When the government collaborates with the open-source community, information technology takes on a whole new meaning. In British Columbia, Canada, the BC Developers’ Exchange is taking a different approach to working with developers to solve problems and make the data the government owns improve the lives of citizens.

“We recognized that government had fallen behind in its technology practices and technology utilization, and we were trying to participate in the tech industry that is growing in BC. And we were finding there was a pretty big gap in understanding,” said Todd Wilson (pictured, left), director if the BC Developers’ Exchange at BC Public Service.

Wilson and Shea Phillips, software architect and community builder for the BC Developers’ Exchange, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.

The conversation centered around how the British Columbia government is using open-source technology and developers to move ministries and agencies forward in the digital world.

Developer nation

In order to connect better with the developer community, BCDevExchange opened up data as an incentive to draw the tech industry into projects. Noting that the government has a great deal of data assets, the tech industry is able to benefit by leveraging it to build applications.

Open data was just the beginning, and the BCDevExchange team realized it needed Application Program Interfaces to start the collaboration process to begin developing solutions.

“We brought the province into GitHub, and we’re doing open-source collaboration on GitHub. And it’s been of morphed into a much bigger picture than we originally started with, but it’s been a really exciting way to work,” Wilson explained.

Wilson and Phillips cite examples of teamwork across the community that involved developers stepping in to fix problems with retrieving report data and one tech company using traffic standards reporting to develop an app.

By sharing code through GitHub, developers working on projects can acquire knowledge from previous projects and repurpose applications, giving them a great starting point, according to Phillips.

“[There are] a lot of common things that every application would have to figure out. So by having these starter kits, essentially, development teams have a leg up on taking on new projects. And that reduces the time to market and the cost … [making] things a little more consistent,” Phillips stated.

The datacenter is run through partnerships like the one with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and all the data resides on-premise. Using the Red Hat Inc. OpenShift container platform for all the front-end-facing interfaces, developers go through the open-source platform to access the data through a gateway.  

“What we found with the OpenShift container platform is the developers don’t necessarily need to worry about a lot of the technical policies and network policies that are part of those security standards; that’s handled by the platform,” Wilson said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE