freedom

A Call to Open Budgets, Join us to shape an equitable future

Government decisions about how public money is raised, allocated and spent are moral choices – reflecting a nation’s values and priorities. A nation’s budget determines what services are available and to whom – including schools for children, medicine for the sick and support for the unemployed. To assure that public budgets, and the use of … Read more

Fiscal Transparency in Times of Emergency Response: Reflections for Covid-19

The health emergency we are experiencing at the beginning of 2020 is certainly not the first or last one the world will see. Yet, Covid-19 pushes us to reflect on the preparedness of our fiscal transparency instruments to account for public finance adjustments, as well as to provide useful information in a timely manner—to both … Read more

COVID-19 Hackathons: Only Free Software creates global solutions

Currently we see a lot of hackathons to find tools that help tackle the crisis of pandemic COVID-19. More and more governments and administrations are hosting or funding such hackathons. To make sure that the results of these hackathons can be used globally and adapted locally – that the software can be used, studied, shared … Read more

EUvsVirus Hackathon to develop innovative solutions

To complement hackathons taking place at global and member state level, the European Commission – in close collaboration with EU member states – will host a pan-European hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners and buyers across Europe to develop innovative solutions to coronavirus. The #EUvsVirus Hackathon will take place on 24, 25 and 26 … Read more

Designing AI tools to benefit workers

by Florian Butollo on 8th April 2020 @flobutTwitterFacebookLinkedin This series is a partnership with the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society Continuing our series on artificial intelligence, AI can augment human work—if workers’ representatives have a voice in implementing it. The discourse on artificial intelligence and work is shaped by conflicting narratives. Disempowering notions about mass … Read more

Tackling the Beast: Using GNU Health to help the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction The world is facing one of the the biggest health, economic and social crisis. A minuscule, 50-nanometer in diameter structure is putting the most powerful world economies on their knees, and hundred of thousands are tragically succumbing to COVID-19. This article is an invitation to governments to embrace GNU Health and Libre Software for … Read more

The Open Source Policy Meeting 2020

This year’s pre-FOSDEM EU policy meeting on 31 January 2020 was a water-shed moment for OpenForum Europe. It’s an annual affair, but this year, we almost tripled the number of attendees who gathered to exchange ideas on the role of Open Source in accelerating Europe’s digital transformation. Representatives ranged from individual developers, SMEs and policy … Read more

Open Source Software Country Intelligence

The open source software country intelligence aims to provide insights on all EU Member States in the domain of open source software policies and initiatives. The country intelligence reports and their respective factsheets are published as part of the Open Source Observatory (OSOR) project of the ISA² Programme.  The country intelligence will be presented in two formats: a … Read more