In six hours and two cups of coffee, Adam Becker has created a prototype for what could be the future dashboard for open government IT development.
Tuesday night in his spare time, Becker, a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow working on the RFP-EZ project, launched USAxGITHUB, a public timeline that displays official federal government agency GitHub activity, all on one page.
The tool, updated every 10 minutes, gives the public insight into who, whether it’s an agency, public employee or private citizen, has contributed, modified, forked or subscribed to a particular agency’s repository.
For example, the timeline shows “dannychapman pushed to presidential-innovation-fellows/mygov 29 minutes ago” or “USDepartmentofLabor created repository USDepartmentofLabor/HelpfulRedist 38 minutes ago.”
With a little help from fellow presidential fellow Ben Balter, Becker used Yahoo! Query Language to query and filter data from GitHub’s application programming interface, along with Twitter’s open source front end toolkit, Bootstrap, for the presentation layer. USAxGITHUB is hosted on GitHub Pages.
Six hours and two cups of coffee later, the prototype for how the public can track and collaborate in real time on federal agency coding projects was launched.
Welcome to the future of open government development.
