How The German Government is Planning for an Open Future
How The German Government is Planning for an Open Future
Launching openDesk 1.0 at the Smart Country Convention After previously speaking about our involvement in the openDesk project here, we were very excited to attend the Smart Country Convention in Berlin last week as part of the openDesk platform, where one of the standout moments of the event was th...
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So I would love if this would be the case (German gov using open soruce software) but tbh this reads like marketing bs to me, sorry. "Aims to transform public administration", "providing Germany’s public sector with a secure and open-source alternative". Yes, good. Nice. Cool. But are any government agencies are actually using it? I feel like if they wpild be they'd surely name them ...
Sleswich-Holstein is one of the first states to ditch Microsoft.
You have to know that all of this takes time. They've decided to follow this path in 2022 and were aiming for the first results to appear in 2025.
Two weeks ago ZenDis launched OpenDesk 1.0. https://www.openproject.org/blog/sovereign-workplace/
And I forgot to mention that the French government is on board as well.
They on their side are launching La Suite which is based on the same building block as OpenDesk.
https://code.gouv.fr/en/lasuite/
Some figures for those wondering how broadly adapted this open source suite is.
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Tchap: the trusted instant messaging service for the public sector used daily by 200,000 users. An extension of the Albert AI tool is planned for Tchap soon, during the summer.
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State audio conference with nearly 8,000 users for 700 weekly meetings (2024 figure as of mid-May).
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State web conference with 47,000 users for 10,000 weekly meetings (2024 figure as of mid-May).
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State webinar: the webinar service which can accommodate up to 350 participants, public officials and interlocutors from outside the State (from the public, private or associative sectors) has recorded more than 800,000 users for 65,000 meetings weekly (2024 figure as of mid-May).
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France transfer: the simple and secure solution for sending large files with 140,000 users having exchanged more than 350,000 letters (2024 figure as of mid-May).
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Resana, a public sector collaborative platform with 140,000 users and nearly 800,000 documents shared/month (2024 figure as of mid-May).
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they tried already using open source in several occasions for smaller administrative municipalities.
all failed and went back then, wasting loads of time and money. so for sure marketing gag
Are you sure?
Just about two weeks ago they launched OpenDesk.
https://www.digitale-verwaltung.de/SharedDocs/kurzmeldungen/Webs/DV/DE/2024/10_zendis.html
Element chat is integrated in this suite and is allready vastly used by the federal government, the army,...
I think no government anywhere else has embraced open source as much as Germany does.
The are building their sovereign cloud and different states, Schools, government departments, hospitals... are joining.
They've put their money where their mout is by creating a sovereign tech fund.
https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/
They move slowly, as governments do, but they have a goal and a plan. It's not easy to switch and running contracts have to reach the end of their term but when these contracts are over the move will be huge.
I'm really having high hopes of Schleswig Holstein doing of right (I'm also being prepared of these hopes being crushed 😸). A Swiss Linux podcast (Captain, It's Wednesday) did an interview with one of the politicians responsible for the project and it sounded like the looked at why these projects have failed in the past and are trying to learn from the mistakes:
They started out with sort of a 'fail forward' approach where as German entities were encouraged to try and implement different types of open source software of OS'es. Those experiments have led to a broader understanding and in the meantime they funded the greater project that became OpenDesk.
This year they joined forced with the French government where the were doing the same sort of project with La Suite. The French and the German team joined in a 100 day sprint to deliver somewhere around September.
Oh, that sounds nice! I think it would be very smart of Europe to build their own (open-source) infrastructure just in case someone not reliable were to become US president ... Can't hurt to start preparing (better far to late than never ...)