The result of a research and analysis process, this article details these different projects, based in particular on the extensive information gathered during an interview with Nejia Lanouar, Director of Information Systems and Digital for the City of Paris, and the Lutetia project team: Pierre Levy, Manager and Director of Open Source Projects, Philippe Bareille, Technical Project Manager, and Isabelle Lenain, Head of Engineering.
Références :
This willingness to choose Open Source within the digital services of the City Hall is now reflected in figures: 50% of the software solutions used by the City of Paris are Open Source, including 35% under Lutetia. This result translates into a vision that emphasizes digital services and the need to harmonize the digital relationship with the user.
Precursor and certainly "out of the ordinary" for most French local authorities, the experience of the Paris City Council and the diversity of strategies adopted by the projects it has initiated are rich in lessons. Moreover, its approach provides useful tools for other public actors as well as for private actors likely to collaborate with the public sector. Anticipating the evolution of the regulatory framework that today imposes the principle of open source distribution of any software produced or received as part of a public service mission, it also gives meaning to such source code sharing in the context of local authorities.
Diverse and varied, the projects analyzed in this note allow us to draw good practices and useful lessons for other public and private organizations.
Références :
1 - Exploring Open Source through various business projects for the City
Convinced by the Open Source model, the city of Paris has also forged its expertise in exploring several projects such as Open ENT, MPE or Botalista.Open ENT NG (formerly Open ENT and Lilie) - Paris Classe Numérique
OpenENT NG is a Free and Open Source software aiming to provide the school education community with a digital workspace solution (ENT) allowing, among other things, access to the students' agenda, to a messaging service, to discussion forums and other services (canteen menus, extracurricular services, etc.). It is currently used in Paris in high schools, colleges and 275 elementary school via Paris Classe Numérique.Based on the Lilie open source solution initiated by the Île-de-France region in 2009 (see the presentation of the project in 2010) and renamed Open ENT when other local authorities joined the community, the project is a real success in terms of adoption. This is all the more notable as previous similar initiatives never managed to gain a lasting foothold, despite all the incentives to do so. Today, OpenENT NG can be used, adapted and redistributed freely and at no cost other than the cost of ordered modifications or associated services, with the only condition being that the modifications are returned on the same terms.
Very quickly, other local authorities, like the city of Paris, considering that digital education is a fundamental issue and that ENT is a central aspect of it, wanted to reuse and distribute Open ENT in their own schools, by financing complementary work carried out by different integrators. These local authorities, being sensitive to the possibilities offered by an open approach and mutualization, saw Open Source as a vector of optimization of their means and expenses.
Strengthening its strategic vision under the impetus of the Picardie region, Open ENT became Open ENT NG in 2014 when the tool was technically overhauled to modernize it and make it more modular. From this date, a relatively fluid dialogue was established between the user communities to boost the development of the tool through strategic investments.
Governance and project structuring
Although the community dimension was present from the very beginning of the project's open source design, there was no common governance capable of ensuring real collective support. Faced with the fact that efforts were being divided - each integrator was seeking to pool resources for its own benefit, without sharing and coordinating with its competitors - and the need to remedy this, the Île-de-France Region initiated a community structuring effort in 2013, alongside the other local authorities using the system, in order to define and implement common governance. This effort led to the creation of the Open ENT prefiguration association in November 2014 with the aim of fostering the creation, evolution, promotion and support of the OpenENT software solution by combining the benefits derived from the cohabitation of a community of users and a grouping of manufacturers.This structure was intended to ensure compliance with the rules for contributions to OpenENT - such as the systematic publication of contributions on a common forge - in order to support and coordinate the actions of administrations and local authorities. Designed to be deliberately transitory in order to give its members the time to define an appropriate governance, it was not mobilized in the end. Indeed, the coordination of the community of user members seems to have been done without really relying on the legal structure: on the one hand, because of the primary characteristic of Open Source, which is to give such primary freedom to end users who master a very specific common domain, and on the other hand, because of the priority that was given to the technical evolution of the project to the detriment of its governance.
