The administration of the Italian province of Savona is using free and open source software wherever possible. Earlier this week it unveiled it's new website, rebuilt on the open source content management system Drupal. The province argues that using free and open source software helps it to reduce operating costs and at the same time gives it the freedom to customise and share its applications.
In a statement announcing the new site, published on 24 February, the province adds that it already implements this type of software for many of its administrative tasks.
Savona, one of Italy's 109 provinces, for instance uses this type of software to offer on-line access to its database of geographic information. "The web-platform offering the services for navigation is built completely in open source."
The province announced in 2007 that it would move to an open source office suite. The Italian open source IT services provider Yacme assisted in the move to OpenOffice. It lists the 350 desktops in the province among its many references.
The use of OpenOffice by the province was also the topic of a presentation in July 2010 at a workshop organised at the Tuscany Open Source Software Laboratory, a joint-research lab from the Tuscany region's Competence Centre for Open Source, the Province of Pisa, the University of Pisa, and the Navacchio IT incubator centre.
Digital signatures
The province and the company both were involved with the development in 2011 of Oxsit, an open source extension to OpenOffice to offer electronic digital signing of documents, based on the XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (Xades) XML extensions. Oxsit was developed with the support from the municipalities of Trento, Rovereto and Bologna, the provinces of Bologna and Savona and the Galliera Hospital in Genoa.
Oxsit is made available under two open source licences, the GPLv3 and the EUPL. It is available on the Joinup software development forge.
More information:
New web site for the province (in Italian)
Geographic information from the province (in Italian)
Digital Signature of ODF compliant European legislation (in Italian)
OOoXAdESSignIT (Oxsit)