Government code is public. It is not open.

The list at government.github.com is the closest thing that exists to an official register of government open source. It is maintained by GitHub, and governments add themselves to it. This analysis enumerates all 1,079 organization handles on it, then every public repository each one owns, then the merge history of every repository that is still alive.

Two facts about the list shape everything that follows. First, it is opt-in. No government appears on it that did not choose to. Whatever these numbers show is therefore a best case, not a representative sample of government technology. Second, it is well maintained: only 2 of the 1,079 handles no longer resolve, so the picture below is not an artifact of link rot.

Between them these organizations hold 75,638 public repositories. The distribution is extremely uneven: the median organization has 15 repos, while the largest single one, Norway's labour and welfare agency navikt, has 3,098. Fifty-five listed organizations have none at all.

The United Kingdom, with 212 organizations, publishes more public code than the United States does with 332.

Publishing a repository and maintaining one are different acts. Filtering the 75,638 repos down to those a person could actually work on removes roughly four out of five.

Forks account for 8,670. A further 875 are empty. The largest single deduction is archiving: 22,082 repositories, 29.2% of everything on the list, are already archived, which on GitHub means read-only by explicit choice. What remains after requiring a push inside 12 months is 22,337 repos, and requiring that issues are open and a license is present leaves 15,577.

The sharpest test is not whether a repository is public but whether anyone outside the organization has successfully changed it. For all 22,337 living repositories this study read the 15 most recently updated merged pull requests and classified each author by their relationship to the organization.

Most living government repos do merge pull requests: 70.8% merged at least one in the last 12 months. But the overwhelming majority of that traffic is internal.

GitHub organization membership can be private. When it is, a staff engineer's pull request is reported with exactly the same author association as a stranger's. Spot checking confirmed this: on alphagov/govuk-frontend, several of the accounts labelled as outside contributors are GOV.UK Design System developers.

So the raw 53.6% figure is an upper bound, not an estimate. To get a floor, this study excluded any "outside" author who had merged pull requests into three or more separate repositories belonging to the same organization, a pattern that describes staff rather than a passing contributor. That cuts the figure to 17.8% of living repos, or 5.2% of all government public repositories.

Because the threshold is a judgement call, here is the full sensitivity range rather than a single number.

Inside the United States the pattern runs against intuition. Federal agencies, which are furthest from the public, publish the most code by a wide margin and are the most open to outside contribution. The layers of government closest to residents, cities and counties, are the least active on both measures.

All 53 U.S. state-level organizations combined publish 1,256 public repositories. The United Kingdom's tax agency alone publishes 1,792.

Outside contribution is not evenly spread. It concentrates in a small number of organizations that have built the habit deliberately, and they are disproportionately British and Nordic. The U.K. Ministry of Justice alone attracted more distinct outside contributors in a year than every U.S. state, city and county organization combined.

NASA is the strongest performer in the United States by a wide margin, with more than twice the outside contributors of the next American organization.