The Open Government Partnership (OGP) recently launched the OGP Toolbox, bringing together digital tools to promote openness in government and improve democracy. Development of the platform started at a hackathon organised at last year's OGP Summit in Paris. The portal currently features 190 use cases, 1277 tools, and 521 organisations.

The back-end of the platform has been built on open source software tools developed by the French government. The front-end, i.e. the web interface, has been made available for reuse on GitHub under the AGPL open source license.

Platform

The OGP Toolbox brings together various open source software tools to constitute the platform. Information on software packages is automatically aggregated using the Open Software Base, a toolset originally developed by Etalab, the French Prime Minister's task force for open data. It uses the YAML format to collect and store data on programs from other software repositories and lists. This information is combined with metadata from the local Git repository and then made available for evaluation and comparison of the indexed software packages.

The OGP Toolbox can be accessed through an Application Programming Interface (API) that is also part of the Open Software Base, or through the web front-end.

Open Government Partnership

The OGP is an international initiative to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. It does so by securing concrete commitments from participating governments, which now number around 70.