"Open Source Observatory Newsletter" Newsletter Issues

Where to for pressure groups (05/09/2019)

German government wants to reduce its IT vendor lock-in (15/10/2019)

The German federal government is taking action to reduce IT vendor lock in, the Interior Ministry announced on Thursday. “To ensure our digital sovereignty, we want to reduce dependencies on individual IT providers,” a press release quotes Minister Horst Seehofer as saying.

Italy’s growing catalogue of open source software (15/10/2019)

There are now 42 open source software solutions available in Italy’s Catalogo del riuso (Reuse Catalogue), announces Developers Italia, the developer arm of Team Digitale, the country’s digital government transformation project. The latest additions to the list includes two projects from the environmental protection agency of the Piedmont region.

Hamburg to support open hardware labs across town (15/10/2019)

The city of Hamburg (Germany) will support the creation of labs that enable inventors to build open source hardware machines. The hardware labs are intended to help the city progress towards a circular economy. Earlier this summer Hamburg joined the ‘Fab City Network’, joining Seoul, Paris, Boston and other cities that have pledged to ”work towards producing everything they consume by 2054”.

Document Foundation: ‘ODF 1.3 ready for ratification by OASIS’ (14/10/2019)

Version 1.3 of the Open Document Format (ODF), an open standard for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, will be ratified by the OASIS standardisation organisation in December, according to the Document Foundation – the organisation supporting the development of LibreOffice. This update of the ODF standard has been made possible by financial contributions from the United Kingdom, the European Commission, and three office productivity software companies: US multinational Microsoft, UK-based Collabora, and German software maker CIB.

Compliance monitoring of EU’s Common Agricultural Policy made more transparent and efficient with Open Source (15/10/2019)

The RECAP project aims to develop an improved remote monitoring of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) obligations and to supplement the in-field inspections procedures, reducing the compliance costs both for farmers and public administrations. RECAP integrates satellite remote sensing and user-generated data into added value services, co-designed and co-created by public authorities, farmers and agricultural consultants. Furthermore, RECAP also offers personalised services for better compliance with the CAP environmental standards and stimulates the development of new added value services through add-ons to the main platform.

ANSSI shares its incident response tool for forensic analysis on GitHub (15/10/2019)

The French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) has made the incident response tool for compromised systems, DFIR ORC, available on GitHub. DFIR ORC is intended for computer security professionals wishing to collect forensically relevant data.

France’s Gendarmerie: “Freedom of choice is priceless” (14/10/2019)

Politicians should value highly the technological independence provided by using free and open source software, recommends Lieutenant colonel Stéphane Dumond, head of IT at the Gendarmerie in France. Using such software puts public services in control of their technology decisions and reduces strictly pecuniary constraints, he says.

Open source entering the race for alternative energy research (14/10/2019)

Joint German and Spanish research project managed to describe complex physical processes in the Earth's crust using open source research platform, OpenGeoSys. The insights generated will contribute to answer the research question whether water can be pumped safely into deep active volcanic areas to generate renewable heat and electricity.

Zürich Canton to share its software as open source (14/10/2019)

The Swiss Canton of Zürich will make software developed for or by its public services available as open source. On 30 September the Canton parliament accepted a proposal to change the way it develops software to increase the role of open source. The government now has two years to work out how to adapt its rules and regulations.

Growing use cases for Barcelona’s Decidim eParticipatory solution (14/10/2019)

Across Europe and across the globe the number of use cases is growing for Decidim, the eParticipation software developed as open source by the city of Barcelona. Mexico City, for example, recently began to use Decidim, calling on its citizens to propose, debate, vote and decide on local projects and proposals that affect their lives.

Taiwanese government standardises on true ODF document format (26/01/2019)

The Taiwanese model, in which policies require that documents generated by office productivity tools truly adhere to the ODF standard, can serve as an example to EU governments. It proves the strong relation there is between interoperability, open standards and open-source software.

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

FOSDEM '20 (15/10/2019)

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.

OSAM mobile apps modules (12/11/2018)

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.

Vincles BCN (15/10/2019)

Vincles BCN is a new service of the City of Barcelona's Social Services Department to help us keep in touch with our seniors. Vincles BCN allows you to make videocalls to the senior, send them videos, photos, and suggest meetings. For this app to be activated a senior who is a member of Vincles must provide you with an access code to his/her network.

Skills Profile Tool (05/09/2019)

The EU Skills Profile Tool for Third Country Nationals, is an online questionnaire in the format of a CV to assist national authorities and relevant services to identify and document skills of Third Country Nationals. It aims to facilitate the integration of TCNs in the labour market by supporting the identification and documentation of their skills and work experience. The Tool is available in all EU official languages (apart from Gaelic) and in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Somali, Sorani, Tigrinya and Turkish – the main languages of refugees receiving asylum in Europe. The questions are displayed in two languages at the same time on one screen, reducing language barriers between caseworkers and the TCN.

France’s public services increasingly contribute to open source (03/09/2019)

Agriculture, aviation, culture, finance, justice, education, and treasury: from across France’s public services, software developers are committing code to publicly hosted open source projects. An analysis of commits and pull requests for the open source projects hosted on GitHub, a public code repository, shows that it’s increasingly common for France’s public services to code in the open.

