First Annual Federal Source Code Summit Combines Code, Community and Cool to Promote Open Source in Government
By the Code.gov Team
It’s been over a month since our first annual Federal Source Code Summit: Building Coding Communities, and we are still basking in the afterglow of an amazing summit. With nearly 200 participants and 13 guest speakers and panelists, we can honestly say that our first summit was a tremendous success. We shared important information and ideas — learned where we are, our path forward, and had a lot of fun along the way.
Though originally slated for the spring of 2020 as an in-person event we ended up having to take a hard pivot to a virtual platform given the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the setbacks and delays, navigating the new normal of the pandemic and growing social unrest, we found renewed purpose as a program in conducting this summit. We realized that now more than ever people needed community and that open source could be a useful tool in creating that community.
The Code.gov mission of promoting open source software can help connect people both here in the United States and around the world and build communities to help provide solutions to the problems we currently face through new and innovative uses of open source software.
The summit was just a first step in bringing together members of our Code.gov community. They represented various agencies throughout the US government and governments abroad. They included people from all walks of life with varied experiences and backgrounds that help to shape and inform their work.
We kicked off the day with greetings from Karen Trebon — Chief of Staff for TTS Solutions at GSA and member of the Code.gov team. From there, Daniel Morgan, Chief Data Officer for the Department of Transportation (DOT) gave us a very exciting and timely keynote discussing the benefits of open source software in government and how the DOT is utilizing it in their projects. We also had three panels featuring international governments, examining open source policy implementation, and discussing software development with open source.
We also were able to slip in some fun for our attendees with a very spirited game of “Code in Pop Culture” trivia. Brian Lee from the Centers for Disease Control was the clear winner, blowing us away with his broad knowledge of everything from The Legend of Zelda to HBO’s Silicon Valley to Zapp and Roger’s R&B hit “Computer Love.”
A highlight of our summit featured our very own Dr. Joseph Castle who gave us an overview of his Federal Source Code Study findings. A labor of love, Joe has worked diligently on this study for years in an effort to show both the benefits and challenges with federal agencies implementing the Federal Source Code Policy and publishing open source software. [View Joe’s Slide Deck Here via GitHub]
Overall, we view this first Federal Source Code Summit as an overwhelming success and we look forward to building upon this momentum and expanding the summit to include the general public. In the coming weeks we hope to share more clips from the summit with you. In the meantime, we encourage you to stay connected to our coding community. Join our Code.gov Community of Practice Listserv by sending an email to the link requesting to be added, and of course, be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium.
Let’s continue to build this coding community together! #CodeOn
