"Open Source Observatory Newsletter" Newsletter Issues

More than just an observer (07/08/2020)

Open source Drive-through Testing Software for COVID-19 (07/08/2020)

The Hungarian start-up Rollet released a free and open source software solution named NOÉ for administering in-car COVID-19 testing. Already in use in Budapest, the open source software is available for reuse by any government or organisation interested in the rapid sampling of any virus for which a car provides a suitable environment for testing and screening.

Slovenia to reuse Germany’s open source Covid-19 tracing app (03/08/2020)

The government of Slovenia on Tuesday awarded a tender for the localisation (translation) of the Covid-19 track and trace application developed for the German government. The Ministry of Public Administration hopes to have a Slovenian version of Germany’s open source software solution available for smartphones in mid-August.

Schleswig-Holstein: ‘National and international cooperation decisive for open source’ (03/08/2020)

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein says national and international cooperation among public services and others is key to success in making a switch to open source. The state government published its open source strategy in June, presenting it as a combination of a response to the changing business models of software vendors, and a strategic focus on data, sustainability, and technological sovereignty.

Open source library services platform (03/08/2020)

FOLIO is an open source library services platform (LSP) providing core functionalities for library management systems and extensible features that help libraries to meet their users’ evolving needs. Since 2019, FOLIO has been successfully implemented in several institutions around the world.

Lutece: Case Studies on Sustainability of Public Sector Open Source Communities (06/08/2020)

As part of its work to create Guidelines for Sustainable Open Source Communities in the Public Sector, OSOR developed five case studies to better understand what success factors influence the sustainability of public sector open source communities. This case study focuses on Lutece, an open source Content Management System aiming to allow each Parisian district to easily design their own website.

Voice of Groningen: Case Studies on Sustainability of Public Sector Open Source Communities (06/08/2020)

As part of its work to create Guidelines for Sustainable Open Source Communities in the Public Sector, OSOR developed five case studies to better understand what success factors influence the sustainability of public sector open source communities. This case study focuses on the Voice of Groningen, an open source participatory democracy platform designed to give citizens more decision-making power in relation to their locality.

OSS factsheet - Bulgaria (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Bulgaria's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Croatia (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Croatia's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Cyprus (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Cyprus' public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Denmark (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Denmark's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Estonia (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Estonia's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Greece (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Greece's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Hungary (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Hungary's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Lithuania (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Lithuania's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Malta (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Malta's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Netherlands (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in the Netherlands' public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - UK (03/08/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in the United Kingdom's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OpenFisca (06/08/2020)

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). OpenFisca also allows yuo to 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).

Re3gistry 2 (06/08/2020)

The Re3gistry 2 is a reusable open source solution for managing and sharing "reference codes". It provides a consistent central access point where labels and descriptions for reference codes can be easily browsed by humans and retrieved by machines.

Xtralingua (06/08/2020)

The goal of the Xtralingua tool is to build a desktop Graphical User Interface that provides users with an easy way to extract quantitative text profiles from multilingual texts. The tool is modular and open source, in order to be easily accessible and adaptable to specific scientific needs.

FrOSCon 2020 (23/08/2020)

FrOSCon is the 2-day annual event organised by the Department of Computer Science at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, with the help of FrOSCon eV. The event gathers an exciting programme of lectures and workshops for visitors of all ages who want to use, learn about or develop free and open source software.

OpenSym 2020 (25/08/2020)

The 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2020) is the premier conference on open collaboration research and practice, including open source, open data, open science, open education, wikis and related social media, Wikipedia, and IT-driven open innovation research.

Slovak procurement office recommends making licence requirements specific (11/08/2020)

Public services in the Slovak Republic that wish to avoid IT vendor lock-in have been advised to make their licence requirements clear – for example by requesting open source – when procuring software and related services. This is one of the recommendations in a case study published last April by the country’s public procurement office and Slovensko.Digital, a non-profit organisation promoting open government and government modernisation.

OSS factsheet - Luxembourg (09/07/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Luxembourg's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Poland (08/07/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Poland's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

Integreat: Case Studies on Sustainability of Public Sector Open Source Communities (08/07/2020)

As part of its work to create Guidelines for Sustainable Open Source Communities in the Public Sector, OSOR developed five case studies to better understand what success factors influence the sustainability of public sector open source communities. This case study focuses on Integreat, an open source digital integration platform designed to reduce information poverty for new arrivals in and within Germany.

Lutece (08/07/2020)

LUTECE Core is the application platform that provides standard services for digital services and business application. All the features are developed as plugins and modules and can be easily added to built up fully customized web applications. The platform is based on Java and runs on a Web container such as Tomcat or Jetty.

SDMX IT TOOLS (08/07/2020)

SDMX, which stands for Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange is an international initiative that aims at standardising and modernising (“industrialising”) the mechanisms and processes for the exchange of statistical data and metadata among international organisations and their member countries. SDMX provides various tools for facilitating the exchange of information between international organisations and data and metadata providers. The solutions are developed either by international institutions which are partners of the SDMX initiative or by the SDMX user community.

pygeoapi (08/07/2020)

pygeoapi.io is a relatively new, actively developed, opensource software package providing Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) API's for various data formats. JRC prepared a draft document on how to use OGC API Features as INSPIRE download service according to regulations. Combining the two aspects makes pygeoapi a very suitable candidate to expose datasets as download service.

