Open Source Software and Open Data Standards in Public Administration George L. Kovács, Sylvester Drozdik
Paolo Zuliani, Giancarlo Succi
Computer and Automation Research Institute, H-1111 Budapest Kende u. 13-17. Hungary, Phone: 36-1-279-6140, Fax: 36-1-466-7503
Free University of Bolzano, Dominikanerplatz 3 Piazza Domenicani, I-39100 Bozen, Italy, Phone: +39-0471-315-640, Fax: +39-0471-315-649
[email protected]
[email protected]
Abstract - A European joint project (COSPA) with the participation of eight countries from all parts of Europe studies the application advantages (and drawbacks) of Open Source software (OS) and of Open Data Standards (ODS) in Public Administration (PA). PAs are among the biggest computer- and software consumers world-wide, thus they should be very careful what to use, how to use. PAs spend every year a considerable amount of money for commercial off-the-shelf software licenses. By using appropriate technologies, such expenses might be either dramatically reduced, or re-routed to further develop local business ecosystems. This project aims at introducing, analyzing, and supporting the use of ODS and OS software for personal productivity and document management in European PAs.
transparency of functioning, and by the savings on software licenses. The European society as a whole will benefit from the adoption of ODS and OS software in the public sector: • the citizen will not be required to buy proprietary software for accessing the information and services provided by the PA. That will in turn increase the accessibility of public services; • PAs will increase “trust and confidence” by using recognized, transparent and secure technologies; • businesses will enjoy better access to government services, by eliminating possible digital impediments.
I. INTRODUCTION There are currently a number of initiatives aimed at introducing OS software in European PAs, but they are mainly performed at local levels, with no coordination, no sharing of knowledge or practices and no rigorous cost/benefit analysis. We have similar experiences – in different levels – in Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and in Hungary. In particular, the introduction of ODS and OS software might be hampered by: • cost of data migration; • interoperability and integration with existing solutions; • personnel training; • concerns about support, maintenance, sustainability and future proofing. Our work aims at building a leading, effective and visible success case for the introduction of ODS and OS solutions in the PA by: • deploying ODS and OS desktop software solutions in several European PAs, and benchmarking their effectiveness through a cost/benefit analysis; • building a European, multilingual, freelyaccessible knowledge and experience base (KB and EB) by comparing and pooling knowledge, and by building on and complementing current activities in the field; • disseminating the results and the experiences of the study through leaflets, several publications, using university education and other possibilities including a series of workshops at regional and European level. The motivation for using OS software and ODS are mainly given by their extreme versatility, adaptability,
II. STATE OF THE ART AND PRELIMINARY EXPERIENCES Before of starting our project at the beginning of 2004 we had to take a look around: what is going on, what are the trends in Europe and world wide ? There are currently a number of initiatives aimed at introducing OS software in European PAs, but they are mainly performed at a local level, with no coordination, no sharing of knowledge or practices and no rigorous cost/benefit analysis, as for example the LinEx project of the Extremadura Region in Spain [2]. The Consortium of the Municipalities of the Province of Bolzano-Bozen (Italy), has already performed a trial installation of one of the most important elements of OS, the OpenOffice in ten small associate PAs in 2003 [1]. Each transition lasted about four days and employed two instructors. The main points of the experience are: • the easy installation of OpenOffice on about one hundred Windows-based desktop computers; • the automatic conversion of more than two hundred documents from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice was performed without any particular problem and with great efficiency: the size of an OpenOffice document was generally one third of the equivalent Office document; • inefficient use of resources: personnel routinely used only the very basic features of Office, and did not consider little more complicate features which would have lead to better use of resources; • on-site, one-to-one personnel training;
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users with good knowledge of Office did not have any problem in switching to OpenOffice. Most of the problems were caused by personnel with little Office knowledge.
