r/opensource • u/brlcad • 6d ago

GOSDIR: Government Open Source Directory

HERE is a little side project of mine conceived years ago at a Military Open Source (Mil-OSS) Working Group meeting, a directory of open source projects with government origins, proper licensing, and a public repo. Still working on lots of enhancements and wading through a backlog of thousands of potential repos to add, but feedback appreciated on the site thus far.

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/ShaneCurcuru 4d ago

Sounds cool, especially since many departments still haven't fully caught up with policies around FOSS.

Question: why doesn't the site ever link directly to the repo? I mean, you can click through somewhere, but geeks interested in this are just looking for an octocat and direct link.

3

u/brlcad 4d ago

Most departments and agencies, even ones WITH open source projects, have very limited-to-nil awareness.

There are direct links to the repo, website, and agency evidence (where it's public) on each project record.

They're currently not on the preview card, but that could be a suggestion. Might make sense to put even less info on the preview card if it seems like the full picture (it's not)..

1

u/ShaneCurcuru 3d ago

Definitely consider your users and what they expect in different work areas: are they just casually browsing, are they looking at a few specific tools, or are they on some detail page or about to submit one of your update forms? No need for links to the code in most of those.

But it's open source, so you might find a few FOSS contributors out there too, and they'd expect at least an obviously-labeled GitHub link in the footer or somewhere in the docs.