Germany's BSI responsible for further development of Mailvelope (03/09/2019)

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has invested in the further development of Mailvelope, an open source browser plugin for end-to-end encryption of webmail and web forms.

Electronic Register of Common Land for Wales to launch in 2022 (28/08/2019)

In order to comply with the Welsh Government’s digital-first approach and further enable the implementation of the Commons Act 2006, the current paper-based registers and associated maps will be transformed to an electronic register of common land for Wales. OSGeo open source tools will be put forward which enable online browsing of the registers by Commoners and enhance efficiency for the Common Registration Officers.

Italy’s top financial inspectors to include public sector software reuse in their audits (03/09/2019)

Italy’s Court of Audit (Corte dei conti), which monitors public finances, will be including in its audits the savings generated by all of the country’s public services that share software created by or for them. The reasoning is that public services that do not share software solutions prevent others from reusing them, and so increase the costs to society. This is one of several newly introduced checks that focus on government digitalisation.

The French Ministry of the Interior opts for an open source software, Nextcloud (03/09/2019)

Nextcloud announced that its open source solution will now power the French Ministry of Interior, which favours a European open source alternative for its cloud needs instead of a large American, centralised solution.

Europe’s public services looking for Python developers (03/09/2019)

Searching for current public tenders requiring Python on TED, the procurement portal of the EU Official Journal, delivers fascinating examples of public services across Europe that use or want to use the open source programming language.

Russia scrapped open source plans to focus on self-reliance (03/09/2019)

The Russian Federation aims to rid its public services of reliance on foreign software suppliers. The objectives are for Russia to gain control over the software that is uses, and to create independent and economically beneficial solutions. The policy is a roadblock to using open source, says one of the country’s open source advocates.

New Finnish government to promote open source (03/09/2019)

The new government of Finland, formally appointed on 6 June, will promote the use of open source software for public services’ IT systems. The preference for open source, open (programming) interfaces and open data is part of the Government Programme that was published on 3 June.

European TSO's go open source in building the smart electricity grid (03/09/2019)

RTE and TenneT, the two largest European electricity transmission system operators (TSOs), will discuss their digitalisation and open source strategies in a webinar on 8 August 2019. Both operators are members of Linux Foundation Energy (LF Energy), a coalition of IT and energy organisations and research institutes working jointly on open-source solutions for innovation and transition. We recognise that open source is the commodity foundation upon which the entire IT industry rests, Loek Bakker, Head of the CIO Office of TenneT, writes in a blog post. For TenneT, like many other utilities, open source is essential to our strategic success.

Analysis of the state of play of Open Source policies in EU Member States (03/09/2019)

At the beginning of 2019, the European Commission (Directorate-General for Informatics, Interoperability Unit) finalised a study to define the new vision and strategy of OSOR. The study highlighted the need of the community for more country intelligence in the domain of open source software. Hence, as of September 2019, the OSOR collection will foster the Information Observatory services, by providing insights on all EU Member States in the domain of open source software.

Taiwanese government standardises on true ODF document format (26/01/2019)

The Taiwanese model, in which policies require that documents generated by office productivity tools truly adhere to the ODF standard, can serve as an example to EU governments. It proves the strong relation there is between interoperability, open standards and open-source software.

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

DevOpsDays Stockholm (03/09/2019)

DevOpsDays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Each event is run by volunteers from the local area.

LibreOffice Conference 2019 (05/09/2019)

LibreOffice Conference 2019 (LibOCon 2019) will be hosted by the Spanish city of Almeria during the month of September, from September 11 (Wednesday) to September 13 (Friday). LibOCon is the annual gathering of the LibreOffice, Document Liberation Project and The Document Foundation communities, now in its 9th year. At LibOCon, LibreOffice users gather to network and meet key LibreOffice developers, designers, localizers, documenters, supporters and marketers, and to learn about the latest in LibreOffice development. LibOCon is volunteers driven and not for profit. Attendance to the conference is free previous registration.

Open Source Summit Europe 2019 (05/09/2019)

The Open Source Summit Europe is a conference and trade fair organised annually by the Linux Foundation. In 2019, the conference will take place in Lyon (France), from 28 - 30 October. The conference aims to reach developers, architects, and other technologists, as well as open source community and industry leaders.

About Website Evidence Collector (05/09/2019)

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) publishes the tool Website Evidence Collector under the European Union Public License (EUPL-1.2). The tool supports the automation of privacy and personal data protection inspections of websites. The EDPS welcomes any feedback and suggestions for improvements to be sent to: edps-it-policy@edps.europa.eu The tool collects evidence of personal data processing, such as cookies, or requests to third parties. The collection parameters are configured ahead of the inspection and then collection is carried out automatically. The collected evidence, structured in a human- and machine-readable format, allows website controllers, data protection officers and end users to understand better which information is transferred and stored during a visit of a website, i.e. the consecutive loading of a number of web pages without giving consent or logging in.

midPoint (05/09/2019)

Change is inevitable in life, in business as well. New projects and tasks are created everyday, furthermore the organization and company is performing like big organism where employees are changing their positions and project roles. All of it brings transformation of business processes, new business rules, policies and active organizational structures. To keep all of information up to date and secure is more than important. From technical point of view it is needed to set up approval processes, synchronize data, integrate systems, format and transformate data, set protocols leading to speeding up IT processes and with efficiency cut IT costs. It is needed to let identity management and identity governance run a dialogue. The way how to manage it is called midPoint. MidPoint is unique open source solution combining identity management and identity governance. It covers technological and business requirements.

