OpenForge debuts as India’s GitHub for e-governance projects
Electronics and IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, has formally launched Open Forge at the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICE GOV) held on March 7 in New Delhi. The new platform is designed as an Indian alternative to code repository platforms like Git Hub and Source Forge, and will store and share major e-governance projects.
Open Forge has been in development since last year with the aim to build an appropriate technology infrastructure for implementing the government’s policy on open source. Open Source For You had exclusively reported the development of this platform last August.
Based on open source Tuleap, Open Forge leverages PHP to accept projects including applications, frameworks, libraries, SDKs and APIs. It serves the code-sharing model for two broad areas — Government to Community (G2C) and Government to Government (G2G). The code available under the G2G section is private and controlled by government bodies, while the G2C area will bring government and community members under one roof and provide a public repository platform similar to Git Hub.
The National e-Governance Division (Ne GD) is handling Open Forge under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the Ne GD team, which had previously developed the cloud-based Digi Locker platform, is operating and maintaining its features at the backend. The platform is hosted on the data centre at the state-run National Informatics Centre (NIC).
The Ne GD members feel the platform will “play a pivotal role in preventing the problem of duplicity and fragmentation” in various e-governance projects of the government. It will result in some reduction of the total development time and costs and, ultimately, bring the culture of sharing to the government’s software development efforts.
While developers and major open source communities are yet to explore the features of Open Forge, more than 50 private and public projects are already available on the platform.
Open Street Map, the Mizoram State e Governance (MSeGS) project, e Sign Integration Java class and Open Street Map, among others, are already up on this platform.
Open Forge is not just an option for storing e-governance projects but can also be a Git Hub alternative for open source developments, as it offers some advanced features. There is a tracker to let you track bugs, tasks and requirements for your hosted projects. Likewise, you can use the built-in document manager to publish and manage documents such as administration or user guides, API documentation and a frequently asked questions bank.
There is Git support to handle multiple repositories for a given project and manage ‘personal repositories’ for each developer. The platform also allows you to access your Git repository using any of your favourite tools.
The NeGD team plans to enhance Open Forge adoption among developers by building communication tools.
These tools would include mailing lists, a news service and Web forums.
You first need to sign up on the Open Forge website to start storing and sharing your code with the public. The signup process requires a user name, password and a valid email address. Organisations can also access the platform using the same procedure.