About the Foundation for Public Code

Business management and procurement for public administrations

This resource

Contents

  1. What codebase stewardship can mean for my organization
    1. Within my organization’s development process
    2. Our collaboration with external development or implementation parties
    3. For the development or implementation parties we work with
    4. Collaborations with other public organizations
    5. Codebase ecosystem level

What codebase stewardship can mean for my organization

Within my organization’s development process

Codebase stewardship and the Standard for Public Code help us internally to:

  • find reliable existing public code
  • create legible code and documenation for long term maintenance
  • create stability during turnover of staff
  • execute agile policy interventions, ensuring our digital systems accurately reflect policy
  • maintain futureproof systems which are easier to upgrade and add new features to
  • improve communication and collaboration within multidisciplinary teams
  • make projects more attractive for funding, from internal or external sources

Our collaboration with external development or implementation parties

Codebase stewardship and the Standard for Public Code help us work with market parties to:

  • use a tested and reliable standard as common reference for quality
  • set up effective multi-vendor collaboration
  • replace vendors, enabling a more diverse and reliable acccess to market parties

For the development or implementation parties we work with

Codebase stewardship and Standard for Public Code help the market parties we work with:

  • reduce risk and uncertainty of government contracts, thanks to professionalised procurement and monitoring process
  • improve their satisfaction at building high quality, reusable and scalable code
  • improve the collaboration with other vendors working on same codebase
  • target marketing and productification of their code to other public organizations, helping their work scale

Collaborations with other public organizations

Codebase stewardship and the Standard for Public Code help us and our collaborating partners to:

  • enable economies of scale by sharing maintenence costs, as well as leverage each others’ investments in new features and upgrades
  • have a neutral and shared standard and quality verification process so all parties can trust the common codebase as well as documentation, product marketing and community management
  • set up effective collaborations which other public organizations are more likely to join

Codebase ecosystem level

Codebase stewardship and the Standard for Public Code help our codebase commmunity:

  • grow a large, healthy and diverse community of public organizations and vendors maintaining and contributing
  • hedge risk and ensure longevity
  • ensure security, quality and cost effectiveness of open source at scale