The objective of the Open Forge platform is to promote sharing and reuse of e-governance application source code. In 2015, the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India rolled out the “Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications”, which provides a framework for archiving government custom developed source code in repositories and opening these repositories for promoting reuse, sharing and remixing. By opening the source code, the Government wants to encourage collaborative development between Government departments / agencies and private organizations, citizens and developers to spur the creation of innovative e-governance applications and services.
Scope of the project includes development of a Collaboration Platform under the “Source Open Policy”. Further it includes creation of a project team, development and maintenance of the platform, onboarding of departments, promotion of the platform and community management. The community to be created and managed through the platform will be key driver in bringing agility and quality to the application development process. It will also lead further reuse and value addition to the e-Governance software landscape.
Special features & Achievements of Open Forge platform:
- This is one of the first of its kind platform from a Government organization across world. Other governments have released policies for adoption of Open Source software, but Government of India has taken a step further by providing a dedicated platform for collaboration between government, industry, academia and opens source enthusiasts.
- NIC has conducted Open Government Data Hackathon at multiple locations through Open Forge platform.
- Some of the key projects under Digital India program such as GeM, UMANG, DigiLocker, NCoG, UPI, RAS, eGov Smart City Platform are relying on Open Forge for the development lifecycle.
Target and current status of implementation:
Collaborative Application Development Platform ‘Open Forge’ is live and functional.
Specific achievement of Open Forge division:
NeGD is extensively using Open Forge platform for its significant projects such as UMANG, DigiLocker, RAS and NCoG. DigiLocker team is extensively using this collaboration platform project for the complete software development lifecycle. DigiLocker teams from different geographic locations across states are seamlessly collaborating for development of the product. Adoption of best Software Development practices using Open Forge has resulted in reduction of duplicate effort and saved time and effort through reuse of software codes.
Visit : https://openforge.gov.in/