The cloud's opportunity cost (24/04/2019)

Programme for Sharing & Reuse Conference 2019 announced (25/04/2019)

The provisional programme for the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2019, which will take place on 11 June in Bucharest, Romania, has been published. Under the theme Open.Share.Link., the event will provide an opportunity to be at the forefront of the latest developments in open source universe in Europe and beyond. The conference will start with opening speeches by Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Cristian Cucu, representative of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU and Mário Campolargo, Deputy Director-General of DG Informatics at the European Commission. Stela Mocan, Lead of Technology & Innovation Lab in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, World Bank Group will give the keynote speech.

UK grant for open source healthcare (19/04/2019)

The UK government has awarded a GBP 790,000 (about EUR 990,000) grant to research and implement eObs, an open source digital healthcare observation solution that can identify patients who are deteriorating and alert medical specialists. The solution, which uses information gathered by handheld devices, also helps cut workloads in medical wards by reducing the length of time patients stay and minimising the number of transfers and referrals.

Reuse award for Denmark’s OS2 open source community (19/04/2019)

Denmark’s Minister for Public Sector Innovation has awarded the Genbrugprisen (Reuse Award) of DKK 100,000 (about EUR 13,000) to the OS2 community, honouring the municipalities’ development of reusable ICT solutions.

European Commission raises bounty awards to challenge developers (19/04/2019)

For the next two weeks, the European Commission is raising its EU-FOSSA bug bounty awards. It is giving a 50% bonus for critical bugs, and a 30% bonus for other vulnerabilities. This means that certain bugs submitted with a fix can earn a developer up to EUR 45.000.

Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia join EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (19/04/2019)

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 refiles EUPL, now in its list of “International licenses" (19/04/2019)

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).

France’s economic council wants a greater European role for free software (19/04/2019)

The European Union should encourage the use of free software, for example by setting quotas in public procurement and financing its development, says France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Conseil économique, social et environnemental, or CESE). The constitutional consultative assembly sees free software, sharing and reuse as strategic parts of the European digital culture.

Unesco calls on governments to preserve source code (19/04/2019)

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.

Norway’s new health archive is being built on open source (19/04/2019)

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.

EU-FOSSA 2 Hackathons (19/04/2019)

The EU-FOSSA 2 initiative will host three hackathons during 2019. With over 50 confirmed participants, the first hackathon focused on PHP Symfony. It took take place in Brussels on 6 and 7 April.

Italian town to increase use of open source (19/04/2019)

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 (19/04/2019)

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 Public Network (Balearic Islands) (19/04/2019)

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 (19/04/2019)

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).

Interministerial web conferencing (19/04/2019)

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 .

Shared solutions in the public sector of Catalonia (19/04/2019)

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 (19/04/2019)

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 - the Cornerstone of e-Governance (26/02/2019)

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.

Sharing & Reuse Conference 2019 (11/06/2019)

The Sharing & Reuse conference, taking place in Bucharest (Romania) on 11 June, is organised by the European Commission’s ISA² Programme under the patronage of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the Europe. The conference will be opened by Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Cristian Cucu, representative of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU and Mário Campolargo, Deputy Director-General of DG Informatics at the European Commission. Stela Mocan, Lead of Technology & Innovation Lab in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, World Bank Group will give the keynote speech. The conference will bring together representatives of public administration and private sector - policy and decision makers, legal professionals and procurers, IT managers and developers, open source enthusiasts and advocates. We will get together to discuss open source policies and strategies, and their implementation in EU Members States.

UK Open Source Awards (12/06/2019)

The UK Open Source Awards is a non-profit event celebrating significant contributions made by participants in the UK to Open Source technology.

OpenSym 2019 (20/08/2019)

The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym, formerly WikiSym) is an annual conference series dedicated to open collaboration research and practice. The conference will take place from 20 to 22 August 2019 in Skövde, Sweden.

Open Source Summit Europe 2019 (28/10/2019)

The Open Source Summit Europe is a conference and trade fair organised annually by the Linux Foundation. In 2019, the conference will take place in Lyon (France), from 28 - 30 October.

Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019: 16 solutions shortlisted (29/04/2019)

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 world has changed (27/02/2019)

Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019: deadline extended (27/02/2019)

Extra extra! If you are interested in the Sharing & Reuse Awards and haven’t had time to enter the contest, we have good news for you: The deadline for submitting entries has been extended until 12 March 2019. Two of the four contest categories are for open source applications. Contribute to open source in public services, and submit your software.

The Future of the Open Source Observatory (OSOR) (26/02/2019)

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.

City of Nijmegen reinvigorates OSS policy, forcing interoperability (26/02/2019)

Nijmegen, the oldest and 10th largest city of the Netherlands, is reinvigorating its open source policy.

German municipalities attracted by open source GIS (26/02/2019)

The public works department of Bad Oeynhausen (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) is the most recent user of the QGIS geographic information system to have signed up for support at the KRZ municipal data centre Minden-Ravensberg/Lippe.