The transition was quite successful, as all the ten municipalities are now exclusively using OpenOffice. It is worth to give a more precise definition of open source, which is the following according to [14]: (1) Generically, open source refers to a program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge, i.e., open. Open source code is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community. Open source sprouted in the technological community as a response to proprietary software owned by corporations. (2) A certification standard issued by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) that indicates that the source code of a computer program is made available free of charge to the general public. The rationale for this movement is that a larger group of programmers not concerned with proprietary ownership or financial gain will produce a more useful and bug -free product for everyone to use. The concept relies on peer review to find and eliminate bugs in the program code, a process which commercially developed and packaged programs do not utilize. Programmers on the Internet read, redistribute and modify the source code, forcing an expedient evolution of the product. The process of eliminating bugs and improving the software happens at a much quicker rate than through the traditional development channels of commercial software as the information is shared throughout the open source community and does not originate and channel through a corporation's research and development cogs. OSI dictates that in order to be considered "OSI Certified” a product must meet the following criteria: * The author or holder of the license of the source code cannot collect royalties on the distribution of the program * The distributed program must make the source code accessible to the user * The author must allow modifications and derivations of the work under the program's original name * No person, group or field of endeavour can be denied access to the program * The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution * The licensed software cannot place restrictions on other software that is distributed with it. Open source software (OSS) provides advanced support for a broad range of open data standards. As a direct consequence, a transition to OSS will automatically increase, or at least very much facilitate, the adherence to ODS. A comparably much harder and more significant problem is the wealth of data stored and managed by legacy database applications. Virtually all
public administrations have to maintain legacy database applications. Often this data is of critical importance and huge (financial) resources have been and are allocated to collect, organize, and maintain the data. We mention some typical examples. The township of Hansthol (Denmark) has joined forces with 4 other townships to develop an Informix-based accounting system. A joined effort was necessary to reduce the costs per township. This system has to be maintained and an upgrade or replacement is considered a difficult task. In fact, upgrading this type of database application is so poorly understood that it is simply postponed as long as possible, which is clearly highly problematic. The municipality of North Jutland (Denmark) maintains a number of infrastructure (GIS) databases. These databases store detailed information about roads, rivers, houses, cables, pipes, etc. Although this data is highly useful and relevant for citizens and companies (e.g., companies offering mobile services that depend on this infrastructure) it is basically inaccessible. Moreover, different municipalities collect the data independently. This leads to redundancy and incompatible data collections. On 28 May 2003 the City Council of Munich in Germany voted in favor of the migration of its 14,000 desktop and notebook computers to open source operating system and office applications. The decision was based on a study comparing the alternatives and assigning 6,218 (out of 10,000) points to a Linux/OpenOffice migration, vs. 5,293 to an upgrade of Microsoft Windows. This move, unprecedented on this scale in the European public sector, has been widely commented and discussed since then [3]. In early September 2003 the City of Vienna’s IT department announced plans to assess the feasibility of a migration to Linux for the city administration’s desktops. Based on further study, the Austrian capital will decide by mid-2004 whether to start phasing in the open source operating system, and may then switch several hundred computers a year over to Linux to assess the system on a wider scale. A decision on full migration of all 15,000 desktops will nevertheless not be made before mid-2007 [4]. In October 2003, the City of Amsterdam in the Netherlands announced that it would start testing OSS for both server and desktop applications. The trial will aim at assessing the quality, functionality, reliability and security of a number of OSS distributions, as well as evaluating the migration and maintenance costs, including users training costs. If this pilot gives satisfactory results, it could be followed with wide-scale migration to OSS, including for some or all of the city council’s 15,000 desktop computers. In October 2002 an IDC study [5] showed that the fiveyear estimated Total Cost of Ownership of Windows2000-based servers is lower (from 11% to
22%) than that of Linux-based servers. However that study, apart from being commissioned by Microsoft, assumes that no upgrade takes place in the five years projection. This way upgrade costs for new Windows releases were left out of the study, and we know from past experience that every two-three years there is a new release of Windows. In fact, Microsoft’s new upgrading policy Client Access License is moving towards that direction, by imposing compulsory software updates on that timescale. Even Paris would change to Linux and Open Source on all their 17. 000 computers and 400 servers according to [15]. As far as independent studies on OS software and ODS are concerned, we observe a substantial lack. The main efforts are the June 2002 study commissioned by the IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Programme of the European Commission [6] and the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) project in FP5 [7]. The former is a feasibility study about developing a common repository for software of interest to European PAs. The study analyses the functional, legal, and technical requirements of such a pooling service and gives recommendations on how to build it. The aims of the pooling facility are to stimulate the replication of good practice in e-Government services, to exchange and share knowledge, and to create a community of developers and public sector users. FLOSS is an EU FP5 project aimed at collecting data about the usage and development of OS software in Europe. Surveys were conducted between February and May 2002 on about 1.500 companies and public institutions, asking whether they were employing, or willing to employ, OS software. Four hundred of these were indeed using, or planning to do so in the near future, some kind of OS software. There are two points of the FLOSS study, which are of interest for us: •
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OS for desktop applications was employed only by the 20% of those four hundred establishments using OS software. If we further restrict ourselves to the use of OpenOffice that percentage drops to 10%. This confirms common wisdom that OS is better suited for server and IT infrastructure tasks; it turned out that companies and public institutions were generally unable to quantify the benefits deriving from the use of OS applications. They were also not even able to quantify benefits like license fees’ savings and hardware cost savings.
