European Commission Pushes e-Government Openness

The European Commission last week released the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), intended to give governments across Europe guidelines for making public services interoperable.

Separately the Commission released an action plan aimed at improving e-government services, with the aim of seeing 80 percent of businesses using these services by 2015.

Open source and open standards

The European Interoperability Framework (PDF) is designed to complement and tie together the various National Interoperability Frameworks at a European level, the Commission said.

While the document recognises the importance of open source software and open standards, some in the open source industry said the EIF doesn’t go far enough due to the influence of proprietary software companies.

The Commission said the framework is designed to help get around “e-barriers”, which mean that EU citizens are currently often obliged to contact or travel to public administrations abroad in order to deliver or collect information or documents they need to work, study or travel within the EU.

“In order to overcome these constraints, public administrations should be able to exchange the necessary information and cooperate to deliver public services across borders,” the Commission said in a statement. “That requires ensuring interoperability among public administrations.”

The Commission said the Internet has made progress on technical interoperability, so that governments can begin to work on areas such as legal, organisational and semantic interoperability.

“The European Interoperability Framework paves the way for public administrations in the EU to use a common approach by adopting guiding principles to allow genuine collaboration between public administrations, while modernising and rationalising their systems to increase in a cost-efficient way their capability to provide high-quality public services,” the Commission stated.

Preference for open specifications

The framework specifically calls on European governments to “prefer open specifications” as a way of improving interoperability, and establishes general principles such as “openness” and “reusability” to help guide governments in the development of custom-made systems.

OpenForum Europe, whose members include Google, Oracle and open source software vendor Red Hat, said the focus on open technical standards should improve competition.

“The EIF will help public authorities escape from the sort of technology lock-in into one single vendor that until now has been the norm across Europe,” said Openforum Europe chief executive Graham Taylor, in a statement.

However, Red Hat criticised the Commission for not going far enough in its definition of what makes a specification “open”.

Mark Bohannon, Red Hat’s vice president of corporate affairs and global public policy, argued the definition had been watered down by “heavy lobbying by vested proprietary technology interests”.

Bohannon pointed out that the Commission recommends intellectual property rights in “open” specifications to be licensed on either royalty-free or Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. However, in a definition dating from 2004 the Commission required royalty-free terms.

“Given this latest announcement in EU policy, the open source and open standards community will have to be vigilant to ensure that this policy is implemented in a meaningful way and achieves its true goal: interoperability, vendor choice, portability, collaborative innovation and competition in providing products and services,” Bohannon stated.

European eGovernment Action Plan

The Commission has also launched the European eGovernment Action Plan, which aims to give governments guidelines for improving e-government services.

The action plan aims to ensure key public services are available online so that businesspeople can set up and run businesses from anywhere in the EU, regardless of their country of origin.

The initiative aims to implement a once-only secure registration of data with authorities and an EU-wide national electronic company identity (eID), making cross-border business procedures easier to manage.

The programme aims to make data available for re-use by third parties to stimulate the development of new public services and applications.