This is the first of a series of five studies exploring the sustainability of open source software communities in the public sector.

 

INTRODUCTION

Integreat is an open source digital integration platform designed to reduce information poverty for new arrivals in and within Germany. With the aid of an interactive website, smartphone application and PDF brochure in their native language, Integreat helps refugees integrate into their new communities by increasing their social inclusion and keeping them informed about the support services that are available to them. Launched in 2015, Integreat has proved to be a highly successful open source project in the public sector, with plans to further expand throughout Germany and abroad. While the Integreat community was not started from within a public administration, it has helped over 60 municipalities in Germany with their project. The project’s success can be attributed to its sustainability, largely due to the revenue model of its associated non-profit organisation Tür an Tür and Integreat’s focus on ensuring continuity and communication within its open source community at all stages.

To learn more about the sustainability of Integreat, OSOR spoke to Integreat Project Manager, Fritjof Knier, and an Integreat software developer working in the public administration of the Hersfeld-Rotenburg district, Alexander Hacker.

COMMUNITY AT A GLANCE

Name	Integreat
Brief description	Open source digital integration platform used by German municipalities to reduce information poverty for new arrivals in and within Germany.
Starting date of the project	2015
User community	Over 60 municipalities and counties with 400 content creators
Developer community	20 active code contributors
Software output	Repository on Git Hub
Licensing	Content within Integreat is published under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0). The Content Management System is available under a GNU General Public Licence. The smartphone application and web application are both published under an MIT licence.
Funding	Originally public funding coordinated by their associated non-profit organisation Tür an Tür and prize money. Now funded by municipalities who pay a fee for the service depending on the number of inhabitants.

 

PROJECT OUTPUT

In 2015, Germany was trying to grapple with the increasing number of refugees seeking asylum. At the same time, many public administrations were ill-equipped to provide asylum seekers with the information that they needed to ease their transition to life in Germany, thus creating a situation whereby many refugees were suffering from information poverty. The situation in Augsburg, the hometown of one of the founders of Integreat, was no different. Project manager Fritjof Knier, who was a student at the time, highlighted how newly arrived asylum seekers in Augsburg were provided with a printed guide designed to help them, however, the guide had been designed in 1999, meaning that the contents and the design were somewhat out of date. Fritjof and other students working in Tür an Tür, a local refugee association that generally works to improve the living conditions and social integration of refugees and asylum seekers in Germany by strengthening their participation in society, set about redesigning the 1999 guide using the tools of the 21st century. They worked to gather all the relevant information that an asylum seeker could possibly need upon their arrival to Augsburg and make it available in their native language and in a new format based on open source software.

Following Integreat’s initial launch and some national press coverage, other cities in Germany began reaching out to the project team. Now, Integreat is used in over 60 municipalities throughout the country, and the team works closely with several municipal governments and other experts in this field to further expand the use of the software. Following the success of the platform, the focus of Integreat shifted from asylum seekers and refugees to anyone arriving in Germany and moving across the country.

Integreat’s digital integration platform helps cities, counties and federal states to centralise their information, increase their digital visibility and accessibility, reduce language barriers and create information transparency. Integreat also helps local integration officers to carry out their work efficiently and municipalities to carry out their digital integration work in a cost-effective manner. The package version of the software can be further developed by software technicians, and all the informative content contained within the platform is managed by the municipalities. Fritjof estimates that there are around 400 active content contributors to the Integreat platform, scattered across various municipalities, who populate the software with relevant information without contributing to the source code itself. According to him, some municipalities choose to have a few system users, with the rest of the municipalities’ staff sharing information with them. Other municipalities choose to have some 20 user accounts, all uploading their information directly onto the platform. Alexander Hacker, a software developer working for the public administration of the district of Hersfeld-Rotenburg, worked to launch Integreat in his municipality. By gathering information from his colleagues and other institutions, and also developing additional features for the platform, he tailored Integreat with their community in mind, using new technical customisations that he developed.

The complete programme and source code of the Integreat app is freely available under an open source license (MIT). The Content Management System is available under a GNU General Public Licence. Integreat expressly supports the Public Money, Public Code campaign, which works to ensure that software developed with public funds for public administrations is published under a free software and open source license. In addition, all content from the different cities and municipalities using Integreat is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0), meaning that the software and content can be reused to the benefit of new and existing districts and cities.

 

TIMELINE

Project Integreat was launched in Augsburg in 2015. While working on the initial launch of Integreat, the project team began to collaborate with Prof. Helmut Krcmar, the Chair for Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich. Given his experience working on public sector projects for refugees and asylum seekers, he not only encouraged fellow staff members to join the project in an operating role and students to help with the software development, but he also helped to direct the project team to other cities and municipalities that might be interested in using Integreat. This collaboration, combined with national press coverage following a successful launch in Augsburg, led other cities and countries to reach out to the project team regarding potential expansion opportunities. Since then, Integreat has successfully launched in larger cities, including Dortmund, Munich, and Nuremburg, among others.

Initially, Integreat relied on public funding that their associated non-profit organisation Tür an Tür coordinated from their large network of people supporting asylum seekers trying to enter the German labour market. This funding helped to support two part-time positions from the summer of 2016 to the end of 2018.

