Obamacare’s Open Source Project Lives On — Even After White House Kills It

Months before the ill fated launch of Healthcare.gov — the website built to give millions of Americans access to affordable health care — government officials were already describing it as something special.

Healthcare.gov “is going open by design and default,” said Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, in a Twitter message posted last April. “This is a big deal.”

Sivak’s agency had tapped a small, but tech savvy company called Development Seed to build the front-end of the website, and according to a report at the time, they envisioned a site that was very much in line with cutting edge web development techniques. Healthcare.gov would use Jekyll, a widely used tool for building sleek and fast websites, and the software code underpinning the site would be released on GitHub, the social coding site where you can let anyone fix problems with your software.