Information about the contest

The Sharing and Reuse Awards contest was open for submissions between 8 July and 28 October 2016, and public administrations were invited to submit their solution via a registration form.

How does the awards contest work?

First and second prizes of €15,000 and €10,000 respectively were granted to the winning teams in each of the following four categories:

• Successful case of collaboration to develop and provide common IT solutions across borders;
• Successful case of collaboration to develop and provide common IT solutions at the national level;
• Successful case of collaboration to develop and provide common IT solutions at the regional level;
• Successful case of collaboration to develop and provide common IT solutions at the local level.

Eligibility Criteria

In order to be eligible to enter the contest, a solution needed to meet the following criteria:

• Developed by or for public administration(s) from a EU Member State or an EFTA country;
• Have been reused by other public administrations;
• Is either an open source software or a shared service;
• Its description is published on Joinup. (If your solution is not yet on Joinup, the Joinup team will contact you to help publish it after you have submitted your application for the contest).
• The description of the solution is provided in English.

Please note that solutions developed by the European Commission, European Parliament or the European Council are excluded from the competition (see FAQ).

Evaluation Criteria

Solutions that took part in the contest were assessed based on the following evaluation criteria:

1. Solution design: What technologies is it based on? What is the architecture of the solution? Is it scalable, extendable? Does it reuse other services / software solutions or standards / open specifications? What license model is used?
2. Solution governance: Which organisations, institutions and countries are involved in the solution’s governance process? How is the solution's development and provision financed?
3. Impact/results: How does your solution help public administrations? What benefits does your solution bring to its stakeholders, users? What is the cost / benefit?
4. Extent of reuse: How many administrations have been using this solution and what is the extent of their use? Are there concrete plans for future reuse? How easily could your solution be implemented in a context different from the one in which it was initially developed?
5. Sustainability: How is the sustainability of your solution guaranteed? Can continuous support be provided? Will the solution be further maintained.

Why is it important to share and reuse IT solutions in the public sector?

Reusing high-quality, modern and tested solutions allows public administrations to provide to citizens and businesses in Europe better, more cost-efficient services, faster. At the same time collaborating on common solutions facilitates knowledge-sharing and the exchange of good practice among public administrations.

By developing common standards, common ways of exchanging information and by reusing each other's IT solutions, public administrations also contribute to better interoperability – that is, they increase their ability to exchange information with each other and understand the exchanged data.

Finally, the sharing and reuse of solutions can increase competition – it enables more enterprises to provide IT services to public administrations.

Information available in 26 languages

Information about this contest is available in 26 languages.