Today, there is sufficient dialogue among communities to ensure development and collaboration, particularly because of the central "ensembler" role taken on by Open Digital Education, the company that develops the new OpenENT NG technical core. Nevertheless, the growing adoption of the project due to its open source nature reinforces the importance of supporting the collective interest through a functional structure that can provide some of the tasks that members do not provide individually. This is to increase the community and the number of effective contributors to the project (to date, it is still relatively complex for an end user to contribute directly, but several companies have integrated or developed extensions).
Project license (management of contributors' rights)
Inheriting the legal framework of Lilie, Open ENT is distributed under a dual license, the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 and CeCILL-C 1.0, which have been "modified" for the needs of the project. The use of these two licenses is explained by the initial will to combine the benefit of a modular framework (allowing the development of modules independently of the software core and subject to their own licenses), which is constraining by the use of the application in Saas mode (Software as a Service - when the software is accessed remotely, usually by a browser or mobile) and compatible with French law (the CeCILL-C license having been written for this sole purpose).In addition to the fact that the solution meets a real need with an ergonomic design that makes it easy to use, its success is based on a combination of factors: strong political support, a modular architecture, a community that has built up around the project and continues to develop it, and the important place given to economic players who continue to be involved in the solution alongside local authorities.
Mutualization of developments
Today, after the initial investment made by several local authorities (most notably the Île-de-France region), which enabled the development of the basic foundation, each local authority invests financially in the development of modules that are then shared.Particular attention is paid to ensuring that requests are fairly uniform from one community to another so that the potential for pooling is high. Thus, local authorities generally agree to co-finance the development of a module and work together to optimize orders to their suppliers. Similarly, public actors remain particularly vigilant to ensure that the integrator and the project leader play the game of mutualization. Among the lessons that can be learned from Open ENT, it is essential that integrators understand and effectively contribute to the open source development of the project. Similarly, when the role of "publisher" is assumed by an economic player (and not via a community structure created for this purpose), it is essential that it understands the philosophy and challenges of Open Source, and plays the game despite the existence of competition.
Références :
Contract Preparation and Procurement (CPP) and MEP
Developed in 2007, the Elaboration et Passation des Marchés (EPM ) software was designed as part of the modernization of the City of Paris' information system in order to manage the numerous public contracts of the community. Initially released in Open Source (under the CeCILL 2.0 license) in order to share this solution with other French and foreign local authorities, this project has been the subject of a major investment by the City, which has invested a great deal of business engineering and legal know-how.A few other major local authorities (such as Marseille) have sought to benefit from this solution and thus contribute to its adoption. However, difficulties in setting up open source governance of the product, shared among local authorities and adapted to the challenges of each, concomitant with the State's adoption of the solution, modified the organization and management of the roadmap. Thus, the project's economic model, which combined a pooling of needs between local authorities and an investment by the initial publisher, could not materialize for two main reasons: insufficient pooling within the framework of the project (preventing the community from growing) and insufficiently defined governance.
Today, a new version of the project, MPE, has been developed with GIP Maximilien on the basis of EPM business engineering. Pragmatically, Paris is going to join this grouping, but it will require a guarantee that it will be able to leave with another company at the end of the contract, if necessary.
With hindsight, the City probably did not anticipate sufficiently when building EPM, the desire to pool the project in the long term, since the development was only thought out according to its own needs, whereas the elaboration and awarding of contracts involve particularities according to the local authorities - and Paris is really a special case in terms of volume and skills. The product has therefore been used by the State, which has had it adapted to its needs, and by other local authorities, which have nevertheless found it to be oversized and have gradually moved away from it. The lesson to be learned from this project is that pooling and collaboration must be considered as early as possible in the project, otherwise it will be particularly complex to implement after the fact: from a legal (collaboration framework) and technical (in particular by choosing a modular architecture) point of view.
