Vietnam's ministries, provincial administrations and municipalities are turning to free and open source, building on European examples, policies and concrete software solutions. To intensify collaboration, a Vietnamese delegation, including representatives from the Ministry of Science & Technology, universities and free software firms, met with the European Commission's ISA Programme last month.
The Vietnamese government officials met with project officers of the European Commission's ISA Programme. The two groups presented their key projects and discussed preliminary ideas on co-operation.
The science ministry is building Openroad, a platform to help Vietnam's public administrations share and re-use their ICT solutions. This is based on ISA's Joinup platform. "Joinup, its tools and the information it provides are a great help to others", says Nghĩa Lê Trung, a program director at the ministry and one of the members of the Vietnamese delegation.
Combining the information with other sources, such as Cenatic, the Spanish government's resource centre on open source, and OSS Watch, a similar public service for higher and further education institutions in the United Kingdom, helps Vietnam's public administrations to learn fast. "We now know how to approach open source."
Exemplary
Perusing Joinup is motivating Vietnamese public administrations to re-use solutions such as the public key infrastructure developed by the Belgian federal government, the European Commission's secure document exchange platform Open-e-TrustEx and the EC's e-procurement solution OpenPeppol. It has also pointed administrations to France's open source groupware and calendaring application OBM and other tools.
"European public administrations are one of the main users of open source," says Lê Trung. "Here we find good examples for our own government practices, guidelines and policies." For example, Vietnamese government officials are now writing a reference software architecture, based on the German Standards and Architecture for e-Government Applications (SAGA).
Principal
Vietnam's public administrations are increasingly turning to free and open source, says Lê Trung, including the three biggest cities, Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City and several of its 63 provinces. About one in four ministries has switched to using the OpenOffice suite of office productivity tools, one-third is using the Thunderbird email client and one in two uses web-browser Firefox.
"Two of our leading examples are the Office of Government and the State Bank of Vietnam", Lê Trung says. "They have met the goals of Vietnam's directive on free and open source, including having it installed on all desktops and having all civil servants trained to use it."
Lê Trung is a consultant for the science ministry's programme to increase awareness on free and open source. The ministry is setting up a competence centre and has, since 2007, organised seminars, hands-on workshops, road-shows and conferences. "Since the Google Summer of Code is limited to those fluent in English, we're organising our own 'Creative Summer."
The ministry also provides support to the country's budding free software communities. "These communities are growing in importance and will help provide support to Vietnam's public administrations."