Projects the City of Amsterdam is doing in Open Source, and what I see as the big problems in public Open Source development, as presented at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit 2018 in Sonoma, CA.
For World Water Day 2024, we promote the vital link between water and peace.
Open source for the city
1. Open Source for the City
Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit
— 8th of March 2018
2. Boris van Hoytema
“My mission is to build an Open Source ecosystem for cities”
boris@publiccode.net
@bvhme
Hats:
Open Source Advisor
Open Source Development Manager
Director
The Foundation
For Public Code
4. Development in
Amsterdam
★ Developing software in-house
★ GDPR requires more control
★ Using Open Source, contributing
back
★ Example role, communicating
about it
★ Amsterdam Open Source
programme
★ SCORE
9. 1. Custom, opaque
Very specific and not easy to learn from.
Might lack documentation, have non-English
code and documentation, contain
copyrighted content or lack an Open Source
licence.
2. Custom, reference
Specific to our case and documented, can be
used to learn from.
3. Adaptable
Documented and possible to adapt.
4. Reusable, configured
Configured specifically for our use, easily
reconfigurable.
5. Reusable
Fully (externally) configurable and useful for
anyone.
Reusability
Indicating if others can take
our code and run (with) it
15. SCORE(European Union Regional Development Fund
Interreg North Sea Region
Smart Cities through Open Data Re-use
programme)
16. ● 9 cities, 15 partners
● 50% co-financing for
Transnational development of
‘Solutions’ dev, test, implement,
reimplement, scale
● Agile & Open
● Develop best practices
17. Community
● Working groups for
○ Mobility Hubs
○ Flooding and drainage
○ Travel time
○ Sensors and Signal
registry
○ Traffic flows
https://score.community
18. Agile Process
Process for transnational development
in EU Interreg Funding context
http://score.partners/process
Standards for code co-development
https://github.com/score-partners/
20. Code & Code
(& Code& Code)
“We are not a software
company”
★ Not identifying IT
as a core business
★ Software is a mix of
laws, policy and computer code
21. Only-My-Public
Money
“This is payed for by my
taxpayers, why should others
get to use it for free”
Hard to prioritise:
★ Documentation
★ Community
★ Reusability
★ Sustainability
22. Director only
collaboration
“It’s too costly to send
developers to that conference,
but I’ll go”
★ Hierarchical organisation
structure
★ Developers seen as executing leaf
nodes, not as field experts
23. Context
Matryoshkas
“This is totally specific to our
organisation”
● Differing legal contexts
● Differing written languages
● Jargon is specific per organisation
● No awareness of what is shared
24. Not invented
here
“We’ve made this ourselves
leading to huge savings”
★ Reuse for infrastructure and
frontend code obvious
★ Not so for domain specific code