The CMS Census tracks and analyses the content management systems used by different public organisations, giving insight into the popularity of Open Source solutions among them. The goal of the tracker is to give up-to-date information for decision-makers to choose the right software, help smaller user groups to find tooling for specific purposes and reduce vendor lock-in. It was developed with the needs of decision-makers, service providers, and CTOs in mind.
“Other analytics tools are good for finding out the CMS market share in different countries or worldwide. But from the decision-maker point of view, I want to know what other organisations in my category are using”, explains Sebastian Kreideweiß lecturer on the side at Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences.
A group of Kreideweiß’ students wrote a bachelor’s thesis which confirmed Open Source is widely used in the public sector. This finding drove the students to develop the CMS Census website and run the first analysis. The tool further refined the research methods used in their bachelor’s thesis and revealed that more than 95% of the German public administration websites use OSS.
The team collects the domains manually for analysis. Then they are sent to a CMS detection service for getting the system information, explains Kreideweiß. The CMS Census website itself is built on open-source CMS TYPO3.
CMS Census currently covers only Germany but the team is already adding new countries. The next addition will be Estonia, and the long-term goal is to cover the whole of Europe. The team also has a bunch of feature improvements in the pipeline, including relational data displays.
“Next feature of CMS Census is to use open data to show which companies are currently providing services for different systems and software. Showing the details of a service provider, the users can see its tech stack and the related applications”, added Kreideweiß.