COSPA (consortium for studying, evaluating, and supporting the introduction of open source software and open data standards in the public administration)

Abstract

In this paper, we report about COSPA, the Consortium for studying, evaluating, and supporting the introduction of Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Data Standards (ODS) in the Public Administration. The project, an EU FP6 research project, aims to evaluate the effects of the introduction of OSS and ODS for personal productivity and document management in European PAs. The objectives of the project and the major research activities will be reported, with particular relevance given to the current challenges and future research.

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COSPA (Consortium for studying, evaluating, and
supporting the introduction of Open Source software and
Open Data Standards in the Public Administration)
Bruno Rossi
Free University of Bolzano-Bozen
Piazza Domenicani, 3
39100 Bolzano-Bozen, Italy
Bruno.Rossi@unibz.it
Barbara Russo
Free University of Bolzano-Bozen
Piazza Domenicani, 3
39100 Bolzano-Bozen, Italy
Barbara.Russo@unibz.it
Giancarlo Succi
Free University of Bolzano-Bozen
Piazza Domenicani, 3
39100 Bolzano-Bozen, Italy
Giancarlo.Succi@unibz.it
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we report about COSPA, the Consortium for
studying, evaluating, and supporting the introduction of Open
Source Software (OSS) and Open Data Standards (ODS) in the
Public Administration. The project, an EU FP6 research project,
aims to evaluate the effects of the introduction of OSS and ODS
for personal productivity and document management in European
PAs. The objectives of the project and the major research
activities will be reported, with particular relevance given to the
current challenges and future research.
Keywords
OSS, Open Source Software, Migration, COSPA.
1.INTRODUCTION
COSPA, the Consortium for studying, evaluating, and supporting
the introduction of Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Data
Standards (ODS) in the Public Administration, is an EU FP6
research project that aims to experimentally assess the potential
benefits for European PAs that plan to introduce and evaluate
Open Data Standards and Open Source Software in desktop
applications for personal productivity within the context of
European PAs.
2.CONSORTIUM DETAILS
The consortium is coordinated by the Free University of Bozen-
Bolzano and is constituted by 4 Research Institutions (Aalborg
University (Denmark), Sheffield University (UK), Limerick
University(Ireland), MTA Computer and Automation Research
Institute (Hungary), plus 8 partner PAs, 2 partners from the
industry (Conecta, IBM) and more than 60 international observers
with the aim to disseminate the results of the consortium. More
than 19 European countries are represented inside the consortium.
2.1Consortium objectives
The aims of the consortium are related to the study and
introduction of OSS and ODS inside the PA, in particular the
objectives are the following:
- to analyze the requirements of PAs in order to ease the
deployment of OSS. In this sense the objective of the
consortium is to identify possible OSS and ODS
solutions that fulfill the gathered requirements.
- to perform pilot installations and experimentations with
OSS on the desktop side of partner PAs, to ease the
successive cost/benefit analysis.
- to evaluate OSS through a rigorous statistical and
cost/benefit analysis. The focus is to determine whether
OSS can be a viable solution to adhere to the
requirements
- to build a European knowledge and experience
repository useful for migration purposes.
- to disseminate the results and the experiences of the
project through the knowledge base and a series of
workshops at regional and European level, with the aim
of stimulate the sharing of knowledge and the public
and business’ awareness on the project and on OSS in
general.
3.RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The interactions between the different parts of the project are
reported in Figure 1.
The project initial research activities performed regarded the
extraction of the requirements from the partners PAs and the
identification of the possible solutions for the deployment of OSS
and ODS. This activity resulted in one large catalogue of OSS and
one on ODS that will be published as soon as the deliverable
receives the Commission final approbation. A large work of the
consortium was related to the acquisition of the requirements at
the business process (BP) level, BPs were extracted from partner
PAs to determine the exact needs for the activities. All the
Figure 1. Interactions between different parts of the
project.