Référence :
Botalista
The information systems at the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques (CJB) of the City of Geneva have developed in recent years a "Système d'information botanique de Genève" (SIBG) in order to emancipate themselves from unsuitable "proprietary" technologies (belonging to a single editor who freely decides on pricing conditions, technological developments, etc.) and to propose an Open Source alternative called Botalista based exclusively on free software and the CJB's own knowledge and tools.Initiated by Geneva, the project has always been announced as an Open Source project open to other botanical gardens. In fact, on October 30, 2019, the city of Geneva validated the availability of the Botalista software in Open Source under a GNU GPL-type license, the creation of the Botalista association as well as the membership of the city of Geneva to the said association. Other stakeholders include the Botanical Garden of the City of Paris - consisting of four gardens: the Arboretum of the Ecole du Breuil (Bois de Vincennes), the Parc Floral de Paris (Bois de Vincennes), the Parc de Bagatelle (Bois de Boulogne), the Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil (Bois de Boulogne) -, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux and the Botanical Garden of Nancy in France, as well as the Botanical Gardens of Berne, Lausanne and Neuchâtel in Switzerland
The city of Paris joined the community after exchanges between botanical gardeners of the two cities and in exchange for the promise of an open source transition of the entire project. Today, the solution is used in 10 to 15 gardens of the city. The main difficulty encountered to date concerns the monitoring of the sharing of the open source code by the service provider. For this reason, a dedicated association has been created at the initiative of Geneva, in order to centralize development requests and their follow-up until the code is shared. The memberships to the association will allow to finance a full time equivalent (FTE) to do this management and follow-up work. The association is useful for the management of the project, but also to ensure its sustainability.
As Paris is not at the origin of the project or even of the community, and as the governance is not perfectly finalized, it is more difficult for it to intervene directly. Nevertheless, concerning the evolution of the economic model, opinions diverge on the dual licensing policy with a version for community members and one for companies.
Références :
Beyond the software, the project is currently working on the implementation of a " Botalista DataShare Center " powered by web services installed on each instance of Botalista and allowing people in the Botalista community to share processed information (such as people's names, Latin species names, bibliographic references, species descriptions, etc.), thus reducing data entry effort and disparity. Connectivity and information sharing with other types of databases will also be possible, based on international standards for the transfer and exchange of biodiversity-related information. If the links are not clearly expressed, such an initiative could necessarily be linked to the botanical reference network Tela Botanica.
Références :
2 - Lutetia, a project of global scope
LutèceRéférences :
is a free and open source portal engine that allows to quickly create a dynamic web site or application. Developed by the Direction des Systèmes et Technologies de l'Information (DSTI) since 2001, it is today the base on which most of the new digital services set up by the city of Paris are based. It has been registered on Adullact since 2005, has its own website since 2007 and joined the code base of the OW2 association in September 2014 as part of the OW2 "OSS in Big Cities" initiative.History and current situation
The choice of Open Source in Paris has been supported politically since 2001. Nevertheless, a pragmatic posture has been maintained and each time a project is launched, an objective examination is made of the criteria of competitiveness, long-term cost, shared sovereignty, transparency, etc. It is also important to measure the effort required when there are off-the-shelf solutions. There can be no dogmatism in this area: the context and business needs are different each time and lead the City of Paris to ask the right questions.It is now clear that, without the Lutece solution, the development of dozens of digital services for the user, coherent and adapted to the specificities of the City, would have been much more expensive and more difficult to implement, not to mention the complex management of multiple relationships between different editors and integrators.The Lutèce project was initiated in 2001 under Bertrand Delanoë's first term of office in order to provide the 20 borough councils of Paris with a digital content management tool. Today, it is very politically supported and allows to offer a global vision of the digital services offered by the city. Such a maintenance required that the solution be regularly compared to competing proprietary solutions (with very high costs, which facilitated the choice of Open Source) and that the relevance of the technical choices with regard to the needs of the City be demonstrated (for example, the City Hall was able to organize a hackathon around 3 Open Source solutions, leading to the choice of Lutèce). The tool being used as a base for the design of various and varied sites, it was chosen to associate it with the permissive BSD license.
Référence :
Référence :
Development of the uses of the City of Paris
This will to establish Open Source as the default choice within the City Hall also allows, thanks to the reuse it favors, to quickly develop and deploy services, as it was the case with the free transportation or the participative budget. Such large-scale projects take only 6 months to be ready.More than 100 services have been developed in the last 5 years, with an impressive catalog of uses, some of them shared with other communities. It is also important to note a global approach in the conception of Lutetia tools aiming at facilitating the use of each one by harmonizing the user experience as much as possible. These developments are carried out internally, benefiting nevertheless from a third-party application maintenance provided by large integrators for the management of the roadmap and the realization of certain new projects (via framework agreements). Although the development of these open source solutions can be carried out internally by the City of Paris' IT department, which has only 10 developers, this is an option that few local authorities in France have.As a result, development is often the subject of a public procurement contract - the open source nature of the solution makes it possible to open up a contract while systematically imposing the desired solution. As a result, the lack of in-house expertise is not an obstacle to the development of new open source solutions, or to the contribution of existing solutions, by the local authority.
