Ireland's Local Government Management Agency (LGMA) is using award criteria to galvanise ICT service providers to offer solutions based on free and open source. In two linked requests for tender in October and November, the organisation writes that it wants to have full ownership of the intellectual property of any solutions, and the rights to re-use, distribute, update or amend the product.
The deadline to submit bids is already passed for both calls, in November and December respectively.
In the first request, the LGMA describes its needs for a document work-flow system to help with building inspections, compliance and certifications. The other is for a government portal - the front end to the building inspection system - which is to be extended and enhanced to bringing together information from local authority websites.
Customer relations
The document work-flow solution, described by the LGMA as a Building Control Management System, is meant to provide back office processing capability for the Inspectorate Building Control unit. It will be used by local authorities' inspectorate divisions. The system is to improve building control and assist in complying with new building control regulations.
Apart from asking for the right to redistribute the solutions, LGMA requires that the solution can be combined with SugarCRM (CE, the Community Edition), for managing interactions with citizens and other users. "Given the number of solutions based on SugarCRM CE within the sector and the growing competencies in the sector on this product, SugarCRM CE is the platform proposed for the delivery of this solution."
Open data
The same customer relationship management tool is also one of the requirements for the other project, the government portal. Here, the list of new functionalities include a redesign of the site, integrating social media, offering access to open data and offering electronic payments. The local government portal is currently running Drupal, an open source content management system. LGMA writes that the new functionality is to be built adding existing Drupal modules, or by writing new modules.
The tender requirements are similar to contract clauses made available by the European Commission's ISA programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations). In February the EC unit published six standard 'contract clauses', to be used by public administrations in their procurement requests. The clauses can help make sure that the procured IT solutions can be shared and re-used. The provisions could help public administrations that write their own code and want to distribute the application, or that use open source software and want to repackage and redistribute it.
More information:
Tender for the Development of a Building Control Management System to Specification and Related Services
Tender for the development of a Web Application in Drupal & Associated Services