OSOR organised its final webinar in its series on Policy & Strategy Aspects of OSS in Public Administration which took place online on 27 September from 13:00 - 15:00 CET. After looking at existing problems and describing the needs of the Public administration when it comes to open source, this last webinar focused on existing and future solutions for the Public sector. This event followed a workshop on the same themes where public administrations officials, policymakers, CTO's and open source users participated in discussions on existing solutions. You can find all the presentations from this webinar at the end of this article.
The webinar presented a summary of the information gathered in the workshop, presentations from experts, and an open discussion of the topic of solutions that have been proven to work. This webinar also contributed to the book which is being written by the OSOR team based on input from experts throughout 2023 and which will present the state of open source in the EU’s public services.
After an introduction by Ciáran O’Riordan from the OSOR Team and Monika Sowinska, Project Officer at the European Commission, DG Informatics, Ciarán presented the outcome of the workshop which you can find in the first presentation. An important mapping effort, this work shows the existing initiatives in terms of catalogues, procurement guides and community building. It also delved into the existing OSPO's structures, showing different organisational possibilities and solutions, each adapted to their own context.
We then had the chance of having Clare Dillon, Researcher and InnerSource Commons Foundation Member who represented the Open Ireland Network. She presented the results of the report published by the Open Ireland Network. Her presentation also featured a set of recommendations to support the use of open source in Ireland. The webinar audience also had the chance to learn more about the future NORF project for open source in Universities.
After that, we received Petra Dzurovčinová, Chief Innovation Officer of the city of Bratislava, who described the city's approach to the use of open source. A practical case, the work of Bratislava on open source can notably be seen through their ID service, which brings together several public services for citizens. Thanks to key indicators, the municipality has shown great increases in interests from its citizens. Learn more with the presentation at the end of this article.
Finally, the webinar concluded with a presentation of the Paris OSPO's by Phillipe Bareille, who has been leading the efforts on open source in the city for many years now. His presentation started with a history of innovative open source projects from the city of Paris. It then showed the new organisation developed with the newly created OSPO. In this presentation, the audience had the opportunity to learn more about the launch of opensource.paris.fr or the upcoming translation Hackathon for Lutece, one of the city's main projects.