Stand-out consumption and/or contribution to Open Source within the Public Sector

[anajsana]

Mirrored discussion from TODO Slack by Chris Howard:

Hello All, I wondered if anyone has any examples of stand-out consumption and/or contribution to Open Source within the Public Sector - which organisations (Gov Offices, National Govs, Public Healthcare, Travel etc) are really behind the open source agenda and actively engaged in it?

I'm trying to demonstrate to a public org that OS in this sector isn't as 'rare' as they envisage it to be

[anajsana]

Maurice Hendrik replied:

https://openstad.org/ https://signalen.org/ https://www.openzaak.org/ are examples from Amsterdam

[anajsana]

Anonymous person replied:

On behave of the Dutch Association of Municipalities we run an 'incubator' in which we initiate, scale and mantain open source software solutions for cities/municipalities in the Netherlands. We create public/private collaboration ecosystems were the mission is leading.

Currently, https://signalen.org/ is our most successful example. Most of the general information on the collaboration and the open-source software is accessible through the website Signalen.org

Simply put, I dare to say that the Dutch municipalities have created the open-source software that every city wants and needs in order to receive and manage nuisance reports and service requests. Improvement of customer satisfaction and the quality of public services are the foundations of our mission.

Currently, we have 10 municipalities running the Signalen software in production. Ranging from Amsterdam to the small town of Waadhoeke. We currently service more than 2 million inhabitants and we handle approximately 700.000 reports and service requests per year. More than 2000 civil servants work with the Signalen software 24/7. In 2023 we are scaling the collaboration to about 20 new municipalities and counting. We’re also on seeking international expansion of Signalen.

We believe in the principal that public money should lead to public code and therefore we have made the software open source and available for everyone.

Market parties are a playing a crucial role in our ecosystem. They help the municipalities with implementing Signalen and in many cases they also provide managed hosting; ‘Signalen as a Service’.

To sum it up;

Signalen offers a full open-source solution for nuisance reports and service requests, which you can tailor and configure to the specific way of working within your own organization.
All (Dutch) cities have a solid positive financial business case, compared to their previous situation ( and on a national scale the potential savings are really good, to put it mildly)
Market parties provide the services needed for continuity, so municipalities can provide a stable and trustworthy solution for their organization and their inhabitants.
The Signalen software is compliant to the GDPR, WCAG (accessibility) and the Archiving act.
Because Signalen is open source it contributes to the values of being a transparent and accountable government
Because Signalen is ‘owned’ by the government we work mission driven, instead of spending public money on license fees and (proprietary) products from companies whose primary incentive is to maximize profits for shareholders.

[anajsana]

Stephen Kilbane replied

January's OSPOlogyLive event in January is focused on the public sector; previous presentations at LF events about "OSPO++" have mainly been focused on OSS and OSPOs in the public section. Not directly what you asked, but a good place to start.

[anajsana]

Ana replied:

In Spain, some municipalities have (or had) Oficinas de Software Libre (FOSS Offices) that act like OSPO. For instance, in Galicia, they have the “Oficina de Coordinación de Software Libre” https://amtega.xunta.gal/es/software-libre

[anajsana]

And I know this is a different sector, but in case you are also interested, most of the public and private universities in Spain with a FOSS Office are in this archive: https://www.uco.es/aulasoftwarelibre/directorio-de-oficinas-de-software-libre/ just in case you’d like to deep dive 🙂

[anajsana]

Chris Howard replied:

Thanks everyone these are all amazing and I'm going to spend some time reading/researching over the weekend.
Have a great one and really appreciate the guidance here. 👍

[anajsana]

DeCause replied:

Chris I’m still new to the public sector, and this is one of my many questions I’m chasing down answers to while spinning up an Open Source Program at CMS.gov.

There have been many examples of open source policies and projects released in the past 10 (20 in some parts of .gov) years.
CFPB, GSA, 18F, USDS, all have public open source policies listed on their GitHub orgs in a repo.
For particularly representative projects, the earliest one I can think of is SELinux, and a more recent wide-spread one would be the USWDS (US Web Design System.)

Happy to chat more about this, and following this thread if other folks have better answers 🙂

[anajsana]

Stephen Kilbane replied:

How could I forget GOV.UK? The UK's Government Digital Service is developed in the open - there was even a presentation on it at the 2018 Open Source Summit in Edinburgh. You can find the UK Government's operation version at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service, and the GitHub repos are at https://github.com/alphagov.

[anajsana]

Chris Howard replied:

Thanks for the further suggestions - I can't believe I didn't think of GDS either! 😲
The USWDS is a great example and some really interesting licensing too that's helpful insight. 👍

[anajsana]

Eric Boucher replied:

The French “Beta Gouv” pole is an interesting endeavor as well and is building almost everything in the open - https://github.com/betagouv
https://beta.gouv.fr/