In summary, it is therefore clear that an independent, coordinated, empirical analysis and assessment of the benefits and the problems deriving from the use of OS software is needed. That work would provide companies and public institutions with more significant data and analyses for their strategic decisions. The European
Commission already recommend the use of OS software and the adoption of ODS. However, we believe that only a proper study of the issues arising from the introduction of OS software is the key for a wider adoption of OS solutions both in the public sector and in businesses. Such a study is currently missing and our project is filling this gap. III. SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL GOALS There are many claims about the benefits of Open Source (OS) software: for example it is supposed to cost less and to be more efficient than commercial software. However, these claims are often contested by competing empirical evidence, since there are several impediment factors which might overcome the advantages deriving from the use of OS in a corporate or public sector environment: cost of transition, personnel training and, interoperability and integration with existing technologies. OS opponents often highlight these factors. Given the size and impact of the expected benefits and the credibility of both the proponents and opponents, it is now time to have an impartial study and assessment of such issue. We are analyzing the effects of the introduction of ODS and OSS for personal productivity in European Public Administrations (PA), at identifying when such introduction creates significant returns, and at creating an infrastructure supporting European PAs in a wise and non-disruptive adoption of ODS and OS. Specifically, we will analyze, deploy and benchmark OS solutions for personal productivity in the partner PAs. Furthermore, we started already to build a knowledge and experience base by pooling the knowledge acquired, in order to enable a long-term exploitation of the results of the project. An ODS is a model for data exchange and storage for which all the documentation regarding its features and specifications is freely available to everyone. This implies that, in principle, the same data may be accessed, processed and stored by software produced by different companies. ODS contribute in: • increasing privacy and transparency of the user’s data, since the citizen may inspect that the data being processed or sent over the Internet do not contain information not explicitly authorized; • reducing dangerous situations in which commercial software vendors exploit proprietary data formats to consolidate and augment their market share. Such broadly used formats and languages, as Adobe’s PDF, the HTML/XML web languages, and the JPEG/MPEG graphical formats are among the most known ODS. By OS we mean a model for software development in which the source code of the software itself is freely available to everyone. This means that for using the
software there are no license fees to pay and that everyone can inspect the actual functioning of the software, thereby augmenting trust and security of the software itself. OS software usually conveys popular ODS for data storage and exchange. The operating system Linux is the most famous example of OS software and it is now featured on over 30% of the world’s servers. There are many other examples of successful OSS: • the Apache package is used by 62% of the world’s web servers (Microsoft’s server 20%); • Sendmail is used by 67% of the world’s email servers; • the Samba suite for file and print servers has been used for the over ten years by thousands of people worldwide. IBM has recently added its support to the Samba project. A common aspect of successful OS software it seems therefore to be its specialization to server tasks, for which no much interaction is needed with the nontechnical end user. It also seems that the adoption of OS solutions for personal productivity (desktop tasks) such as office automation, web browsing, or email, it is not currently significant, less than 5%, as reported by the FLOSS study [7]. Nonetheless there are success cases, see for example the already mentioned LinEx project of the Extremadura Region in Spain [2], although it is on a smaller scale and does not provide cost analysis. In the personal productivity area, including desktop operating systems, the dominance of Microsoft products is overwhelming. However, this situation does not look strongly motivated, since today there are viable OS solutions for personal productivity. In particular, we cite the OpenOffice suite for office automation, the RedHat [8] and Suse Linux [9] distributions, the Ximian [10] desktop framework and the Multisync [11] synchronising software for mobile devices. Such packages are very user-friendly and offer the vast majority of features, which a Microsoft user would expect to find. The “look and feel” issue is now reaching maturity in OS software and this is probably the right time to move this ahead. We shall therefore introduce, analyze, and support the use of OS software (and their associated ODS) for personal productivity and desktop operating systems in the PA of different countries in different environments. In particular our, objectives are the following: * to gather and analyze user requirements from the partner PAs, in order to devise possible OS solutions. Different countries’ and PAs’ specialization generate a variety of different environments and problems to be addressed. The project will therefore perform a comprehensive study of the partner PAs’ requirements for personal productivity and operating systems, and provide possible solutions. The focus of this task is not to develop brand new applications, but rather to identify and combine OS software and ODS which fulfill the PA requirements. Work might possibly include the development of some tools, which will enable the
