"with the proliferation of issues and a scarcity of resources to address them all, leaders inside and outside government are turning to the principles of participation, collaboration, transparency, and efficiency to address the challenges facing our country and the world." - Tim O'Reilly
Platform Tools
The Foundation
The current Open Source for America site is built on top of the Apache Open for Business (OFBiz) system. Our goal has been to shape the mature facilities provided by OFBiz into a tool more closely aligned with the activities of an organization whose primary focus is political rather than commercial. In this day and age, however, these activities are intertwined ever more closely and a strong operational foundation based on economic intrinsics is a strength.
Integration
OSfA is not specifically an Apache project or a Java project, and integration with other systems and other projects is the most important objective for this site. Our infrastructure provides a well-rounded data model for aggregating and correlating, but we have no desire to duplicate the work of other projects. Currently we integrate Mailman as our mailing list software directly with OFBiz's party classifications, but we would like to see this go much further.
We are looking for volunteers to help us create a mash-up or mash-ups. We want to pull together data from many projects and drive involvement through the marketing and communications resources of our partners. In this way, working together, we can create significant impact and significant change.
If you have a project that you think could benefit the OSfA user base then join the infrastructure mailing list and let's get started!