OSS factsheet - Latvia (08/07/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Latvia's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

Cutting a new industry (09/07/2020)

Share your ideas for the evolvement of OSOR (13/07/2020)

OSOR is launching a short survey to collect your ideas on how to further enrich the content on the Open Source Observatory and find out your satisfaction rate. We are counting on you to share your ideas with us to continue making OSOR relevant for our community.

Denmark’s OS2 clarifies the legal basis for open source in municipalities (15/07/2020)

Municipalities using and contributing to open source are balancing their financial, legal, and social responsibilities, concludes a legal note written for OS2, Denmark’s community of public services that are pooling their efforts in the development of open source tools.

Estonia’s eVoting code is shared publicly, but for now not developed as open source (14/07/2020)

Estonia is sharing the software source code the country uses for electronic voting, to enable voters to verify the system. The software runs on top of X-Road, the country’s eGovernment services backbone and records exchange. Other countries could reuse the code, the new head of Estonia’s State Electoral Office tells the Commission’s open source observatory (OSOR). But it won’t be easy.

Detmold is first German city to use Consul for citizen participation (13/07/2020)

The city of Detmold is Germany’s first public service to implement Consul, an open source citizen [citizens’] participation web platform originally developed by the city of Madrid (Spain). Detmold, in North Rhine-Westphalia, uses open source software solutions “wherever technically sensible and feasible,” website administrator Carsten Kettner told the Commission’s open source observatory OSOR.

Commission’s NGI funds project to improve performance and security monitoring for open source mail servers (08/07/2020)

The European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) - a research and development grant programme - is helping to fund the development of Lightmeter, an email delivery monitoring tool made available as open source. The software is getting EUR 50,000 from NLnet, one of the partners in the EUR 250 million NGI initiative.

European and African Universities collaborated to launch an open source biomedical engineering e-Platform (08/07/2020)

UBORA is an e-Platform for the open source co-designing of new solutions to face current and future global healthcare challenges. UBORA is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and it is developed jointly by European and African Universities in collaboration with national and international policy makers.

The French education platform relying on open source tools (08/07/2020)

The French Ministry of National Education and Youth (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale et de la Jeunesse) launched the beta version of the apps.education.fr platform. Relying on open source software, apps.education.fr is meant to ensure pedagogical continuity and help meet teachers’ needs for distance learning tools.

Open source in Hamburg: ‘a showcase for technological sovereignty’ (08/07/2020)

The renewed government coalition of the city of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, wants an increase in the use of free and open source software. The city is to become an example for digital sovereignty, local politicians announced in early June.

The French government’s open source platform that turns law into software through socio-fiscal modelling (08/07/2020)

OpenFisca is a free and open source calculation engine that enables the modelling of socio-fiscal systems in a collaborative and transparent manner. It allows users to compute a large number of social charges, social benefits and taxes, and to simulate the impact of reforms on these sums. Developed in France by Etalab and BetaGouv, OpenFisca is now used in 10 countries around the world.

The City of Barcelona’s participatory democracy open source platform (08/07/2020)

Supported by Barcelona City Council, Decidim is an open source digital platform dedicated to participatory democracy, entirely designed and built in a collaborative manner. Since its inception, the platform has been implemented by several cities, regions and organisations worldwide.

Getting the message across (15/06/2020)

Contributions to open source software used as a proxy to measure Artificial Intelligence developments (12/06/2020)

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a study on ‘Identifying and measuring developments in artificial intelligence’ in May 2020. The paper assesses global software advancements on Artificial Intelligence (AI) by measuring the number of contributions made to AI open source software on GitHub.

Lessons learned from Turkey’s Eyüpsultan switch to open source (11/06/2020)

Public services preparing to increase their use of free and open source software, especially on PC workstations, should take a cue from the municipality of Eyüpsultan in Turkey. In 2015, Eyüpsultan began a two-year switch to open source desktops. It succeeded because the IT administrators made sure the desktops looked very similar. “The reaction we got on the first day was amazing, it makes me smile even now,” says Hüseyin Güç, leader of the GNU/Pardus Linux Team.

Code for Romania tailors game elements to software for young visually and hearing impaired students (11/06/2020)

Open source software developers working for Code for Romania are planning to use elements from computer games to build educational software for school children with deafblindness and multisensory impairments. First code development will start early next month, and the first tests of alpha versions are planned for August or September.

The French government’s inter-ministerial catalogue of open-source software (SILL) gets its own dedicated open source website (11/06/2020)

Published annually since 2013, the French Inter-ministerial Catalogue of Open Source Software (Socle Interministériel de Logiciels Libres, SILL) is a list of recommended open source software for French public administrations. Previously only available as a PDF document, the 2020 edition is also available as a web version developed as an open source software.

Key takeaways from the OSOR webinar on sustainable OSS communities (11/06/2020)

The key purpose of the webinar was to present and receive feedback on OSOR’s draft Guidelines for Sustainable Open Source Software Communities in the Public Sector. Additionally, participants had the chance to hear from Nephtis Brandsma, product owner at Groningen municipality, and Fritjof Knier, CFO of Integreat, about their journeys toward being part of sustainable public sector open source software communities.

OSS factsheet - Austria (11/06/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Austria's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Romania (11/06/2020)

Want to know more on the use of open source software in Romania's public administration? This report and factsheet will help you to gain an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives

RNDT metadata converter (15/06/2020)

Developed by the Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale, the RNDT metadata converter is a reusable solution allowing to request an OGC CSW (Catalog Service for the Web) and transfer the metadata records through a XSLT script.

