The 4th Rencontres Régionales du Logiciel Libre in Toulouse brought together the regional community.
“Free software is one of three pillars of our digital strategy”, has confirmed Nadia Pellefigue, the vice-president of the regional council of the Midi-Pyrenees (South-West of France).
“Free software and open source will help the regional industry and employment, because it can mobilise people”, Nadia Pellefigue said. “Public procurement has been spurred but there is still room for improvements”, she added. Cost savings, meaningful local jobs and lower dependencies on foreign firms are the three advantages of free software she listed.
Ms Pellefigue was one of the officials at the Rencontres Régionales du Logiciel Libre (RRLL), which took place in Toulouse in October.
The conference was organised by the SoLibre cluster, which gathers local free software companies, and the CNLL (National Council of Free Software). The event aims to promote local free software communities and encourage the exchange of best practices and knowledge.
“Free software is an essential element of our digital strategy”, said Bertrand Serp, vice –president of Toulouse Metropole. He is in charge of the digital strategy, and president of the association Open Data France. “Since 2014, 90% of Toulouse IT is based on free software and it helped to save EUR 1.8 million in three years”, he said. The city of Toulouse moved all its desktops to LibreOffice, the open source productivity suite.
Pooling resources to build a public service
The event highlighted several public administration projects . Examples include the local council of Gironde (region of Bordeaux), which showed how it deployed an online service for digital archives that every local administration can use. Based on an open partnership, this service uses open source solutions to help pooling resources (financial,HR) from three local and regional administrations. The city of Bordeaux and the Bordeaux Metropole are part of the project, but other administrations could commit to it.
The agglomeration of Carcassonne (the prefecture of the French department Aude) deployed an inter-communal portal based on the open source content management system, Ametys.