Renater, France’s research and education telecom network, is probably the first public administration outside of Spain to use LibrePlan, an open source project management solution, assumes Jeroen Baten, involved in the tool’s development. The French network connectivity agency started using LibrePlan in early 2014, says Baten.
In 2013, the Dutch ICT consultant Baten took over many of the community tasks from Igalia, an open source software firm based in A Coruña (Galicia) and the original authors of LibrePlan. Baten had been looking for open source project management tools, hoping to put them to use in the hospital where he was head of software development at the time. “There were a few features the hospital would like included, and we submitted our code to Igalia.”
LibrePlan started in 2009 as a project intended to be used by shipyards in Galicia (Spain), for managing and subcontracting their projects. The initial development was funded by Galicia’s Ministry of Industry and by Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, with funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
The Dutch software developer is now offering LibrePLan trainings, and is promoting his user manual. “There are many requests to use LibrePlan as a cloud-based service, and I hope we can offer that soon.”
Baten hopes other public administrations will soon take interest in LibrePlan. There is a lot of interest in good open source project management tools, he says. “Our demo server is at times overwhelmed by the requests.”
In the Netherlands, the municipality of Oss confirms that it is considering to test the software.