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| Public Discussion on the ‘Application of Open Source Systems in Public Administration’ |
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On December 3rd, 2007 ARC Fund co-organized with the Ministry of Public Administration and Administrative Reform a public discussion on the ‘Application of open source systems in public administration’. The aim of this event was to discuss the opportunities arising from the use of OSS and to stimulate an open public discussion on the benefits and challenges of the implementation of Free/Libre and Open Source Software in public administration.
About 100 people took part in this forum including Mr. Nikolay Vasilev , minister of State Administration and Administrative Reform , representatives of the Council of Ministers, the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications, Municipalities, NGOs, branch organisations and companies working with open source solutions.
Lecturers and participants provided evidence, case studies and other useful information highlighting the advantages of using OSS and open standards in general.
Mr. Slavcho Manolov , coordinator, Center for Information, Communication and Management Technologies presented to the audience the recommendations of the European Commission about deployment of open document formats for exchange of electronic documents in the state administration.
Mr. Emil Yakimov , director ‘IT security’ in municipality of Peshtera, presented the experience of the municipality with open source software. The deployment of FLOSS started with an UNDP funded project – first were installed OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, GIMP and Linux OS (Debian); in the second year of the project Peshtera municipality was provided with OSS for e-government services.
Mr. Yavor Markov from Strategma pointed out that software solutions should be considered separately, not as a whole. He claimed that in some areas open source solutions are better than proprietary software and vice versa. As far as server operation systems are concerned, evidence shows that Linux based systems perform better than Microsoft solutions.
Mr. Mark Lange , Senior Policy Counsel for the Microsoft EMEA Law and Corporate Affairs department, presented the point of view of Microsoft towards the development of OSS. According to him, Microsoft acknowledges the existence of alternative software solutions. Mr. Lange said that Microsoft is influenced by the principles of transparency and cooperation among the open source community and the company could learn a lot form the OSS developing companies.
Mr. Yovko Lambrev from IBM delivered a presentation about the activities of IBM in the field of OSS. IBM has completed more that 15000 installations and 3000 migrations to Linux worldwide – sound evidence that Linux is reliable, flexible and efficient. IBM is engaged in the OSS domain in various forms – the company has established a research lab with 600 OSS developers, support centers, competence center. IBM has also opened some projects to the open source community and distributes freely ‘redbooks’ with insights about the OSS business.
In his closing remarks, Mr. Nikolay Vasilev explained that he would give green light to a pilot project for implementation of FLOSS in the state administration.
Despite the fact that the discussion covered many areas, participants and organizers agreed that this event was fruitful – it was another step towards deploying FLOSS and open standards in the government structures. Mr. Vasilev promised that he would organize another discussion on the same topic till the end of January 2008.
Agenda (in Bulgarian)
Videos from the discussion are available on the website of Computerworld magazine
Open book for free/libre and open source software
Media Coverage (In Bulgarian)
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