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Open Source Observatory (OSOR) newsletter
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An autonomous ICT sector
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The city of Tirana (Albania) gets it: using open source software creates opportunities, promotes creativity, and helps local businesses and citizens. Turkey also recognises it: this summer the government implored public services to switch to ‘domestic and national’ information and communication technology, including open source.
The Basque Country (Spain) shows what happens when governments encourage the use of open source software. In the past year, Basque ICT companies that specialise in free and open source software report revenue growth of 8 percent – much higher than the autonomous region’s average. And in France, the Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL), a national trade group advocating free software that represents over 300 ICT firms, once again confirms that the market for open source keeps on growing, in terms of both turnover and jobs: it expects that by 2020 close to 70,000 people in France will have jobs related to open source software.
In all these countries, governments actively encourage the use of open source in public services. They realise that their investments in open source create future benefits and generate a virtuous loop between the public and private sector. It's something for other governments to consider as a new year's resolution.
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Latest News
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Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019
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The Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Mariya Gabriel, has officially launched the Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019.
The Awards put in the spotlight the most innovative and impactful IT solutions for public administrations (both open source software and IT shared services).
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Our 2018 Paris Summit: Open source software in public administrations
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For public services that are considering how to contribute to open source, Matthieu Faure, open source solution architect at Adullact has a practical recommendation: “Open source can not be told what to do, but what you want can be created.” His advice is to “simply contribute. Submit code, supply documentation, it can be anything.”
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Basque Country open source ICT sector grows 8%
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In the past year, ICT companies in the Basque Country in Spain that specialise in free and open source software report a revenue growth of 8 percent – much higher than the autonomous region’s average – according to a member survey by ESLE, the region’s trade group for these ICT service providers.
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Turkey encourages public services to use open source
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The government of Turkey is renewing its drive to get public services to switch to open source software solutions. This summer, the government urged the public sector to contribute more to the national economy, and using open source is one of the mandated measures.
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Tirana turns to open standards and open source to modernise government services
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To offer modern government services, the city of Tirana (Albania) is turning to open source software. Soon, Tirana will complete the implementation of the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools on all of the city’s 1,000 PC workstations.
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UK GDS: Overcoming barriers to coding in the open
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The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) is sharing its recommendations for how public services can overcome barriers to developing software as open source. In a blog post, GDS summarises its answers to 11 roadblocks frequently encountered. Their words of advice are useful for public services from all over Europe.
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Presenting the Joinup Licensing Assistant
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During the recent Paris Open Source Summit on 5 December 2018, Joinup presented the draft for a new licensing assistant. The assistant is to facilitate the selection and understanding of licences based on their content and purpose.
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Sweden: For confidentiality, don’t use foreign clouds
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Public services in Sweden should not use non-Swedish cloud services to handle confidential information, government lawyers say. Sweden’s national procurement services agree, and are calling on the country’s ICT sector to offer cloud services that can be used safely by the country’s public sector.
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Tax returns must allow open source, says UK SME
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The UK’s tax authority (HMRC) should include open source options in its list of software suppliers for sending VAT (sales tax) returns and income tax updates, says Flax & Teal, a Belfast-based software development and data analytics company. HMRC is gradually adding new suppliers to the list, but so far has not included any open source options.
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OECD: open-source software pivotal in artificial intelligence
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Open-source software plays an important role in artificial intelligence (AI). This includes specific software libraries, editors and development environments, and machine learning platforms. So say the authors of the latest OECD Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Outlook (2018), who identified AI and (big) data as the most prominent disruptive developments in innovation.
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Russian observers test election monitoring app
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National Public Monitoring (NOM), a Russian independent association of public observers, has been testing a monitoring tool for voting based on blockchain technology. The software will be made publicly available on GitHub under a GPL licence at the beginning of 2019.
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Germany boosts digital teaching and learning via open source portal
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Germany intends to modernise teaching, saying that a digital transformation of the education sector is needed to prepare the country’s future generations for a digital society. The Ministry of Education and Research is financing the creation of a ‘Schul Cloud’ (School Cloud) made available as open source software.
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A call for open research computation
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Openness has become an important pillar of science practice. Open access makes research output (i.e. scientific publications) publicly available. In an EU context, open access also includes open science data, i.e. making available all the data that underlies a publication.
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Latest Studies
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Berlin Technical University and Nextcloud: showing public services how to interact with open source projects
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Public services commonly wonder how to interact with fluid communities of open source developers and users. The seven-year relationship between the Technische Universität Berlin and the developer community of Nextcloud, an open source solution for cloud storage, file sharing and file synchronisation, shows how such a relationship can be both easy and mutually beneficial.
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'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp
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A new administrative coalition has forced Digipolis Antwerp to rethink its procurement policy. In 2015 the City of Antwerp reorganised its ICT architecture from silo-based systems dependent on large suppliers to a modular approach, for which the re-usable components are provided by a network of startup companies.
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Latest Software
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Joinup (source code)
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This is the source code for Joinup ( https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/ ). Joinup is a collaborative platform created by the European Commission and funded by the European Union via the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme. It offers several services that aim to help e-Government professionals share their experience with each other.
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Ethical and Good Governance Mailbox
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The Ethical and Good Governance Mailbox ("Bústia Ètica i de Bon Govern" in Catalan) is a secure channel that allows the anonymous participation of citizens to inform about any action or omission contrary to the values of Good Governance and thus help improve public management.
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Mustangproject
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Mustangproject is a library and tool for the open e-invoicing standard ZUGFeRD/Factur-X. ZUGFeRD works by embedding a XML file into a PDF, making it a hybrid (i.e. both human and machine readable) invoice. Mustangproject is both an APL licensed java library and a command line tool which allows to extract and combine PDF and XML, and to migrate from ZUGFeRD v1 to v2 public preview and count how many PDF files contain ZUGFeRD metadata.
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OSAM mobile apps modules
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OSAM is the Services in the Cellphone Office (Oficina de Serveis Al Mòbil) at Barcelona City Council. OSAM provides modules that can be used to perform a series of common tasks in all of the apps published by the Barcelona City Council.
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Upcoming Events
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18/04/2019 - 19/04/2019
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26TH Open Systems Days Croatian Linux Users’ Conference
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DORS/CLUC - Dani otvorenih računarskih sustava / Croatian Linux Users' Conference - is the oldest and biggest regional conference that covers free and open source software, open standards, and the Linux operating system. For the last 26 years, DORS/CLUC has brought together many prominent individuals and companies from the free and open source software community.
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