The long-term trend is clear: increasingly, Europe's local public serviecs are pooling resources and joining hands to work on common ICT solutions. The vast majority of these solutions is made available under an open source licence.

The European Commission's Open Source Observatory (OSOR) has many such examples: from Norway's Kongsberg region – involving a handful of municipalites, Denmark's OS2 community – joined by 66 of the country's 98 municipalites, to Belgium’s IMIO – servicing 75% of municipalities in the Walloon region. In France, several regions are using a similar approach to offer services, including the Paris region, the Vendée, Aquitaine and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.

We can now add Finland to this list. This summer, COSS, the country’s open source resource centre, started working with Kuntaliitto, the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities, to motivate municipalities to pool resources and jointly organise procurement of open source ICT solutions.

These joint efforts help public services to reduce costs, increase their efficiency, truly achieve interoperability, and get rid of IT vendor lock-in.

The European Commission's ISA² Programme, responsible for OSOR, places such examples in a broader context. ISA²'s "Sharing and Reuse Framework for IT Solutions" provides recommendations and offers best practices that should appeal to all public services.

OSOR will continue to bring you new examples of public services that join hands to work on open source. We aim to persuade others to follow suit.