Référence :
Difficulties to mutualize Lutetia at the national level
Today, and although the only possibilities of reusing the Open Source code internally are a sufficient valorization, the City of Paris seeks to share its developments with other French and international cities, on the model of Barcelona with Decidim. If Lutetia is a success at the level of the City of Paris, it has been difficult to share the developments outside the City of Paris, even if the emphasis is really put on this component only since 2018, without a dedicated communication budget. For now, the spin-off is mostly done according to an opportunity strategy: by a strong presence of the Lutetia team at conferences to promote the solution and by the realization of MOOCs, presentations, etc. Since 2019, the Bloomberg Foundation helps to communicate around the project. The choice in 2019 of Lutetia by Lyon for its digital services and for a business management software could nevertheless start a virtuous reverse dynamic. More recently, a municipality in the inner suburbs of Paris chose DansMaRue for its reporting tool and the appointment scheduling software was deployed in a hospital in Burgundy Franche-Comté during the health crisis in record time.Mutualization remains the main source of value for Open Source projects developed or supported by administrations. In itself for Paris, this is not a problem for the future of the project, the needs of the municipality are such that the inner sourcing is sufficient to amortize the cost of the developments of Lutetia, but it represents a loss of opportunity for mutualization on an even larger scale. Thus, some nearby projects, such as RDV Solidarités or the new multi-local authority software developed byADULLACT (see the projects on the Comptoir du Libre), are examples of initiatives similar in spirit with which there is still little convergence.
Several obstacles to this pooling have been identified: the lack of political support for open source; the "risk-taking" that open source could represent for certain IT departments that prefer to buy "off-the-shelf software"; and finally, the lack of resources allocated to these pooling issues. On the other hand, Paris has not hesitated to reuse modules developed by Lyon, such as for the ENT, Botalista and MPE software.
International pooling
The international mutualization of Lutetia is also well underway.It is this logic of mediatization of Lutetia which also presided over the setting up of a partnership withJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore, following a hackathon organized by the University which allowed the development of a module on Lutetia for NGOs helping the homeless and in which the Paris developers had participated.
This was then concretized by a larger implementation of Lutetia by the University within the city at the service of an NGO (the American municipal model being very different from the one we know, a lot of missions assimilated to public services are carried out by NGOs or private companies). Students, as part of their final year project, have already set up a Lutetia website with a number of plug-ins to facilitate the users' procedures. In 2020, the contribution process has been simplified so that students at the beginning of their studies can also participate, in order to be able to spread it to other communities similar to the NGO currently using it. A partnership has been established with the University of Baltimore (for the development of a plug-in). A project to propose Lutece as a development platform in the framework of the "Semesters of Code" organized by the institution is currently being studied.
In 2020, the City of Budapest chose to develop its participatory budget site with Lutece and was able to achieve this in a few months.
The city of Paris has the ambition to co-construct, with the communities which wish it, a legal model which would make it possible to carry in common the Lutetia roadmap with the interested economic actors.---
The Digital Society Lab proposes to take a critical look at the ethical and social challenges of digital technology. In this context, the firm Inno³ is producing a series of resources for public actors wishing to mobilize the potential of the digital commons in their strategy. Throughout the year, these articles decipher the legal and economic challenges of the digital commons.Sources
- 1. https://www.magazine-decideurs.com
- 2. https://www.cio-online.com/
- 3. LAW No. 2016-1321 of October 7, 2016 for a Digital Republic
- 4. "State Open Source Software Contribution Policy".
- 5. list of licenses authorized by the law for a digital Republic
- 6. article D.323-2-1 of the code of relations between the public and the administration (CRPA)
- 7. the site
- 8. Public Money, Public Code
- 9. Free Software Foundation Europe
- 10. Tela Botanica
- 11. ODbL (1.0)
- 12. "OW2 OSS in Big Cities
- 13. ADULLACT
- 14. BSD
- 15. wikipedia
- 16. Decision of the Council of State CE n°350431 of September 30, 2011
Digital Commons in the community: the strategy of the IT Department of the City of Paris
The result of a research and analysis process, this article details these different projects, based in particular on the extensive information gathered during an interview with Nejia Lanouar, Director of Information Systems and Digital for the City of Paris, and the Lutetia project team: Pierre Levy, Manager and Director of Open Source Projects, Philippe Bareille, Technical Project Manager, and Isabelle Lenain, Head of Engineering.
