The German federal government signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with nine of the German states to create a "sovereign workstation", built on open source software. This initiative builds on previous agreements and work within the states to spearhead such a software suite.
The declaration identifies certain “basic functions” such as “productivity (including word processing), collaboration (including cross-organisational collaboration) and communication (including video conferencing)”, that should be “provided, tested and iteratively expanded” through the cooperation.
At the same time, the signing public sector authorities are enacting a “hybrid strategy” to tackle existing dependencies with the goal to “on the one hand [conduct], intensive and detailed negotiations with existing IT providers in order to reduce pain points in a targeted manner. the other hand, alternative - in particular open source-based - IT solutions are to be will be identified and developed.”
First steps already taken
Beside the Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology, the other signatories are the states of Baden-Württemberg, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Schleswig-Holstein. Schleswig Holstein is taking a lead role in this aim.
The state has already worked with regional public IT provider Dataport to develop the “dPhoenixSuite”, which has been adopted in the thousands in Germany’s northern public administration and is based entirely on open source software. The suite provides standard groupware, such as email, calendaring, contact management and tasks, word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software. Lastly, it also aims to provide the technical tools for remote collaborative office work, through audio and video conferencing software. Minister for Digitalisation in Schleswig-Holstein, Jan Philipp Albrecht set out the goal for the state to replace all office software by 2026 with open source software, including all specialised use cases.
Common work
Although it is not stated within the declaration explicitly, it is to be expected this pioneering work will be reused in the future cooperation and collaboration on a common platform for all signatories. Further, the sovereign workstation also aims to promotes modularity and interoperability by using open standards that are free from technical or legal restrictions on usability, with specific respect to European data protection and information security requirements.
To coordinate the work, all parties will take part in regular working sessions and agreed to keep decision makers involved on quarterly basis to enable further decisions to be taken. The decision to build a central open source platform with a code repository was re-affirmed and the new sovereign workstation should be provided through that central open source platform, hosted by the German Public Administration Cloud.