German national railway company Deutsche Bahn wants to put its digitalisation on the right track. In early November, the company's digital arm, DB Systel, announced its open source manifesto. With the transition to open source, the logistics company plans to accelerate innovation, increase efficiency, ensure interoperability and build the organisation’s IT capabilities. DB Systelis Deutsche Bahn’s daughter company responsible for the digitalisation of the train giant.“Deutsche Bahn is committed to the use of open source software and active participation in the community. The manifesto stands…

The State Chancellery wants to create a language model that will assist the state administration in text production and processing. The tool, tailored specifically for public servants, aims to to tackle text generation tasks such as summarising emails, transcribing audio and assisting in project planning. Schleswig-Holstein plans to roll out the AI model for testing before the end of the year. “In the future, we will provide our colleagues in the state administration with AI services directly at their workplace,” says the state Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter. “In addition to the use of…

Earlier this year, OSOR reported the German Government's intention to transition its official content management system, the Government Site Builder (GSB), to a TYPO3-based system. The tender to make this plan a reality is now available on Germany's official procurement portal. This investment is divided into three parts: €26,880,000 for product development and support; €73,200,000 for migration and relaunch; and €8,000,000 for operation thereafter. The services of the revamped CMS will be operated by ITZBund, Germany's central IT service provider for the federal administration. This will…

The CMS Census tracks and analyses the content management systems used by different public organisations, giving insight into the popularity of Open Source solutions among them. The goal of the tracker is to give up-to-date information for decision-makers to choose the right software, help smaller user groups to find tooling for specific purposes and reduce vendor lock-in. It was developed with the needs of decision-makers, service providers, and CTOs in mind. “Other analytics tools are good for finding out the CMS market share in different countries or worldwide. But from the decision-maker…

Sharing and re-use is a basic efficiency principle in public IT services. In this vein, the German government offers the “Government Site Builder” (GSB) as a basis for governmental websites. The GSB is a web content management solution for the creation, quality assurance, release and publication of content on the internet, intranet and extranet, specifically engineered for the needs of the German public sector. The government sees GSB as a starting point for public administrations to create responsive, meaning mobile-optimised, websites, with different levels of customisation possible…

The German BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) licenses its TaSK Framework tool under the EUPL-1.2 European licence. What is this TaSK Framework tool? It is a configurable test tool for performing TLS conformity to the BSI specifications. So…, and what is TLS? TSL means Transport Layer Security. It is the protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. TSL is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, voice over IP, and the most important for payment security: HTTPS. The TLS protocol aims primarily to provide security…

The Parliament of Saxony, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, has adopted a motion to develop an Open Source strategy (press release) to counter the issue of the administration’s increasing dependencies on individual software vendors due to more and more public services going digital (motion point I.1). The motion proposes increased transparency and the use of Open Source solutions in the state’s administration. We talked with Dr Daniel Gerber, spokesperson for digitalisation and network policy for Bündnisgrüne (Green parliamentary group in Saxony), to get some more details on this motion…

The German Federal IT Cooperation (FITKO) develops the Federal Development Portal as a part of the IT Planning Council project “FIT-Connect the Federal”. This portal (source code licensed under the EUPL) is the central place for technical documentation, development resources and implementation examples on standards and interfaces of the IT infrastructure of the German Federal State and of the 16 federated Länderns. The Portal is also a central contact point for software developers. Developers play a central role in the implementation of digital applications for the administration. They must be…

The new German federal government is in office since early December and promises to give open source in the biggest EU Member State another boost, with a number of new commitments. Open source will be a cornerstone of Germany’s digital state. On 8 December 2021 a coalition of SPD (Social Democratic Party, the Greens (Alliance 90 / The Greens) and Liberals (Free Democratic Party) took office after obtaining a majority in the 26 September federal elections. With the new government comes a renewed commitment to digitalisation of not only the public sector but society and economy at large. The…

The German federal government signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with nine of the German states to create a "sovereign workstation", built on open source software. This initiative builds on previous agreements and work within the states to spearhead such a software suite. The declaration identifies certain “basic functions” such as “productivity (including word processing), collaboration (including cross-organisational collaboration) and communication (including video conferencing)”, that should be “provided, tested and iteratively expanded” through the cooperation. At the same…

Open source software is digital public infrastructure, yet it is not receiving the funding necessary to ensure the sustainability of important projects. Based on this assumption, a feasibility study funded by the German Ministry for Economy and Energy suggests a “Sovereign Tech Fund” to be created to plug funding holes in the open source software ecosystem. The feasibility study, based on interviews, analysed the status quo of the open source ecosystem and found that action was necessary. Even though open source has reached a high level of relevance and according to data 99% of Fortune 500…

VocBench is a web-based, multilingual, collaborative development platform for managing and sharing reference data and controlled lists of codes and terms used to organise information. With persistent URIs, managed concepts are correctly referenced in any domain. Developed in a context neutral way as an open-source project, it can be deployed or further developed for any sector wanting to have authentic reference data/codes made available for information systems and human users. Reference data, such as code lists and authority tables, means data that are used solely to characterise or relate to…