SSI eIDAS Bridge reference implementation (15/06/2020)

The SSI eIDAS bridge is a pilot focusing on providing a cross-border identity solution compliant with the eIDAS trust framework. It opens a new way of implementing the eGovernment’s once-only principle. The eIDAS bridge refers to the component that will interconnect the SSI core solution to the eIDAS trust framework.

Interoperability Test Bed (15/06/2020)

The Interoperability Test Bed is a service offered by the European Commission’s DIGIT to facilitate the conformance testing of IT systems. It offers an intuitive web user interface that allows administrators to define their project’s overall testing setup as well as users to connect and run tests. The lastest additions to the Testbed are a GraphQL validation service and a GeoJSON validation service!

OW2’online20 (17/06/2020)

The OW2’online20 event is the annual event of the OW2 community. This year’s edition is exceptionally held online due to current travel restrictions. The online event will offer a series of online presentations and a live chat with the speakers. The OSOR team will participate in the event to present the work on open source policy country intelligence reports.

OpenExpo Europe 2020 (17/06/2020)

OpenExpo Europe is one of the disclosure windows in Technological Innovation, Digital Transformation and Open Source. Created seven years ago, the four-day event aims to promote the open source ecosystem and generate networking.

Things have changed (12/05/2020)

The Dutch government releases a guide on local practices of digital participation (12/05/2020)

Netwerk Democratie, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relation’s programme for “Democracy in Action”, and the Interreg Like! project of the European Regional Development Fund partnered to publish a guide on local practices of digital democracy. The publication provides guidelines, checklists, and case studies stemming from initiatives in Dutch municipalities that rely on open source solutions to improve their digital participation processes.

The Italian government releases user-centric public services application (12/05/2020)

In 2018, the Italian government launched the IO App, an open source application that aims at regrouping public services and making them available to citizens through a user-centric app. The IO App was born from the mission of Team Digitale to ‘build simpler and more efficient services for citizens, public administration and businesses, through innovative digital products’. Team Digitale’s mandate ended in 2019 and their projects, including the IO App, are now managed by the Digital Transformation Department within the Ministry for Technological Innovation and Digitalisation and the state-owned company Pago PA SpA.

Public procurement and open source: levelling the playing field (08/05/2020)

RTE (Réseau Transport d’Electricité), the electricity transmission system operator of France, has progressively increased its use of open source software since 2018 and has been including open source software in its procurement since 2019. Recently, RTE published a memo providing guidelines on including open source software in public procurement procedures.

Italy’s Digital Republic includes threatened South Tyrol school project (08/05/2020)

The project behind South Tyrol’s use of open source in schools has joined the Italian Digital Competence Coalition, an initiative by the country’s Ministry for Technological Innovation and Digitisation to promote digital inclusion and advance digital skills. The ministry is bringing together expertise from more than 100 projects across Italy to create a national strategy and intervention plan.

Webinar on open source software policies in the European Union (08/05/2020)

Thank you to all the participants who attended the OSOR webinar on open source software policies in the EU Member States held on 8 April 2020. Here is a short summary of the event for anyone who missed out.

Galicia’s Rianxo municipality uses open source for nearly everything (08/05/2020)

The municipality of Rianxo is one of those European public services that deserves to make the headlines because almost everything is done using free and open source software. For other public services, the transition to open source should now be easier than ever, says the town’s pioneering IT administrator.

Hämeenlinna joins network of Finnish municipalities for open source (08/05/2020)

The city of Hämeenlinna (Finland) recognises open technology as an opportunity to attract tech companies and get citizens involved. That is why the municipality is now increasing its use of – and contribution to – open source software.

Spanish and French governments turn to open source video-conferencing platform (08/05/2020)

The Spanish and French governments have turned to an open-source solution, Jitsi Meet, to host online meetings and press conferences. Jitsi Meet is a video conferencing tool that doesn’t require the download of any software or the creation of an account.

Italy says it will share source code of Covid-19 track-and-trace app (08/05/2020)

The government of Italy will publish as open source the source code of a smartphone application developed to track and trace the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the country.

GIS video tutorial attracts municipalities from across Europe (08/05/2020)

An online training course on gvSIG - an open source geographic information system (GIS) - continues to attract new users from Europe and across the globe. Over the past two years the gvSIG Association has provided certificates to trainees working for municipalities in Italy, Romania and many other countries, who have successfully completed the course.

Dutch government encourages public services to share their software source code (08/05/2020)

The Dutch government wants the country’s public services to share as open source any software solutions that are written for or by them. “My appeal to public services is to release the source code, unless they have good reasons not to,” writes State Secretary for the Interior Raymond Knops in a letter to the Dutch parliament. “A public service that uses open source software can also be expected to actively share with society software that it develops itself.”

RDF validation service (13/05/2020)

The Test Bed offers a generic RDF validation service that can be used to validate arbitrary RDF content using SHACL shapes to check both syntax and business rules. The RDF validation service is available for use as a standalone validator and through the Test Bed as part of complete conformance testing.

CEF eArchiving (13/05/2020)

eArchiving provides the core specifications, software, training and knowledge to help data creators, software developers and digital archives tackle the challenge of short, medium and long-term data management and reuse in a sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable and interoperable way.

