Openforge platform - A collaborative platform for e-governance application development

Open-Source platforms are ideal for innovations. These platforms aid developer communities, groups, and individual contributors to collaborate and build a hub of applications and resources.

A majority of top multinational companies are observed to be developing their products and services with the support of Open-Source platforms. Due to its abundance in advantages and support for active development, such platforms are becoming popular for developing applications and solving specific problems.

Open-Source platforms like Github and Sourceforge are widely used resources for building new and innovative projects. Earlier this year, with a likeness to GitHub and Sourceforge, Government of India’s National e-Governance division introduced Openforge - an open platform for collaborative e-Governance application development.

The prime focus of Openforge is to drive innovative minds into e-Governance. This initiative is open to all developers, communities, agencies, private firms etc, to regulate the repositories of different e-Governance projects. It will enable reuse, sharing, and integration of source code of open software applications.

In 2015, Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India (MeitY) made known a framework under the “Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications”. This framework opened doors for archiving source code in repositories, that is customised and developed by the government.

Also, these repositories will be made available for everyone to share, reuse and remix. Openforge is brought in with a dream to further the digital transformation in India.

Features of Openforge:

Focusing on the collaboration between Government, other agencies, individuals and so forth, Openforge is implemented with rich features to aid activites from project development to deployment. This platform can provide resources in a systematic and simple manner.

Openforge is still in its initial stage - despite features like Project administration, Trackers, Document Manager, Version control using Git, and Communication tools. Such features can be used for collaboration, communication, and control between the projects.

Openforge also classifies some of the projects into ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ using project administration. The Private projects are exclusively developed between the Government bodies (G2G). Whereas the public projects are open, that is, it is free for use among Government as well as communities, groups and individual developers (G2P).

How is Openforge helpful?

The central focus of Openforge is in e-Governance. Here are some of its advantages:

• Openforge is free, therefore no premium price is implemented for commercial gain. Also, the management tools and trackers are available free of cost.

• The efficiency and effectiveness of projects tend to increase, due to the collaborative environment presented to developers.

• There is no pain of creating documentation of the projects, as it can be made using documentation tools provided by Openforge.

• The deployment of projects are quicker

• Plenty of resources and knowledge repositories are made available to developers, helping them learn and innovate.

• Standardization of the projects increases, therefore there is lesser scope for fragmentation and redundancy.

• The quality of e-governance applications rises with the collaborative nature of development.

Developers can now make use of Openforge to build apps for social impact and leverage its various advantages in catering to social change.