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General information about the Joinup platform.
FAQ
General
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Even though there is a clear focus on public administrations within Joinup, the portal is open to everyone. Anyone interested in interoperability solutions for public administrations, semantic interoperability, or Open-Source Software is eligible to join the Joinup platform.
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Kudos are virtual credits awarded to registered users, each time they contribute content to Joinup. In other words: the higher the total number of Kudos a member has, the more active he/ she is.
How does it work? Each activity a registered user performs on the portal is awarded a credit, a numerical value, which is associated to the member’s profile.Kudos do not only help to locate highly active members within the community; they also serve to track down users with comments, cases and posts highly rated by their peers. Kudos also affect the order of the People’s list, giving more visibility and recognition to active members. -
Currently, users with many kudos do not receive prizes or incentives from Joinup aside from being recognised for it on the portal itself.
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Simply by keeping your user profile up-to-date and by contributing your content to Joinup.
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If you find that your contributions and the activities you have participated in were not correctly rewarded please contact the Joinup staff via the contact page.
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Member’s kudos are shown on their personal profile. The easiest way to view your own kudos is to go to your personal profile and ‘Preview your profile as others see it’.
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Kudos are updated on a regular basis (but not on a daily basis). If the kudos are not added to your personal profile within 7 days after your participation please contact the portal staff.
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All activities which score kudos are defined in the following tables: kudos
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The following activities are awarded with Kudos:
https://webgate.acceptance.ec.europa.eu/joinup/page/what_are_kudos -
As of today, the portal language cannot be changed. You can, however, select documents from our resource database in their different languages of origin. You will find the option to select documents according to their language in their sub-menus. At a later stage, we will implement multilingual features.
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Your case must be submitted in English so that all community members can enjoy reading your cases. You can, however, attach documentation in its original language.
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For the time being, newsletters will be available in English only.
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Yes. Just like the profile of any registered users, your profile is publicly visible to all users of the Joinup platform. However, you do have the option to hide your e-mail address from other users, by editing the privacy settings for your “My Page” which is accessible via “My Dashboard”. Users will no longer see your e-mail address, but can still send you e-mails via the “Send a message” feature of the platform.
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If you would like to remove your accounts please login with the account that you want to remove, edit your “My Page”, and click the “Delete Account” button.
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In case you are experiencing problems while accessing your Joinup account, please follow these steps in order to reset your password:
- Go to the login page: joinup/user/login;
- Click the link ‘Request new password’;
- You will receive an e-mail in your inbox;
- Follow the instructions of the email to activate your new password before trying to log in.
Please remember that you can customise your password by editing your page “My Page” which is found in “My Dashboard”.
If problems persist, please do not hesitate to contact the Joinup Helpdesk on joinup/contact
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Unfortunately, Joinup doesn't support SSH at the moment. If you need any help, please contact the Joinup Support Team via the Contact page and we will do our best to help out.
Legal questions
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F/OSS licences are (too) numerous. Facing this proliferation, the Open-Source Initiative (OSI) is the main organisation maintaining a list of "approved licenses". The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) was created by the European Commission to comply with the European legal context: it is currently the sole licence which has official value in 22 linguistic versions. The EUPL was approved by OSI. The EUPL reduces the impact of license proliferation by providing a compatibility list, which includes the GPL.
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No, any licence that is recognized by the OSI (Open Source Initiative), or the FSF ( Free Software Foundation) will be accepted for distributing projects hosted on Joinup. For end-user applications and solutions that should be protected from “appropriation”, the use of the European Union Public Licence is highly recommended as common legal framework across Europe, because it is valid in all official European languages. The EUPL is especially written in consideration of European law and practice.
Joinup has a “licence wizard” to facilitate licence selection.
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You should report it to the Joinup legal service, which will investigate and try to solve the issue amicably. If needed, the Joinup administrator will remove / put off line all projects, pages or texts that appear – whether originally or later – to be contrary to the Joinup principles. Other forges (federated forges) web masters will be involved as the case may be. In addition, the European Commission may also use any other legal instrument that could be suitable for enforcing the respect of the applicable copyright law.
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No. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including public administrations and companies) that can make and use modified version internally without ever releasing it outside.