CEF Context Broker (08/05/2020)

EF Context Broker is an API that can integrate data from multiple systems, creating a holistic view of information. By providing the layer that describes each type of data, the Context Broker makes it possible to create an interface that makes it easy for anyone to view and interpret big data. Using the Context Broker, organisations can monitor their metrics in real time through live updates and share the context information they choose with third parties, enabling process improvements and innovation across the whole data value chain.

OSOR webinar on the Sustainability of Public Sector Open Source Communities (04/06/2020)

The OSOR team is happy to invite you to an interactive webinar on our Guidelines for Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) Communities in the Public Sector, which we have been developing together with Dr. Maha Shaikh from King's College London. The guidelines are meant to serve as a practical tool that any public sector OSS community (or OSS enthusiast) can use to create and maintain sustainability.

Shower the power to innovate (16/04/2020)

Digital Response to COVID-19 (10/04/2020)

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, colleagues from the European Commission’s Directorate for Informatics and several other services along with the Joinup, NIFO, and OSOR teams have joined forces to release a repository of digital solutions and initiatives that help public administrations, businesses, and citizens fight back against the coronavirus.

Governments release open source contact-tracing apps to fight Covid-19 (17/04/2020)

Several governments across the globe have recently released open source contact-tracing applications designed to help identify potential COVID-19 cases based on users’ exposure to confirmed cases.

OSOR publishes 10 country reports! (15/04/2020)

The OSOR team has been working on the publication of country intelligence reports on open source software policies in all EU Member States. More than 10 reports are now available in OSOR’s Knowledge Centre!

Pasteur Institute and Greater Paris University Hospitals release open source COVID-19 auto-diagnosis bot (15/04/2020)

On 20 March 2020, the Pasteur Institute, Greater Paris University Hospitals (AP-HP) and the chatbot start-up Clevy, released the so-called Covid-bot, an open source COVID-19 auto-diagnosis chatbot. The Covid-bot allows respondents to assess their risk of COVID-19 contamination by filling a questionnaire.

Open source solution WebXray to help protecting public websites (10/04/2020)

On 4 February 2020, the UK’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) published a report on online targeting and ad-tracking processes on public websites. Several additional studies were conducted on the topic and the majority of them used the open source software webXray to collect data and conduct analysis on the websites’ level of compliance with current data protection regulation.

Thanks to open source, locked down schools in South Tyrol continue classes (10/04/2020)

Locked down because of the Corona epidemic, schools in northern Italy’s South Tyrol have moved to online classes thanks to BigBlueButton, an open source webconferencing solution. ICT service providers - including one in Luxembourg - and members of the local Linux user group are helping the schools to implement BigBlueButton. Already 45 teachers from ten schools are now able to organise small classes this way.

Dutch share decentralised data exchange as open source (10/04/2020)

Nuts, an open source, decentralised data exchange solution offering a large-scale trusted chain of custody, is inviting healthcare organisations to join. The project is being tested by hospitals, general practitioners and companies involved in healthcare, and hopes to launch the first version this summer.

Radio France contributes to open source audio streaming software (10/04/2020)

Radio France, a public service radio broadcaster and the country’s biggest Internet radio broadcaster, is actively contributing to free and open source software for Internet audio streaming. In addition to code contributions and bug fixes, the broadcaster contracts core contributors to key open source projects, and helps introduce the software to others.

GNU Health (15/04/2020)

GNU Health combines the socioeconomic determinants of health with state-of-the-art technology in bioinformatics and clinical genetics. It manages the internal processes of a health institution, such as financial management, stock & pharmacies or laboratories (LIMS). It provides a strong reporting/analytic functionality on demographics and epidemiology.

Joinup Licensing Assistant (15/04/2020)

As from June 2019, Joinup proposes a new solution: the JLA, a unique tool allowing everyone to compare and select open licences based on their content. The JLA is linked to SPDX (for Software Package Data Exchange), an initiative of the LINUX foundation that attempts to standardize the way in which organizations refer to software licenses: each licence is identified by a full name, such as "European Union Public Licence 1.2" and a shorter identifier, here "EUPL-1.2".

EU Council Presidency Translation Toolkit (15/04/2020)

The EU Council Presidency Translation Toolkit is – an online translation workspace – where users can translate text, full text documents (preserving document formatting), and websites in the 24 official EU languages. The workspace is connected to the eTranslation and TildeMT machine translations engines.

OSS factsheet - Czechia (14/04/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Czechia? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives?

OSS factsheet - Ireland (14/04/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Ireland? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives?

OSS factsheet - Spain (15/04/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Spain? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives?

French government launches in-house developed messaging service, Tchap (14/04/2020)

The Tchap project created a new open source encrypted communication tool for French public agents in order to improve information dissemination and ensure the security of the French government communication network.

#EUvsVirus - a pan-European Hackathon (16/04/2020)

The European Commission, in close collaboration with the EU member states, will host a pan-European hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners and investors across Europe in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges. Now is your chance to help tackle coronavirus!

Digital sovereignty and modernization of public administration conference (04/05/2020)

On 4 May, the Free Software Foundation Europe is organising a conference on Digital Sovereignty and Public Administration. The event will showcase successful free software projects in administration from the provider's perspective and discuss the administration's perspective on free software projects.

Open source in Europe: economic and strategic (10/03/2020)

European Commission to use open source messaging service Signal (12/03/2020)

In February 2020, European Commission agents received a communication encouraging them to use the messaging service Signal. The Signal messaging service is an open source and fully encrypted alternative to proprietary solutions.

