Code for America Commons is a project by

Code for America Code for America is a non-partisan, non-political 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2009 to address the widening gap between the public and private sectors in their effective use of technology and design. According to its website, the organiza ...

and OpenPlans focused on reducing government IT costs by helping government entities share code and

best practices A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to other known alternatives because it often produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing ...

. It was initially launched as Civic Commons as an independent

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

, but later became a program of Code for America. The project is a coordinated effort between

, OpenPlans, and the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO).

Projects

Federal IT Dashboard

The Federal IT Dashboard was launched in June 2009 as a government transparency initiative. According to US CIO Vivek Kundra, it was "a website where you could track $80 billion of IT spending annually." Initially it was only available to the federal government, which used the dashboard to monitor project effectiveness and decide the allocation of resources. With help from the Civic Commons initiative, the IT dashboard was made freely available to all government entities in March 2011.

Enterprise Addressing System

The Enterprise Addressing System (EAS) is a

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

application introduced by the

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

Department of Technology to manage the city's master database of addresses. In response to other jurisdictions' expressed interest in EAS, the city of San Francisco decided to

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

the system with help from Civic Commons. In early 2011, Farallon Geographics developed a secure solution for EAS using open source geospatial technology.

References

External links

Code for America CommonsCode for AmericaOpenPlans
{{DEFAULTSORT:Code for America Commons Local government in the United States Non-profit technology Free software projects Non-profit organizations based in the United States