In this interview with Fernando Nubla (IT Project Manager at the European Commission) and Alice Vasilescu (IT Consultant) we explore LEOS, an open source solution that is designed to make legislation drafting more efficient and to help those involved in this process by facilitating efficient online collaboration.
Please introduce yourselves to our audience
Fernando Nubla is an IT project manager at European Commission. He has a solid background in design and development of IT solutions. As a connoisseur of different Information and communications technologies, he conscientiously and professionally transmits his knowledge and experience onto the younger generations. As from 2019, he is the leading force of the project LEOS an open source solution that is designed to make legislation drafting more efficient and to help those involved in this process by facilitating efficient online collaboration.
Alice Vasilescu is an IT consultant specialising in system interoperability for large-scale European projects, IT security and passionate about open-source community building. One of her assignments, as external consultant, is LEOS Community management.
Could you briefly describe your Solution and mention some of its highlights?
Drafting any legislation requires consultations and collaboration between many stakeholders in EU institutions and Member States. Many contributors need to work together on the same document and legislative drafting requires a specialised tool that is ‘knowledgeable’ about law. Each user involved has their own needs, not to mention each legislative body and EU Member State.
Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) is a project under Interoperable Europe initiative of the European Commission, funded by the Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL).
LEOS allows to draft legislation in a structured XML standard based on Akoma Ntoso for European Union (AKN4EU), which in essence makes law computer processable opening plenty of opportunities.
How do you typically use the Interoperable Europe Portal?
LEOS open software has to be collaboratively developed and maintained with multiple stakeholders making the community-building aspect key for achieving interoperability and increase the quality of the outputs.
In order to support our users in their onboarding journey we performed user research to better understand the different stages in this journey and the specific user needs. The onboarding journey we defined includes 5 stages:
- Awareness – the aim of this stage is to inform potential users about our project and it includes campaigns, events, articles, news items, success stories, etc
- Enquiry - the aim of this stage is to support the user in getting familiarised with LEOS This includes user manuals, features description, high level architecture, demos etc.
- Discover – the aim of this stage is to support the user in getting a more in depth understanding of the LEOS solution. This includes LEOS application architecture and other technical documentation.
- Evaluate – the aim of this stage is to support the users with their assessment of the potential reuse of LEOS. This stage includes technical workshops, requirements elicitations workshops, tutorials.
- Project – the aim of this stage is to enable the users to be active members of the community and contributors to LEOS. This includes code repository platform, ticketing system.
For the first three stages we use extensively the Interoperable Europe Portal. The Interoperable Europe Portal is usually the place where users find out about LEOS and start getting familiarised in more details.
Its content management features allowed us to structure the content as we wanted to in order to make it easier for the user to navigate through our content. It is also the place where we promote our events, publish blogposts, news and user testimonials. Moreover, the portal is used to publish study results and thereby assist us to share our learning and experience. Our users can subscribe to our solutions and keep up to date with our new developments and news.
The presence of LEOS on the Interoperable Europe Portal provides an easy entry point to the code base on code.europa.eu.
How has the Portal helped you with your project? What are some of the benefits it has brought?
The Portal has helped us promote our solution and help the users learn more about LEOS. We needed a valuable knowledge-sharing platform, where our target users would look for solutions and Interoperable Europe Portal was the answer. It was great that other related solutions are also on the Portal and we could easily create links and synergies between them.
Any last thoughts you would like to share with the Portal’s users?
Finding the right platform for an open source community is crucial to the success of the open source project. In a landscape where multiple solutions exist, it is very important to use a trusted and well known platform where your target audience is most likely looking for similar solutions. We strongly recommend Interoperable Europe Portal for your open source solution.
We hope you enjoyed reading this interview with Fernando and Alice! For more information on LEOS visit the LEOS - Open Source software for editing legislation on the Portal.