Spain’s Bizkaia lets companies and citizens experiment with open source blockchain platform (12/03/2020)

The provincial council of Bizkaia, one of the provinces of the Basque Country in Spain, is letting companies and citizens run experiments with its blockchain platform in the hope of spinning off useful public and commercial services. “We consider this part of the public infrastructure, similar to roads or healthcare,” explains Valentin Garcia Souto, head of development and innovation at the IT department of the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia.

OSOR webinar: the new OSOR and its Knowledge Centre (10/03/2020)

On Tuesday 11 February, the OSOR community gathered for a webinar to discuss the functionalities of the OSOR platform and its new Knowledge Centre. Attendees shared their feedback and ideas on OSOR, its scope, and most importantly they shared their needs. Thank you for helping us tailor OSOR to your needs!

Open source is key to Estonia’s vision for artificial intelligence (10/03/2020)

For the government of Estonia, open source is always a priority, says the country’s Chief Data Officer, Ott Velsberg. “Everything we do, including artificial intelligence, should be open source if there are no reasons not to,” Mr Velsberg told the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory.

Czech company donates road tax solution to government, considers making code available (10/03/2020)

Actum Digital, a Czech software company, is considering publishing the code of the road tax portal that was created during a weekend hackathon at the end of January. Publication would allow others to evaluate the quality of the code and the scope of the services it provides. However, the software cannot be shared as open source, says Actum CEO Tomáš Vondráček: “We agreed with the hackathon participants that the rights would be passed to us, and that the work would be given to the Czech state for free.”

Wallonia’s GeoChallenge competition likely to favour open source (10/03/2020)

Availability as open source is not a requirement for entries to the GeoChallenge competition for geographic solutions launched by Belgium’s Walloon region. However, “[open source] will not be neglected in our reflection,” says Emmanuel Jauquet, one of the organisers of the competition, who works for the Walloon government’s Department of Geomatics.

The City of Dortmund continues its transition to open source software (10/03/2020)

Five years after the creation of its Open Source Working Group, the City of Dortmund published several reports on the “Investigation of the potential of Free Software and Open Standards”. The reports share the city of Dortmund’s open source policy goals as well as its ambition to create an alliance of municipalities in favour of open source software.

CERN adopts Mattermost, an open source messaging app (10/03/2020)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has decided to discontinue the use of the Facebook collaboration app Workplace, instead opting to replace it with Mattermost, an open source messaging app. CERN switched to open source software after changes to Facebook’s solution subscription prices and possible changes in the data security settings.

Open source tools adopted by seven European cities to fight construction and organic waste (10/03/2020)

Launched in 2019, the EU-funded CityLoops project aims to tackle the issue of excessive construction and organic waste, which are two of the most significant urban material flows. Using the principles of circular economy, CityLoops project will develop a series of innovative procedures, approaches and open source tools to recycle waste. The project, which will run until 2023, already released open source tools including an open source web-based Material Flow Analysis tool as well as numerous training resources.

Germany’s industry recognises the advantages of open source (10/03/2020)

In Germany, one in every three large companies is involved in developing open source software, according to a survey published by Bitkom, a German IT and telecommunications industry association. About half of these firms let staff participate in open source projects, and almost 40% of them are paying members or sponsors of open source organisations.

Open source lets European universities sync, share and cluster (10/03/2020)

Universities and academic research networks across Europe are building a giant “science cloud” by scaling up open source solutions for synchronising and sharing data. The researchers are “following the open-source strategy for delivering services” to tie together their local implementations into an integrated network.

OSS factsheet - Germany (10/03/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Germany? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - France (10/03/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in France? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives?

OSS factsheet - Slovenia (10/03/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Slovenia? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

Libre en Fête 2020 (07/03/2020)

The 19th edition of the Libre en Fête (in English Celebrating open source) event is approaching. Libre en Fête is a succession of events across France, organised by the April association together with different groups of users of open source Software, digital public spaces , libraries, media libraries, computer clubs, fablabs and all open source enthusiast associations and structures. This year, Libre en Fête events will be held between Saturday 7 March 2020 and Sunday 5 April 2020.

#KubeCon #CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 conference (30/03/2020)

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will organise the #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, a four-day event on open source solutions and cloud native solutions. The conference will gather experts, stakeholders and people willing to learn more on cloud native and open source solutions. The conference will take place in the city of Amsterdam, from the 30th of March to the 2nd of April.

OpenTech Summit 2020 in Berlin (21/05/2020)

The OpenTech Summit is a one-day event organised by the Technical University of Berlin and MotionLab to promote the use of open source solutions across Europe. Taking place in Berlin, the OpenTech Summit is a unique event to bring together stakeholders and open source enthusiasts.

ELI annotation tool (12/03/2020)

The ELI annotation tool is a tool for building notices describing legal resources using the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) standard. The notices describe several standard legal entities (legal resources, legal expressions and formats) using standard properties. The values of some of these properties are constrained using controlled vocabularies described with the SKOS standard

Blockchain Based Notary Proof Of Concept (12/03/2020)

The European Commission (DG DIGIT) has developed a Blockchain-based notarisation proof of concept for log files and documents. The main functionality of the system is to notarise any kind of digital content by creating a unique hash (fingerprint) of any digital document format and to store this hash in a distributed and decentralized ledger.

