The Standard for Public Code

Contents

  1. Standard compliance and certification
  2. The goals for the Standard for Public Code
  3. Make the Standard better

The Standard for Public Code gives public organizations a model for preparing open source solutions to enable collaborations with similar public organizations in other places. It includes guidance for policy makers, city administrators, developers and vendors.

All codebases in stewardship with the Foundation for Public Code have chosen to apply the Standard to their own work.

The Standard is recognized as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

The CITYxCITY Academy has a free online course covering the Standard for Public Code.

Thumbnail for the video on the Standard for Public Code: a printed version lying on a table between two hands

A video introduction to Standard for Public Code (4:12) on YouTube

Standard compliance and certification

The Foundation for Public Code ensures that codebases under its stewardship are compliant with the Standard for Public Code. We can also assess public code codebases not in stewardship if the codebase community is committed to becoming compliant with the Standard for Public Code.

If you are interested in this, check out the process for certification.

The goals for the Standard for Public Code

This Standard supports developers, designers, managers and policy makers to:

  • develop high quality software and policy for better public service delivery
  • develop codebases that can be reused across contexts and collaboratively maintained
  • reduce technical debt and project failure rate
  • have more granular control over, and ability to make decisions about, their IT systems
  • improve vendor relationships with a better economic model

The Foundation for Public Code helps public organizations share and adopt open source software, build sustainable developer communities and create a thriving ecosystem for public code. It does this through codebase stewardship. For this process the codebase stewards use the Standard for Public Code to make sure the code it stewards is high quality as well as collaboratively maintainable.

Potential users of codebases tested against the Standard for Public Code can expect them to be highly reusable, easily maintainable and of high quality.

The Standard for Public Code does this by:

  • setting out a common terminology for public code development
  • establishing measures to help develop high quality public code
  • providing guidance on how to fulfill its criteria and operationalize compliance

The Standard for Public Code is meant to be time and technology independent.

Make the Standard better

We welcome feedback on how to make the Standard more useful, especially if you work with policy at a public organization or software development.

You can contribute to the Standard by: