Open Source delivers a very competitive alternative to proprietary solutions, says Jaakko Järvenpää, one of the IT administrators of the City of Oulu in Finland. Oulu recently began a portal to offer its citizens digital access to the city's services, based on Open Source.
The Oulu portal, 'OmaOulu.fi', gives citizens access to for example the proceedings of the city council and provides insight in the agenda's of elected members. Oulu's city council hopes this will enable citizens to become more involved in activities and decisions made by the council
Citizens and companies will in the near future also be able to fill in and file certain applications using the portal. They will then also be able to track the processing of such an application and will be able to manage their own set of documents and forms related to interactions with the city council.
OmaOulu.fi is built on the Open Source Liferay web portal software, running on Red Hat GNU/Linux, the Jboss application server, the Apache web server and the MySQL database. The portal also uses Nagios for monitoring the services and security of the system, the Alfresco content management system and the Openfire server to offer instant messaging services. "Apart from saving costs, the main reason to choose Open Source is that it makes the portal technically open. That gives us more choice if we ever want to change IT service provider", Järvenpää said.
He added that Open Source software should not be the top reason for selecting IT solutions. "It just so happens that when comparing technical openness and standardised solutions, the Open Source solutions often are a very competitive alternative, if not the best. We will stay the course."
OmaOulu.fi was opened in May 2008.
The city council's first plans for a citizen portal date from 2005. The actual implementation started in September last year and lasted until April this year.
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