Using open source is helping the government of Galicia (Spain) to streamline and rationalise its operations. The government's Free Software Coordination Office is contacting all ICT managers to explain the advantages of using this type of solutions, disseminate best practices and promote the sharing and reuse of regional, national and international free software solutions.
In late June, Amtega, the autonomous region's agency for technological modernisation, published an English translation of the main points of the 2014 free software plan.
The main actions include migrating at least 1000 PC workstations to a free software office suite of at least a 1000 PC workstations. The regional government is also implementing notification services for citizens and business, reusing Notific@ - developed by the government of Andalucía. It will be updating regional government portals using the content management solutions Drupal and Liferay. It is also working on a unified registration solution, based on document management system Alfresco, and the regional libraries will be migrated to use the Koha library system.
Public software, public transport
Galicia's 'Free Software Coordination Office', Amtega's open source resource centre, has an advisory role in several other government projects involving free and open source, including the Galician Metropolitan Transport System, the public record of taxi licenses and the use of a digital archive for the Galician Public Health System, based on Dspace.
The resource centre is ready to help the region's public administrations publish their software solutions as free and open source. Amtega is promoting the government's open data policy, helping public administrations make available dataset in the regional opendata portal and assisting in the development of new services based on these data.
Galicia's 2014 free software plan also targets schools, citizens and companies. The Abalar project is using free software solutions such as Drupal, Moodle and Coppermine to overhaul the use of ICT in primary and secondary schools. Launched in 2010, this year the project will reach some 50,000 students." To promote the use of free and open source by both citizens and small and medium enterprise, Galicia will continue its ICT demonstration centre. To help close the digital gap it is also providing trainings, including organising public classes in 98 towns across the region.
More information:
Amtega's Free Software Action Plan 2014 (pdf)
Amtega's announcement (in Galician)
Mancomun news item (in Galician)
OSOR news item