European Software Freedom Policy Meeting 29 January 2016, Brussels

1. ● OSS Directory: www.ossdirectory.com
● Swiss OSS Portal: www.opensource.ch
● OSS Market: www.ossmarket.ch
● CH OSS Awards: www.ossawards.ch
● Open Cloud Day: www.opencloudday.ch
● Open Education: www.ossanschulen.ch
● Open Manufacturing / Open Hardware
Swiss Open Systems
User Group
www.ch-open.ch
Largest Swiss association
promoting open source and
open standards.
● Founded 2009 by /ch/open
● One out of two nonpartisan ICT lobbying groups
● 7 core team members from national parliament
● 44 members from the national parliament
● 42 policy recommendations submitted
● Dinners and open hearings about specific topics:
e-voting, public open source procurement, open
government data, net neutrality etc.
● Funded by 8 open source providers
Parliamentarian
Group for Digital
Sustainability
www.parldigi.ch
Political lobbying group for
open source, open
standards, open data etc.
● Founded 2014 with grant money from /ch/open
● Academic research, education, and consulting on
digital sustainability, OSS, open data, open
government, and ICT procurement, e.g.:
● CAS course and research of ICT contracts
and vendor dependencies
● student lectures on OSS research and open
data programming with open source tools
● consulting for governments on OSS strategies,
alternatives to proprietary software etc.
Research Center for
Digital Sustainability
www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.unibe.ch
Academic hub at the Institute
of Information Systems at
University of Bern
European Software Freedom Policy Meeting - 29 January 2016, Brussels
Dr. Matthias Stürmer, matthias.stuermer@ch-open.ch, +41 76 368 81 65

2. Public policy priorities
1. Migration on OSS
How can governments and firms switch from Microsoft et al. to OSS?
→ City of Bern, Federal Administration etc.
2. Procurement of ICT
Goal of sustainable procurement by decreasing vendor dependencies
when procuring open source software (problem of non-bid contracts).
→ Working group of public institutions has compiled OSS procurement
checklist in German and translated it to English and French recently.
3. Release of OSS
Political and legal issues when Swiss Federal Court published source
code of OpenJustitia, a court decision management system.
→ Legal expert report about situation in Switzerland coming soon
4. Crowd-funding of large OSS development activities
Several public institutions are interested in funding specific OSS
products, e.g. Scribus, QGIS and LibreOffice
European Software Freedom Policy Meeting - 29 January 2016, Brussels
Dr. Matthias Stürmer, matthias.stuermer@ch-open.ch, +41 76 368 81 65