Open Source Observatory (OSOR) newsletter

Decidim, by the city of Barcelona, OpenFisca by France's eGovernment unit (DINSIC), and Web Accessibility Observatory Tracker by Spain's General Secretariat for Digital Administration are three of eight open source solutions shortlisted for the Sharing & Reuse Awards contest. The winners will be announced at the Sharing & Reuse conference, taking place in Bucharest, Romania, on 11 June.

The Linux Foundation launched the CHIPS Alliance, which will be home to open source projects related to microprocessors and Systems on a Chip (SoCs). All the early backers — Esperanto Technologies, Google, SiFive and Western Digital — are involved in the development, implementation and application of the open RISC-V processor architecture, which is one of the two architectures selected for the European Processor Initiative (EPI).

OSI, the Open Source Initiative, categorises licences that are officially “open source” – meaning that OSI declares that such licences (or “licenses” according to the US spelling) are compliant with its Open Source Definition (OSD). The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) is now listed among “International licenses”, with CeCILL (a licence created in France by the three main public IT research organisations, INRIA, CEA and CNRS) and LiLiQ (a licence created by the State of Quebec – Canada).

Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is calling on governments to help preserve source code. The appeal is gaining support from researchers, universities and archives across the world. “The role of software development in all fields of innovation is still largely underrated,” Unesco says.

The new Norwegian Health Archives (Norsk helsearkiv, NHA) is being built using open source software, including operating system Linux, relational database management system MariaDB, search engine Elasticsearch, and digital preservation system Archivematica.

The Italian town of Montelupo Fiorentino is expanding its move to open source, following a decision by the town’s council. This year, the IT department aims to switch some 90% of all its PC workstations to an open source operating system.

Cityweb is a CMS aimed at managing and implementing the web site of a local Public Administration, in particular municipalities, based on version 7 of the Drupal framework. The CMS makes it possible, through a distributed editing team, to organise and manage the content of the web site. The CMS administration interface offers integrated tools to manage menus, write texts, attach documents and multimedia elements, and the possibility to grant permits to create decentralised editing teams.

IoTIB is the first IoT network in Europe that covers an entire region (the Balearic Islands). Our network is free software based and focused on providing service for IoT projects to all public institutions . It maintains the governance of the sensor network and it provides a unique middleware way to collect and send data. IoTIB uses the infrastructure of emergency and communications towers of the Baleraric Islands Government: antennas, fibre optics, radio links, secure encrypted communication and more.

OpenFisca transforms legislation into code and allows you to: Calculate variables of the tax and benefit system of a country given input variables. Thus, OpenFisca can calculate social benefits and taxes on test cases (a person or a household). Simulate the budgetary consequences of a reform and its distributional impact when plugged on a survey. This means OpenFisca can calculate social benefits and taxes on population data (real data or survey data).

The interministerial web conferencing platform is a set of interconnected applications mainly based on the open source and WebRTC-compatible Jitsi project. It allows the officials of the French state to create and join online meetings directly from a web browser and it includes many features such as screen sharing, collaborative real-time documents editing and instant messaging .

In 2001, all Catalan administrations – the Catalan Government and local authorities - in a joint strategy signed in the Catalan Parliament created the Consortium Open Administration of Catalonia (AOC). Its mission is to promote the digital transformation of the Catalan authorities promoting governments agile, collaborative and logical. The AOC vision will ensure that people enjoy quality public services and live in an open society.

LUTECE is a free and powerful Java based Content Management Framework developed by City of Paris since 2002. This software is an opportunity for other cities or associations to freely reuse, contribute and provide off-the-shelf services to their citizens. LUTECE received an award for the “Best Open Source Strategy” at the "Champion of Free Software" contest organised at Paris Open Source Summit 2018 and a Quality Award from OW2 in 2016.

Open-eID software is a collection of software components offering support for PKI-based functionality, i.e. operations with different cryptographic tokens (e.g. eID cards), handling digitally signed documents, file encryption/decryption and signing and authentication in web environment.