Request: Identify/group what 18F has that is reusable/forkable

[polastre]

18F has certain projects which can be forked, deployed in your own cloud, etc. Other projects are really intended to just be deployed by 18F/USG. When talking with other governments, the question often comes up is "what stuff has 18F built that I can reuse?" Grouping this in a logical way would help encourage other organizations to join our community and pitch in.

Examples of projects that are general tools / libraries usable by others:

• Answers
• Midas
• Shipper
• Open Source Program

Examples of projects that are not really intended to be reused by others (instead are more application/domain-specific):

• MyUSA
• MyRA
• DOI Extractives

Then there's a bunch of projects that fall in between -- it is possible, that with some work, they could be generalized for other organizations but they are currently not in that state. Eg, fbopen.

Not sure of what the right solution is, maybe a tag or a "fork" button. Maybe a "group by" filter/sorter.

[konklone]

I think 18F should definitely be identifying and promoting its reusable bits, because they'll just get lost in our GitHub repo.

Would this be better suited as part of an /open page on 18f.gsa.gov? We want to describe our open source output and policies more clearly there already, I think.

[gboone]

Love this idea and agree it'd be better as a page like 18f.gsa.gov/open. I'll add it to the work @elainekamlley and I are doing on where the site should go.

[polastre]

I'm generally against more slash / pages. It would be nice if this could be handled by /dashboard or /developer, and I think it can. I get lost with all the proposed / pages.

[konklone]

There have been many proposed / pages, but right now only /developer and /dashboard have actually shipped. 😃 (Though I just drafted a /third-parties page in 18F/18f.gsa.gov#399.)

I do want to do a /open in any case, I think it'll be important for our image and is a place to really hammer home our views and speak to a different crowd than our home page does. I think this is more likely to happen as part of a pending redesign, but we could do it whenever.

[webmaven]

@polastre how would you want it handled by either /developers or /dashboard?

[polastre]

@webmaven through filters/buttons on the dashboard page. Basically the ability to group or limit results by different categories.

[webmaven]

👍