Standardisation in progress with INSIDE (Spain) (26/02/2019)

Spain publishes the first versions of two of the components of the CSV Suite, included under the INSIDE system umbrella, both under EUPL licence, on the Portal of Electronic Administration (Portal de la Administración Electrónica).

France education minister rejects calls for more open source in schools (26/02/2019)

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.

Open source: making Earth observation data easier to use (26/02/2019)

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.

Joinup Licensing Assistant - White paper v1.01 (26/02/2019)

White paper on the rationale for producing a Licensing Assistant in Joinup. This tool will facilitate licence selection bases on their content, compatibility and support.

Slovak advocates want parliament to push for open source (26/02/2019)

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.

New Karlsruhe teaching laboratory focuses on open source (26/02/2019)

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

Greece robotics competition targets open source software and hardware (26/02/2019)

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.

Finland successfully migrates university libraries to free software backend (26/02/2019)

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

Thüringen launches its first open source award (26/02/2019)

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).

Cities agree on minimal interoperability mechanisms (26/02/2019)

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.

Open source and cloud based procurement services for France’s municipalities (26/02/2019)

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

Study: Governments need to coordinate IT vulnerability disclosure policies (26/02/2019)

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.

Open source at the heart of Belgium’s development cooperation organisation (26/02/2019)

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.

Taiwanese government standardises on true ODF document format (26/01/2019)

The Taiwanese model, in which policies require that documents generated by office productivity tools truly adhere to the ODF standard, can serve as an example to EU governments. It proves the strong relation there is between interoperability, open standards and open-source software.

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

open-eid - the Cornerstone of e-Governance (26/02/2019)

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.

Tools to manage digital documents on the Catalan public administrations (26/02/2019)

A digital repository that allows the management of documents -and electronic files.

Tools for e-procurement with local authorities in Catalonia (26/02/2019)

A set of eProcurement tools for local authorities in Catalonia.

eSET, a methodology to digitise small Catalan municipalities (26/02/2019)

eSET is a service that combines the deployment of a system of labor and management together, standard and optimized for small municipalities with a set of AOC electronic administration solutions. It is currently deployed in 150 Catalan municipalities.

Open Source Summit Europe 2019 (28/10/2019)

The Open Source Summit Europe is a conference and trade fair organised annually by the Linux Foundation. In 2019, the conference will take place in Lyon (France), from 28 - 30 October.

OpenSym 2019 (20/08/2019)

The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym, formerly WikiSym) is an annual conference series dedicated to open collaboration research and practice. The conference will take place from 20 to 22 August 2019 in Skövde, Sweden.

26TH Open Systems Days Croatian Linux Users’ Conference (18/04/2019)

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.

Software Freedom Kosova Conference 2019 (04/04/2019)

This year's Software Freedom Kosova Conference will take place in Prishtina on 4-7 April 2019. It will be the tenth anniversary of the conference, organised by FLOSSK, the NGO advocating free and open source software in Kosovo.

Chemnitzer Linux Tage (16/03/2019)

The 2019 edition of the Chemnitz Linux Days will take place on 16 and 17 March 2017. The conference offers a cosmopolitan and peaceful environment, the conference organisers say. They aim to promote and welcome an open society, "from which many new and good ideas emerge".

<center>The Future of OSOR</center> (12/02/2019)

The European Commission is conducting a study to define the new vision and strategy of OSOR. To contribute to this study, we are currently launching an online survey to collect views and opinions from the OSOR community. That is why we decided to use a newsletter channel to reach out to the OSOR users.

Blue Hats for Government (14/01/2019)

New Luxembourg coalition to promote use of open source in public services (10/01/2019)

“Open source software will be promoted, especially by using it in public administrations.” For the first time, a Luxembourg government has included open source in its coalition agreement.

France builds a government community for open source (10/01/2019)

The French government is building its own open source developer community, aiming to bring together software developers and IT scientists who want to contribute to government-led open source projects.

Finland’s teachers turn to open source geospatial tools (10/01/2019)

PaikkaOppi, a portal that introduces Finland’s school students to geographic maps and the use of geospatial information, will switch to using Oskari, the open source, on-line geographic map-building tool.

Slovakia ‘should reinvigorate its open source push' (10/01/2019)

In the Slovak Republic, public services turn to open source software only because of highly-motivated innovation champions in their organisation.

Canton of Bern removes barriers to sharing its software as open source (10/01/2019)

The Swiss canton of Bern has begun sharing software developed by and for the canton as open source. Earlier this year the canton adapted its ICT regulations to allow code sharing.

Germany’s Hesse funds open source eHealth app (10/01/2019)

The Ministry for Social Affairs and Integration in Hesse, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, is funding ‘Warts Ab’ (‘Wait for it’), a smartphone application that will let users avoid queues at their general practitioner and other medical services.

New Czech law makes ICT neutrality a right (10/01/2019)

A law being prepared by the Czech Republic on eGovernment services (‘Právo na Digitální Služby’ or ‘Right to Digital Service’) will establish technological neutrality for companies and citizens. This means they may not be forced to use any particular software because of technology choices made by public services.

Heraklion encourages reuse of its open source identity management tool (10/01/2019)

Public administrations across Greece are welcome to reuse the identity-management software solution built by the city of Heraklion.