Ref2Link (12/03/2020)

Ref2Link is a text mining tool to extract EU and other legal references from unstructured data. Ref2Link is a free tool that automates the detection of references and generates hyperlinks based on dynamic and customisable rules. Ref2Link supports out-of-the-box multilingual detection of EU legal instruments, including support of ELI and ECLI standards, and administrative references. National administrations may adapt the default detection rules to meet their own specific requirements.

A showcase for innovation (17/02/2020)

OSOR Workshop on Sustainable OSS Communities at FOSDEM 2020 (07/02/2020)

Thank you to all participants who attended our workshop on Sustainable OSS Communities in the Public Sector - the OSOR team had a blast at FOSDEM 2020. The room was packed with OSS enthusiasts who brought invaluable contributions to the discussion. The contributions will feed into the contents of the Guidelines on the sustainability of open source communities in the public sector. These key findings can be downloaded from the dedicated page in the Knowledge Centre.

French climate citizen assemblies: when open source tools help participative democracy (14/02/2020)

In the framework of the French Climate Citizen Assemblies, the French government in collaboration with the Open Source Politics developed the ‘Contribuez’ platform (French for “Contribute”). The ‘contribuez’ platform is an online tool that allows French citizens to debate, share proposals, comment and vote. The platform is powered by Decidim, an open source solution.

Switzerland plans to anchor public services’ contribution to open source in law (07/02/2020)

Swiss federal government organisations and agencies will soon be free to share the source code of their software solutions as open source. In addition, software developers working for the federal government should be able to be part of open source communities. The government wants to anchor this in federal law, according to new Guidelines on Open Source in the Federal Government, made public last Friday.

Europe’s open source service providers appeal for political support (07/02/2020)

Open source trade associations from France, Germany and Finland have joined forces to create the Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre (APELL). The new umbrella organisation was announced in Brussels (Belgium) on Friday, the day before Fosdem - the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, the continent’s largest open source conference.

More Linux for Poland’s social security (03/02/2020)

Poland’s Social Insurance Institution (Zakład Ubezpieczeń Społecznych, or ZUS) is increasing its use of Linux. ZUS signed a three-year support contract with Linux Polska to help with its high-availability clusters of virtualised Linux servers, the company announced in January.

Barcelona supercomputing centre tests Spain’s first open source CPU (03/02/2020)

Barcelona’s Supercomputing Centre (BSC) is testing its first batch of 100 open source chips based on the RISC-V computer instruction set architecture. The centre aims to build open source CPUs that can be used for high-performance computing and Internet of Things applications, as well as for academic research projects. “The European RISC-V ecosystem is growing fast,” says Miquel Moretó, one of the RISC-V researchers at BSC.

Lithuania is launching an open source-powered open data portal (03/02/2020)

Lithuania is preparing a new open data portal, thanks to which businesses, citizens and public administrations will be able to access and contribute to a repository of open datasets. The Lithuanian administration chose the open source solution CKAN in order to develop its open data portal. A beta version of the portal is already operational, and it will be fully functional in June 2020.

ECB uses open source blockchain solution Corda to test Digital Euro (03/02/2020)

The European Central Bank (ECB) conducted an analysis of the economic and societal impact of issuing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBCD) or Digital Euro. In the framework of this analysis, the ECB carried out a ‘proof of concept’ related to the anonymisation of digital currency transactions, by using the open source solution Corda, a blockchain platform for business.

European public services rely on Bareos for backups (03/02/2020)

European public services make up about half of all customers that pay for support services on Bareos, a backup solution available as open source. The software is used by universities across the continent, national and state archives, and municipalities small and large, reports Bareos, the 8-year-old company based in Cologne (Germany) that is the main developer of the eponymous software solution.

Dutch municipalities now have an open source option to manage civic services (03/02/2020)

Dutch municipalities may soon have an alternative option for managing civic services and citizens’ personal records. The Alkmaar-based company Procura in December announced it will make its existing software solutions available under an open source licence. Municipalities can implement the software on their own, join a consortium, or ask the company to help.

German armed forces testing open source chat (03/02/2020)

The Bundeswehr, Germany’s unified armed forces, is testing the use of Matrix, a secure open source chat software solution, the federal defence ministry told the German parliament in December. According to the ministry, the software could potentially be used not only by the armed forces but also by other government departments.

OSS factsheet - Italy (19/02/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Italy? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Portugal (19/02/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Portugal? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Sweden (19/02/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Sweden? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Belgium (19/02/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Belgium? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

OSS factsheet - Slovakia (17/02/2020)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Slovakia? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

CAS Lib (17/02/2020)

The Central Authentication Service (CAS) is an open source single sign-on protocol for the web. Its purpose is to permit a user to access multiple applications while providing their credentials only once. It also allows web applications to authenticate users without gaining access to a user’s security credentials, such as a password. The name CAS also refers to a software package that implements this protocol. For improving the flexibility and in order to maximize it, it is able to authenticate users and leaves the session handling up to the developer.In order to foster a greater adoption of this library, it has been built with interoperability in mind. It only uses PHP Standards Recommendations interfaces.

EU login bundle (17/02/2020)

A standard Symfony bundle to authenticate users against EU Login.

CAS Bundle (17/02/2020)

CAS Bundle, a standard Symfony bundle for authentication using CAS protocol.

Open Source & Digital Transformation conference (20/02/2020)

The Open Source and Digital Transformation conference is a one-day event organised by the Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA) and the Association of Portuguese open source software companies (ESOP) to promote the use of open data, open source and data reuse. The conference will take place at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, from 9am to 4.30pm.

