The Open Source Observatory is more than an attentive witness. We are an active participant in the open source community, encouraging public services to adopt this type of software.

Over the past year we have been busy refreshing and revamping our information resources. See, for example, our updated list of open source organisations and competence centres, and the directory of open source software repositories. The former will help you find relevant contacts in Member States, while the latter is an entry point to finding open source software repositories with solutions developed by and for public administrations.

In July, we completed our country intelligence reports, which give our readers insight into the state of open source in the EU Member States and the United Kingdom. Within a month or so we hope to publish an overview of all of these. You can already see a preview by watching our presentation at the OW2 online'20 conference, which took place two months ago. We are happy to report that almost all of the 28 countries that we studied actively promote open source through either specific legal instruments or encouraging guidelines.

We are also continuing to upload new case studies. The most recent ones are on the use of Consul citizen participation software by the city of Groningen (Netherlands) and on the use of the open source Content Management System Lutece by the city of Paris (France).

Lastly, we continue to keep you up to date on new developments. As active participants, we totally agree with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein: open source requires national and international cooperation. We aim to help build and strengthen such networks.