Esri: Going Open with GitHub As many of us know, GitHub has become the largest and most popular open source, social coding platform in the world. Not only does GitHub provide developers with a simple and effective way to publish projects and to collaborate with other developers, it also gives organizations a way to deploy large software development projects in the same space. Organizations can publish projects and interface with the community through the standard “Fork, Clone, Pull Request” methodology to accept code changes back into projects. Internal teams at large organizations can also use the private features of GitHub to curate and further develop projects until they are ready to be moved the public domain. Esri hosts over 80 public code repositories on GitHub. These “geo projects” extend across a very wide-range of disciplines and technologies. This includes everything from full client-server Government solutions to specific geo-utility/analysis tools to ArcGIS products, components and solutions. Here are a few examples: - Geoportal Server - a standards-based tool that enables the discovery of geospatial resources and data; - Citizen Service Request Solution - a client-server application allowing citizens to submit requests from their desktop, mobile and tablet devices; - Spatial Framework for Hadoop - a spatial framework that allows developers and scientists to use the Hadoop data processing system for spatial data analysis; - Bootstrap for Maps – an example of how to use Bootstrap with Dojo to build mapping apps; - ArcGIS Flex Viewer - the complete Flex source code for building RIA web applications. This session covers how Esri embraced GitHub for sharing geo projects both across the organization and to the public domain, the implementation strategy, the technical challenges faced, and why others might want to consider adopting GitHub for their organizations as well.