Cyprus infrastructure specialists win Vienna gamification challenge (10/01/2019)

Software developers working for KIOS, a public utilities infrastructure research centre at the University of Cyprus, were one of the winners of the ‘Smarter together Vienna challenge’.

Our 2018 Paris Summit: Open source software in public administrations (20/12/2018)

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 cannot 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.”

Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019 (20/12/2018)

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).

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

Fosdem 2019 (02/02/2019)

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Chemnitzer Linux Tage (16/03/2019)

The 2019 edition of the Chemnitz Linux Days will take place on 16 and 17 March 2017. The conference offers a cosmopolitan and peaceful environment, the conference organisers say. They aim to promote and welcome an open society, "from which many new and good ideas emerge".

26TH Open Systems Days Croatian Linux Users’ Conference (18/04/2019)

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.

OpenSym 2019 (20/08/2019)

The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym, formerly WikiSym) is an annual conference series dedicated to open collaboration research and practice. The conference will take place from 20 to 22 August 2019 in Skövde, Sweden.

EU Council Presidency Translation Toolkit (10/01/2019)

An online translation workspace, where users can translate text, full text documents (preserving document formatting), and websites in the 24 official EU languages.

ELI annotation tool (10/01/2019)

A tool for building notices describing legal resources using the European Legislation Identifier standard.

CyberReadyGame (10/01/2019)

The aim of the game is to pass specific cyber knowledge from experts to non-experts by creating mixed teams and by engaging in various scenarios.

Joinup (source code) (18/12/2018)

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.

Ethical and Good Governance Mailbox (12/11/2018)

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.

An autonomous ICT sector (19/12/2018)

Sharing & Reuse Awards 2019 (20/12/2018)

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).

Our 2018 Paris Summit: Open source software in public administrations (20/12/2018)

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.”

Basque Country open source ICT sector grows 8% (18/12/2018)

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.

Turkey encourages public services to use open source (18/12/2018)

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.

Tirana turns to open standards and open source to modernise government services (18/12/2018)

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.

UK GDS: Overcoming barriers to coding in the open (18/12/2018)

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.

Presenting the Joinup Licensing Assistant (19/12/2018)

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.

Sweden: For confidentiality, don’t use foreign clouds (18/12/2018)

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.

Tax returns must allow open source, says UK SME (18/12/2018)

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.

OECD: open-source software pivotal in artificial intelligence (18/12/2018)

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.

Russian observers test election monitoring app (18/12/2018)

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.

Germany boosts digital teaching and learning via open source portal (18/12/2018)

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.

A call for open research computation (18/12/2018)

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.

Berlin Technical University and Nextcloud: showing public services how to interact with open source projects (29/08/2018)

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.

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

Joinup (source code) (18/12/2018)

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.

Ethical and Good Governance Mailbox (12/11/2018)

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.

Mustangproject (12/11/2018)

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.

OSAM mobile apps modules (12/11/2018)

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.

OpenSym 2019 (20/08/2019)

The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym, formerly WikiSym) is an annual conference series dedicated to open collaboration research and practice. The conference will take place from 20 to 22 August 2019 in Skövde, Sweden.

26TH Open Systems Days Croatian Linux Users’ Conference (18/04/2019)

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.

Chemnitzer Linux Tage (16/03/2019)

The 2019 edition of the Chemnitz Linux Days will take place on 16 and 17 March 2017. The conference offers a cosmopolitan and peaceful environment, the conference organisers say. They aim to promote and welcome an open society, "from which many new and good ideas emerge".

Fosdem 2019 (02/02/2019)

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Government autonomy (12/11/2018)

More municipalities in Sweden to emphasise sharing and reuse (11/11/2018)

Sambruk, the eGovernment services development project involving 85 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities, will increasingly focus on open source solutions. At a meeting last week, the Sambruk board decided to prefer ICT solutions that facilitate sharing and reuse, and that make it easy for other public services to contribute to their development.

Developers help Greece merge amendments into laws (11/11/2018)

This summer, computer science students in Greece contributed code that could help the Greek government automate the process of keeping the country’s laws up to date. The 3GM project is one of ten Google Summer of Code (GSOC) projects supported by the Greek Free and Open Source Software Society (GFOSS). Developers worked on 3GM tools that parse, analyse and compare legal texts to detect amendments.

80% of Barcelona’s IT investment linked to open source (11/11/2018)

This year, the city of Barcelona is investing 78.7% of its IT budget on open source. By 2020, Barcelona expects nearly all of its IT investment to be linked to open source projects, says Xavier Roca, director of IT development at the city.

EC signs framework contract for next EU-FOSSA open source bug bounty (11/11/2018)

The European Commission is about to launch a series of open source bug bounties. On 2 October the EC, for it’s EU-FOSSA 2 project, signed three framework contracts for running bug bounty programmes on open source software.

Elections in Hesse: new coalition expected to favour open source (11/11/2018)

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) expects next week’s elections in the German federal state of Hesse to result in a coalition containing at least one party that favours open source. The advocacy group reached this conclusion by combining polls with the results of the Digital-O-Mat, an online portal that maps parties’ positions on key digital topics.

