Sweden and Finland exhibit in this case study exemplary cross-border collaboration based on open source software for the benefit of the public. Two universities, one from each country, cooperated in the Open Kvarken project in order to explore the use of open source software by public administrations. The name of the project is symbolic, as Kvarken is the name of the Archipelago that separates (or unites) the two neighbours. The project in three years has shown interesting examples of open source software use in the public sector and the operation of two centres of open source knowledge, in Vaasa, Finland and Umeå, Sweden.

 

Quick Facts
Project Name	Open Kvarken
Sector	eGovernment
Start Date	2008
End Date	Ongoing
Objectives	To check existing open source technology for use by the public sector
Scope	Regional, International
Budget	1,7 million €
Funding	Public (mix)
Achievements	The use of open source software by public administrations in the region has proved that there are significant benefits for them and that open source software can be part of cost-effective and viable solutions when all medium- and long-term factors have been taken into account.

 

Introduction

In 2008, a common proposal from the University of Applied Sciences in Vaasa and the Umeå University received funding from the Botnia-Atlantica Interreg programme (which supports cross-border cooperation in the Nordic countries) and local administrations to create a common Open Kvarken project that would foster the use of open source software by public administrations.

The objective of this project is to check existing open source software technology for the use of public administrations. The scope of the project covers public administrations in the Kvarken region.

The project has shown significant success in the direction of increased awareness on this type of software towards the public sector. This was made possible by continuous dissemination through workshops and handouts, in parallel to the examination of open source products for use by the public sector. The result is adoption of open source by the public sector in several municipalities in the region, which has become a case to be studied for wider adoption as well. The Open Kvarken project has shown that there are significant cost savings in the use of this type of software when taking into account all affected cost factors: procurement costs, operational costs, and also hardware costs and the effect of the support services that do not need to be imported.

Organization and background

The main objective of Open Kvarken is to bring Open Source solution alternatives to the public sector. The private sector is also encouraged to offer support for Open Source solutions in the public sector. The interest in sharing software between different authorities is growing and the ownership of the source code by the public sector can provide significant savings. This way the public sector only needs to buy services to adapt the source code to its specific needs. According to the Project Manager of the Finnish crew Rainer Lytz, “Here the Open Kvarken project can offer information and change of attitudes in our own regions”.

The Open Kvarken project (Kvarken is the name of the archipelago between Sweden and Finland) is funded by Botnia-Atlantica

and local authorities in Sweden and Finland.

Lead partner in the project is the Vasaa University of Applied Sciences (VAMK), Finland in collaboration with the Umeå University, Sweden.

The project aims to advance the cooperation and development in the Kvarken region and the two universities in particular. A significant incentive is the increased interest in moving to open source and other work in progress, especially on Open Office. One of the objectives of the project has been to commercialise Open Source projects in the sense that commercial companies are invited to offer services around open source-based solutions. In this direction, part of the project funding (200 000 €) has been provided to the Open Kvarken project for public tenders.

This Open Kvarken project was based on the Open Source philosophy from the start.  In the project proposal it was stated that all code to be developed should be licensed under GPL v.2.0. The Vaasa University of Applied Sciences has had Open Source projects since 2004. The name of the first project was BIOS – Business in Open Source. The Open Kvarken project has tried to help the local Regional Council of Ostrobothnia[1]  to adapt an Open Source strategy since they already have an Open Access strategy for Broadband. The project has developed guidelines for such an Open Source Strategy but it has not been implemented yet.

Budget and funding

The Open Kvarken project has a budget of 1 700 000 €, which is distributed as follows:

• 50% comes from the Botnia-Atlantica programme, which is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund;
• 25% from the Västerbotten County Administrative Board (in Swedish);
• 17% from the Regional Council of Ostrobothnia;
• 7 % from the Vasaa University of Applied Sciences.

The project duration is three years, up to August 31, 2011; however, the project results will remain available after the project completion through the two competence centres created as part of the project in Sweden and Finland.

Summary of technical aspects of Open Kvarken

During 2010, Open Kvarken has been testing and evaluating in the form of subprojects several open source systems that could be considered beneficial for local companies and municipalities. Some of the most interesting subprojects that have already been commercialized in companies and municipalities in both Finland and Sweden are presented below.

