Open Source Observatory (OSOR)

Last month, the British intelligence agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) published its first public project under the Apache 2 open source license.

Companies House, the UK registry of companies, has deployed the open source database system MongoDB to rebuild its core services. Instead of revamping the existing (web) services based on Oracle, the agency decided to lay a completely new foundation for its digital services. The very same REST API that will be used by the Companies House to build their new web interface will also be made available to the public. That allows others to develop their own applications or to integrate these services into their own software and infrastructure.

The Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) has deployed the open source software package ownCloud to provide cloud storage and file sharing services to 10,000 students and employees, making this one of the largest deployment of ownCloud worldwide. Each of the students and employees has 20 or 100 Gbyte, respectively, at his or her disposal. As the ownCloud software will be integrated into the existing IT processes of different areas of research, teaching and administration, the number of users will increase to more than 30,000.

In Sweden, the public open source movement is working its way from the bottom up. Kivos and Open Jämtland are two regional organisations coordinating interoperability and open standards issues for their respective municipalities. Both promote the use of open source software and open standards by public agencies as well as software vendors, and enable and deploy open source based solutions for local government. In these endeavours they are supported by SALAR, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, which represents all 290 Swedish municipalities and all other regional governments.

Another supporter is Vinnova, the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems, which invested 380,000 euro to develop of a platform for public e-services. This will host about ten e-government services which will be delivered through the cloud, offering services that can be used by all municipalities.

One of these municipal services is 'Fixa min gata', the Swedish equivalent of Britain's FixMyStreet. The first pilot was recently launched. Eventually it will be available to all Swedish municipalities as a single, national service.