In 2016, a municipality approached Integreat about signing a contract for a collaborative cooperation agreement whereby Integreat would support the municipality through the implementation and operation phase of the project. In order to be able to sign this contract, Integreat had to establish itself as a non-profit public sector project, and they did so under the umbrella of Tür an Tür, thus allowing them to proceed with the contract and expand their project in other municipalities.

Since 2019, Integreat has continued to grow in strength. The software has been implemented in over 60 public administrations throughout Germany, the majority of which opt for collaborative cooperation agreements and pay Integreat for their assistance in implementing the software. Municipalities pay 3,500 EUR, 5,000 EUR or 7,000 EUR per year depending on their number of inhabitants. Integreat’s revenue (160,000 EUR) covers 80% of the necessary budget (200,000 EUR) per year. This budget includes technical maintenance, further development, support and scaling efforts. Integreat is now largely independent from external funding, and in a stable position to consider expanding their service throughout the public sector on a global basis.

 

COMMUNITY'S SUSTAINABILITY

The widespread usage of Integreat and the array of awards it has received since its inception in 2016, including the 2018 Google Impact Challenge Award for Germany, are testament to the astonishing success of this public sector open source software project. Fritjof attributes this success to the sustainability of the project, the vibrancy of the project, and the unique nature of the platform. With regards to ensuring sustainability, Integreat believes that an OSS community looking to develop a similar public sector project should focus on the following five points:  

• Partnership: Treat public sector actors as partners in order to foster trust and a collaborative working relationship. By treating municipalities as partners, municipalities often reach out to Integreat when they have ideas for new projects, and they help to put other interested municipalities in contact with Integreat. This helps to ensure the continuous funding and sustainability of the Integreat project.
• Continuous funding: The partnership model that Integreat maintains with public administrations helps to not only encourage new projects, but also to ensure the continuous funding and sustainability of Integreat.
• Code: There should be designated team members who update the software, conduct peer-reviews, and follow up on any bug reports to ensure that the application does not become digitally irrelevant over time.
• Teamwork: Ensure that the project team is sustainable in and of itself, and that the onboarding procedure is fine-tuned so as to increase staff and volunteer retention. In Integreat, new team members receive some initial supervision, smaller projects, and guidelines about operating within the team, thus ensuring continuity and a sense of community.
• Mission: Once a community has a clear vision of what it wants to achieve, understands why decisions are taken, and is involved in these decision-making procedures, then that community is likely to be vibrant and sustainable.
• Uniqueness: Monopolise the standard of the service that you provide, both in terms of uniqueness and quality, in order to ensure that you are irreplaceable.  While other services exist, only Integreat has been able to successfully do what they do and demonstrate that it works as an open source software project that is suitable for the public sector by helping public administrations in their efforts to work independently.

 

LESSONS LEARNED

Aside from the aforementioned importance of maintaining a vibrant open source community and ensuring a smooth onboarding procedure for new team members, both Fritjof Knier and Alexander Hacker had insights to share regarding the lessons they have learned in relation to the development and implementation of open source software in the public sector.

Firstly, Fritjof highlights the importance of understanding how the public sector operates and exercising patience when working with them. Public sector contracts can take some time to be drawn up and the general tempo of work within public administrations can vary, meaning that open source software communities seeking to work with public sector actors must be able to adapt their work to this tempo. It is also crucial to work as closely with public sector representatives as possible and to learn about their work processes and IT systems. By adjusting to the infrastructure that they use, understanding the community that they work with, knowing how their decision-making processes function, and understanding their software capabilities, it will be easier for open source software project communities to engage and work with the public sector in a sustainable manner. This was reaffirmed by Alexander, who experienced varied enthusiasm among local stakeholders involved in the project, particularly when supplying the district administration with the information necessary to populate the platform. By understanding that the stakeholders were all generally willing to help, but that their pace of work is a bit different, Hacker knew to simply follow up with them over time in order to collect the necessary information that had been promised.

Secondly, it is best to start small and think big. A key takeaway from the project team was that it is best to launch an open source software project in a smaller public administration. Augsburg is the third largest city in Bavaria and the 23rd largest in Germany. While decision-making procedures within its public administration can be lengthy and challenging, they are by no means comparable to those in larger cities such as Berlin or Munich. For example, initial contact regarding the use of Integreat in Munich was made in early 2016, and the official launch of the platform took place in early 2020, four years after the first round of discussions. Working with a smaller public administration and successfully implementing the software there will enable project teams to demonstrate their successes and lessons learned to larger public administrations.

Finally, Fritjof stressed the importance of operating in a transparent and horizontal manner. The project team for Integreat has a horizontal structure, which helps to foster a sense of trust not only within the project team itself, but also with other community members. By involving young people and treating everyone equally with regards to their involvement, not only does this foster a positive working environment, but also it ensures the sustainability of the project, given that it will not depend entirely on one individual. This was further reinforced by Alexander Hacker, who stressed the importance of giving all community members control over the product and the means to participate. Integreat survives on willing cooperation, and Alexander is confident that the community will continue to cooperate and drive the project following the completion of the Hersfeld-Rotenburg Integreat platform in June.

 

POLICY CONTEXT

For information regarding the policy context of the use of open source software in the public sector in Germany, please consult the respective Country Intelligence Report and its corresponding factsheet. You will find a detailed overview of the political actors, strategic players, political and legislative initiatives, and general public sector open source software initiatives in Germany.