successful integration of OS desktop software in existing PA environments; * to perform in the partner PAs trial installations of OS desktop solutions developed on the basis of the previous requirement study, in order to enable the subsequent cost/benefit analysis. Deployment will follow a two-step strategy: in the first step we focus on desktop applications only, for example by replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice. In the second step we will also deal with desktop operating systems, for example by replacing Windows with Linux. PA personnel will be provided with training on the new software, either through on-site courses or via distance learning. The deployed software will be coupled with an automatic tool for extracting product and process metrics, in order to gather productivity and effort data for the benchmark study of the following objective. Furthermore, all the transition will be monitored to get a comprehensive picture of the operation; * to benchmark the effectiveness of the deployed OS solutions through a statistical and cost/benefit analysis. Financial, economic, reliability, effort, cost, and time aspects will be considered and integrated, also using techniques like the balanced scorecards. We emphasize that the study is not meant to show that OS solutions are better than proprietary solutions or vice-versa. We aim to determine whether the two solutions enable personnel to deliver with comparable productivity in given circumstances, the only difference being that OS is free and provides ODS automatically; * to build a European knowledge and experience repository by comparing and pooling knowledge acquired in the user requirements analysis, in the deployment phase, and in the benchmark study, in order to provide OS software desktop success cases for citizens, PAs and businesses. Work will exploit models and methodologies for eliciting, comparing and integrating knowledge, in order to synthesize and pool existing knowledge on the use of OS in the PA and the new knowledge generated by the project. A particular emphasis will be placed on models and methodologies, which enable e-Learning, in order to improve accessibility and availability of knowledge. The knowledge base will be in fact placed on the Internet and made freely accessible; * to disseminate the results and the experiences of the project through several channels including the knowledge base and a series of publications, open days and workshops at regional and European level, with the aim of stimulate: o the exchange and sharing of knowledge among the partners in the project; o public and business’ awareness on the project and on OS in general. The motivation for using OS software and ODS are mainly given by their extreme versatility and adaptability, and by the big savings on software licenses. ODS can easily cross hardware and software platforms,
thereby making them available to a wider audience. Savings on license fees hold for the PA as much as for the citizen, because he/she would not be required to buy proprietary software for accessing the information and services provided by the PA. The two facts together might in turn increase the accessibility and availability of public services. A strong, lasting dissemination and exploitation of the results of the project is foreseen: objectives address that task in two ways. At large, dissemination will be performed by exploiting the knowledge base: a web portal will let users to access knowledge either through predefined use cases (e.g. school- or hospital-related contents) or via user-defined paths. On a smaller, more focused scale, presentations, publications and workshops devised will be the main vehicle for transferring knowledge and building awareness, and they will be targeted especially at local PAs, businesses, schools and healthcare centers. The knowledge base will also contribute in the long-term exploitation of the results by remaining available after the completion of the project. IV. SOME ADVANTAGES OF OPEN SOURCE PROGRAMMING AND OPEN DATA STANDARDS Open Data Standards and Open Source Software are a large technological and cultural shift from the traditional, shrink-wrap-oriented IT market. Determining when it is advantageous to use ODS and OSS has the potentials of impacting very deeply the European Union. The need to address this issue has been emphasized in the Three Roses workshop (Brussels, 14-15 April 2003) [12] as one of the priorities for the diffusion of OS software and ODS. The legal framework that surrounds ODS and OS software allows unlimited modification, inspection and use, thus liberating the PA from vendor dependency. While many public administrations have special legal provisions that requires vendor to submit source code for software that is explicitly made to the PA order, no such requirement exists for shrink-wrap packages that now are the dominant desktop platform for all administrations across Europe. The project might have an impact also at the business level, by providing a non-biased study of the benefits and costs of a transition to OS desktops. Also, businesses might be more convinced by OS desktops once their viability have been assessed and validated in a corporate environment such as the Public Administration. While the adoption of OS server software was driven by businesses, it is highly likely that for OS desktops it has to be vice-versa, with PAs leading the way to adoption. Several advantages may come from widespread adoption of ODS and OSS. The most important ones are going to be detailed below, as - Greater flexibility - Independence from vendors and more competitive markets - Adherence to standards
