Webinars and resources springing up everywhere

The first upcoming webinar, on 30 March, is one for those working in public administration, on "Public Services Open-Source Governance and Collaboration". It will present the role of the OSS community in the upcoming governance structure which will be created by the Interoperable Europe Act, and will be followed up by presentations from the Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs) of two Member States. These topics will be discussed in the context of the Brno Declaration.

The second webinar, open to all, will be on 4 May on the topic of "Policy & Strategy Aspects of OSS in Public Administration". This webinar will present the report from an expert workshop which OSOR is organising on 25 April which will gather knowledge of the challenges and solutions for using OSS in public administration.

Our third OSOR announcement is a new resource on the website: "OSPOs " OSS Governance". This new section contains information to understand how public administrations manage their use of OSS, as well as the concept of an OSPO. Information is currently being gathered. This section should become a focal point for this topic.

We are also very pleased to continue our series of interviews with Fabio Bonelli this month talking to us about selecting software and the impact of Italy's Digital Administration Code which "gives precedence to FLOSS solutions that are available in the Developers Italia catalogue or in other FLOSS repositories".

From Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz, we have an article about the EUPL and specific Interoperable Europe Act provisions.  The article goes into details about the provisions on sharing solutions, about the how the EUPL can become the default licence and about governance of the structures which the IEA will create.

In the Czech Republic, the government will be removing Google Analytics and replacing it with an OSS project, Matomo. This project, which some may recognise by its previous name, Piwik, is being adopted to increase transparency and reduce the amount of citizen data that is sent outside the EU for processing.

And finally, we have news that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is starting a trial of the online office document suite Nextcloud and Collabora Online (the online version of LibreOffice).  In line with the interests of the EDPS, the trial of this software is to evaluate if the body can have better control over data and, similar to the Czech Republic's migration, to keep EU data in the EU.

Plenty of reasons for optimism! We hope you enjoy the read, and that we see many of you at the upcoming OSOR events.
The OSOR Team