SHARE IT Act
Enabling Reuse of Federal Source Code
Streamlining compliance and reducing burden of creating and maintaining software repository metadata through automation, open standards, and open source.
What is the SHARE IT Act?
"This bill requires federal agencies to ensure that custom-developed code
(i.e., source code that
is produced under an agency contract, funded exclusively by the federal government, or developed
by federal employees as part of their official duties) and certain technical components of
the
code such as architecture designs and metadata are
(1) owned by the agency,
(2) stored at no less than one public or private repository, and
(3) accessible to federal employees under certain procedures. Agency
contracts for
custom-development of software must acquire and exercise rights sufficient to allow
government-wide access, sharing, use, and modification of any custom-developed code.
The bill does not apply to source code that is classified, developed primarily for use in a
national security system, or developed by an element of the intelligence community.
An agency's office of the chief information officer may exempt source code from being shared
or made publicly accessible to protect individual privacy."
Bill Summary
This website provides the following to help users become SHARE IT Act ready.
Documentation
Guides and references for all things SHARE IT Act.
Schemas
Complete reference of all metadata fields, their descriptions, and requirements for code.json.
View ReferenceImplementation
Step-by-step procedures for creating, updating, and maintaining code.json files in your repositories.
View GuideSHARE IT Act Journey
Complete the following steps to bring your repository and agency into compliance with the SHARE IT Act
For repositories managed by project teams:
Identify key information about your repository
Add a code.json file to your repository to provide required project
metadata
OR
Automate code.json updates for the future
For agencies:
Identify GitHub organizations and other platforms where source code is hosted
Generate the agency-index.json using index-generator
OR
Provide the index json file at:
OR
For report to Congress:
code-gov serves as an inventory of all source code metadata in the federal government
Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government submits a report with a list of all exempted software including narrative justifications
Comptroller General of the United States submits a report including an assessment of the implementation of the act
Tools
Utilities and tools to help generate, validate, and manage, and visualize repository metadata.
Web Form Generator
A step-by-step interactive web form for creating, generating, and downloading a valid code.json file.
Open Tool
Index Generator
Python-based CLI tool that scans GitHub repositories for code.json files, and generates an index file for agency-wide reporting.
View on GitHub
Automated Generator
GitHub Action that automatically generates and updates code.json files. It can computes labor hours, detect languages, and maintain accurate metadata.
View on GitHub
Repository Scaffolder
Template generator for creating new repositories with all the necessary documentation and code.json files pre-configured according to standards.
View on GitHub
Metrics
Website to view statistics and data visualizations about open source projects at the repository or organization level.
Open Tool
Repolinter Actions
A Github Action that pre-populates documentation based repository maturity.
View on GitHubReady to be Compliant?
By taking our short quiz, we can help guide you through the process.
Take the Quiz