- Increased security - Development of local economies A. Greater flexibility The availability of source code and the modularity of open source systems allows for far greater flexibility in adapting the desktop environment to the true needs of the administration. For example, it is possible to create lock-down systems with a minimum of applications to reduce training and maintenance costs, or provide system updates and improvements without the need of physical intervention or reboots. This does not require costly central management systems, or sophisticated management tools, but leverages the multi-user and stable nature of open source systems and that of standardized packaging. Also, desktop may be tailor-made to adapt to older hardware platform, making it possible to have productive work carried on PCs that may be inadequate for the most recent commercial operating systems. Another advantage is the possibility of providing localized version of OS software with little effort. That might turn out to be very useful now that ten new countries will join the European Union in 2004. The availability of common software and data platforms, though localized to the country’s language, would favor the integration of those ten countries in the Union. B. Independence from vendors and more competitive markets The administrations are not forced to upgrade systems, or to undertake multi-year software acquisition processes; this also frees the PA from exclusive support contracts. The open nature of OSS makes it possible to leverage the internal IT staff if present, and turn to external consulting only for specific needs; also, the administration may choose consulting services based only on cost effectiveness and quality of the services, and not according to exclusivity agreements with the commercial vendor. Having data processing based on OSS makes it possible to reduce the migration costs thanks to the adoption of standards that cannot be subverted (because the code makes it impossible to hide implementation details); this in turn allows for greater data transparency, and prevents the creation of “data hostages”, that is archives of important information held in a proprietary data format. Altogether, OSS and OSD prevent the establishment of vendor dependencies into the market, making the market more dynamic, easier to enter, and therefore, better and stronger both under the perspective of supplier and more fair and less constraining under the perspective of the consumer.
C. Adherence to standards
E. Development of local economies
The modular and open nature of OS software make it a natural fit for non-proprietary and open standards, a fact demonstrated by the high percentage of services offered by the internet that are delivered by open source systems, like the Apache web server, the Bind name server, and the various mail systems. This openness inherently increases interoperability, and with the recent push towards open and non-patent encumbered standards by many PAs and organizations (like OASIS) makes OS a natural choice for administrations, that by mandate must be open to all citizens. Since administrations that decide for a proprietary format are forcing their users (i.e. the citizens and businesses) to acquire commercial software just to interoperate, the move to open source will remove cost and technical barriers to interoperability not only by users but also by other PAs willing to interoperate, thus reducing overall data interchange costs.
For many PAs the license costs are a significant part of the yearly budget, and the sudden change in commercial software licensing may impose additional, extra-budget expenses for externally imposed changes (“forced software obsolescence”). OSS may decrease the acquisition costs, and through the creation of a knowledge base (and leveraging the user community) the requirement of paid support contracts may be substantially lowered.
One should that different OS software which push different data formats could cause a fragmentation in the ODS field. This would clearly nullify the advantages of ODS and it would favour the market penetration of proprietary data formats. It is therefore clear that an impartial study of ODS would help the establishment of a few strong ODS, with much benefit for the societal and businesses communities. D. Increased security While it is not possible in general to prove that open source is intrinsically more secure than commercial software, many authors have pointed out that the public scrutiny of OSS help in finding software bugs and security problems earlier, thus reducing their impact. Also, the fact that desktops may be customized by removing unnecessary components greatly reduces the impact and probability of security breaches. Linux systems are routinely placed among the least-attacked and less vulnerable operating systems. The availability of source code means that cryptographic code may be analyzed, and that no backdoors or other implementation problems exist; this makes it easier to verify compliance with national and European standards. Viruses do not represent a problem for Linux system, a fact confirmed by the virtual absence of anti-virus software for Linux. On the other hand, we well know that the situation is radically different for Windows: there are several thousands of dangerous viruses which force users to buy anti-virus tools, thereby increasing the cost for software equipment (without taking into account the cost of damages caused by the viruses themselves). Another advantage of OSS is that since patches are applied from source, they are unlikely to impact in an adverse way a stable operating environment, unlike shrink-wrap software maker's binary patches that may range in the tens of megabyte size and that can severely impact even unrelated services (or even create security problems themselves).