Références :
This willingness to choose Open Source within the digital services of the City Hall is now reflected in figures: 50% of the software solutions used by the City of Paris are Open Source, including 35% under Lutetia. This result translates into a vision that emphasizes digital services and the need to harmonize the digital relationship with the user.
Precursor and certainly "out of the ordinary" for most French local authorities, the experience of the Paris City Council and the diversity of strategies adopted by the projects it has initiated are rich in lessons. Moreover, its approach provides useful tools for other public actors as well as for private actors likely to collaborate with the public sector. Anticipating the evolution of the regulatory framework that today imposes the principle of open source distribution of any software produced or received as part of a public service mission, it also gives meaning to such source code sharing in the context of local authorities.
Diverse and varied, the projects analyzed in this note allow us to draw good practices and useful lessons for other public and private organizations.
Références :
1 - Exploring Open Source through various business projects for the City
Convinced by the Open Source model, the city of Paris has also forged its expertise in exploring several projects such as Open ENT, MPE or Botalista.Open ENT NG (formerly Open ENT and Lilie) - Paris Classe Numérique
OpenENT NG is a Free and Open Source software aiming to provide the school education community with a digital workspace solution (ENT) allowing, among other things, access to the students' agenda, to a messaging service, to discussion forums and other services (canteen menus, extracurricular services, etc.). It is currently used in Paris in high schools, colleges and 275 elementary school via Paris Classe Numérique.Based on the Lilie open source solution initiated by the Île-de-France region in 2009 (see the presentation of the project in 2010) and renamed Open ENT when other local authorities joined the community, the project is a real success in terms of adoption. This is all the more notable as previous similar initiatives never managed to gain a lasting foothold, despite all the incentives to do so. Today, OpenENT NG can be used, adapted and redistributed freely and at no cost other than the cost of ordered modifications or associated services, with the only condition being that the modifications are returned on the same terms.
Very quickly, other local authorities, like the city of Paris, considering that digital education is a fundamental issue and that ENT is a central aspect of it, wanted to reuse and distribute Open ENT in their own schools, by financing complementary work carried out by different integrators. These local authorities, being sensitive to the possibilities offered by an open approach and mutualization, saw Open Source as a vector of optimization of their means and expenses.
Strengthening its strategic vision under the impetus of the Picardie region, Open ENT became Open ENT NG in 2014 when the tool was technically overhauled to modernize it and make it more modular. From this date, a relatively fluid dialogue was established between the user communities to boost the development of the tool through strategic investments.
Governance and project structuring
Although the community dimension was present from the very beginning of the project's open source design, there was no common governance capable of ensuring real collective support. Faced with the fact that efforts were being divided - each integrator was seeking to pool resources for its own benefit, without sharing and coordinating with its competitors - and the need to remedy this, the Île-de-France Region initiated a community structuring effort in 2013, alongside the other local authorities using the system, in order to define and implement common governance. This effort led to the creation of the Open ENT prefiguration association in November 2014 with the aim of fostering the creation, evolution, promotion and support of the OpenENT software solution by combining the benefits derived from the cohabitation of a community of users and a grouping of manufacturers.This structure was intended to ensure compliance with the rules for contributions to OpenENT - such as the systematic publication of contributions on a common forge - in order to support and coordinate the actions of administrations and local authorities. Designed to be deliberately transitory in order to give its members the time to define an appropriate governance, it was not mobilized in the end. Indeed, the coordination of the community of user members seems to have been done without really relying on the legal structure: on the one hand, because of the primary characteristic of Open Source, which is to give such primary freedom to end users who master a very specific common domain, and on the other hand, because of the priority that was given to the technical evolution of the project to the detriment of its governance.