Public Code Directory Project Launches (11/11/2018)

OpenUK, Free Software Foundation Europe, OpusVL and Public Money/Public Code have launched a public code directory. A curated, distributed and federated directory of code, resources and studies that have been funded by Public Administrations around the world.

Swedish procurement frameworks to build on EU’s Tallinn declaration (11/11/2018)

The Swedish government’s national procurement services department (Avropa) is referring to the EU’s 2017 Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment (also known as the “Tallinn Declaration”) to motivate public services to use open IT standards and open source software.

Hungarian tax authority wants source code for system upgrade (11/11/2018)

Hungary’s National Tax and Customs Administration (NTCA) is looking for software service providers to upgrade its central tax information exchange system. The NTCA currently uses a mix of proprietary and open source components, including Linux servers and Apache Geronimo servers for Java applications. All custom code developed for the upgrade must be handed over to the NTCA, the organisation specifies.

Study: ‘Promote public sector use of open source implementations of ICT standards’ (11/11/2018)

European public services should be encouraged to use open source implementations of technical specifications, an EC-commissioned study concludes. The Commission should support this with guidelines and by promoting best practices.

Open-source RISC processors making waves in research and industry (11/11/2018)

It's still early in terms of silicon implementations, tooling and operating system support, but the open RISC-V processor specification is making inroads in the processor world. As RISC-V Marketing Manager Ted Marena wrote at the beginning of this year on on IEEE Times, RISC-V is to open hardware what Linux has been to open-source software.

'Buy from startups' strategy pays off for City of Antwerp (11/10/2018)

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.

Berlin Technical University and Nextcloud: showing public services how to interact with open source projects (29/08/2018)

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.

Mustangproject (12/11/2018)

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.

Sentilo (12/11/2018)

Sentilo is an open source sensor and actuator platform designed to fit in the Smart City architecture of any city who looks for openness and easy interoperability. It is built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of cities and companies that believe that using open standards and free software is the first smart decision a Smart City should take. It was started in November 2012 by the Barcelona City Council.

Ethical and Good Governance Mailbox (12/11/2018)

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.

Paris Open Source Summit 2018 (05/12/2018)

The Paris Open Source Summit 2018, one of the main European conferences bringing together policy makers, government representatives, industry, developers and many others, will take place on 5 and 6 December. The European Commission's Open Source Observatory intends to be actively involved in organising one of the round table discussions, and we also expect to see other European Commission projects related to open source present.

Fosdem 2019 (02/02/2019)

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Chemnitzer Linux Tage (16/03/2019)

The 2019 edition of the Chemnitz Linux Days will take place on 16 and 17 March 2017. The conference offers a cosmopolitan and peaceful environment, the conference organisers say. They aim to promote and welcome an open society, "from which many new and good ideas emerge".

26TH Open Systems Days Croatian Linux Users’ Conference (18/04/2019)

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.

European Open source & free software Lawyers Event (EOLE 2018) (05/12/2018)

Annual conference cycle with an international reach, the European Open source & Law Event (EOLE) aims at encouraging the mutualization and diffusion of legal knowledge related to free licences, as well as the development and promotion of good practices. Initiative born in 2008 from users’ needs, EOLE has for objective to develop a legal doctrine dedicated to the open source, with a particular attention to the delivery of neutral and quality information.

Changing words into loud action (11/10/2018)

Renewed push for adoption of ODF document standard (11/10/2018)

The Document Foundation, the organisation supporting the development of LibreOffice, is calling for supporters to promote the use of Open Document Format (ODF). Standardisation organisation OASIS would welcome and assist renewed marketing efforts, as would the Open Source Initiative.

Estonia and Finland publish first joint X-Road release (11/10/2018)

The Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), a public service started in August 2017 by Estonia and Finland, is making available its first two extensions for X-Road, an open source eGovernment data exchange solution originally developed and used by Estonia. The new extensions make it easier to build new services based on X-Road.

Open-source RISC processors making waves in research and industry (11/10/2018)

It's still early in terms of silicon implementations, tooling and operating system support, but the open RISC-V processor specification is making inroads in the processor world. As RISC-V Marketing Manager Ted Marena wrote at the beginning of this year on on IEEE Times, RISC-V is to open hardware what Linux has been to open-source software.

Bulgaria prepares to build its own central code repository (11/10/2018)

In November, Bulgaria’s state eGovernment agency SEGA (Държавната агенция „Електронно управление“ ДАЕУ) will award a contract for building the country’s open source code repository. SEGA began studying submitted proposals this Tuesday. The repository, to be based on Git, will be hosting source all software newly developed by or for Bulgaria’s public services.

European cities reuse Madrid’s open source citizen participation solution (11/10/2018)

Consul, the citizen participation platform shared as open source by the city of Madrid (Spain), is being implemented in 18 countries across the world. In Spain, Consul is used by over 40 villages, towns and cities. In Europe, Consul is also used by Paris and Aude (France), Turin (Italy), and Tirana (Albania), while Madrid has recently been in touch with towns and cities in Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Poland.

Vilnius: “Open source improves our public services” (11/10/2018)

The city of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital and with over half a million inhabitants the country’s largest city, is increasingly using open source software. The most recent example is WordPress: in July the city unveiled its new portal built on this content management system. “Open source enables us to improve our public services and empowers us to share our solutions and data,” says Dalius Kazlauskas, senior project manager at Vilnius’ E-City department.

