Open Source Observatory (OSOR)

Seamless services

Gijs Hillenius

14/02/2018

The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has published cross-governmental API data and standards to help public services share and reuse technology, and to make better use of data. “API standards…

Government big data

Gijs Hillenius

12/02/2018

Romania’s Ministry of Communications and Information Society is launching two “big data” projects to make public services more efficient, improve tax collection and prevent fraud. The ministry wants…

Permanent fixture

Gijs Hillenius

08/02/2018

Following the success of its first open source bug bounty, the European Commission is preparing a second, larger project. As well as paying software hackers to uncover bugs, the EC is also considering…

Technological freedom

Gijs Hillenius

31/01/2018

Portugal has revised its National Digital Interoperability Regulation (RNID) “to align with European guidelines”, reports the country’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (Agência para a…

Market

Cyrille CHAUSSON

30/12/2017

A strong cultural and historical background favours open source. France leads the European open source market, with penetration in IT services and software higher than that of other countries, says…

Datos gob es

Gijs Hillenius

29/12/2017

In November, the Spanish government published as open source the code for its open data platform data.gob.es. The portal combines the Drupal content management system with CKAN open data repository…

Using GitHub for now

Gijs Hillenius

29/12/2017

Bulgaria’s State e-Government Agency (SEGA) has started to build its national open source software repository in which it intends to share all software written for and by public services. In the…

Public Money, Public Code

Adrian Offerman

21/12/2017

The City of Barcelona is migrating its computer systems away from the Windows platform, so reports the Spanish newspaper El País. The City's strategy is first to replace all user applications with…

Collaborating on collaboration

Gijs Hillenius

21/12/2017

Software developers working for the governments of Canada and the Netherlands are working to join their government’ collaboration portals, GCconnex/GCcollab and Pleio respectively. Both platforms are…

‘Open source makes you better’

Gijs Hillenius

18/12/2017

The city of Paris advocates the use of free and open source software by public services. This does not necessarily lower costs, the French authorities say, but it allows the capital’s public services…