By GovFresh · October 22, 2013
A new We the People petition opened Sunday calling for the federal government to make the healthcare.gov source code publicly available “so we may help fix any found issues.”
From the petition:
It is believed that the enrollment issues with healthcare.gov are likely due to poor coding practices in components that are unavailable to the world's development community to evaluate. Code funded by taxpaying citizens should be made available to the general public as government funded development is generally public domain software. Please release the code so we may help fix any found issues.
The petition has more than 1,000 signatures, still a ways away from the 100,000 needed by November 19 to receive an official White House response.
More discussion on open sourcing healthcare.gov can be found here, here and here.
In the meantime, the Department of Health & Human Services released a statement on Sunday saying it will bring in the “best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.”
President Obama addressed healthcare.gov technical issues at a Monday speech at the White House:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw3SJw-vF-8