Building smart cities on the open-source Things Network (11/10/2018)

LoRa, a low-power, long-range radio technology for networks on a municipal scale, provides a low-cost infrastructure on which municipalities can build a plethora of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications.

Italy’s Team Digitale urges use of technological principles in ICT procurement (11/10/2018)

The Digital Transformation Team of the Italian government is calling on buyers and sellers of public sector ICT solutions to apply 16 technological principles, including the use of open ICT standards and making available source code as open source. ‘Team Digitale’ hopes to get all of Italy’s procurers and ICT solution vendors to agree.

Dutch government to remove legal barriers to sharing code as open source (11/10/2018)

The Dutch government plans to remove legal roadblocks to allow public services to publish the source code of their ICT solutions. A pending proposal from the government to the parliament will change the country’s rules of conduct that minimise interference with the private sector. Next year, the government will begin encouraging public services to publish their source code publicly.

OpenEuropa developers contribute to open source (11/10/2018)

OpenEuropa’s software developers working on the European Commission’s Drupal-based software projects also contribute to related open source projects. When they come across a bug in a component needed for their EC projects, and they know how to fix it, they submit patches to help the upstream projects move forward. On Wednesday 12 September at the DrupalEurope conference in Darmstadt (Germany) members of the OpenEuropa team will talk about the ways they can contribute to open source projects.

Germany funds open source security check for SMEs (11/10/2018)

Germany’s federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy has been funding a 26-month project to help small and medium-sized companies avoid IT security issues when using open source content management systems. The project started in September 2016 and will end in November this year. The project is now looking for sponsors to continue the online service. “The costs are low as it’s mostly hosting costs,” says David Jardin, one of the developers involved.

South London healthcare service validates its open source approach (11/10/2018)

The development of Open-eObs, a bedside observation software solution to improve hospital care, confirms the value of open source software for the UK’s South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. The software was developed and tested in cooperation with hospital staff. The trust is encouraging other healthcare organisations to reuse the software and pool resources to build future versions.

French working group Mimo withdrawn from the LibreOffice community (11/10/2018)

The Document Foundation, an open source institution in charge of the governance of the LibreOffice suite, has decided to withdraw the French government's participation in its advisory board. The French government had been represented in the community since 2013 through the Mimo inter-ministerial working group.

Hackathon award for Latvian open source preschool directory (11/10/2018)

CareQueue, an open source project that presents public data on preschools, won last week’s Open Data Hackathon 2018 in Riga (Latvia). The software plots preschools on a map, showing space availability and waiting list times. The developers have combined data from the municipality and the national open data portal; however the software was developed specifically to make it easy to adapt to other cities and countries.

Trade group praises Portuguese public sector project (11/10/2018)

The use of open source at Portugal’s Institute for Justice Financial Management and Infrastructures (IGFEJ), funded by the Ministry of Finance, has been praised by ESOP, the country’s trade group for open source IT service providers. IGFEJ uses open source software to run an online service for citizens to request certificates related to court cases.

Croatia’s customs to switch to open source for core business system (11/10/2018)

Croatia’s Customs Administration wants to switch some of its core business systems to open source. The organisation is looking for specialists who can help build a new Linux-based server infrastructure for its risk and ICT assets management systems, while reusing the organisation’s high-performance IBM Power systems.

Italy about to test its mobile app for eGovernment services (11/10/2018)

Italy’s Team Digitale, the government digital transformation team, is about to start testing a smartphone app for its IO service, which will provide citizens with easy access to all kinds of government services. The entire software stack is open source, and the code comments and nearly all of the documentation are written in English to encourage international cooperation.

e-invoicing library "Mustangproject" publishes new version (11/10/2018)

The Mustangproject published version 1.5.4 of it's open source java e-invoicing library for ZUGFeRD.

Berlin Technical University and Nextcloud: showing public services how to interact with open source projects (29/08/2018)

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.

Open source makes Dutch government cloud a reality (09/01/2018)

The Dutch government’s data centre in Groningen (ODC-Noord) is becoming the benchmark for all of the government’s cloud services. ODC-Noord combines the open source cloud infrastructure OpenStack with the open source storage platform Ceph. The resulting cloud service is proving enormously scalable, while keeping costs low. As a result, the list of government clients using ODC-Noord’s cloud services is growing rapidly.

OpenFest 2018 (03/11/2018)

OpenFest is the biggest Bulgarian conference dedicated to free culture, free knowledge sharing, free and open source software. It is the most anticipated annual gathering of fans, creators and supporters of open source and free art in Bulgaria.

SFSCon 2018 (16/11/2018)

The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFScon, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFScon promotes the use of Free Software in IT infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness in the region. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.

LibreCon 2018 (21/11/2018)

LibreCon, Spain's "largest conference on Business and Open Source focusing on the challenges and emerging opportunities of the Industry 4.0 and the digitalisation of the Primary Sector", will take place on 21 and 22 November in Bilbao (Spain) in the Palacio Euskalduna.

