A Hacking Good Time with the Social Security Administration and Code.gov
By Code.gov and Social Security Administration
What happens when the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Code.gov team get together… a “Hacking” good time! Last month, the Open Source team at the Social Security Administration (SSA) hosted their first hackathon for the agency’s development community. There is nothing we love more than a hackathon. These events allow federal agencies to try new approaches to collaborating on source code, and they often lead to new ideas and cost savings to the American taxpayer.
The theme for the event was “Know Your Repos” and focused on enhancing documentation of existing source code and repositories. According to The Art of Open Source Documentation by Jennifer Riggins, “documentation helps your users succeed with your software, empowers them to be self-sufficient, enables them to give further feedback, and is the organizational backbone of your project.”
Approximately 50 attendees stopped by throughout the day and enthusiastically engaged in various exercises and activities. Joseph Amalfitano, an Information Technology Manager for SSA who led the event, said, “It was great to be able to pull together developers from different components to collaborate with each other in an informal and relaxed environment.” The hackathon proved to be an excellent interactive forum where coders with varied experience could gain knowledge of the repos. They were also encouraged to become more involved in helping solve open tasks — promoting transparency and collaboration that can help make government more efficient.
Given the great turn out, overwhelming positive feedback (from both online surveys and in person) and the overall success of the event, SSA has decided to host a hackathon each quarter.
