This should be 3-5 requests not counting images, and 668kB is an order of magnitude too big.

less data than the homepage of Google is today

Comparing against another massively over-engineered, bloated web page isn't particularly useful.

expires headers

That's great, but it doesn't affect the initial download size or the memory/CPU usage in the user agent.

https://vimeo.com/147806338

paulryanrogers• 10 years ago

Mobile browsers don't always keep things until the server says they expire. That being said a frequent user will probably end up saving data in the long run.

yellowapple• 10 years ago

Apparently Github supports displaying STL models: https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources/blob/master/3D%20M...

_audakel• 10 years ago

I was kinda hoping to see some projects from the NSA. Noooope.

skiplist1• 10 years ago

Just an honest question. Can I obtain some estimation of the capabilities of CS people working for the government by just reading all these code. Will I find here a glimpse of code beautifully designed and tailored to solve some really deep problem that require real intelligence?, can I use these code to learn how to code a big project?

The People's Code

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