Presidential Innovation Fellow Ben Balter recently posted to Twitter news on what may be the federal government’s first agency-to-agency accepted “pull request” at the collaborative coding site GitHub.
A pull request allows one party to enhance another’s code submission, known as a repository, and submit it back to the original developer for review and merge to the initial repository.
The request was made on the Digital Government Strategy Report Generator, which generates agency progress reports related to the White House’s Digital Government Strategy. The repository is located at the General Services Administration’s official GitHub account.
“I am preparing the digital strategy implementation for the Dept. of Commerce and we are using your report generator. Thank you for the tool as it has accelerated our deployment,” wrote Bill Severe in submitting the request. “I would very much like to combine our efforts on this for the benefit of the entire FED community.”
In accepting the request, Balter replied, “Thanks again to both for the feedback and for the code. Truly a model of what government should be doing.”
