Roadmap

This roadmap serves as a model for how we’re developing, growing and scaling our organization. It is defined and approved by the board of directors.

Growing the public code ecosystem

Awareness, Partnership, and Chapters

The Foundation for Public Code will continue to transform and expand to meet the growing needs for digital infrastructure stewardship in the public sector.

Awareness

Now that we have created and tested our core process of stewardship, and are helping multiple codebases move towards maturity, we need to expand our capabilities to bring an awareness of public code to public organizations big and small across the globe, as well as contribute to general public understanding of what is at stake regarding the procurement and stewardship of digital infrastructure in government. To this end we will expand our capabilities and capacity to continuously produce educational and awareness-building materials and activities:

• media production
• participating in and organizing events
• white papers and research
• press and published books/articles

Partnerships

The Foundation for Public Code seeks to establish partnerships with interested public organizations, and help them prepare to participate in the codebase stewardship collaboration process. By building networks of collaboration with partners at the municipal and regional levels, it will become easier to bring the case for structural financial support to national governments and larger states or provinces, as many of the gains in sharing public software across cities are recognized most easily by these ‘parent’ organizations.

A focus for the partnership program will be global diversification, with an interest in discovering and supporting existing open software infrastructure that has been developed by cities and their vendors regionally, and which solves a problem for multiple other potential replicating organizations. In addition, we will seek organizations that are planning similar large procurements, and help them collaborate around a single shared codebase instead of working in in parallel.

Chapters

The Foundation for Public Code is transforming its organizational model to enable international chapters. There will be a global umbrella organization, along with local chapter organizations. The umbrella organization will be an association in which the strategic council, board of directors, and delegates from the chapter organizations work together to define long term priorities. Local chapters will tailor their work based on the needs of the local public code ecosystem and participating public organizations. The North America chapter is the Foundation for Public Code’s first local chapter.

Tending to stewardship

Activities, Codebases, and Communities of practice

Activities and processes

As an open organization, we approach our stewardship activities as open process codebases. We continue to develop activities like the governance game that serve to help public organizations transform their capabilities and capacities toward participation in public code ecosystemic collaboration and codebase co-development. While we may work to prototype and refine these processes, they are ultimately held in stewardship as process product codebases that we aim to provide to ecosystem participants, such as private consulting practitioners and transformation agencies within public organizations. We will develop a certification process around these activities, including our core stewardship processes, that will allow practitioners, both public and private, to offer these activities as commercial or internal services.

Our direct stewardship activities will focus primarily on codebases that generate awareness of the value and capability of the public code approach, and are most broadly scalable to our global partner community. In order to manage stewardship for codebases beyond our capacity, we will develop an open reference process for building non-profit vehicles, with their own governance, participation, and financial model, in which to steward public codebases independently. We will work with other organizations that specialize in generating such vehicles, like software conservancies or open cooperatives.

Codebases

As we grow, we will work to diversify both the geographic and functional range of the codebases we steward. We will build awareness and utilization of public code by ensuring that the codebases we steward serve as aspirational examples of the capabilities of public code to provide essential, efficient, reliable, and valuable infrastructural resources and services that implement policy. We will strive to have the codebases we steward become the standards in their respective public domains. Codebase stewardship becomes a role modeling performance activity.

Communities of practice

One of the core realizations of open source development is that it is made of people. This is doubly true for public code, as it involves both open software developers and policy makers. In order to create a successful ecosystem public code practice, the foundation needs to provide awareness and education in public administrations and training and certification to outside vendors and consulting services. This process of awareness, education, and certification is both horizontal across all aspects of digital transformation in the public sector, and vertical, oriented around specific application spaces and codebases. As mentioned above, these vertically oriented communities of practice may even evolve into self-governing non-profit vehicles for stewardship. The horizontal communities within and around public organizations will include networks of stakeholders in digital transformation ministries and OSPOs, public code developer communities, and professional development organizations.

Achieving sustainability

Philanthropy and Structural funding

Philanthropy and grants

As we build the case for structural funding at regional and national levels, we will continue to be financed by both individual and organisational philanthropy. While we expand our successful outreach to philanthropic individuals, we will also begin to participate in the large-scale funding ecosystems of granting organizations such as Bloomberg, Omidyar, Realdania, and others. To this end, we will build a core practice that concentrates on communicating and maintaining relations with grant-making individuals and organizations.

Structural funding

To ensure a long-term sustainable future for the Foundation for Public Code we must establish sources of recurring structural funding from our members and other partner public organizations. It is our aim that all core stewardship activities will be sustainably resourced through these structural funding mechanisms. We will build out capabilities that focus on acquiring these relationships at regional, national and supra-national levels, and transparently report our impact and financing to both philanthropy and these structural partners.