The SBA and Open Source: A Perfect Fit for Small Business
For small businesses, open source software provides unlimited access to fully functioning software that can help grow and automate your business at little to no cost. Additionally, open source business software has an advantage over commercial software in that it can be customized to your specifications. Why try to fit a square peg into a round hole, when you can have software that is a perfect fit for your company and its goals, right?
The catch is that you have someone on your team that knows how to install and configure the software. As long as someone on your team has the necessary know-how, you can easily customize the software to meet your unique needs and you should be good to go. Yet, many people don’t know that the Small Business Administration (SBA) and programs like Code.gov have been building coding communities to help provide access to open source and code that can be helpful to developing your business.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) has been working hard to meet the requirements set out for all federal agencies to open source and share with the world custom developed source code. As part of those efforts, the SBA recently open sourced two pieces of development, which we feel would help other federal agencies by saving them time, money, and the energy of having to implement the code themselves:
- Infrastructure code powering the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) platform
- NodeJS client library for Granicus GovDelivery newsletter service
What is CKAN?
The CKAN infrastructure code was been an exciting project for the SBA to develop and share with the world. Quite simply, it is a community-built application for sharing open data. This code allows you to setup infrastructure to run your own CKAN platform in a modern, resilient, and secure way. If you have access to Amazon Web Services (AWS), then this is all the code you’ll need to setup your own CKAN instance for sharing your agency’s open data. If you are running in other infrastructure, then this is a blueprint for how you can run a CKAN application/platform using containers, making things easy. You can also check out the implementation on the internet or visit Data.gov, the federal government’s open data site.
What is GovDelivery?
We’re also very proud of the SBA GovDelivery project. The Granicus GovDelivery newsletter is a communication solution designed to seamlessly connect people to government organizations through digital platforms. The newsletter offers government agencies and programs a plug and play type of template that allows them to communicate news and updates regularly to those in and out of government who are interested. The SBA wrote a small package that allows NodeJS users to integrate the GovDelivery newsletter tool. Since most federal agencies use GovDelivery for sending mass email, we feel like it’s also a project with a high degree of reusability.
WHY did SBA open source it?
The SBA and your team here at Code.gov don’t believe in recreating the wheel. You shouldn’t have to learn all the hard lessons over and over again. So, the SBA felt it necessary to make it open source so that it would be available to all — especially the small businesses they serve.
HOW do you use it?
Start with the README.md at https://github.com/USSBA/sba-gov-ckan and then feel free to clone the SBA repository and test this out! Feel free to email Ryan Hilliard with the SBA with any questions you may have.
CODE ON!!
