Nearly half of all municipalities (960 out of 2000) in France’s former Bourgogne (Burgundy) region (now Bourgogne-Franche-Comté) are relying on open source-based services for several administrative tasks. The services are attracting many other public administrations, including schools, hospitals and government-run retirement homes.
The public administrations services include websites, webmail, electronic management and archiving of legal documents, and workflow tools for civil servants and elected officials. Public administrations also have access to a regional procurement portal, open data solutions, and webconferencing and note-sharing tools. Other services include a one-stop-shop to help set up businesses, and geo-tagged directories of organisations, associations, and businesses.
All of these services are centrally managed and maintained by the e-bourgogne-franche-comté groupement d'intérêt public (GIP), comparable to a public-owned company. The e-bourgogne-franche-comté GIP uses well-known open source components, including Linux servers (Redhat and Centos Linux), webserver Apache, java application server Apache Tomcat, database MySQL, and numerous desktop solutions.
The e-bourgogne-franche-comté GIP is inspiring - and working closely with - other regions in France, said Maciej Murmylo, project manager, including Megalis in Brittany and Maximilien in Ile-de-France.
Murmylo was one of the presenters at the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal. At the conference, e-bourgogne-franche-comté was one of the winners of the Sharing and Reuse Awards.
“The Bourgogne Franche-Comté region is rural, with a great number of municipalities - 3,800 - way more than there are in Austria”, Murmylo said. The majority of these municipalities have limited financial and human resources, which restricts their IT options. “For us, sharing and reuse is a must”, Murmylo said.
The services were initially offered in only the Bourgogne region. Following the 2016 reorganisation of France’s regions, in which their number was reduced from 22 to 13, its services cover an much larger area. This brought growth for the e-bourgogne franche-comté GIP. It now has 1.400 members, including 960 municipalities, 226 Inter-municipal agencies, 46 Schools, 25 Hospitals and 12 retirement homes.
More information:
e-bourgogne presentation at the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017 (video)
e-bourgogne presentation at the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017 (PDF)
OSOR news item
Sharing and Reuse report on e-bourgogne