A guide aiming to help local governmental organisations to improve their IT procurement, was made public yesterday in Madrid. "This will help make it technically, legally and procedurally feasible for local governments to share their IT solutions and thus increase the efficiency of their investments."

"To do this, we must ensure that these IT solutions are interoperable and use open standards and formats, based on free and open source software", explained in a statement the three organisations that jointly presented the guidelines, Red.es, a IT research and development organisation funded by the Spanish ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society, Asolif, a federation of Spanish open source IT service providers, and Cenatic, the Spanish government's resource centre on open source.

The guide is the first in a series of products and results from the Alial project by Asolif, involving Cenatic and other organisations.

"Public administrations must adapt their organisations to meet the requirements of the Law on Electronic Access of Citizens to Public Services, and here, open source software is an alternative that effectively resolves some of their challenges", said Sebastián Muriel General Manager of Red.es in a statement.

Miguel Jaque, Cenatic's director, added: "Now more than ever, free software is a proven alternative, that can be used by governments to improve their IT investments."

Pablo Gomez, chairman of Asolif, said that he hopes the guide will increase the confidence of local governmental organisations in procuring open source IT solutions. "This type of software allows re-use by other public administrations, which helps to save costs and increases the quality."

The guide is divided into two. The first part describes legal considerations, functional requirements, procedures, and organisational and economic criteria. The second part describes a basic method for bidding of any IT development project. 

More information:

Guide for local governments on tendering free and open source software  (pdf, in Spanish)

Alial project website (in Spanish)