Today, there is sufficient dialogue among communities to ensure development and collaboration, particularly because of the central "ensembler" role taken on by Open Digital Education, the company that develops the new OpenENT NG technical core. Nevertheless, the growing adoption of the project due to its open source nature reinforces the importance of supporting the collective interest through a functional structure that can provide some of the tasks that members do not provide individually. This is to increase the community and the number of effective contributors to the project (to date, it is still relatively complex for an end user to contribute directly, but several companies have integrated or developed extensions).
Project license (management of contributors' rights)
Inheriting the legal framework of Lilie, Open ENT is distributed under a dual license, the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 and CeCILL-C 1.0, which have been "modified" for the needs of the project. The use of these two licenses is explained by the initial will to combine the benefit of a modular framework (allowing the development of modules independently of the software core and subject to their own licenses), which is constraining by the use of the application in Saas mode (Software as a Service - when the software is accessed remotely, usually by a browser or mobile) and compatible with French law (the CeCILL-C license having been written for this sole purpose).In addition to the fact that the solution meets a real need with an ergonomic design that makes it easy to use, its success is based on a combination of factors: strong political support, a modular architecture, a community that has built up around the project and continues to develop it, and the important place given to economic players who continue to be involved in the solution alongside local authorities.
Mutualization of developments
Today, after the initial investment made by several local authorities (most notably the Île-de-France region), which enabled the development of the basic foundation, each local authority invests financially in the development of modules that are then shared.Particular attention is paid to ensuring that requests are fairly uniform from one community to another so that the potential for pooling is high. Thus, local authorities generally agree to co-finance the development of a module and work together to optimize orders to their suppliers. Similarly, public actors remain particularly vigilant to ensure that the integrator and the project leader play the game of mutualization. Among the lessons that can be learned from Open ENT, it is essential that integrators understand and effectively contribute to the open source development of the project. Similarly, when the role of "publisher" is assumed by an economic player (and not via a community structure created for this purpose), it is essential that it understands the philosophy and challenges of Open Source, and plays the game despite the existence of competition.
Références :
Contract Preparation and Procurement (CPP) and MEP
Developed in 2007, the Elaboration et Passation des Marchés (EPM ) software was designed as part of the modernization of the City of Paris' information system in order to manage the numerous public contracts of the community. Initially released in Open Source (under the CeCILL 2.0 license) in order to share this solution with other French and foreign local authorities, this project has been the subject of a major investment by the City, which has invested a great deal of business engineering and legal know-how.A few other major local authorities (such as Marseille) have sought to benefit from this solution and thus contribute to its adoption. However, difficulties in setting up open source governance of the product, shared among local authorities and adapted to the challenges of each, concomitant with the State's adoption of the solution, modified the organization and management of the roadmap. Thus, the project's economic model, which combined a pooling of needs between local authorities and an investment by the initial publisher, could not materialize for two main reasons: insufficient pooling within the framework of the project (preventing the community from growing) and insufficiently defined governance.
Today, a new version of the project, MPE, has been developed with GIP Maximilien on the basis of EPM business engineering. Pragmatically, Paris is going to join this grouping, but it will require a guarantee that it will be able to leave with another company at the end of the contract, if necessary.
With hindsight, the City probably did not anticipate sufficiently when building EPM, the desire to pool the project in the long term, since the development was only thought out according to its own needs, whereas the elaboration and awarding of contracts involve particularities according to the local authorities - and Paris is really a special case in terms of volume and skills. The product has therefore been used by the State, which has had it adapted to its needs, and by other local authorities, which have nevertheless found it to be oversized and have gradually moved away from it. The lesson to be learned from this project is that pooling and collaboration must be considered as early as possible in the project, otherwise it will be particularly complex to implement after the fact: from a legal (collaboration framework) and technical (in particular by choosing a modular architecture) point of view.
