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 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 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…

Gematik, the provider of digital solutions for the German health care system has chosen the open source Matrix protocol to underpin Germany’s new instant communication platform, which will be used by over 150.000 organisations, such as general practitioner offices, hospitals, and insurance organisations. The decision follows examples such as the German armed forces and France’s government adopting Matrix as the basis for their instant communication needs. The current digital communications system in the German health care sector has shown itself to not satisfy all the communication needs of…

The registered charity German Caritas Association switched to open source for its platform dedicated to the provision of online counselling services. In doing this, it calls for a growing involvement of other associations in the open source community. The platform for online counselling launched by the voluntary association Caritas in Germany (Die Online-Beratung der Caritas) has chosen open source for its platform. At the end of June 2020, the Deutsche Caritasverband e.V. released the software source code of the Caritas online counselling platform on Github under AGPL 3.0, for sharing and…

Since the idea arose in 2012, Schleswig-Holstein has slowly but steadily moved toward open source solutions in the public sector. Along with other states in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein works for digital independency. ”In June 2012, the newly elected government stated in its coalition agreement that it would increase its public administration's use of free software solutions” Gijs Hillenius wrote on the OSOR in 2014, referring to the state of Schleswig-Holstein. The general reasons behind their changing to FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) was to reduce vendor lock-in, reduce IT prices and…

The German government is taking the next steps to fulfil its commitment of increasing the level of digital sovereignty of its public sector. In a recent decision, the Conference of the IT Coordinators of the Ministries approved the “Strategy for Strengthening Digital Sovereignty for Public Administration IT”, with a view of creating a Centre for Digital Sovereignty, built on open source. With the publication of a study in 2019, the German federal government already showed an increased awareness of strategic dependencies on a low number of IT suppliers. The study identified the increased cost…

Sign language has its own grammar, which might be far from the local spoken and written language. Word-to-sign databases include deaf people and help people who wish to learn sign language (for instance parents of deaf children). Governments are called upon to promote open source in this domain. Word-to-sign concerns people who have hearing disabilities and allows connecting written words to sign language. As sign language is one hundred precent visual with its own grammar, it is not a given that deaf children can access written language as their hearing peers do. Once sign language is seen…