Community of Démarches Simplifiées (DS)

Démarches Simplifiées (DS) is a paperless service that enables all public bodies and local authorities to create online procedures in few minutes only, and to manage user requests on a dedicated platform. The project we present is how to we successfully achieve to have various (and sometimes opposed) public bodies work together around an open source software. DS was initiated by French State (the “DINUM”, cross-ministries IT service). It was intended for an exclusive use to ministries. As a non profit organisation of local governments, we exchanged with DINUM to bring the voice of local govs, that are also interested in using a software such as DS. We gained the trust of DINUM developers, by providing relevant contributions. We also had to patiently explain to local govs willing to install and enhance DS, to take great care not to fork. Forking can be a short-term solution, but it costs a lot, and from the point of view of public spending, it is a failure. A large part of our work consists in explaining all the benefits each and every one has of working together, on the same trunk of code, managing the discrepancies of agendas ; and how highly efficient it is for the public money spending. As day to day work, with lots of explanations, understanding of the political demands for each local gov, we finally managed to bring all this community together. The Community of DS now represents more than 10000 local govs. And we are quite proud that every one of them is sticking to the community, and do not fork.