Code.europa.eu is the code development platform for open source projects by the European Union institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies. Over the next few months, the Commission Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) will put a spotlight on some of these projects.

Launched two years and three months ago, in September 2022, the platform already hosts 214 main projects with a total of 737 code repositories. Code.europa.eu is continuously seeing new projects being added.

The service is one of the outcomes of the Commission Open Source Software Strategy (C (2020)7149 final. It was created following the Commission Decision of 8 December 2021 on the open source licensing and reuse of Commission software (2021/C495 I/01). This made it a lot easier for Commission software developers to share their work with others as open source, and to contribute to other open source projects.

The platform is intended for open source software development projects created by European Union bodies, offices, and agencies. Code.europa.eu is managed by the EC OSPO.

A wide variety

The Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) is the most recent EU institution to begin sharing open source software solutions on code.europa.eu; with preparations starting in December.

Other institutions sharing and developing open source solutions on code.europa.eu - besides the Commission - are the European Parliament, the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), and the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA).

The service is geared towards software developers; however all of the projects can be explored by anyone. Visitors can browse a wide variety of projects from healthcare, Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine translation, geographic information systems, procurement, to crop diversity.

A Practical Step towards digital sovereignty

Code.europa.eu was officially launched on 16 September 2022. The service “facilitates co-development, and the sharing and reuse, of European public service solutions”, said Veronica Gaffey, Director General of DIGIT (the then Directorate-General for Informatics, now the Directorate-General for Digital Services), when she officially announced the website, during a conference that had been organised as part of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union, in the City of Brno. “It is a practical and incremental step towards achieving digital sovereignty”, she said.

All of the projects on code.europa.eu welcome contributions. To interact with the project teams on development of software, users will need to create an account (using the EU Login Portal). Developers and project owners are recommended to read the Guidelines.

The OSPO will be highlighting some of the projects on code.europa.eu in the coming months. Stay tuned!

More information:

code.europa.eu
European Parliament on code.europa.eu
European Central Bank on code.europa.eu
European Data Protection Supervisor on code.europa.eu
European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency on code.europa.eu
Earlier OSPO news item