Documenting Intergovernmental Software Sharing Examples
August 5, 2020 | Waldo Jaquith and Divjot Bawa
The database below has been created as a part of an ongoing effort to document examples of intergovernmental shared software. These examples have been produced by a government and both used and contributed to by other governments. This initiative acknowledges, that while the criteria for “contributed to” is, as of yet, undefined (e.g., does a single “commit” count, does the work of any one employee represent that government, etc.), collaboration may occur either in an informal way or may be formalized via, e.g., a non-profit organization with government agencies as members or an interstate compact. While many of the examples provided are from the United States, we also include excellent examples from other countries as well.
This initiative has been developed through the work of the State Software Collaborative (SSC) which helps states collaboratively build and buy custom software and technical infrastructure, utilize modern software development and procurement practices, and develop shared processes to effectively deploy existing commercial software tools where ultimately, instead of 50 states buying 50 versions of near-identical, overpriced software, states can procure high-quality, fair-priced software just once and share it amongst themselves. With this objective in mind, the SSC believes it is imperative to “think out loud” and share our research as it is underway to not only obtain feedback while it is in progress but also publish and begin circulating this useful data as soon as possible.
We are actively seeking out additional examples and encourage you to complete the following form if you would like to add to our growing repository. Once received, your submission(s) will be reviewed by the SSC project team and will be marked “Reviewed by the Beeck Center” within the Airtable. Additionally, this dynamic repository has been organized with several descriptors that allow users to easily navigate and sort through the database. If there are additional helpful data-points that you would like for the database to track, please leave us a note in the form.