The Government of India has launched a platform called OpenForge for open collaborative development of e-governance projects. The announcement was made at the 10th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICeGOV) in New Delhi today by Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Law & Justice and Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India.
OpenForge is similar to popular open source development platforms like GitHub and SourceForge, but it stands out because of its exclusive focus on government and civic applications. With this dedicated collaborative forum, the government aims to encourage the use of free and open source software (FOSS) for the development of source code for e-governance projects. The project could be anything from applications, frameworks, languages and libraries, to SDKs, APIs, datasets, components and plugins. Apart from the government, open source developers, corporations, startups and even students can use the platform to build modern, best-in-class software.
“This project reiterates our government’s open, share, and collaborate philosophy to e-governance through best information sharing, tracking and communication tool,” says Prasad. “We have observed that open source collaboration can generate up to 50% savings in software development costs.”
Apart from cost savings, OpenForge will also lead to faster delivery of eGov solutions because of source code being shared and reused. Moreover, frequent reuse leads to uniformity in application development, which ultimately translates into standardized and interoperable solutions.
OpenForge is in line with the IT Ministry’s 2015 ‘Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications’, which said, “The Government of India aims to make public the source code of various software applications/ components/ products as it may consider suitable and whose Intellectual Property Rights are held by various Government entities.”
