The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has announced it joined GitHub to facilitate collaboration and help other organizations benefit from its software development efforts.
“It’s critical we identify more ways to be innovative, reduce costs and integrate efforts across the intelligence community and all of government,” said NGA director Letitia Long.
NGA is sharing code for GeoQ, a tool it said it developed to assist with humanitarian and disaster recovery efforts, and refined through a partnership with FEMA. FEMA reportedly has been using it as the basis for a shared disaster response solution across the US government and first-responder community.
GEOq provides workflow management and integrates imagery and analysis from multiple sources to get a better picture of disaster areas and the extent of damage.
“We built GeoQ on all open-source frameworks to make it easily shareable with our mission and response partners,” said Ray Bauer, technology lead for NGA’s Readiness, Response and Recovery team.
“What we’re hoping for now is to spark interaction with the GitHubcommunities to improve the code,” he added.