Welcome to the Open Government Platform! You'll find here a growing set of open source, open government platform code that allows any city, organization, or government to create an open data site. Below you'll see the first code for a data management system.

The Open Government Platform (OGPL) was created as a joint product from India and the United States to promote transparency and greater citizen engagement by making more government data, documents, tools, and processes publicly available through a freely available, open source platform. Making this data available in useful machine-readable formats allows developers, analysts, media, and academia to develop new applications and insights that will help give citizens more information for better decisions. In using an open source method of development, the OGPL community will provide future technology enhancements, open government solutions, and community-based technical support. Additional countries, like Canada and Ghana, have joined in the OGPL community, contributing leadership, code, and creativity to make this a better product. OGPL has become an example of a new era of diplomatic collaborations that benefit the global community that promote government transparency, citizen-focused applications, and enrich humanity. You can find out more about OGPL.

The code available today is in various stages of release, some operational and some in beta (each release status is noted). The core of OGPL is the data, documents, tools, policies, and processes that governments will share and applications that are created by developers around the world. Using OGPL, governments will be able to:

• Create web applications and mobile apps to view, use, and merge various datasets

• Start challenges or competitions to accelerate and promote applications and new businesses around government data

• Provide online citizen services through forms, registrations, and applications

• Publish links to regulatory, statistical, and other information compiled by government agencies

• Developers will be able to create applications that help citizens make better decisions by viewing, using, and merging datasets from different nations by:

• Building from OGPL’s open source architecture that enables web-based innovative applications and lower cost, rapid development

• Merging geographic data with agency data to create easy-to-understand maps that shows trends in areas like employment, environmental, and community health

OGPL product has four main components implemented on a single Drupal instance. The entire code can be accessed here.

1. OGPL Web Site—A module for governments and their agencies to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use.

2. Data Management System—A module for user management of agencies which can upload datasets that will be available on the web site.

3. Content Management System—A module for managing and updating various functionalities of OGPL.

4. Visitor Relationship Management—A module for collating and disseminating feedback on various datasets.

OGPL contains the essential features for a government to establish an open data capability. It is expected, using open source methodologies that the global developer community will continue to expand and evolve this release to bring in improvements and new functionality. Initially, OGPL will provide governments the ability to:

• Publish government data, documents, apps, tools and services from multiple departments within a government

• Build on Web 2.0 open-source technologies with low-cost scalable infrastructure

• Engage citizens in their open data initiatives for better understanding of their needs

• Provide publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools to add external software modules for data visualization, wizards, and other purposes

• Create data-rich community spaces around topics of national priorities and international interest

• Empower end-users to share datasets via social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter

We are currently seeking testers and experienced open source developers to provide recommendations as additional modules are released to the open source community. If you are interested in being part of OGPL, please contact us via email or on Twitter at @OGPL or Facebook.