Lutece at Fosdem 2020
Is it really necessary to present Fosdem after 20 years of existence? It is simply largest 2-day meeting in Europe to promote the use of free and open source software, held at the University Libre in Brussels, Belgium.
For the first time, Lutece had the great privilege to join the OW2 booth where enthusiasts were able to meet members of the team to discover the platform or to propose to join the developer community. We even had a place of choice, between the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Mozilla Foundation, a few steps away from the Apache Foundation and other OSF, OWASP, Jenkins...
This booth allowed us to finally physically meet our friends that came all the way from Johns Hopkins University, and who took the opportunity to demonstrate the development of their enrolment plugin based on Lutece, made for NGOs in Baltimore, Maryland.
That wasn't the only privilege we've had! In her 50-minute presentation on Saturday morning on How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government with recent real-world examples, Open Source Diva, aka Danese Cooper, representing the Irish company Nearform, put Lutece in the spotlight with her in-depth analysis (see video below).
Brief: Free and Open Source software has revolutionized the Software Industry and nearly all other areas of human endeavor, but until now its reach into actual governance at the municipal citizen level has not been very deep. Initiatives like Code for America have encountered challenges driving acceptance for FOSS alternatives to proprietary software for citizen governance. At the same time the gap between citizen need and cities' capabilities as widened. But several new projects are aiming to change this state of affairs to help empower citizens and improve municipal services worldwide through adoption of FOSS. Learn about these efforts and how you can get involved.
Another hightlight of the weekend was the presentation by Jacob Green, founder of MOSSlabs, on Sunday morning on Organizing Open Source for Cities adapting the Open Source Program Office (see the video below).
Brief: Open Source is vital in the expansion wave of smart cities. Yet, where is the sustainable municipal open innovation economic engine/s, and how do we start them spinning at scale? - Only through structured collaboration and community. We present the community collaboration efforts, accomplishments, and vision of the partners behind the launch of the Johns Hopkins Open Source Program Office for Open Cities, the community creation efforts of the City of Paris's open source city services platform Lutece, and the interactions with and between Baltimore communities, Paris communities, and open source communities and institutions.
Open Source is vital in the expansion wave of smart cities. Yet, where is the sustainable municipal Open innovation economic engine/s, and how do we start them spinning at scale? - Only through structured collaboration and community. The open source communities and institutions are highly successful at this in other industries. In cities, open source is not enough, we also need open data, open standards, and so on. As we scale, openness and transparency, interoperability, feedback mechanisms, security, non-bias, privacy, become dominating design requirements. Accelerating the scale of good solutions needs help and structure. There are 18,000 municipalities in the US alone, currently siloed, and meaningful technical and community cooperation is minimal. We need a new flexible institutional framework to advance cooperation and scaling within our interdisciplinary design requirements.
The open source program office is a successful industry construct in the open source world, and we aim to investigate adapting this construct to accelerate and scale open cities; from open source software & services, open data, and standards, to non-bias, security, privacy, access, diversity, and above all TRUST!
Johns Hopkins University has launched what is the believed to be the first OSPO for higher education and launching it in part to support Open Cities including Baltimore. Jacob Green from Mosslabs.io discussed the launch of the JHU OSPO, its initial initiatives, and collaborations with City of Paris.