SuksIt last year helped found Friprogforeningen (Free Software Association in Norwegian), an organisation that aims to develop and manage free software for use in public administrations.
Friprogforeningen is considering offering Norway's municipalities several open source applications, including the Redmine project management suite, Limesurvey, for managing surveys online, and the print queue management tool Bifrost. According to Inger: "Hosting these applications is something commercial IT service providers should consider. It makes it a lot easier for small public administrations to switch to using open source tools."
Friprogforeningen is already hosting one of Norway's most successful open source projects, Frikomport. This open source online course management tool developed by the Kongsberg region is now used by some seventy municipalities, universities and other organisations in the country, Britt Inger said in a presentation at the Open Source World Conference in Granada, Spain, in the workshop organised by the European Commission's ISA programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations).
The Frikomport code is made available as open source, using the GPL licence. But organisations prefer to use the online hosted version, Inger notices. "The hosted service carries a very low cost, of €750 per year". The more municipalities join in the using and development of such tools, the lower the costs, she explained. "Sharing development costs is a very important motive for our community of municipalities. A programmer will cost us about €115 per hour. Sharing these between sixty municipalities it comes down to a mere €2 per hour. This would not be possible if we didn't have a sustainable community", she concludes.
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