Civic Commons

A primary goal of Civic Commons is to make it easy for jurisdictions at all levels to deploy low-cost, reusable software, using open standards, open protocols, and open source code wherever possible. Pooling resources reduces costs and avoids duplicated effort; equally importantly, it helps make civic IT expertise more cumulative and portable across jurisdictions, for civil servants, for citizens, and for vendors. Civic Commons will initially focus on working with government entities to identify, document, and relicense technology currently in use.

Civic Commons is committed to the following activities:

• Facilitating the sharing of code among government entities, with an eye towards developing a thriving ecosystem of freely available civic code. 
• Connecting governments throughout all phases of technology procurement, and building systems for more transparent & informed technology choices.
• Developing and supporting Open Data and Open Standards.
• Spreading government technology best practices
• Building a community of government technology practitioners as well as independent “civic hackers”.