Italy to begin an open source competence centre

Italian public administrations considering to use open source can turn to a competence centre specialised in this type of software. The centre, which will be opened tomorrow, aims to foster the development and adoption of open source software.

“The Italian Competence Center is a no-profit no-loss consortium, operating on a national scale and addressed to meet the needs of basic software and applications for schools, universities, small municipalities, hospitals, small and medium enterprises in the adoption of open source software”, says an announcement published by Spago, a project developing open source software for business intelligence applications.

The centre is a joint-venture of three universities, Insubria University, the University of Sannio, the University of Bolzano, and Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, an Italian IT firm and one of the developers of Spago. The four organisations are also involved in Qualipso, a research network on open source software.

According to an announcement by the ministry for public administration and innovation, the centre is a follow-up to the Qualipso project and will resemble open source resource centres in other countries, including Spain, France, China and Brazil. “The competence centre will aggregate skills and resources in research and in innovation, national and international.”

The ministry says that using open source can help public administration offer electronic services to citizen and companies. Open source helps to increase government transparency, is a way to streamline business processes and promotes cooperation between administrations. source.

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