Open November 2025: CivicActions Rallies Digital Services Community to Expand the Digital Commons

The initiative is designed to strengthen open collaboration and transparency across the public digital services landscape. Participants are encouraged to share openly licensed assets such as templates, design patterns, automation scripts, checklists, and learning resources that others can adopt and improve. The overarching goal is to expand a shared repository of civic technology resources that enable more equitable, efficient, and user-centered services.

Open November emphasizes public value and reuse: by making these resources available via platforms like GitHub or GitLab, contributors help scale solutions beyond their own teams. All contributions must be openly licensed and publicly accessible, and the campaign encourages sharing with the hashtag #OpenNovember.

To support contributors, CivicActions has published a digital toolkit and visual assets, including the Open November logo and a “contributed” badge. Instructional videos such as “How to Contribute to a Drupal Module” offer step-by-step guidance for new contributors. Other videos cover contributions to the Open Python Directory and general project onboarding.

The campaign reflects CivicActions’ broader mission to normalize openness in public sector digital work. By encouraging sharing and collaboration across jurisdictions and sectors, Open November aims to shift norms toward more modular, discoverable, and community-driven infrastructure for government technology.