CiteLibre

The City of Paris has developed internally the Lutece open source framework for the past 22 years. It was built to directly fulfil the City's need and today is deployed in every department of the City, serving about 80% of the City's digital services.

As it is freely distributed as open source software since 2002, we built up a community of users and contributors and benefited from their help and support.

Today, Lutece is being used by more than 40 cities around the globe (mainly in France so far though), and has growing partnerships with many public administrations. We also are more and more called upon to showcase and demo it.

Up until last year, organisations that wanted to deploy a Lutece-based website had to parse all our library of components, read through their documentation and figure whether or not they would need them or not so assemble their website. Which would discourage the less technical teams (which also often happen to be decision makers).

As a recently-created open source program office, we had the opportunity to set an open source policy that would also fulfil the digital roadmap which is set by the municipal team for the current mandate.

Based on the Good Governance Initiative that we contributed in writing with the OW2 consortium and the Eclipse Foundation, we easily implemented the generic approach to our City of Paris environment and constraints.

Amongst best practices-related opportunities, we also had to take the community of users to another level, by reducing the technical effort to run a fully functional Lutece website. This is how the CiteLibre project was launched:

CiteLibre (by Lutece) is a software suite that consists of fully functional application assemblages made to reduce technical constraints to focus on the offered features. It relies on the full Lutece components library and embeds all pre-configured servers to run a fully-operable digital service, open source and GDPR-compliant.

One only needs a containerised environment, a simple file and a single command to launch the full integrated service, which graphical integration has been white-branded for better projection and customised-integration within any website.

Which makes it fast and easy for any decision maker to go through the application, get the most of it and freely decide.

No technical skills required to run the available applications, one can focus on what really matters: the given and supported services.