Référence :
Botalista
The information systems at the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques (CJB) of the City of Geneva have developed in recent years a "Système d'information botanique de Genève" (SIBG) in order to emancipate themselves from unsuitable "proprietary" technologies (belonging to a single editor who freely decides on pricing conditions, technological developments, etc.) and to propose an Open Source alternative called Botalista based exclusively on free software and the CJB's own knowledge and tools.Initiated by Geneva, the project has always been announced as an Open Source project open to other botanical gardens. In fact, on October 30, 2019, the city of Geneva validated the availability of the Botalista software in Open Source under a GNU GPL-type license, the creation of the Botalista association as well as the membership of the city of Geneva to the said association. Other stakeholders include the Botanical Garden of the City of Paris - consisting of four gardens: the Arboretum of the Ecole du Breuil (Bois de Vincennes), the Parc Floral de Paris (Bois de Vincennes), the Parc de Bagatelle (Bois de Boulogne), the Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil (Bois de Boulogne) -, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux and the Botanical Garden of Nancy in France, as well as the Botanical Gardens of Berne, Lausanne and Neuchâtel in Switzerland
The city of Paris joined the community after exchanges between botanical gardeners of the two cities and in exchange for the promise of an open source transition of the entire project. Today, the solution is used in 10 to 15 gardens of the city. The main difficulty encountered to date concerns the monitoring of the sharing of the open source code by the service provider. For this reason, a dedicated association has been created at the initiative of Geneva, in order to centralize development requests and their follow-up until the code is shared. The memberships to the association will allow to finance a full time equivalent (FTE) to do this management and follow-up work. The association is useful for the management of the project, but also to ensure its sustainability.
As Paris is not at the origin of the project or even of the community, and as the governance is not perfectly finalized, it is more difficult for it to intervene directly. Nevertheless, concerning the evolution of the economic model, opinions diverge on the dual licensing policy with a version for community members and one for companies.
Références :
Beyond the software, the project is currently working on the implementation of a " Botalista DataShare Center " powered by web services installed on each instance of Botalista and allowing people in the Botalista community to share processed information (such as people's names, Latin species names, bibliographic references, species descriptions, etc.), thus reducing data entry effort and disparity. Connectivity and information sharing with other types of databases will also be possible, based on international standards for the transfer and exchange of biodiversity-related information. If the links are not clearly expressed, such an initiative could necessarily be linked to the botanical reference network Tela Botanica.
Références :
2 - Lutetia, a project of global scope
LutèceRéférences :
is a free and open source portal engine that allows to quickly create a dynamic web site or application. Developed by the Direction des Systèmes et Technologies de l'Information (DSTI) since 2001, it is today the base on which most of the new digital services set up by the city of Paris are based. It has been registered on Adullact since 2005, has its own website since 2007 and joined the code base of the OW2 association in September 2014 as part of the OW2 "OSS in Big Cities" initiative.History and current situation
The choice of Open Source in Paris has been supported politically since 2001. Nevertheless, a pragmatic posture has been maintained and each time a project is launched, an objective examination is made of the criteria of competitiveness, long-term cost, shared sovereignty, transparency, etc. It is also important to measure the effort required when there are off-the-shelf solutions. There can be no dogmatism in this area: the context and business needs are different each time and lead the City of Paris to ask the right questions.It is now clear that, without the Lutece solution, the development of dozens of digital services for the user, coherent and adapted to the specificities of the City, would have been much more expensive and more difficult to implement, not to mention the complex management of multiple relationships between different editors and integrators.The Lutèce project was initiated in 2001 under Bertrand Delanoë's first term of office in order to provide the 20 borough councils of Paris with a digital content management tool. Today, it is very politically supported and allows to offer a global vision of the digital services offered by the city. Such a maintenance required that the solution be regularly compared to competing proprietary solutions (with very high costs, which facilitated the choice of Open Source) and that the relevance of the technical choices with regard to the needs of the City be demonstrated (for example, the City Hall was able to organize a hackathon around 3 Open Source solutions, leading to the choice of Lutèce). The tool being used as a base for the design of various and varied sites, it was chosen to associate it with the permissive BSD license.
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Development of the uses of the City of Paris
This will to establish Open Source as the default choice within the City Hall also allows, thanks to the reuse it favors, to quickly develop and deploy services, as it was the case with the free transportation or the participative budget. Such large-scale projects take only 6 months to be ready.More than 100 services have been developed in the last 5 years, with an impressive catalog of uses, some of them shared with other communities. It is also important to note a global approach in the conception of Lutetia tools aiming at facilitating the use of each one by harmonizing the user experience as much as possible. These developments are carried out internally, benefiting nevertheless from a third-party application maintenance provided by large integrators for the management of the roadmap and the realization of certain new projects (via framework agreements). Although the development of these open source solutions can be carried out internally by the City of Paris' IT department, which has only 10 developers, this is an option that few local authorities in France have.As a result, development is often the subject of a public procurement contract - the open source nature of the solution makes it possible to open up a contract while systematically imposing the desired solution. As a result, the lack of in-house expertise is not an obstacle to the development of new open source solutions, or to the contribution of existing solutions, by the local authority.
