Lutece is a free and modular open source platform developed and championed by the City of Paris. It is built to let city governments share, re-use and adapt digital services created by other cities.The membership of the community is growing, and now includes participants from the St. Francis Neighbourhood Center in Baltimore, USA, with support from Johns Hopkins University.

Lutece is a project that entails 400 off-the shelf modules that are specifically built for city governments to provide digital services for their residents. The reuse is in focus, and other cities are able to customise and enhance modules to meet the specific needs, and to then contribute upstream to the Lutece community with the modified digital modules or even new software.

This software platform was identified by the St Francis Neighborhood Center (SFNC), a Baltimore community center based. It works with support for children in the local neighborhood, by for example providing after school programs. With support from Johns Hopkins University’s recently started Open Source Program Office and Institute of Applied Open Source, they are using Lutece to provide innovative digital services to residents of the city of Baltimore.

The work with SFNC has started with a website based on Lutece and they have started working with specific implementations of the code, such as enhancements to the way the Lutece website can be hosted in a container.

While expanding into the US, Lutece has also been adopted by the City of Budapest. Last year, the city sent a delegation to Paris to learn more about the Lutece function for Participatory Budgeting, a method of democratic decision-making whereby residents of the city vote on how a proportion of public resources should be spent. The Budapest Participatory Budgeting team are now working with the solution and are contributing back.

Budapest, Baltimore and Paris will through Lutece be able to share and improve on each others’ digital solutions, be it for a neighborhood’s after school activities or participatory budgeting in a whole city.