Building an Open-source Ecosystem for Cities
A spotlight on The Foundation For Public Code, a 2018 Global Sprint project
Boris van Hoytema (@bvhme) is the Open Source advisor for the City of Amsterdam and programme manager for collaboration of the EU SCORE consortium of cities that co-develop software. His goal is to create an Open Source ecosystem for cities. Boris, who is starting the Foundation For Public Code with Ben Cerveny, was selected to join our current round of Mozilla Open Leaders.
I interviewed Boris to learn more about The Foundation For Public Code and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is The Foundation For Public Code?
Public institutions have always been organisations built around code, or as it is known in government, policy. With the advent of technology, we see that more and more of this code is turning into code executed by machines.
The Foundation For Public Code is meant as a place where public organisations can collaborate on writing inclusive, usable, adaptive, open and sustainable software and policy together.
Why did you start The Foundation For Public Code?
Ben and I have been working in the ‘Smart City’ scene, which is just a buzzword for city technology, for a while. When we started it was pretty much all about convincing cities that ‘technology’ was important to them. That battle has now been won and everyone understands that. However, due to the nature of public organisations, their bureaucracies and environments this has not yet materialised.
Public organisations have not been able to benefit from a lot of the cultural and technical changes that have changed the tech industry over the last 20 years. The tech industry has found a way to support collective ownership through Open Source collaborations.
Cities face increasingly large problems as power shifts away from gridlocked national governments and the challenges facing the world are getting more pressing. Open Source could be a great enabler for cities to solve their problems together. It would enable cities to develop core building blocks for problem-solving together whilst not losing the control they need to provide their citizens with their personal solutions.
The software that a city uses should, however, be held to a different standard then software used in the commercial world, since it is making decisions about humans. It should be seen as being closer to that other kind of code, policy. In order to provide that kind of accountability, the software development process needs to adhere to certain requirements.
We feel that we can help cities with developing better, more accountable, software and policy together.
How are you building this open source ecosystem for cities? What are you starting with?
We would love to see an Open Source ecosystem for software and policy in cities in the same way that that exists for server backend, IT infrastructure or web-frontend code. However, cities are not like companies so the requirements for doing this are very different.
We see a lot of great work being done within the legal contexts of states, provinces, countries etc, but shared development often stays stuck there because there is nothing at the ecosystem level. What we want to do with the Foundation For Public Code is trying to identify the missing infrastructure in this process on an ecosystem level and provide that.
We want to start with guidelines, or a code, for public software projects to adhere to. We also want to provide a place where these codes, or guidelines, can be developed by the cities within their context whilst the Foundation For Public Code can guarantee that it will also work on an ecosystem level. We want to serve as an ecosystem partner that can facilitate the collaborations whilst also holding contributors accountable.
I see you’re also embedded in the City of Amsterdam’s data-portal team. What’s it like to transition a city to open source?
When Amsterdam started building the new data infrastructure for the city, the goal was mainly to connect all the data inside of the organisation. This meant that we needed to build our own technology, which is so much more difficult without using Open Source software. And when using Open Source to this degree at some point you’ll start contributing back to it as well.
The challenges around this have to do mostly with getting a mandate and carving out time and space to use and contribute to Open Source. For many reasons, the way of working that comes with Open Source is quite alien to governments. So a lot of the changes that I’m working on are cultural changes more than technical ones.
I believe that cities can’t fulfil their role if they don’t get control over their computer code, and Open Source is a great tool to collaborate on this at scale. I want to make Amsterdam a leader in this field and build the ecosystem of code that is so necessary.
For Amsterdam I’ve made the website amsterdam.github.io where we display some of our projects, collect our knowledge on our projects and share it with the rest of the world.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
We have a vision of what needs to be done and a broader and vaguer vision of what that could look like, but putting that into actual words and structures is a whole different story. The process of writing down what we have now has been a process of slowly distilling what we have in our minds into something we can explain, whilst in that process continually running into new problems.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
We would really like people with experience is running ‘open’ projects, people who have worked in the public sector and people interested in the relationship between technology and society to be at home in our project, regardless of whether you are a technical person or not. So the main skills we are looking for are building processes and communicating. However we are very much open to ANY suggestion, and would love for anyone to feel that they can be a part of this.
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
We’re all people that live in quite an abstract problem space and we recognise that explaining what we’re doing to a broader audience is one of our big problems. So if you don’t understand something, it is probably not because of you.
What will probably be the best way to help us is by reading what we have in there and filing issues for whatever you don’t understand or think should be better/different.
In the CONTRIBUTING file on our GitHub we explain all the ways in which you can help.
We’ll be sprinting in-person at the Mozilla offices in London. Register to join us!
What meme or gif best represents your project?
[I don’t think we’ll be able to do this, tooooo abstract]
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