The project examines different open source tools that can be used by public administrations. In some cases, there are interrelations between different software systems (e.g. between the OpenMeetings and the Moodle platforms); however, in general the tools are standing alone so as to address different PA requirements.

• OpenMeetings is a web based conference system that does not require any installation on the computers of the people using it. It runs on Open Kvarken servers in both Finland and Sweden that make it available to the public for testing purposes. Currently, there are approximately 100 organizations on these servers and over 500 users in the test group. JNT[2]  has participated in the development of new features and testing.  Commercial versions and support can be bought from JNT and Mediamaisteri.

• E-Booking is a system that aims to handle and allocate resources within a municipality. The e-Booking system integrates two different booking systems that handle physical room resources and human resources. The same OS-tool (http://www.silverstripe.com/) is used for both applications and they are developed simultaneously and might have some common reusable backbone code. Resources are configurable at the department level and they may be anything, such as conference rooms, playing fields, catering services, etc. It has been developed for the municipality of Korsholm.

• Eduvom is a sub-project in the municipality of Vörå where Open Kvarken has designed the complete IT infrastructure based on Open Source. Using Xen[3]  for virtual server, the project also includes Ubuntu as desktop, OpenLDAP for authentication, NFS (Network File Server) for file sharing, OpenMeetings for web conferences and virtual classrooms. Eduvom also include Moodle as E-learning platform linked with OpenMeetings. Zimbra is used for email, and Joomla! for their Eduvom.fi portal (with LAMP as base).  The Eduvom project is now ready for commercialisation.

• Föräldramötet (Parents Meetings) is a portal for communication between teachers and parents. It allows parents to easily check up happenings, homework assignments, problems etc. concerning their children in the nursery or school. This project is developed in Sundsvall by Nordic Peak and has been commercialized in Sweden. Föräldramötet is being used in more than 300 day-care schools in several municipalities in Sweden and will also be introduced in Finland.

• Wigo.SE is a platform for the documentation of cultural heritage and corporate storytelling. Wigo is based on MediaWiki with some new extensions and integration to Facebook. The development is done together with archaeologist from the Västerbottens Museum in Umea.

• Moodle, an E-learning platform, is in use in several Universities introduced to undergraduate education.  Moodle in combination with OpenMeetings is a powerful tool for education purposes. This concept can be commercialised separately. The County Council in Västerbotten has started a number of courses based on Moodle, and one church (Mariakyrkan) in Umeå is using Moodle for confirmation classes. Moodle has been introduced in Vörå for hands-on practical training.

• Kaltura, a video solution, was evaluated by Open Kvarken together with the projects MediaCenter and NKW. The video solution has great potentials and it is planned that in spring 2011 they will continue to develop plug-ins for several platforms such as Moodle, Drupal, and Joomla. MediaCenter will then be able to offer this platform for all municipalities within Västerbotten. The NKW project is a collaboration project between Vasaa, Bodö and Umeå that is currently using the Kaltura installation of Open Kvarken for their video presentations. Together the two projects aim to create a good video solution for all parts.

• WebSurvey is a web interface and a system for online surveys and/or data collection. It has also been implemented and it is in use in Korsholm. Folk, Visitas, Open Eye, Boklådan and OpenGeoTracker are five new open source products, which have been developed in Umeå.

• Folk is a web application that gets the correct address from the Skatteverkets database for people living in Sweden. This product is now running in Umeå and it is also used by neighbour municipalities as a service. It has also been offered to the Kivos network of more than ten municipalities in the western region of Sweden.

• Visitas and Boklådan are two new products from the Umeå community, which were released in 2010. Visitas has the potential to be used in several different areas where mobile communication is the prime target. More information can be found at the website of Digital Umeå.

• Open Eye is a web-based Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligent (BI) platform licensed under the GPL v3. The main objective of Open Eye is to provide a high-end BPM and BI solution that includes reporting and portfolio management, for any companies at a minimal cost of acquisition and ownership. The product is developed by Anchor Management.

• OpenGeoTracker is the latest product developed by Omicron. It is a tracking device for the Android platform and a map server based on Google Maps. It can be used to track any type of object. In spring 2011, Open Kvarken will present a demonstration for this product at the homepage of its website.

