Abstract
Mancomún is an initiative of the Galician Government, launched in 2006, to encourage and facilitate the use of free and open source software (FOSS) in Galicia. Its core mission is to assist the public administration, but it is designed to also be useful for the education and private sectors. The most visible part of Mancomún is the mancomun.gal web platform, which publishes information and provides online services for collaboration and for software development, but developing software, software migrations and the related training are also a large part of Mancomún.
Within the Galician Government, the actions related to Mancomún are generally carried out by its executive branch, La Xunta de Galicia.
This study aims to investigate the origin and evolution of Mancomún and its progress toward its aims.
Historical context
In 2004, Galicia attracted significant attention for the launch of Trisquel, a version of the GNU/Linux operating system with the dual focus of providing Galician language localisation of all packages and applying strictly a rule that only FOSS packages would be included in their distribution. This project was launched with support of the University of Vigo. Today it is often mentioned on Mancomún, and their Galician language support has been shared upstream and is now available in many projects and in other GNU/Linux distributions.
The Mancomún project was initiated in May 2006 while Galicia was governed by the Partido Socialista de Galicia (PSdeG) in coalition with the Bloque Nacionalista Galego party (BNG). The BNG pushed for a technological renewal of Galician institutions and included “free software” (software libre) in the charter. Besides perceived economic advantages, the idea that FOSS could be freely adapted for Galicia and translated into Galician also weighed in favour of migrating to FOSS.
Galician and Spanish both have full official status in Galicia, recognised by both the Galician regional law and Spain’s national law. The Galician Government additionally gives the Galician language the title of “Galicias’s own language” (lengua propia). The word Mancomún can be loosely translated as “commons”, which reflects the nature of FOSS as a digital commons and the nature of Mancomún’s web platform as a commons where people meet.
The establishment of Mancomún coincided with a general revamp and expansion of the Galician Government’s online presence.
The mancomun.gal platform
mancomun.gal serves as a platform for publishing news, a document repository and online services for FOSS projects. The document repository includes technical documentation, tutorials, training materials and guides.
A lot of attention was attracted by the publication, in 2022, of the Guide to good practices for releasing free content and software.
Publications have increased in recent years with, as of 2023, 30-40 news items being published each month, a weekly summary in video format, a podcast (with over 100 episodes) and a monthly newsletter.
There is also a page of the website dedicated to a repository with entries dating back to 2006. This service presents a curated catalogue of FOSS solutions and includes projects carried out by entities outside of the Government.
Mancomún also offers a videoconferencing service, using BigBlueButton, available for video training, conferences and presentations.
The Forxa code-hosting platform (see below) is also part of mancomun.gal.
Software development
Software development efforts remain active. One example is the Archam-SPW platform, based on Java Spring Web, designed to speed up development of web applications and standardise their look & feel, ensuring such applications meet the requirements of Galicia’s public administration.
Another project currently under active development is wsdlit. This software allows developers to create documentation in different formats, including HTML, PDF, EPUB and MOBI.
A set of system administration tools based on Ansible is also under active development.
Sharing and reuse
All of the above entailed a certain degree of customisation of existing tools, applications, and services, and sometimes the development of bespoke solutions specifically developed for the public administration. That said, Mancomún's original promoters were concerned about duplicating efforts and reinventing the wheel. This concern led to policies that would encourage the reuse of existing software. Projects like Wand@, an electronic processing platform, and Notific@, a notification system, both developed by and for the Andalusian regional government, were incorporated into Mancomún’s software catalogue to be used by the government.
The 2022 edition of the Free Software Plan mentions a continued effort to promote the reuse of applications developed within the public administration, supporting ICT managers in the release process in accordance with the Government’s software release procedures (and the publication of a new version of said release procedures).
Forxa code hosting platform
To further facilitate the sharing and reuse of software distributed under FOSS licences, Mancomún set up its own code hosting forge, Forxa, in 2007 for software projects worked on within the Galician public administration. The Forxa repository was available for projects developed within the public administration itself and for those created by private entities for the Galician public administration. The projects were (and are) publicly accessible, and the system provides features including version control, a repository for the code, documentation, a basic website, a forum for fielding user queries, and task sections containing sub-projects.
Activity on the software repository has been paused since October 2021, but projects hosted before that time remain available. The services provided by Forxa were not widely available when it launched in 2006. Today there are many such services, so providing this service is less of a priority. Some software projects developed by Mancomún and Amtega are currently hosted on external repositories. Two examples are Archam-SPW and ARCHetype AMtega SPring Web, which are parts of a model for creating new web-based software products using Java and Amtega’s base framework. GitHub is often chosen because it gives access to a broader set of features. While Forxa’s immediate availability is not a top priority, because alternatives exist, there are plans to replace the current software (FusionForge) with GitLab and to re-launch Forxa.
wsdlit used for creating documentation (mentioned above) is an exmaple of a project currently hosted on GitHub.
