How it works

GitHub: A Swiss Army knife for open government

Every morning, the first waking task most humans perform is checking email or the latest updates on their social media accounts. For developers, that initial daily fix is GitHub, the social coding platform that has captured the hearts of millions of hackers and tech enthusiasts around the world.

The social network for professional developers and everyday hackers aims to bring distributed, open collaborations to the world, one repository at a time, and it's beginning to find its way into government. Founded in 2008 by P.J. Hyett, Chris Wanstrath and Tom Preston-Werner, the San Francisco-based company claims 6 million people have created more than 13 million repositories to date on its platform.

With an ever-growing population of users, an aggressive expansion of features and more than $100 million in venture capital funding, GitHub is going beyond just a tool for the tech elite and is poised to be Silicon Valley's next big public offering.

The term "GitHub" is a riff on the open-source distributed version control system Git developed in 2005 by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds. Other VCS platforms include Subversion (created by CollabNet and now part of Apache Software Foundation's ecosystem) and Perforce. Years before Git, SourceForge was the first centralized platform that allowed developers to share code and manage software development projects.

Although GitHub hosts millions of open-source projects, the company retains all rights to the platform code, which is built using Ruby and Erlang. Open-source alternatives include Git, GitLab and Gitorious, each of which offers the ability to download the source code and use it freely on internal development environments, similar to GitHub Enterprise but without the associated licensing fees.

The history

In many ways, the rise of open source in government in recent years is a direct correlation with GitHub's growth and its attractiveness to influential early-adopter agencies, including NASA, the Federal Communications Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Today, government and civic hackers' open-source accomplishments are synonymous with shiny new GitHub repositories.

But GitHub isn't government's first foray into version control and code repositories. The Defense Department launched Forge.mil, a centralized platform available only to DOD collaborators, in 2009. From a technical perspective, rather than being a unified code base, Forge.mil is an integration of the content management system Drupal and the proprietary version control system CollabNet.

GitHub's big government breakthrough came in May 2012 at TechCrunch Disrupt, when U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel, alongside Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, introduced the Obama administration's Digital Government Strategy, which calls for agencies to "participate in open-source communities."

At the conference, VanRoekel announced that the White House would begin publishing to GitHub, and officials subsequently released the complete code base of the "We the People" online petition platform. The larger wave of government GitHub adoption came with the implementation of the digital strategy, and since then, federal agencies have been on a social coding spree.

Today, more than 300 government agencies are using the platform for public and private development. Cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco), states (New York, Washington, Utah) and countries (United Kingdom, Australia) are sharing code and paving a new road to civic collaboration.

Some agency examples In addition to a rapidly growing code collection, the General Services Administration's new IT development shop has created a "/Developer program" to "provide comprehensive support for any federal agency engaged in the production or use of APIs." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has built a full-blown website on GitHub to showcase the software and design work its employees are doing. Most of the White House's repos relate to Drupal-driven websites, but the Obama administration has also shared its iOS and Android apps, which together have been forked nearly 400 times.

Civic-focused organizations -- such as the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation -- are also actively involved with original projects on GitHub. Those projects include the OpenGov Foundation's Madison document-editing tool touted by the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and the Open Knowledge Foundation's CKAN, which powers hundreds of government data platforms around the world.

According to GovCode, an aggregator of public government open-source projects hosted on GitHub, there have been hundreds of individual contributors and nearly 90,000 code commits, which involve making a set of tentative changes permanent.

The nitty-gritty

Getting started on GitHub is similar to the process for other social networking platforms. Users create individual accounts and can set up "organizations" for agencies or cities. They can then create repositories (or repos) to collaborate on projects through an individual or organizational account. Other developers or organizations can download repo code for reuse or repurpose it in their own repositories (called forking), and make it available to others to do the same.

Collaborative aspects of GitHub include pull requests that allow developers to submit and accept updates to repos that build on and grow an open-source project. There are wikis, gists (code snippet sharing) and issue tracking for bugs, feature requests, or general questions and answers.