The government of the Basque autonomous region in Spain will begin a resource centre on open source and open standards. The Ministry of Justice and Public Administration in November signed an agreement between the Basque Government and the Association of Free Software Euskadi (ESLE).
The decision to sign this agreement was announced on 30 October. The resource centre will have an advisory body from representatives of ASOLIF (the National Association of Free Software), ESLE and the Basque Government.
"We will create a support office for open source software, to promote and assist with implementations of this kind of software within the Basque administration", the ministry writes in a statement.
The office will advise the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications (DIT). Next to helping with existing open source implementations, the resource centre will organise conferences and workshops to get all IT managers informed about free and open source software.
On top of the list of actions the centre will work on are to research possibilities to increase the use of open source in education, to find applications that can be migrated to open source and to start pilot projects and demonstrations with open source.
ESLE will help the set-up the resource, using its network of contacts in the Basque region and will assist in planning, training and education, in organising events and in doing research and analysis.
"The resource centre and the cooperation with ESLE are intended to increase the Basque's government's freedom of choice, result in better price-performance of its IT investments and increase their interoperability."
The agreement explicitly recognises the usefulness of IDA guidelines of migration to Open Source Software, IDABC's European Interoperability Framework and the Spanish IT standards on safety, security and maintenance.
More information:
Announcement by the Ministry of Justice and Public Administration (in Spanish)
ESLE announcement (in Spanish)