Red Hat pursuing CfA feather for municipal IT

RALEIGH, US: Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced a collaboration with Code for America (CfA), a non-profit organization that partners with local governments to foster civic innovation, focused on using technology to increase civic engagement.

The collaboration brings Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA Fellows and partner communities free-of-charge to help achieve CfA's goal of fostering collaboration between city hall and city residents and innovative problem solving through technology.

With OpenShift, CfA Fellows will be able to build, test, deploy and manage applications with the benefits of ease of use, flexibility and scalability for their applications, as the announcement explained.

The pairing of OpenShift's rapid deployment capabilities with the innovative applications built by CfA Fellows is a compelling mix for moving civic technology capability forward as claimed there.

Rather than the municipal IT staff or Fellows having to provision and maintain servers, the application developers can focus on what they do best: writing code. Code for America matches Red Hat's vision of community-powered innovation, and open source technology gives civic groups the opportunity to not only solve pain points for IT and developers, but also improve service to end users.

The CfA Fellows will receive access to OpenShift free-of-charge for one year. CfA's 2013 partner cities - Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas); Las Vegas; Louisville, Ken.; New York; Oakland, Calif.; San Francisco; San Mateo County, Calif.; South Bend, Ind.; and Summit County, Ohio - will also receive an option of one additional year of free hosting and services. In total, the value of Red Hat's contribution to CfA is worth approximately $300,000 in hosting and service per year.

Ashesh Badani, global leader, Cloud and OpenShift, Red Hat added,

"As PaaS becomes an increasingly important component in the adoption of cloud across industries and geographies, it will become more crucial for government agencies to be ahead of the curve. OpenShift offers developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications. With built-in platform support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and Java and customizable cartridge functionality, developers can also add additional languages that they choose to develop in. OpenShift also supports many popular frameworks, such as Zend, Java EE, Spring, Rails, Play and more."

As per Mick Thompson, engineer in residence, Code for America

"Cities are changing. Across the country, we are seeing local governments begin to leverage the phenomenal advances in modern technology to be more responsive and connected to their residents. Through this partnership with Red Hat, the Code for America Fellows will be equipped to collaborate with our cities and counties and do even more, creating sustainable, innovative civic technology."