midas: government open source in action

August 10, 2014

The project I’m working on, Midas Innovation Toolkit, was developed in the open from day one. It started as a Presidential Innovation Fellows project, sponsored by the US Department of State.

Both the State Dept and Health and Human Services (HHS) are actively working to pilot the software within each agency to foster collaboration within different target communities. Developers at each agency are leveraging each other’s efforts by submitting changes (via pull requests) to a common shared codebase (hosted on github).

It’s exciting to see this cross-agency collaboration through open source. The software is designed to help agency employees collaborate across team boundaries, and it’s wonderful that we’re doing that with the software itself using the entirely different mechanisms of open source.

I’m relatively new to the project and still learning about it myself, but would welcome volunteer contributions — or feedback on how to make the project more welcoming to people who want to help. It uses Nodejs and Sails with Backbone on the front end, and we’ve just started writing some Chef recipes for automated deployment. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the github issues list.

Would love to hear what you think about this project specifically or government open source in general!

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