Software migrations - servers
When Mancomúm was launched, the dominant software setup for webservers was a combination of FOSS packages known as the “LAMP stack”. These combined a GNU/Linux operating system with the Apache web server, a MySQL database, and PHP as the server-side development language. Such solutions were deployed by the Galician Government in regional ministries (consellerías).
The Government’s Presidency’s regional ministry invested €825,000 in FOSS solutions in 2010. This included a “map of Galicia’s Telecommunications Infrastructure,” a MySQL cluster to better support the LAMP stack of the regional ministry’s websites, a NAGIOS platform to monitor the network and online services, several applications to facilitate parliamentary queries for the Government’s vehicle fleet management, and infrastructure for the justice department.
The Regional Ministry of Education and Universities implemented an email service and the Regional Ministry for Culture and Tourism implemented various services, including a web application for managing Galicia’s cultural heritage, urban planning, and libraries, all through FOSS.
The Regional Ministry of the Sea, which oversees maritime affairs and fisheries, developed two FOSS applications for the Galician coastguard: one for registering data on infractions and inspections, and another for the Legal and Procurement Management Service. Similar initiatives were taken up by other regional ministries and departments.
Over the years, these services have been refined and modernised, incorporating or switching in new technologies as they become available.
Software migrations - desktops
The most prominent user-facing project in recent years has been the migration of the office suite used by public administration workers. Prior to 2010, government employees of the had been using proprietary software for their office productivity needs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software. In 2010, Amtega, the Government’s Agency for Technological Modernisation, began the process of migrating the Government’s office staff to LibreOffice (in the initial phase they used its predecessor OpenOffice).
Besides office productivity suites, these workstations were equipped with a variety of FOSS software packages alongside the proprietary applications which civil servants had been using until that point. The software installed included Mozilla Firefox as a web browser and web application front-end, the VLC media player, 7zip and PDF Creator. Users were given the option to choose which software they would like to use for their day-to-day work: the applications they had been using up until then or the new FOSS alternatives.
During the transition, various departments were gradually migrated away from solutions like Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. In 2014, the Government announced that the migration had reduced licensing costs for servers, back-office, and desktops by 50%, resulting in an average saving of €1.7 million per year since 2010.
In 2015, the Government began a gradual phasing-out of the remaining proprietary productivity software suites. Until this time, LibreOffice was installed on 7,300 workstations alongside Microsoft Office. By the end of the year Microsoft Office had been uninstalled from 1,520 of those machines, leaving LibreOffice as the sole productivity solution for users. This process continued throughout 2016 and 2017, culminating in a full migration of all Government-dependent teams. The migration was completed in 2018.
The migration was accompanied by extensive and frequent training courses, which were conducted in most departments and regional ministries of the Government. The courses were designed to reduce friction for workers and covered all the applications included in the suite, as well as other aspects of the use of LibreOffice.
A migration at the operating system level was also carried out in schools, where computer labs were migrated to Abalar’s system of GNU/Linux, adapted for education.
Funding assistance
A secondary goal of Mancomún was to secure funding from non-government sources, including technology-oriented companies, to reduce dependence on elected officials which may fluctuate. However, no such sponsors are listed on the Mancomún website and funding continues to come exclusively from the Government of Galicia.
Review of progress
The adoption of FOSS and open standards in the public sector tends to have a trickle-down effect in the private sector. Software vendors are adapting to the new requirements of developing in the open and making their source code available. For non-IT companies, the use of open standards gives them more options when interacting with government agencies. Leading by example and raising awareness of their use of FOSS through events and training also has an impact. This has been the case in Galicia, where data from 2014 shows that the percentage of companies using FOSS in Galicia was higher than the Spanish national average. The educational and promotional work carried out by Mancomún has been key to this success.
Mancomún has also enabled the Government to share solutions, development and know-how across Galician public institutions, resulting in more departments, agencies and regional ministries migrating to and adopting FOSS solutions. This has enabled the Government to modernise and expand its digital services to citizens, improve its tools for departments, and save money in the process.
Mancomún’s assistance in FOSS migrations also met the BNG party’s initial ideological aspirations, as FOSS could be adapted to the specific needs of the region and easily translated into the Galician language.
After over 10 years of very active work it would be fair to say that Mancomún has been successful in achieving many of its original objectives and the project continues to make progress.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Adrián Chaves, Chema Casanova and La Oficina de Software Libre of La Xunta de Galicia (in particular Pablo Sanxiao and Jorge Lama) for their valuable input in the creation of this article.
Author: Paul Brown