[andychase]

I work for the US EPA, speaking in my personal capacity.

We have a Github, but in a lot of ways it feels kind of like an archive. Does anyone have feedback on how it can be made more useful? We have all the authority to be good OSS community members.

Maybe if we were to prioritize like general purpose libraries instead of just our super domain specific projects?

https://github.com/USEPA

[webmaven]

First, the basics:

Add a description to every repository.

Make sure every repository has an informative README. There are a ton of templates and generators out there, most are pretty good (if you find or create one that is especially useful for your agency, consider promoting it internally).

Now comes the 'next level' stuff.

If a project would be useful in an academic context, perhaps include a blurb on attributing a citation for it.

There are a lot of folks out there looking for projects that will accept their contributions so they can build up some cred. Populate projects' issues with stuff you can tag as a good-first-issue, and your projects will start showing up in various aggregators (be judicious about selecting projects to do this for, you don't want issues and PRs languishing without being incorporated for lack of maintainer interest or time, that just looks worse).

For projects that really are just being thrown over the transom, mark them clearly as such and invite friendly forks.

Try to imagine who might find a particular project useful. Write that up as an example and incorporate it into the README or other documentation (eg. I imagine that anything related to stormwater runoff may be useful to civic planning departments, or perhaps environmental advocacy groups). Blog/tweet about the use case (your agency's comms team may be helpful here).

I hope these suggestions help.

[martincolorado]

I'm not sure what EPA can do to make it more useful. My personal example is the USEPA/USEEIO modeling framework [1]. My agency uses a pricey and rigid proprietary modeling framework. When I suggested USEEIO as an extensible cost-effective alternative I was met with resistance that it is free and mustn't be any good and definitely not defensible in court. Classic .gov thinking. I think DoD prioritizing open-source along with the work of USDS/GSA at digital.gov needs to diffuse to Senior Execs at other agencies to shift the paradigm. Unfortunately it feels like this is a decade out. Thank you for pushing OSS in .gov and to your peers at EPA for USEEIO.

[1] https://github.com/USEPA/USEEIO

[grandinj]

Speaking from experience, convincing management is a long-haul process.

It is needs to be repeatedly brought (but gently).

Forward links to success stories, provide counter arguments to FUD (but again, gently!)

I say gently because it's easy to create enemies by making people look bad, and that's a no-no, you have to gradually wear down the old consensus and build a new one.

[pabs3]

The usual stuff; Do everything in public in the community. Make your public GitHub the place you do internal deployments from, so that you ensure everything deployed internally is public. Contribute back to your dependencies' upstream projects with bug reports/triage, patches, test cases and reviews. Contribute back to the distros you use, with bug reports, packaging updates, patches, testing etc. As well as funding US EPA developers to do this work, fund the most important projects you use through donations or support contracts or whatever else is available.

[pabs3]

Re general purpose libraries, definitely consider splitting projects up into separate libraries, and switch the domain specific projects to using those libraries.