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Difficulties to mutualize Lutetia at the national level
Today, and although the only possibilities of reusing the Open Source code internally are a sufficient valorization, the City of Paris seeks to share its developments with other French and international cities, on the model of Barcelona with Decidim. If Lutetia is a success at the level of the City of Paris, it has been difficult to share the developments outside the City of Paris, even if the emphasis is really put on this component only since 2018, without a dedicated communication budget. For now, the spin-off is mostly done according to an opportunity strategy: by a strong presence of the Lutetia team at conferences to promote the solution and by the realization of MOOCs, presentations, etc. Since 2019, the Bloomberg Foundation helps to communicate around the project. The choice in 2019 of Lutetia by Lyon for its digital services and for a business management software could nevertheless start a virtuous reverse dynamic. More recently, a municipality in the inner suburbs of Paris chose DansMaRue for its reporting tool and the appointment scheduling software was deployed in a hospital in Burgundy Franche-Comté during the health crisis in record time.Mutualization remains the main source of value for Open Source projects developed or supported by administrations. In itself for Paris, this is not a problem for the future of the project, the needs of the municipality are such that the inner sourcing is sufficient to amortize the cost of the developments of Lutetia, but it represents a loss of opportunity for mutualization on an even larger scale. Thus, some nearby projects, such as RDV Solidarités or the new multi-local authority software developed byADULLACT (see the projects on the Comptoir du Libre), are examples of initiatives similar in spirit with which there is still little convergence.
Several obstacles to this pooling have been identified: the lack of political support for open source; the "risk-taking" that open source could represent for certain IT departments that prefer to buy "off-the-shelf software"; and finally, the lack of resources allocated to these pooling issues. On the other hand, Paris has not hesitated to reuse modules developed by Lyon, such as for the ENT, Botalista and MPE software.
International pooling
The international mutualization of Lutetia is also well underway.It is this logic of mediatization of Lutetia which also presided over the setting up of a partnership withJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore, following a hackathon organized by the University which allowed the development of a module on Lutetia for NGOs helping the homeless and in which the Paris developers had participated.
This was then concretized by a larger implementation of Lutetia by the University within the city at the service of an NGO (the American municipal model being very different from the one we know, a lot of missions assimilated to public services are carried out by NGOs or private companies). Students, as part of their final year project, have already set up a Lutetia website with a number of plug-ins to facilitate the users' procedures. In 2020, the contribution process has been simplified so that students at the beginning of their studies can also participate, in order to be able to spread it to other communities similar to the NGO currently using it. A partnership has been established with the University of Baltimore (for the development of a plug-in). A project to propose Lutece as a development platform in the framework of the "Semesters of Code" organized by the institution is currently being studied.
In 2020, the City of Budapest chose to develop its participatory budget site with Lutece and was able to achieve this in a few months.
The city of Paris has the ambition to co-construct, with the communities which wish it, a legal model which would make it possible to carry in common the Lutetia roadmap with the interested economic actors.---
The Digital Society Lab proposes to take a critical look at the ethical and social challenges of digital technology. In this context, the firm Inno³ is producing a series of resources for public actors wishing to mobilize the potential of the digital commons in their strategy. Throughout the year, these articles decipher the legal and economic challenges of the digital commons.Sources
- 1. https://www.magazine-decideurs.com
- 2. https://www.cio-online.com/
- 3. LAW No. 2016-1321 of October 7, 2016 for a Digital Republic
- 4. "State Open Source Software Contribution Policy".
- 5. list of licenses authorized by the law for a digital Republic
- 6. article D.323-2-1 of the code of relations between the public and the administration (CRPA)
- 7. the site
- 8. Public Money, Public Code
- 9. Free Software Foundation Europe
- 10. Tela Botanica
- 11. ODbL (1.0)
- 12. "OW2 OSS in Big Cities
- 13. ADULLACT
- 14. BSD
- 15. wikipedia
- 16. Decision of the Council of State CE n°350431 of September 30, 2011
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