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No, everyone has the right to sell copies, or to ask for a contribution. Services (training, implementation, suport etc.) are nearly never for free. Some licences (like the EUPL) states that the licence is “royalty free”, meaning that the licensor will not try to manage “permanent royalties” depending on the number of users, of computers, the country where it is distributed etc. However, they are other commercial business models than managing royalties.
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I like most of the EUPL provisions, but I would like to change some points, making my own version. Can I do that?
The EUPL is copyrighted by the European Community (the European Union after the Lisbon treaty). It cannot be modified. You can use modified EUPL terms in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not give any impression that your licence is authored by the European Commission or any other institution, without specific authorisation.
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Simply “using” components covered by any GPL version has no impact on licensing your own code. Even when a larger work appears to the end user to be a unique program, its components, when their source code are combined without being modified and merged together, stay licensed under their different primary licences. All copyright attributions must be respected and covering licenses provided. In their purpose to limit software appropriation, free software advocates (FSF in particular) claim for extending GPL coverage in some cases of linking. There is no case law confirming this in Europe (and software licensed under the EUPL is protected against appropriation anyway). Joinup maintains a list of EUPL compatible licences. In case of doubt, please contact the Joinup legal expert that could ask (to the component licensor) a formal FOSS licence exception for distributing under the EUPL.
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The use of Joinup is regulated by 10 principles. Principle #2 states that Joinup is reserved for software and projects that are of particular use for public administrations in Europe, and/or produced by the public sector. The reference to public administrations is not exclusive of other usages: for example a Geographical Information System may be considered as “answering to public sector needs” (road making etc.), even if it can also be useful for private purpose (home building, truck or property management etc.). The reference to Europe is not exclusive either: Joinup welcomes projects that are initiated and could be downloaded and used everywhere, provide they may be useful to public administrations in Europe. The project owner can be a public administration, however it can be any other person (individual, association, company) developing software that is of particular use for public administrations.
Open Source Software
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FLOSS stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. According to GNU.org, free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
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Software which does not provide the user with the above four freedoms is called proprietary software.
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It is not price which sets FLOSS apart from proprietary software. Some proprietary software is distributed gratis - so-called "freeware" or "shareware" - without giving the four freedoms described above.
On the other hand, FLOSS is not without costs. The software itself may be available at zero price, but the distributor may charge for various services, such as packaging the software, making it available, providing documentation and maintenance, or adapting it to a client's needs.
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The GNU General Public License (GPL) is central to the free software universe. It gives users the right to use, modify and redistribute software licensed under it, while only demanding that they again use the GPL to distribute their modified versions. This reciprocal mechanism gave rise to a fast-growing pool of free software.
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The primary objective in this area is to promote the uptake of Open-Source Software in public administrations:
- Encouraging Europe's public administrations to consider and assess the most advantageous IT solutions for their particular needs;
- Reducing the costly replication of public sector software that already exists in similar form elsewhere, lowering the cost of eGovernment solutions and helping spread good practice throughout public administrations;
- Ensuring that the market for IT solutions remains competitive;
- Reducing ISA's own costs for application development and maintenance;
- Helping ensure that Open-Source Software solutions can compete on a level playing field with proprietary solutions.
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The links below provide a quick overview of some of the more significant websites regarding Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). This list, however, is by no means complete:
- The Free Software Foundation
- The GNU project
- Wikipedia articles on free software and open source
- The GNU General Public License, the best-known FLOSS license
- The Open Source Initiative
- SourceForge, the largest site for collaborative FLOSS development
- The FLOSSImpact study, an extensive empirical discussion of the impact of FLOSS on the European ICT market
Semantic Assets
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This term describes resources that support the exchange of data in distributed information systems. Joinup provides syntactic and semantic assets to its users. Syntactic assets define common data structures, e.g. XML schema. Semantic assets, on the other hand, deliver a central terminology to ensure that data elements are interpreted in the same way by communicating parties.
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The interoperability assets provided on Joinup are contributions from European eGovernment projects. Therefore we do not develop the assets ourselves, but we encourage existing interoperability projects to make their results available for reuse by other projects and users through our platform.
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The registry is based on open standards from the OASIS consortium: OASIS/ebXML Registry Information Model and OASIS/ebXML Registry Services Specification. Please contact us for further information.
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Yes, as the owner you can withdraw your asset at any time.