subsequent analysis has been and will be performed at this level
of detail. A framework is currently under development to evaluate
the migration under a cost and benefit analysis and the
quantitative data coming from the pilot introductions of OSS and
ODS in the partner PAs will be inserted into the framework to
provide a real evaluation of the migration process. The
deployment of the experimentation has been carried on over 4,500
sites with a monitored transition to the new desktop solution; this
large scale investigation will give the consortium enough data to
evaluate the migration. All the activities are complementary to the
creation of a European knowledge base on OSS that should serve
citizens and organizations willing to acquire information on open
solutions and on real case studies of migrations.
A characteristic of the analysis so far, is that to facilitate the
understanding of a PA's roles and actions, the concept of Virtual
PA has been created. It is a synthetic model of a PA refined from
all the real-world data collected during the project. This
conceptual PA has proved useful for simplifying the process of
categorizing needs and resources into a manageable model.
4.FUTURE WORK
While the results are so far encouraging, many are the issues still
open in the project. Such a large deployment of OSS for studying
purposes has never been done and requires a rigorous framework
for the successive analysis. The choice has been to model the
framework according to the TCO methodology.
4.1Successes and failures so far
The collection of the requirements in particular at the Business
Process level has been a successful activity so far. One constant
problem of the consortium has been to obtain the results under the
given schedule. Some activities, like the collection of the
requirements and the running of the pilot introduction of
OSS/ODS required more time as was foreseen, also due to the
large amount of data to be collected and of the different partners
involved. Differences in culture, distance and also bureaucracy all
played a major role in the final delays.
The dissemination results were positive, in particular the observer
program convinced many companies across Europe to join the
project contributing to diffuse further information about the
project, OSS and ODS.
4.2Challenges
It remains to be seen whether the project can meet all the initial
aims that were posed by the European Commission. The next
months will be crucial for finalization of the deliverables and the
results will be available to the public domain.
4.3Plans to the end of the project
The next months will be of key importance for two parts of the
project in particular: the finalization of the framework for the
evaluation of the migration and the deployment of the COSPA
knowledge base. All the parts of the project will merge together in
order to produce the final deliverables. To note that the original
point of the project was not to probe the superiority of OSS over
Closed Source Software or vice versa, but to assess whether OSS
can be seen as a valid alternative to current software installations
in PAs across Europe.
5.PAPERS PUBLISHED
Several papers have been submitted to European and International
conferences, journals and magazines:
[1] An Experience of Transition to Open Source Software in
Local Authorities, by P. Zuliani and G.Succi. Accepted for e-
Challenges 2004 Conference, 27-29 October 2004, Vienna,
Austria (http://www.echallenges.org)
[2] Exploiting the Collaboration between Open Source
Developers and Research, by G. Succi and P. Zuliani. Accepted
for ICSE 4th Workshop on OSS Engineering, 25 May 2004,
Edinburgh, UK (http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2004/)
[3] La Migrazione delle Pubbliche amministrazioni verso l’open
source, by P.Zuliani, B. Russo, A. Sillitti, G. Succi. Accepted for
AICA 2004 Conference, 28-30 September 2004, Benevento, Italy
(http://www.aica04.unisannio.it/)
[4] Migrating Public administrations to open source software, by
P. Zuliani and G. Succi. Accepted for IADIS e-Society 2004
Conference, 16-19 July, Avila, Spain
(http://www.iadis.org/es2004/
[5] Software aperto nella Pubblica Amministrazione: il progetto
COSPA, by P. Zuliani, B. Rossi, G. Succi. Accepted for SALPA
2004 Conference, 22-23 March 2004, Pisa, Italy
(http://www.salpa.pisa.it)
[6] Open Source Software and Open Data Standards in Public
Administration, by G. Kovacs, S. Drozdik, P. Zuliani and G.
Succi. Accepted for ICCC'04 Conference, 30 August – 01
September 2004, Vienna, Austria
(http://www.vmars.tuwien.ac.at/iccc04/)
[7] Open Source Software for the Public Administration, by G.
Kovacs, S. Drozdik, P. Zuliani and G. Succi. Accepted for the
6^th CSIT (Computer Science and Information Technologies)
International Workshop (Ed. N. Yussupova et al., ISBN: 5 87691-
023-6), plenary paper, Budapest, October 17-19, 2004, Vol. 1.
pp. 1-8.
[8] Risk Assessment of an Open Source Migration Project, by S.
Drozdik, G. L. Kovács, P.Z. Kochis. Accepted for the OSS2005
Conference, 11-15 July 2005, Genova,Italy
(http://oss2005.case.unibz.it)
6.REFERENCES
[1] Main COSPA website, www.cospa-project.org .
[2] COSPA Project of the Month, Europe’s Information Society,
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/egovernme
nt_research/projects/projects_of_month/200504/index_en.ht
m
[3] COSPA Knowledge Base, http://pascal.case.unibz.it