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The European Commission’s Open Source Observatory (OSOR) recently published the 2026 Paper on Progress and Trends in the National Open Source Policies and Legal Frameworks. This paper examines the evolution of the adoption of open source software and related policies in European public administrations.
Read the full paper: https://openforumeurope.org/publications/progress-and-trends-in-the-national-open-source-policies-and-legal-frameworks-3/
Open Government
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- Written by: Adrian Offerman
- Category: Open Government
Citizens and businesses should have to provide basic information only once, eGovernment services should be user-friendly and intuitive, and users should be digitally literate in order to use online (public) services. These are the most important digital rights for citizens and businesses when interacting with public agencies, as identified by panellists and the audience at the workshop 'Promoting e-society'.
Read more: Digital Assembly developing list of digital rights for interaction with public agencies
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- Written by: Adrian Offerman
- Category: Open Government
Earlier this year, the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Agenda and Telecom Alexander De Croo launched the Digital Agenda for Belgium. The project aims to get the country in the digital top three of the European Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), for 1,000 new start-ups to take root in the country, and for the digital revolution to deliver 50,000 new jobs in a variety of sectors.
Read more: Digital Agenda for Belgium sets 20 priority projects
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- Written by: Adrian Offerman
- Category: Open Government
Code for NL, the brand-new Dutch chapter of the international Code for All network, is looking for fellows. The civil organisation currently has four positions available, one in Amsterdam and three in Eindhoven, where coders/evangelists can help the government to develop citizen-oriented applications in an agile way.
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- Written by: Adrian Offerman
- Category: Open Government
Open data is often seen as the main answer to political and government transparency. The rhetoric of the open data movement, however, fails to recognise the complexity of transparency. A research group compared the scientific concepts of transparency to the UK government's transparency code for local authorities. It concluded that the code is based on a limited concept of transparency and should be expanded to achieve its aims.
- Details
- Written by: Adrian Offerman
- Category: Open Government
It's not a given that an open data initiative will become successful. Only a limited number of datasets are actually used, user support is limited, and the generation of value is seldom demonstrated. A group of researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece and Austria have identified 64 critical success factors for the publication and use of open data. They found, however, that the criticality of these factors depends considerably on the context of the initiative.
Read more: Open data critical success factors strongly dependant on context