• A cooperative webshop based on OsCommerce has been developed in cooperation with Anno.fi.  This program is now available for commercial use.  Coming soon to www.sf.net IPTV pre-study has been done on MythTV and OpenIPTV forum.

• Webapplet, a Web applet and tunnelling function, has been developed by Sesca [4]  in cooperation with JNT and the Open Kvarken project. The tunnelling function is published at the Kamailio  [5]community and will be adapted to the Ekiga  [6]community. This new function will be presented at the project’s spring conference of 2011.  The road to make Ekiga a High Definition telepresence tool with the help of multi-threading passing through all firewall is shortening from day to day.  This can become an affordable telepresence solution with the help of Aleksander Strange and Reynaldo H. Verdejo Pinochet at http://gitorious.org/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-mt with the financial support of the Open Kvarken project.

• Zimbra is an Open Source webmail server that will now be implemented in the municipality of Malax. The implementation is provided by Multitronic in Finland.

• ZoneMinder is a web-based surveillance system and it has been implemented in a local grocery store to suit their surveillance requirements. It has also been commercialised by Multitronic as one of their products.

There are even more software programs, such as Idega, LifeRay, Vtiger, SugarCRM, Projektet, MediaWiki

etc. that have been tested and some of them may start new interesting projects during 2011.

 

Concerning education in Open Source, new courses form part of the educational program in the University of Umeå and the Vaasa University of Applied Sciences. The first course in open source was carried out the summer of 2010 at Umeå University. The next courses are planned for spring 2011. Open Kvarken has also written an ABC-Guide for Open source that is available at the project’s homepage. This guide explains in simple words what open source is. It is planned that 15 ECTS credits[7] , which have already been drafted, will be implemented during 2011 in the University of Applied Sciences at Vasaa.

A significant step towards the wider adoption of open source is the facilitation of the installation process through standardised packaging. OpenMeetings is already available as a Debian package for i386 and amd64 processor hardware architectures for the Debian Squeeze distribution. Following the usual practice in open source, two versions of OpenMeetings have become available, the stable version and the latest version. The stable version is intended for regular users, while the most recent version is intended for people who want to contribute in the development of OpenMeetings by testing the newest version for bugs and new functionality. The testing version is build daily against the current trunk version of OpenMeetings.

Licensing issues

The Open Kvarken project has evaluated open source projects that are available under a wide spectrum of open source licenses. However, all software developed through a public tender procedure initiated by the Open Kvarken project is required to be licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)[8].  The use of a copyleft license such as GPL or EUPL strengthens the open source dimension of the software created with the support of the project.

Cooperation with other public bodies and the community

The Open Kvarken project was welcome by several local municipalities, which are represented in the project’s steering group and support the evaluation of new open source solutions presented by the project.

The following list presents some of the public administrations that have already used the results of the Open Kvarken project:

• Municipality of Vörå;
• Västerbottens Museum in Umeå;
• County Council in Västerbotten;
• Mariakyrkan church in Umeå;
• Municipality of Korsholm.

The project is also in contact with the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions.

The use of the findings of the Open Kvarken project by the abovementioned public administrations has shown that Open Source Software can be expected to result in significant benefits for the public administration and the community in general. As noted in the Open Kvarken video[9] , open souce can support efficient IT solutions when factors such as the reduced cost of ownership and related services, the support to local economy and the benefits from the increased life expectancy of computer hardware.

 

Dissemination activities

The Open Kvarken project evidently considers that in order to raise awareness it is necessary to be in continuous contact with all stakeholders. In this direction, the project organised 12 seminars[10]  and 3 workshops in only three years of operation. In addition, it received significant media coverage and managed to get prime time in Finnish TV news and in several newspapers.

On the project’s website home page a spot from the YLE FST[11]  news program about Open source and Open Kvarken can be found.

One of the main objectives of the Open Kvarken project is changing attitudes towards the use of open source in the public sector. For this reason, the project has created handouts regarding open source in general and also about open source licenses. They have also created handouts for open source that can replace common proprietary software solutions. All these handouts are available at the project’s website[12].

In addition to the activities organised by the project, Open Kvarken made a presentation in the OSOR/ePractice co-organised workshop on “Open Source: Its place in a cross-border environment” before an audience of more than 50 ePractice members from all around Europe.