The likely reduction of the expenses for software licenses allows investing more money in training and personalization, in particular for the creation of new professionals aimed at training PA's personnel and in the creation of locally developed OSS. This will generate human resources with high added value and will then have qualitative and quantitative benefits on employment in the local area. In addition to reducing acquisition costs, ODS and OSS have the potential of directing more costs to local provider of ODS and OSS solutions and support instead of paying royalties and consulting to corporations often located in North America. Such shift would create the double benefit of more wealth for the local European industry and a larger taxation base for the European countries. The independency from vendors allows the PA to commission support for an OS product to more than one company. This, beyond the established benefits of concurrency, contributes at the growth of local IT companies, which will in turn contribute quantitatively and qualitatively on the local economy. The great emphasis on localization typical of many OSS projects will also help in the greatly diverse European PA market, allowing for the introduction of localized and personalized desktops, even for languages that have a small population of native speakers. This in turns reduces training costs, and has a significant positive impact on local communities’ adoption rates and appreciation of the software solution itself. OS software and ODS can turn out to be an asset for developing countries. Given the low acquisition costs and the less stringent requirements for performing hardware, OSS could help reducing the digital divide. Developing countries would benefit from success cases showing how to build effective and low-cost software and hardware desktop solutions for the PA. V. SPECIFIC EUROPEAN IMPACT The Consortium will have a European-wide spectrum of action. The reasons are the following: * PAs are no longer “national” entities, they must instead relate to, and collaborate at an European level. This calls for an integrated, efficient, European-wide approach to document management and data exchange in
the PA. For example, let us think at the Anti-Fraud Office of two member states: they want to check whether a trans-national company complies with tax regulations in both states. It is well known that by cross-checking the two financial datasets it is likely to discover irregularities. Now, if the data are not in a common format, any cross-check action would have to be performed very inefficiently (possibly by hand), thereby diminishing the contrasting activity of the authorities. * The forthcoming paper-less customs of the European Union will be based on OS solutions and ODS, in order to avoid digital impediment for businesses. It is therefore necessary to ensure an harmonisation among the national PAs so to not create fragmentation in data standards (as explained in Section 0) and to push toward a common desktop software platform. * The third reason is that involving many European partners will allow collecting a bigger set of data, success stories, problems and solutions, and will diversify the type and size of the problems faced in the transition. This will ultimately lead to: - better training for PA personnel (we would know in advance most of their problems and needs); - smoother transitions; - a more comprehensive view of the subject, based on data and experiences from different communities, countries and cultures. VI. CONTRIBUTIONS TO STANDARDS The project will contribute to standards by identifying, analyzing and evaluating various ODS for the Public Administration. The project will act at European level to gather a set of user requirements as much diverse as possible, in order to have a comprehensive view of the needs of PAs. It is therefore hoped that the study will help European PAs to choose data standards which best fit their needs, with the further hope that a single data standard emerges, so to contribute in the harmonization of European PAs. A. The consortium and project resources The consortium is composed by organizations with complementary skills and profiles that overall put together the critical mass needed to perform the analysis of the introduction of Open Source and Open Data Standards. VII STRUCTURE OF THE R&D CONSORTIUM The overall structure of the consortium is based on 4 kinds of partners: • Universities and research institutes, providing the key expertise for the analysis and helping the execution of the introductions of OS and ODS in the target organizations • Large PAs –or their EDP spin-offs, and Small PAs, which help identifying the key requirements for the introduction, act as testbed for the introduction; in addition, partner PAs, especially the large ones, support the
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search for new PAs where to experiment the introduction of OS/ODS. an SME expert in dealing with the PAs and in exploiting results of applied research to ensure that the citizen of the European Union benefit from the proposed project and that the European software industry takes full advantage of the knowledge so acquired
