The Open Portal Guard project was initiated by the Town of Grosseto, Tuscany, Italy, to provide secure e-government services for citizens using one of the official national smartcards for authentication: * the Electronic ID Card (Carta d'Identità Elettronica or CIE) by the Ministry of the Interior and issued by Towns * the National Service Card (Carta Nazionale dei Servizi or CNS) by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology that is issued by regional governments (including Lombardia, Lazio, Tuscany) and others. Starting from January 2007, access control based on these cards will be mandatory for all Public Administrations in Italy. However, a local-only solution is unlikely to achieve top quality and long-term sustainability. We believe that the problem needs to be solved in a much larger context--at least a national one, but preferably an international one that attempts to achieve large-scale interoperability of national eID cards and initiatives. Such an objective calls for collaboration of all stakeholders involved. We believe that the open source approach is the best suited vehicle for such collaboration since it permits to share vision, expertise, and code, while guaranteeing full autonomy of the various contributors (such as national eID initiatives). We therefore invite the following kind of stakeholders to join the project: * international coordination and standardization efforts in the eID domain * national eID initiatives * national IT policy makers who include eID cards and according access control in their e-government strategies * public administration who can use OpenPortalGuard for the delivery of secure, internationally interoperable services * private service providers who can use OpenPortalGuard to protect their services * SMEs and national technology providers who can economically exploit the project and contribute to its long-term sustainability * academia active in the eID domain We also hope that this project can help to experiment and demonstrate the approach of open source in support of efficient e-government.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Starting from January 2007, access control based on the Electronic ID Card and the National Service Card cards will be mandatory for all Public Administrations in Italy. Our initiative aims to expand this solution to a cross-border context.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

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