FOSS4G-IT 2020 conference (18/02/2020)

The FOSS4G-IT conference is a four-day event organised by the Polytechnic University of Turin, the Italian Association for Free Geographical Information GFOSS.it and Wikimedia Italia. FOSS4G-IT brings together communities using geographical open data and open source software to foster knowledge exchange and create networking opportunities. The conference will take place in the city of Turin, from the 18th to the 22nd of February.

FOSS Backstage 2020 (06/03/2020)

The FOSS Backstage 2020 conference is a two-day event focused on the non-technical aspects of open source communities which contribute to its success such as good community governance, quality communication, etc. Conference topics include open source project leadership best practices, community management, open source project metrics, open source strategy for enterprise, adopting open source collaboration in corporations, and legal matters when dealing with open source. The conference will take place in the city of Berlin, on the 6th and 7th of March.

Real-world growth opportunities (16/12/2019)

France’s Nancy uses free and open source where feasible (15/01/2020)

The city of Nancy in France is using free and open source wherever possible, both for services relating directly to citizens and for its internal operations, including about 90% of the city’s 900 PC workstations.

Denmark’s OS2 directory information tool lets public services manage systems and services (09/01/2020)

With OS2mo, public services can keep contact details and other information related to employees and their place in the organisation up to date, using authoritative sources of information. Intended to be combined with IT systems management, OS2mo makes it easier to manage access rights. While developed by and for Denmark’s public services, the tool could be adapted to other countries.

France to launch the Digital Labour Code open source platform (20/12/2019)

As of 1 January 2020, the French Ministry of Labour will launch the Digital Labour Code website (Code du Travail Numérique), an open source-powered platform. Thanks to this platform French citizens will get an easy access to information regarding the Labour Code applicable to each sector of the economy.

CERN to switch to Kopano mail server for its 40,000 users (18/12/2019)

In 2020, the European research organisation CERN plans to replace its proprietary mail server with Kopano, an open source alternative. It will also soon unveil a new portal to guide its software developers and allow others access and contribute to CERN software.

Italy’s Team Digitale becomes permanent project (17/12/2019)

Team Digitale, the Italian government’s digital transformation team, will become part of a new department in the prime minister’s office, as of 1 January. The team’s activities are expected to continue in the new organisation, the Dipartimento per la trasformazione digitale (digital transformation department).

Strong growth predicted for open source in Europe (17/12/2019)

Across Europe, the number of jobs related to open source software will grow by some 8% in the coming four years, far more than in other parts of IT, according to research by CNLL, France’s open source industry association, and others. In France, aggregated open source job growth will be 8.4%, in Germany 7.3%, the UK 7.7% and in the rest of Europe 8.3%, CNLL predicts.

Introduction to the new OSOR and its Knowledge Centre (11/02/2020)

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR) is glad to present the new structure of the OSOR collection and introduce the Knowledge Centre and its components. The main purpose of this webinar is to present the new changes and gather your feedback to keep shaping OSOR around your needs and produce content relevant to you.

OSS sustainability workshop at FOSDEM20! (01/02/2020)

We are happy to share that the OSOR team will be running an OSS sustainability workshop at FOSDEM20 conference on Saturday, 1 February 2020! Join us and share your thoughts!

FOSDEM '20 (01/02/2020)

FOSDEM is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is widely recognised as the best such conference in Europe.

CHAOSScon 2020 (31/01/2020)

CHAOSScon is a one-day event focused on open source project health metrics and tools used by open source projects, communities, and engineering teams. The event is organised by CHAOSS, a Linux Foundation project focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health.

DevConf.cz 2020 (24/01/2020)

The DevConf.cz 2020 is a two-day event sponsored by Red Hat which gathers numerous stakeholders of the open source industry.

OSS factsheet - Finland (04/12/2019)

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Finland? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

GRASS GIS (15/01/2020)

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modelling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

Oskari – Open source service platform for embedded maps and geoportals (15/01/2020)

Oskari is the open source platform bringing maps on your website - besides all the other important information. Oskari offers easy-to-use, browser-based tools to access and re-use spatial information from various data sources e.g. in eGovernment applications. One of the main features of Oskari is the easy-to-use wizard for creating embedded maps. Embedded maps are fully functional map clients run as SAAS service from an Oskari installation. They can be used e.g. in the context of eGovernment services where information from different registers needs to be displayed on the map along with map layers from a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) such as INSPIRE.

Unique opportunity to impact sustainability of OSS communities in the public sector! (16/01/2020)

The European Commission (Directorate-General for Informatics, Interoperability Unit) is putting together Guidelines for Building Sustainable OSS Communities in the Public Sector. The guidelines, complemented by public sector OSS community case studies, will serve as a practical tool that any public sector OSS community (or OSS enthusiast) can use to create and maintain sustainable and healthy communities. Help us create guidelines that you would want to recommend – take part in our survey!

City of Prague launched an open source-powered mobile app to increase budget transparency (12/12/2019)

The City of Prague launched in October 2019 the CityVizor application, a mobile app which gives information on how the City of Prague manages its budget (expenses, funding from various sources, local taxes) in order to increase transparency. The application source code, published on GitHub, was released under the free GNU AGPL v3 license.

The French Occitanie region adopts the open source GOFast platform (12/12/2019)

The Occitanie region (France) recently adopted the GoFast collaborative Document Management System (DMS) platform, an alternative to Sharepoint and Office 365. The GoFast platform is the product of the French company CEO-Vision which is specialised in open source-based solutions.

