Case Studies

OSOR: The more they know the more they share. Introducing Open Source Software communities to Europe's public sector — published on Jun 07, 2010

In the early 2000s the European Commission had realized the potential of open source software and its communities for the public sector. As the topic gained on importance the Commission launched the GPOSS portal, which was essentially a source of providing information regarding open source software for public administrations. Eventually the GPOSS portal was replaced by another platform, which allowed for actual cooperation of projects: OSOR.eu. This platform aimed at introducing public administrations to open source software and also to the community dynamics behind the software. It features a variety of projects and has several partnering websites, which contribute to further expanding the network.

Norwegian Mapping Authority — published on Mar 24, 2010

The Norwegian Mapping Authority (Statens Kartverk) is the central organisation for the provision of mapping images to most public bodies and organisations in Norway. After experiencing a vast increase in requests for their services in 2006 and 2007, the Mapping Authority also had to deal with an increasingly overstrained IT infrastructure. The licenses for their infrastructure however were very costly, and acquiring additional licenses would only increase the financial burden consistently in the future. The Mapping Authority therefore chose to employ an IT infrastructure based on open source software solutions, which were free of licensing costs and which proved to be much better, performance wise. In the process of introducing the new IT infrastructure, the team had to build up own expertise in order to maintain a functioning system. With the help of online communities, this has been a great success for the Mapping Authority.

The Swedish National Police: How to avoid locking yourself in while saving money — published on Nov 24, 2009

In 2006 the Swedish National Police launched a project that led to the implementation and migration from an ICT infrastructure based on proprietary products to an ICT server and database platform based on Open Source software and open standards. The previous ICT platform was very costly and obliged the Police to stick with a hand full of vendors. The aim was therefore to cut costs, avoid vendor lock-in, achieve better performance, and introduce open standards. Before ideas were realized, a thorough study was conducted to calculate costs and benefits. This study foresaw cost savings of up to fifty percent over a five years period compared to the proprietary hardware and software in place at this time, while improving performance at the same time. Due to the dimensions of this project that affected the entire ICT infrastructure of the Swedish National Police, it was not always easy to turn ideas into reality.

The Open University UK: creating a win-win situation by sharing code and content — published on Oct 27, 2009

In 2005 The Open University (OU) UK, one of Europe's largest distance learning universities, established that it was time to deploy a new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), for both The Open University itself as well as for their OpenLearn project aimed at providing free open educational resources (OER) to the general public. A team with different sub-tasks was formed, which investigated future learning environments and how learning material was presented and disseminated through those. Next to this, the OU also researched open learning models, as part of the OpenLearn project. The team of researchers and technical staff, after setting out the components required to meet the OU's needs the most appropriate match was determined. The choice fell on the VLE Moodle, which is an open source product. Today the Moodle VLE has been successfully implemented at the OU and the OU has further published a significant amount of their learning material under a Creative Commons license as courses on the Moodle VLE based OpenLearn website, which are freely available to anyone interested. The OU continues to collaborate closely with the Moodle community , as this provides a very large platform for feedback and information. All the OU's development are given back to the Moodle community, which improves the product for the OU and the rest of the community.

Desktop4education: Bringing new environments to Austrian schools — published on Sep 25, 2009

In 2003 the secondary school of Weiz, Austria, started the development of an open source operating system. The overall objective has been to develop a system that was easy to maintain, sustainable in the future, and free of licensing costs: the so called desktop4eduation. Although open source software is not extensively used in Austrian schools yet, it is becoming more and more important, as the government tries to promote free software over proprietary solutions increasingly. Today the desktop4education project is being frequently used as a reference case by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and as such promoted by them throughout Austria.

AirAware: managing the skies of Bucharest using free software — published on Aug 21, 2009

In 2005 the Romanian National Meteorological Administration (NMA) received EU funding for its AirAware project. The project's objective was to improve the air quality monitoring system currently in place and to enhance the system with forecasting capabilities. For the management of all the information and the presentation thereof, the team at the NMA developed a portal that is entirely built on Free/Libre Open Source Software. In the future, the team is hoping to open the project to the public.

OpenCimetiere: Managing graves the open way — published on Aug 13, 2009

For the management of their cemeteries the city of Arles, and its neighbouring municipalities Albi, Tarn and Dadou decided in 2006 that they needed to replace pen and paper with computers and software. The solution had to be secure, adaptable, and fully featured. The IT direction of the city of Arles was in close contact with the open source initiative OpenMairie, which presented many software products for the use in the public sector. It was through this relationship that the four municipalities took the initiative to start OpenCimetiere, an open source management system for cemeteries. This was started with an initialization phase in 2006, followed by a contribution phase in 2007, where the software was further improved and extended. Today, the software is used by over 300 municipalities inside and outside France, and helps an increasing number of municipalities all over the world to manage their citizens' final resting places efficiently.

FriKomPort: Sharing code, costs, and benefits — published on May 25, 2009

In 2006 the Norwegian region of Kongsberg launched a portal to coordinate and administrate courses and trainings for municipality staff. The solution was developed with open source tools, as a common effort of all seven municipalities of the Kongsberg region. Once the project was working successfully, other municipalities and organisations became interested and wanted to use the portal as well. The Kongsberg region eventually published FriKomPort, as the portal was called, as a free software application under the GPL. The portal today is used by more than 50 organisations, and practically all users are very confident about the solution. For the future the FriKomPort leaders hope to share the portal with even more municipalities by publishing an English version.

Eurostat: Standards and open source software for data interoperability — published on May 18, 2009

Eurostat collects and publishes huge amounts of data each year, and exchanges many datasets with other large organisations. This exchange was constantly suffering from a lack of interoperability, as data needed to be converted from one organisation's convention into another, a process which consumes both time and money. Different organisations were also using very different tools to work with the data, which caused further problems. In late 2001, Eurostat got together with a number of EU committees to discuss the need for greater interoperability within the European public sector. In 2005, IDABC agreed to fund the SDMX Open DATA Interchange (SODI) project. Thanks to previous cooperations between Eurostat and other international institutions, the SDMX standard quickly found a large group of sponsors, all of which hoped to benefit from the greater interoperability afforded by using a single standard, and the tools built on it. These tools were developed by Eurostat and other sponsoring institutions, and many of them were published under the EUPL license. The SDMX Converter is an example of the successful development and publication of a tool that is essential for working with the SDMX standard.

VINGIS: Managing Hungary's vineyards with Open Source — published on Apr 17, 2009

In Hungary, wine-growing is an important sector with a long tradition. While the Ministry of Agriculture has documented vineyards and crops for more than 20 years, this documentation was previously not up to EU standards. When Hungary became an EU Member State in 2004, the wine sector had to start providing standardized documentation in order to be eligible for funding under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). For this reason, the state-owned company FÖMI developed the national vineyard register VINGIS. It opted to base its solution on open source software in order to keep the system flexible and costs low. Although the development proved difficult, the final product is benefiting approximately 200.000 people between public bodies and wine-growers.