 

Evaluation

The project has not yet finished, and there is no public evaluation yet available. However, there certain findings already have been identified, which are presented below.

Lessons learnt

The use of open source by public administrations can bring significant cost savings if one tries to observe the global picture. An aspect influenced from the use of open source is the effect that its use has on the necessary hardware. In the YLE-FST news program on Open Kvarken, Kenneth Nickull from the Vörå-Maxmo municipality says[13]:  “Just because a computer is too old to run Windows doesn’t mean it can’t be used to run Linux”. Longer hardware life means reduction in hardware costs, which adds up to the cost savings that are expected from the use of open source instead of proprietary software.

According to Rainer Lytz, the following are some of the main lessons learned:

1. Open Source is an applied science and perfect for Universities.
2. Open Source should be integrated into the curriculum.
3. Universities are the perfect place for testing Open Source Software -COSS network.
4. IT Students can write their theses about open source and produce documentation, and translations.
5. Universities can test and commercialise mature open source.
6. Universities can teach local ICT companies how to cooperate with OS Communities –Open Tenders (if enterprise driven) and include programmers from communities on their payroll.
7. R&D units at Universities can help local ICT companies to reuse code and in this way lower development costs for new software.
8. The Universities can help the Public Sector in writing program specifications and requiring open source licenses when purchasing software.
9. Open source can create local jobs and prevents export of license fees from our regions.

Another point made by Mr. Lytz in the abovementioned news program is that the use of open source by public administrations creates an ecosystem of local supporting companies. This means that the cost of support stays within the region and is not exported.

Future plans

The findings of the Open Kvarken project support the inclusion of Open Source within the Vasaa Applied Sciences University curriculum. In addition, the experience gained through Open Kvarken is expected to be useful for the drafting of new similar projects in the same directions.

Conclusions

The Open Kvarken project has studied an important number of open source products for their use by public administrations. According to the information already made available from its website, the project has received a warm welcome by several public administrations within the Kvarken region that have adopted the open source solutions proposed by Open Kvarken.

The use of open source by public administrations in the region has proved that there are significant benefits for them and that this type of software can be part of cost-effective and viable solutions when all medium- and long-term factors have been taken into account. Such factors include the reduced cost of ownership, the procurement of installation, maintenance, training and operational services at competitive prices from local service providers, and the benefits from the increased life expectancy of computer hardware, thus also contributing to the Green Government initiative.

 

Links

• The Open Kvarken website.
• Umeå Centre of Open Source know-how UCOSS in Sweden.
• Vaasa Centre of Open Source know-how VCOSS in Finland.

 

Notes

 

1. http://www.obotnia.fi/en/d-Regional-Council-of-Ostrobothnia-Regional-Council-of-Ostrobothnia.aspx?docID=306
2. Jakobstad Network and Telecom (JNT) is a local telecom provider.
3. Xen is an open source virtualization program for servers (http://www.xen.org/).
4.  Sesca was an IT company in Vaasa, which has declared bankruptcy, However, as the software is licensed under the GPL license, Open Kvarken can still maintain the code they developed.
5. Kamailio (formerly OpenSER) is an Open Source SIP Server released under GPL, able to handle thousands of call setups per second.
6. Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant Messenger application over the Internet.
7. European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Credit_Transfer_and_Accumulation_System (retrieved on 2/5/2011)
8. More information on the GPL, LGPL and other GNU free software licenses can be found at the GNU website (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html).
9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro5uVH99txw&feature=player_detailpage#t=95s
10.  The last workshop was being held while writing this study. More information will be shortly presented in the news section of OSOR.
11. YLE-FST is the Swedish-speaking programme of the Finnish national broadcasting organisation
12. http://openkvarken.fi/?q=content/handouts
13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro5uVH99txw (retrieved on 29/4/2011).

Acknowledgements

 

This case study was supported by information provided by Mr. Rainer Lytz, Project Manager of the Finnish crew of Vasaa University of Applied Sciences.

The opinions expressed in this document are purely those of the writer and may not, in any circumstances, be interpreted as stating an official position of the European Commission. The European Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the information included in this document, nor does it accept any responsibility for any use thereof. Reference herein to any specific products, specifications, process or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation or favouring by the European Commission.