Each kind of partner has its own, well defined objectives: working with partners of the same kind helps being more effective, especially in the case of Small PAs, for some of which this is the first EU project they have ever been involved. The partners are from the following countries: Italy, Denmark, Hungary, Germany, Ireland and England. It means that different regions of Europe are covered, and – at least at the beginning pf the project one country (Hungary) was not a member state of the EU – until May 2004. A. The Hungarian participation Hungary is the only new member country among the partners (only since May 2004). This fact deserves some extra words. In Hungary the Torokbalint city council is the PA partner. Torokbalint has more than 12.000 inhabitants and a surface of 386 hectare. Due to the vicinity of Budapest and to the 3 divided highways its income comes mostly from the taxes of the multinational firms situated there. There are about 40 civil organizations in the city, and there are two elementary schools, four nursery schools and kindergartens, one music-school and one high school (gymnasium). The mayor’s office has 55 employees, most of the with higher education degree. The city has altogether about 300 public servants. There is a police station with 16 persons in duty. The number of inhabitants increases with 300-500 capita per year due to important investments, there are projects to develop the local human infrastructure. Recently there are mostly Windows based PCs in all offices and in the city council. All the computers of the different offices are connected by networks. The networks are used only to transfer data. There is not yet a serious demand on OSS and ODS, however a first survey shows already the lines, along which the proliferation of open systems will be done first. This way the Hungarian participation is a real challenge for the project – and based on the results further OSS and ODS applications will be possible not only in Hungary, but in further countries, where the importance of open systems is accepted [13], however applications in PA are still poor. VIII. TASKS TO BE SOLVED To have a successful project we have to solve the following tasks during 2004 and 2005. There is a lot of work to do, however we believe, that all tasks can be solved within the expected time limits. The list below shows that first a collection of available tools was done together with the collection of needs. Then the needs and possibilities will be matched – with software writing
activities, if needed. Finally a thorough evaluation and measurements will be done together with making the results as public as possible to assist further OSS and ODS applications – if the results are positive. - Creation of a catalogue of OS Solutions for the PA: recent and expected in the near and far future - Creation of a catalogue of suitable ODS to use in the PA - Define a framework for evaluating returns/losses of the transition to ODS/OS: to be able to measure the results versus the expectations - Gather requirements for OS applications and for ODS in the PA - Identification of target OS applications to use in the partner PAs, their customization to fit the ODS, with specific attention to the use of proprietary tools by other applications still in use in the PA - Definition of a target ODS to use in the project; development of bridges from existing documents to ODS, also using existing OS tools - Run pilot introductions of tools and data standards in the partner PAs and evaluation of costs/benefits of the transition, feeding it back to the WPs in such area - Creation of a knowledge base in OS for personal productivity for European PAs and companies
IX. CONCLUSIONS The paper reports on a new, 6th FW EU project which aims at examining the possibilities of Open Source Software and Open Data Standards in the Public Administration of some PAs of four European countries.
The findings of the project (results, measurements, studies, comparisons, etc.) will be used not only within the consortium, but in several other European countries, too. The consortium working on the project is a wellbalanced set of universities, research institutes, public administrations, system houses and software houses, having an appropriate number of SMEs from 8 countries of different areas of Europe. Some preliminary results of surveys and our first results already prove that the goals of the project are realistic and it is worth while to go ahead with OSS and ODS. X. REFERENCES [1] Barbara Russo, Paolo Zuliani, Giancarlo Succi: Toward an Empirical Assessment of the Benefits of Open Source Software, http://conferences.iee.org/icse2003/ [2] http://www.linex.org/linex2/linex/ingles/index_ing.html [3] IDA, eGovernment Newsletter n°6 - December 2003 [4] http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/jsps/ [5] http://www.idc.nl/ [6] http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/ [7] http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/ [8] http://www.redhat.com/ [9] http://www.suse.com/us/ [10] http://www.ximian.com/ [11] http://multisync.sourceforge.net/ [12] http://www.prelude-portal.org/3roses/ [13] http://www.geekfinder.hu/news.php?id=266 [14]
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/o/open_source. html [15] http://index.hu/tech/szoftver/linux0204/
