Register here to join the discussion on the successes and future of open source in the public sector. If you represent a public administration a team or a company that has successfully developed or implemented an open source solution or initiative within public services, submit your project to the EU Public Services Open Source Achievement Awards by 21 September. 

With OSOR celebrating 15 years, we've decided to check in on some projects that have been around or a similar amount of time. The first one concerns the Italian province of Cremona. Initiatives to use free and open source software in their public administration can be traced back to 1997. Gianni Bassini, the province's systems administrator for a portion of those years, spoke with OSOR to talk about their progress and how the project has survived political and administrative reorganisations.

Looking at two newer projects, we see great work being done on the National Carbon Registry, which is financed by a consortium of large European and global organisations. This software can be used to create an inventory of Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) actions as part of emissions reduction initiatives. The second is a project by the Estonian government to improve tools for the Estonian language. The project is a database and portal for gathering speech recordings to help both preserve the language and improve speech recognition for digital tools in the public and private sector.

On the policy side, also two stories. Spain's new National Strategy for Open Science endorses the
collaborative development model and sharing of information as well as requiring free and open source software infrastructure. This strategy is new but can be seen as the latest action in a chain of positive steps going back to 2007. Meanwhile, the UK government has also updated their Digital, Data and Technology Playbook with firmer requirements to use free and open source software and also some interesting requirements about sharing and reuse.

Finally, we'd like to draw your attention to the "Open Source Solutions for Sustainable Development
Goals (OSS4SDG)", which proposes software projects that can improve gender issues such as online and offline.

If you know people working on similar projects that should be more well known, consider talking to them and suggesting they submit their project for the OSOR Awards.

We hope you enjoy the remaining summer weather, and we look forward to a busy September with

lots more to report on.
The OSOR Team.