An Organizational Analysis of Publishing the People's Code

Publishing software publicly is a new phenomenon for U.S. federal government agencies. In August 2016, the White House issued the Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (FSCP). The FSCP mandated Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies to publish at least 20% of their custom developed code as open source software (OSS). The federal government has the responsibility to account for public spending, including spending for IT. The publication of OSS is one way the public can know about government spending. OSS additionally benefits the public by providing access to code, thus, making it the "People's Code."

From 2016 to 2019, the progress of CFO Act agencies in implementing the policy was mixed. This study examines whether and how organizational theoretical variables – cultural beliefs, public engagement, structural dimensions, and organizational location – affect policy implementation. The study uses the publication of OSS as an indicator of effective policy implementation, and it identifies the factors that hinder or aid publishing OSS. Using metadata collected from GitHub's application programming interface (API), I created a sampling frame that included 23 of 24 executive agencies publishing OSS before and after the FSCP was published. From the sampling frame, 25 participants from 20 agencies agreed to participate in the study. These participants were from software development units that minimally, moderately, or frequently published OSS. The sample consisted of participants from units mostly located outside a Chief Information Officer (CIO) office focused on software development and data science activities. Grounded theory provided an approach for data collection with elite interviews and artifact gathering allowing for analysis in an iterative, comparative manner for generating a theory of policy implementation for OSS publication. Units more frequently published OSS when they expressed non-monolithic and advantageous cultural beliefs; practiced more and more varied public engagement through bi-directional communication, events, and electronic tools; had structures with less centralization, more formalization, more differentiation, and more coordination; and were located in the "middle" of organizations with fewer hierarchical layers. Additionally, some units expressed both cautionary and advantageous cultural beliefs suggesting beliefs alone are not enough to allow units to publish OSS.

This study contributes to policy, public administration, and organization theory literatures. It enhances scholarship by examining a new phenomenon and aids practitioners by providing implications for consideration when implementing policy.