IDB wants the world to use its computer code products for free

WASHINGTON — The Inter-American Development Bank is the first multilateral development bank to publicly share the computer code products it develops for clients in an open-source repository, an effort that has seen downloads from nearly every country in the world since it launched two years ago. IDB’s Code for Development initiative has made available code other governments and organizations can download and repurpose for free from Github, a hosting site for computer code. This saves bank clients and other governments money that was previously being spent designing, developing, and licensing new code to solve similar development problems in sectors from health to governance in different countries and municipalities around the world. “Why do solutions have to constrain themselves to specific jurisdiction or to any border when the problem is the same?” --— Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza, secretary of innovation and citizen participation, San Pedro Garza García The initiative is part of an IDB effort over the last 10 years to make the knowledge generated by the bank available for clients and others seeking to solve development challenges. Already, Code for Development has proven there is an appetite for this sort of free resource, according to Kyle Strand, an IDB senior knowledge management specialist. He said the Latin American region as a whole and particularly Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil have strong open source communities that are interested in learning from, reusing, and repurposing work that has already been done. “Software exists in every sector and so the opportunities to use open source in every sector I think are really high. It’s transversal in some ways because a lot of code we’re talking about is solving functional problems as opposed to sectoral problems,” Strand said. “This is something that especially when you look in the context of countries where maybe the ability to spend a lot of money on licensing isn’t that high, open source becomes a very attractive and viable alternative to addressing your technology issues.” Code developed for bank clients appears in the database if they agree to make it public. Strand said that although tools not developed by IDB can also make it into Code for Development if the bank becomes aware of them and sees them as an appropriate addition to the catalogue, IDB ensures that such software is a quality product that can be downloaded and used safely and securely. Because the Code for Development repository is hosted on Github, IDB does not have exact metrics on how many times its products have been downloaded. But the bank said it does know its Github page has 44,000 pageviews from nearly every country in the world, with the United States, Colombia, and Mexico representing the largest amount of web traffic to the site at 15%, 14%, and 13% respectively. Most of the visitors come from the Americas, and most reach the website by typing the URL in directly. ‘Why not try the same solution if it’s working out somewhere else?’ Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza, secretary of innovation and citizen participation in San Pedro Garza García in Monterrey, Mexico, learned about the open code initiative while working for the Governance Lab Academy at New York University. When she returned to Monterrey to work for the local government, she focused her role on making sure that her municipality can take advantage of existing tools to solve problems they face locally while spending money responsibly. “Why do solutions have to constrain themselves to specific jurisdiction or to any border when the problem is the same, why not try the same solution if it’s working out somewhere else?” Cantú-Pedraza said. The municipality of San Pedro wanted to make more transparent the information about its public works projects, which was already on its website but wasn’t centralized in a way that made it easily accessible or useful to citizens. Information was also displayed on banners at the project site, but the city wanted a better way to show its population how their tax dollars were being used. Cantú-Pedraza knew where she could find a solution. Code for Development had a program originally developed by the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, aimed at increasing transparency around public works projects that could be applied in the case of San Pedro — without the Mexican city having to design and code its own program. “People want to know how you’re spending their money: what works are you going to have in the city, how long are they going to take building,” Cantú-Pedraza said. “A lot of them are done by contractors. Who’s the contractor? So through the platform, you can see all of that in real time. You can even follow how it is advancing.” The government of San Pedro can now input all of that information into a spreadsheet, which updates a website citizens can visit to monitor progress on public works projects and how much money is being spent on them. Another code in the repository was developed by IDB fiscal management specialist Rodrigo Azuero originally for use by Ecuador in determining accessibility of educational mentoring services for teachers that needed additional training. The tool, Gmapsdistance, allows a multi-faceted calculation that includes inputs like time of day, mode of transportation, and cost to identify the ideal locations for schools where the training would take place. “It creates a database, it goes to Google Maps and it performs all these combinations so that the user can see … for the different amounts of combinations, the total distance between each point, and the total amount of time on different commuting scenarios: walking, driving public transportation, by car,” Azuero said. “Anything that can be done basically with Google Maps can be done with our code.” According to Azuero, his code has been downloaded 20,000 times. It has been reused by New York City’s Health Department to calculate how far people with congenital heart conditions lived from the closest treatment center to ensure they would have access to a facility that can meet their needs. Learning about other use cases like this is helpful to IDB, Azuero said, so the bank can track how people are using it and better adapt it for the demands of users. Code for Development has worked to spread awareness about the project to all areas of IDB, Strand said, so staffers keep in mind how projects for current clients may be useful to the code repository for others seeking to solve similar problems in the future. The bank is already using code that was developed for one client in projects for another, and Strand said Code for Development has a guide for best practices for designing code so it can be repurposed. “The biggest area of excitement for us now looking forward is how do we increase our engagement with those actors that can use these tools? How do we help governments decide whether or not an open source tool is right to meet their needs?” Strand said. “For those cases where they decide that it is, how can we support the decision-making process to be able to implement this actually in their case, to improve the lives of the citizens they are working to serve?”