Opening the AMP Source Code

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Accra Agenda for Action, we have taken the opportunity to conduct an AMP Retrospective on the DG blog (check out the other posts in the series here, here, and here). 

As our final Retrospective post, we are pleased to announce that Development Gateway has opened the source code of the Aid Management Platform (AMP). The now-public AMP source code is licensed under the GPLv3 open source license, which allows users to use and edit the software freely. 

DG has always granted a license to governments that use AMP that provides full ownership over the software code. This license never had any start-up or recurring fees; allowed the government to directly – or hire a third-party developer to – modify the code; and provided access to all existent features of the AMP software. This licensing arrangement has been a critical element of AMP, aiming to promote ownership and system sustainability in government systems. Some partner governments have already initiated the process of directly modifying AMP source code to meet their specific needs.

Making AMP open source has been a DG goal for several years, in line with our endorsement of the Principles for Digital Development. To accomplish this, we invested in the staff time needed for migrating to GitHub, completing some refactoring, and updating documentation to create an open and reusable codebase. We have also aimed to streamline licensing terms for our government users, and hope this will open the door to further innovation around the world’s most sustainable aid information management system.

DG will continue to support existing and future implementations of AMP. Recent innovations include providing Arabic language support for the Government of Jordan, to integrating disaster risk GIS layers with USAID and the Government of Haiti, to convening biennial AMP Good Practice Workshops. We also look forward to receiving new feedback from the open source software community, working with partners to continue to support sustainable aid information management systems worldwide.

Interested in seeing our code? The public repositories for AMP, the AMP Public Portal, and the IATI-AIMS Integrator are available on GitHub.