Germany's Administration Services Directory (Deutsche Verwaltungsdiensteverzeichnis, DVDV) is using free and open source software "as much as possible". The DVDV e-government service oriented architecture allows all of the country's 5246 registration agencies to electronically exchange data on civil administration services including taxes, justice, vehicle registration and business licences. The DVDV cloud is used by thousands of civil servants.
"We try to use open source products as much as possible, provided that the performance and security can be ensured", one of the DVDV administrators explains. The DVDV system relies for instance on the JBoss Java application server, and uses OpenLDAP to provide directory information services. "The DVDV is a decentralised service, and as a result it runs on several quite different computer operating systems."
The system uses several common Apache tools including Xerces (xml parser) and log4j (logging). It also uses the Bouncy Castle, offering open source cryptography Java application programming interfaces.
Low-cost
In a report in 2011 for the European Commission, the German DVDV is reported to help save around a million euro per month. The costs to set up the system are reported to amount to 500,000 euro. According to a 2010 report, the system reduced the costs per data transaction from 2,70 euro, using paper, to just 0,38 euro per electronic transaction.
Development of the DVDV started in 2004. The Federal Office of Administration, responsible for the DVDV, has just started on the next generation. "We are at the beginning of DVDV 2.0, scheduled to be operational in 2015. The current, proven structure will be maintained as much as possible, however we will adapted the technology to the latest standards."
Bremer Lizenz
The software development kit for the DVDV are published using a custom open source licence, the Bremer Lizenz für freie Softwarebibliotheken (Bremer license for free software libraries). The kit is meant to help software developers build applications that can be easily integrated with the DVDV. However, the KIT is available to registered users only.
More information:
DVDV (in German)
Study on cloud and service oriented architectures for e-government (PDF)
Bremer license for free software libraries (in German)