France’s minister of education declined calls from the national assembly to make the use of free and open source software a priority in schools.

Academic libraries have -- as all sectors -- a need to reduce costs, improve service, etc. Many still use the same legacy software while others spend billions on licences for proprietary solutions. However, the National Library of Finland made the decisive step forward: They migrated to a free, open source software platform. By next summer, it will be ready for use by nearly all Finnish academic libraries.

The OpenEO research project aims to make it easy to use Earth observation data from satellites to answer questions on land use, from environment and agriculture to biodiversity and ecology. Open source software plays a crucial role.

The European Commission (Directorate-General for Informatics, Interoperability Unit) is conducting a study to define the new vision and strategy of OSOR. To contribute to this study, the European Commission is collecting views and opinions from the Open Source Software community. As part of this, a workshop is being organised, to present the study's findings and to discus, gather views and opinions on the future vision and strategy of OSOR. The workshop will take place on 12 March 2019 from 10.30 AM to 1.30 PM at the European Commission’s premises in Rue Montoyer 15, Brussels, Belgium.

Slovak proponents of the use of free and open source software are rallying for their country’s parliament to approve plans to share the source code of software solutions developed by and for public services.

The Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Germany has opened a new laboratory dedicated to open source software.

Universities and teachers across Greece are encouraging the country’s young schoolchildren to experiment with open source software and hardware. The Panhellenic Open Robotics Competition also encourages school students and their teachers to work together, and aims to create open educational resources.

Do you work in a public administration or the private sector and handle information, services or processes using location-related data? ELISE (The European Location Interoperability Solutions for e-Government) breaks down barriers and promotes a coherent and consistent approach to the sharing and reuse of such location data across borders and sectors!

The National Library of Finland has announced the successful migration of the University of Jyväskylä to Koha library -system.

The Free State of Thuringia in Germany wants to increase the visibility of free and open source software. It is calling on the state’s companies, organisations and citizens to nominate projects involving open source, open data, open hardware or open access solutions for the Thüringer Open Source Preis (Thuringian open source award).

Over a hundred European cities have agreed on ‘Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms’ defining the communication between software programmes and building blocks to allow co-creation and sharing of services.

It’s getting easier for France’s local and regional public services to manage their procurement entirely electronically, thanks to open source software.

EU Member States should agree on how to disclose software bugs and vulnerabilities in computer hardware, and the best ways to mitigate their risks, a study commissioned by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (Enisa) shows.

Because it makes it easier to work together, and because it encourages the sharing, reuse, and improvement of ICT solutions, free and open source is a strategic choice for Enabel, the Belgian development cooperation agency.

Home, sweet home! As a homeowner, would it not be neat to have access to a unique digital file of your house, providing you with an insight into all of the building’s relevant information, including energy efficiency, utility supplies, ground plans, licensed home improvement works, etc.? The Flemish government thought so, too, that is why they developed an innovative solution called Building Passport Flanders (Woningpas)!

When it comes to collaborative urban policy-making of bustling cities, you need all the help you can get to make effective, informed, data-driven decisions. The PoliVisu Toolbox enables cities to test a variety of policy strategies and actions with stakeholders using local data sets (i.e., road sensor data on traffic flows, historical accident data, traffic light data, pedestrian data etc.) and visually simulate potential impacts, without the need to deploy multiple, costly pilot tests.

The EU’s multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-technological environment is what makes it a thriving community. And, naturally, it is also what makes it complex enough to achieve optimal ICT interoperability among Member States. One remedy for this is VocBench. This solution provides centralised management of multi-lingual controlled vocabularies and metadata used by public administrations, and also facilitates a web-based collaborative editing and management platform.

Could you imagine a world without smartphones, e-banking, electronic identification, online tax declarations, cash terminals accepting your national bank’s card in all Member States? And could your children imagine spending hours queuing in a public administration to get a visa or any other official document?

Obviously not. Our public services are increasingly becoming digital, and the next decades promise to be even more so. Europeans should be able to communicate with their public administrations through the simple click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger.

Our role is to support achieving this objective: the European Commission created Joinup to provide a common venue for you to find cutting-edge IT solutions and good practices, and to allow you to share your own solutions. The platform facilitates communication and collaboration on IT projects across Europe.

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The Joinup Team

As the 28 February deadline for submitting entries for the second edition of the Sharing & Reuse Awards approaches, representatives of 3 winning solutions - iMIO, Oskari and MAGDA platform - share their experience of the 2017 competition. They talk about how it benefited their projects and offer some top tips for future participants.