A two-month tour by Friprog, Norway's free and open source software resource centre group, visiting all municipal administrations, helped to raise the profile of this type of software solutions, says Morten Amundsen, the centre's director. "We turned up several applications that the administrations want to share with others; and helped broker a deal with a proprietary software supplier to support a connection with an open source application."

The three-man team at Friprog drove 9000 kilometres and visited 50 municipalities, speaking to over two hundred public administrators, in just under two months, in May and June. "We met the municipal IT support staff in their own offices and got them to talk to their approach to ICT. It is a much more effective way to find information than meetings on conferences, or by exchanging emails."

Friprog's inventory shows that open source is still undervalued and that most are locked in to the software applications of a handful of proprietary software vendors. However, all municipalities have heard about open source, "and more than a few are implementing it in small-scale projects."

Concrete results

Amundsen and his colleagues have just started working on their report. This autumn, they hope to extract from their inventory at least three concrete open source projects.

First, an IT administrator working for the town of Hammerfest had developed software to extract data from the phone system. Second, they stumbled across a tool that was built on top of LibreOffice and used every day a public administration. And third, the municipality of Narvik had spent a lot of time and money on integrate a proprietary cloud office suite with the administration's archive system. "All three want to make their solution open source, and hopefully we can help them."

Take me home

Touring the country, the team found plenty of obstacles, IT vendor lock-in being the biggest. The group intervened in a discussion between the administrations of Bergen, Stavanger and a proprietary software supplier that refused to offer support for Svarut, an open source document portal for interacting with citizens and companies. Amundsen: "It looks like the company is relenting, and our visit might have contributed to that."

The Friprog director recommends other open source resource centre's in the European Union to organise similar treks to visit their country's public administrations. The Norwegian tour, by camper, turned out a success, he says. "Although next year, we'll probably stay in hotels, with breakfast."

More information:

Friprog on tour (in Norwegian)
Digi news item on the open source version of Svarut (in Norwegian)