Government Code Collaborative Falls Short

Tom Adelstein writes "This story starts off singing the praises of the Government Open Code Collaborative, then reminds the reader: you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum? Well, this gated and restrictive open-source government repository fits."

Comments

Government and Sharing Software

[superid]

I've worked at a govt lab for over 20 years. Well over half our products are software (sometimes the rest seems to be powerpoint presentations). When I was hired I made inqueries to several other software development groups about "where are our common libraries? Where is the FFT I should use? where is our standard MLE routine? Where should I put the code for the detection algorithm that I just wrote?" There was no answer then and there is still no answer today. We have over 3000 people and not only do we not share libraries it is virtually impossible to actually exchange source.

When we hear rumors of someone elses code that might possibly be useful (and this happens infrequently, and unofficially via the grapevine) we have to make "official" requests through an unfortunately large hierarchy. We are usually met with "why do you want this? This was developeed with funds from program XYZ and you can't use it. This model has not been validated and we can't release it...."

And this is internal to ONE organization! When we make similar requests to our external sister labs of equal size and bureaucratic depth the problem scales exponentially.

It's very frustrating and I wish I could come up with a way to fix it.