By 2030, the Interoperable Europe Act aims for all key public digital services in EU member states to be interoperable, enabling seamless cross-border information exchange. Open source software is a key tool and lever for achieving the ambitious yet critical goals. Significant investment, guidance, and collaboration will be needed to ensure the European public sector sphere can effectively adopt and sustain open source solutions.

This talk presents findings from an in-depth study of five mature cases where local governments have adopted, developed, and collaborated on open source software from three perspectives:

The presentation offers three takeaways for the attendees. First, the case studies show how local government open source projects have evolved through various stages, what challenges they have experienced, how these have been managed, and how sustainability is planned for. Second, a set of archetypes is defined to support actors in identifying their own role and those of others in the open source ecosystem to foster successful open source collaboration in a specific context. Finally, specific recommendations are provided to guide local governments, community actors, and service suppliers to cooperate in developing and supporting open source solutions with the potential to scale cross-border collaboration.

By Johan Linåker