OSOR has published its two new reports on the state of OSS in Bolivia and Singapore.
In these two reports, you'll be able to learn more about the general perception of OSS in both of these countries, as well as the evolution of legislation and the local initiatives that pertain to open source.
We share with you more about the story of the Bolivian government's engagement towards open source. With strong democratic and economic incentives and thanks to the work of the local open source community, Bolivia was prioritising open source as early as 2011. But what is mostly interesting about this case is how, through a comprehensive enforcement, the Agency for e-Government and Information and Communication Technologies (AGETIC) and the Council for Information and Communication Technologies of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (CTIC-EPB) are facilitating the adoption and use of open source. For those of you who are curious, the CETIC-EPB collects each administrations’ Free Software and Open Standards Implementation Plan, which can provide valuable insight into the way administrations are adapting.
It is also very important to note how the advocacy work done by the local open source community, the Comunidad Software Libre de Bolivia, has helped raise awareness about this need, and how they contributed to the establishment of this policy itself. Overall, Bolivia is on a good track to develop its use of OSS at the national scale, but still need to harmonise this approach at other governance levels.
As for the report on Singapore, you will discover more on how an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset has allowed for innovation and the development of many OS tools thanks to the Open Government Products team. In a drastically different approach to the previous report, Singapore has created a separated unit as part of its digital agency to design new solutions without the burden of the administration's processes. And this method has already been bearing its fruits with success stories around their e-identity and form builder solutions that have been rapidly adopted by services in the public administrations. The success of their products and their active external collaboration with international partners has even enabled other countries to fork or reuse their solutions for their own public administrations.
And while the overall adoption rate of open source at government level might still be low, more solutions are being developed through these innovative and collaborative approaches in various fields.
These reports are the results of a long research that implicated the many individuals and agencies that have been kind enough to help us to understand the use and state of open source in their respective countries, so wish to thank all of them.
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