Do good (open source) and talk about it

Leonardo Favario, Open Source Project Leader at the Italian Department for the Digital Transformation spoke about their guidelines on the acquisition and reuse of software for public administrations. The guidelines were adopted two years ago to support public procurement officers in the implementation of rules on favouring open source in public procurement and the reuse of software. When thinking back, Favario recalled that while the new rules “disrupted” how things were done, they were not enough on their own. What did he learn? “You need to reach all levels. You need people that are able to explain [the rules] to public administrations. You need to build an ecosystem of people going in the same direction”.

Similarly, Petteri Kivimäki, CTO at the Estonia-based Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), recognises the importance of a multi-pronged approach. NIIS’ main project is the decentralised data-exchange layer X-Road, which underpins many of Estonia’s digital public services. Widely considered as a success story of public sector open source, X-Road is used in more than 20 countries. When asked what made X-Road so successful, Kivimäki said “Estonia has done an excellent job in marketing and promoting their digital services, [...] it has given [X-Road] lots of good publicity. Then another very important factor is that it is open source.”

Countries around Europe, such as Poland, are currently implementing the new Open Data Directive. The Directive updates previous rules and now requires public sector organisations to publish many types of data as open data, such as meteorological, geospatial, transport and enterprise ownership data, for reuse by third parties. This data can be extraordinarily useful to power new digital services useful to citizens in their daily lives, but only if its publication reaches those interested to reuse the data. As the old adage goes, do good and talk about it.

The OSOR team