Nancy recognised as France’s top digital free and collaborative public service (12/12/2019)

The city of Nancy is France’s best example of public services that encourage the use of free, open and collaborative digital technology. The city was awarded the status of Territoire Numérique Libre niveau 5 (“digital free territory 5” – the highest level) during a ceremony at the Congrès des Maires de France, which took place in Paris on 20 November.

Portuguese open source trade group pushes public services to pool efforts (12/12/2019)

ESOP, which represents Portugal’s open source services providers, will try to persuade towns and cities in the country to pool their efforts on this type of software, taking a cue from Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

A Major Step for Open Source in Europe (12/12/2019)

As long-time supporters of Open Source, we had high expectations of last week’s European Commission ambitious workshop ‘Open Source Beyond 2020’. These expectations were exceeded. The event gathered an impressive group of representatives of the relevant stakeholder groups, spanning industry, research, advocacy, and policy-making. But what was particularly encouraging was the way the Commission actively sought fresh ideas on how the Open Source opportunity for Europe could be maximised.

Germany’s ruling CDU party adopts open source as a principle (12/12/2019)

The principles of open source should apply to public procurement, says the CDU, Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union. All future digital projects should be published in an open repository, the party writes in its “Digitalcharta Innovationsplatform D”. This policy document was adopted at the CDU’s annual convention, which took place in Leipzig on Friday and Saturday.

Number of open source jobs ‘quadrupled’ between 2016–2018 (12/12/2019)

The number of people working in Europea open source companies may have quadrupled between 2016 and 2018, suggest numbers gathered by Awesome Free Software (AFS), a free software directory first published a year ago. The project, which is still a prototype, combines publicly available data on free and open source software tools and companies.

Royal Navy launched an open source toolkit for application development (12/12/2019)

The United Kingdom's naval warfare force, the Royal Navy, launched the NELSON programme as part of its digital transformation strategy. Moving towards open source, the Royal Navy now provides the open source NELSON Standard toolkit, and requires its future IT suppliers to have capability to develop digital services “using a range of Open Source Technologies”.

Threatened South Tyrol open source school project wins SFScon award (12/12/2019)

South Tyrol’s use of open source in its Italian-language schools was awarded the SFScon award last week. The use of free and open source is of “fundamental importance for public service projects that involve private, personal data - and that includes schools”, says the award organiser, the Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan.

Zero cost for software licences breaks UK procurement spreadsheets (12/12/2019)

Procurement officers working for public services in the UK need to adapt their acquisition models, says OpenUK, an open source industry association.

Canada testing an online repository of open data, code and standards (12/12/2019)

The Canadian government is testing ‘Open Resource Exchange’, an online catalogue for making available open source code, open data, open standards and other reusable solutions. The portal currently has four sections, including a list of 26 examples of public services using open source software, and another list of 33 solutions being developed as open source.

Ubuntu-based development environment (13/12/2019)

This Ansible playbook installs a development environment on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It currently focuses on PHP, but also includes database and containerisation tools.

PHP development environment on AWS workspace (13/12/2019)

This Ansible playbook installs a working PHP development environment on Amazon Linux 2 WorkSpaces . It allows to develop PHP applications with modern and up to date tooling. There are two different versions of the playbook, depending on the configured package repositories. See the 'master' and 'contrib' branches in the code repository for more information. The 'contrib' branch provides more options and PHP versions to develop with, while the 'master' branch uses the official packages.

Nurturing Open Source Communities (05/11/2019)

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR) and EU-FOSSA will organise a workshop “Nurturing Open Source Communities” on 14 November on key sustainability concerns of open source communities. The workshop aims to find practical solutions to tackle sustainability and funding issues in open source.

Portugal’s Seixal completes switch to LibreOffice (05/11/2019)

The Portuguese town of Seixal has completed its migration to LibreOffice on the workstations across its departments in early 2019. The city administration in 2017 decided to switch to LibreOffice, seeing it the best way to comply with the country’s Law 36, prescribing the use of open standards, including the Open Document Format (ODF), LibreOffice’s the native file format.

New platform listing the source codes of software used by French public administrations (05/11/2019)

On 9 October 2019, the Etalab mission launched the code.etalab.gouv.fr website, which references and gives access to the list of software source codes published by French public administrations. French public administrations are encouraged to publish the source codes of the software used.

Open Source Software powering the newly developed internal messaging service of the French government. (05/11/2019)

The French government has found an alternative to WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack for its internal communication network. The French government’s interministerial digital service created Tchap, an encrypted messaging service for public servants only to exchange confidential information. The main goals of the project are to ensure the security of the communication network and to improve the interoperability of the service between different administrations.

Europass Digital Credentials Infrastructure data model (08/11/2019)

The European Commission is developing the Europass Digital Credentials Infrastructure (EDCI) – a set of tools, services and software to support the issuance of authentic, tamper-proof digital credentials (such as qualifications and other learning achievements) across Europe. The EDCI is being developed as part of ongoing work to implement the new Europass Framework for supporting transparency of skills and qualifications in Europe.

Gelinkt Notuleren (08/11/2019)

Gelinkt Notuleren is a Dutch Variant of Semantics@YourFingerTips which aims to support smaller local Flemish governments to draft legislation following the legal standards put in place by the Flemish Government. The application is internationalized to Dutch and the plugins and microservices follow the needs of Dutch local governments. This solution contains a full application which can be run on premise or in the cloud.