Paris Open Source Summit 2018 (05/12/2018)

The Paris Open Source Summit 2018, one of the main European conferences bringing together policy makers, government representatives, industry, developers and many others, will take place on 5 and 6 December. The European Commission's Open Source Observatory intends to be actively involved in organising one of the round table discussions, and we also expect to see other European Commission projects related to open source present.

Fosdem 2019 (02/02/2019)

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Finland’s open code repository now includes municipalities (29/08/2018)

Municipalities in Finland should now find it easier to discover reusable, open source ICT solutions. A list of available solutions is available on the Avoinkoodi (“Open Code”) portal, managed by COSS, the country’s open source resource centre.

Barcelona translates free software guidelines into English (28/08/2018)

The guidelines help city staff with the day-to-day management of projects based on free software, including implementation, development, and how to participate in communities of developers and users.

Getting better at sharing (29/08/2018)

CERN contribution to KiCad aids Open Source Hardware and knowledge transfer (28/08/2018)

KiCad software now provides a set of open-source software tools for designing electronic circuits and creating Printed Circuit Board (PCB) layouts, and is released under the GPLv3 licence.

OpenStack powers private cloud for Denmark’s state public services (29/08/2018)

Denmark’s Agency for Governmental IT Services (Statens It) is using OpenStack, a well-known open source cloud platform. It is less expensive than commercial alternatives, and, since it is entirely under the control of the agency, does not impose any extra security measures on its customers.

Deutsche Bahn Intercity software under EUPL (29/08/2018)

The Open European Train Control System (OpenETCS), the signalling and control component of Deutsche Bahn's European Rail Traffic Management System, is distributed under the EUPL.

Swiss city of Bern publishes its first open source project (29/08/2018)

The capital of Switzerland, Bern, has published its first open source solution. The software, Ki-Tax, is used by the city to manage external childcare subsidies. In addition, the city is introducing open source to all of its schools.

Call for nominations for Galicia’s 11th Free Software Award (28/08/2018)

Universities in Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia can nominate free and open source software and hardware projects for the region’s annual Award for the Best Free Licensed University Project.

EUPL v1.2 – a Free Software Licence (FSF said) (29/08/2018)

It took time for the Free Software foundation (FSF) to include the EUPL v1.2 in its “official” list of free software licences.

City of Rome begins switch to open source office default (28/08/2018)

Rome has begun making LibreOffice the only available suite of office productivity tools on its workstations. The first group to switch uses office tools less than one hour per month

Building microprocessor architectures on open-source hardware and software (28/08/2018)

ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Bologna in Italy started their joint PULP research project on the energy efficiency of microprocessor architectures.

Poznań county looking for open source service (29/08/2018)

Poznań county in Poland is looking for short-term help with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux and other IT solutions. Last week, the district administration published a request for tender, asking for specialists who can work at the agency for about two months.

Schleswig-Holstein wants more open source, Lower Saxony not so much (28/08/2018)

In June the German state of Schleswig-Holstein reconfirmed its long-term commitment to using free and open source software. In July its neighbour, Lower Saxony, announced it would gradually phase out 13,000 Linux-based desktops, in use by the state tax authority since 2006.

Berlin Technical University and Nextcloud: showing public services how to interact with open source projects (29/08/2018)

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.

Open source makes Dutch government cloud a reality (09/01/2018)

The Dutch government’s data centre in Groningen (ODC-Noord) is becoming the benchmark for all of the government’s cloud services. ODC-Noord combines the open source cloud infrastructure OpenStack with the open source storage platform Ceph. The resulting cloud service is proving enormously scalable, while keeping costs low. As a result, the list of government clients using ODC-Noord’s cloud services is growing rapidly.

Vitalinux - Aragon’s school Linux distribution (09/01/2018)

In Spain’s autonomous community of Aragon a fast growing number of schools are using Vitalinux. This tailored distribution of free and open source software solutions boots fast and is easy to use. The workstations can be centrally managed, to keep software up-to-date and ease troubleshooting.

Open Source Lisbon 2018 (27/09/2018)

Open Source Lisbon is the biggest Open Source event in Portugal. The 16th edition will grant business managers and tech enthusiasts one day dedicated to sharing information about how open source technologies can act as a driver of innovation, in a world of emerging technological disruption.

OpenFest 2018 (03/11/2018)

OpenFest is the biggest Bulgarian conference dedicated to free culture, free knowledge sharing, free and open source software. It is the most anticipated annual gathering of fans, creators and supporters of open source and free art in Bulgaria.

SFSCon 2018 (16/11/2018)

The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFScon, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFScon promotes the use of Free Software in IT infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness in the region. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.

LibreCon 2018 (21/11/2018)

LibreCon, Spain's "largest conference on Business and Open Source focusing on the challenges and emerging opportunities of the Industry 4.0 and the digitalisation of the Primary Sector", will take place on 21 and 22 November in Bilbao (Spain) in the Palacio Euskalduna.

Paris Open Source Summit 2018 (05/12/2018)

The Paris Open Source Summit 2018, one of the main European conferences bringing together policy makers, government representatives, industry, developers and many others, will take place on 5 and 6 December. The European Commission's Open Source Observatory intends to be actively involved in organising one of the round table discussions, and we also expect to see other European Commission projects related to open source present.

Fosdem 2019 (02/02/2019)

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.