The ePractice Workshop on Open Source Software for Public Administration, supported by the ePractice.eu and the OSOR.eu communities, will be held in Brussels, on Thursday 7 April 2011.
OSOR news reported about the second ODF Plugfest, the event held in Orvieto at the beginning of this month bringing together standards experts from major multi-national corporations, representatives of European public administrations, andmany individuals active in the European open source  community.
The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.
The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.
Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…
In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).
WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.
Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).
Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!
[Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]
Hi Jesus,
glad to see you joining the conversation.
As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.
Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).
Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.
I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.
OpenOffice package for public administration published in EU open source portal – The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities has released a new version of OpenOffice.org, downloadable at Osor.eu. (via ePractice).
As mentioned in a previous post, ForumPA - the greatest Italian event of and about Public Administration – asked me to chair the only open source conference taking place in the event.
Italian and international speakers provided the audience with an insight into how to effectively deploy open source software in a significant way.
That was very informative and well written. Mentioned below is an excerpt of an article on Open source software:
“Open source has today become a necessity for most businesses. It is estimated that 99 percent of all companies using software use atleast one open source component. The business value added by open source products makes them inevitable for every company. In addition to software, open source has today expanded its tentacles to many areas from open text books to open drug discovery and is fast spreading to other areas……to read more please visit http://www.sinapseblog.com/2010/10/open-source-business-reality.html“
The Linux Foundation today announced that credativ – a consulting and service company employing 45 people in its offices in the UK, Germany and Canada – has become member of the Linux Foundation.
As Linux continues to grow in popularity in Europe, companies like credativ become increasingly vital to the Linux ecosystem. credativ’s contributions to the LSB are especially important as Linux grows internationally and different distributions emerge.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, in commenting the news.
OSOR website today launched a new section to allow users to add blog entries, create and participate in discussions or share documents and cases and assist in creating a knowledge base on their community.
Roberto Galoppini and 
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