Open Source Migrations: Experiences from the European public administrations

The landscape of public organizations in Europe is diverse and complex. Public administrations differ in the services that they provide and on their characteristics, but they all rely on computing to deliver their services, even if it is to varying degrees. This paper analyzes the experience of a group of European public organizations investigating the possibility of supporting their services through the use of Open Source. Open Source is software developed inside a community committed to producing software that is free to use, modify and redistribute.
The group under examination is composed of a number of public administrations varying in size, from four different countries. While the motivation for starting the migration varies across the members, the results from the different experiences are consistent and show that Open Source is a realistic opportunity to consider. Technical, strategic, and environmental aspects that arose during the migration have been investigated and analyzed.

Citation:
Baravalle, A. and Chambers, S. (2007) ‘Open Source Migrations: Experiences from the European public administrations.’ In: Shoniregun, C.A. and Logvynovskiy, A. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Society (i-Society 2007) October 7-11, Merriville, Indiana USA. pp. 38-44..