On February 7th, 2008 ARC Fund organized a seminar on ‘Facilitating Innovations in Municipalities through ICTs’. The event was held at the Sheraton Sofia Hotel Balkan. The agenda covered topics such as strategic planning of ICTs at local level, requirements engineering, public procurement for open source solutions (OSS) and others. A special focus was given to the discussions on the benefits and challenges of the implementation of Free/Libre and Open Source Software in local administrations.
Mr. Todor Yalamov of ARC Fund pointed out in his presentation that often decisions on local level regarding IT infrastructure, software and services are made on ad hoc basis, without the necessary long term planning and are influenced by the central government. Municipalities are often unable to give an estimate on their IT spending. Mr. Yalamov stressed the need of public-private partnerships for IT projects at municipal level. Tools for benchmarking of municipal MIS and websites (front office of the e-government) are also prerequisites for increasing the quality of offered services. Several guidilines for ICT implementation in municipalities are under development through support from LGI/Open Society Instituute.
Mr. Jonas Oberg from Free Software Foundation Europe presented the experience of Sweden in procurement of Free software. Mr. Oberg highlighted the main advantages of FOSS (avoiding lock-in, encouraging competition between vendors, facilitating inclusion and digital solidarity) and the main criteria for evaluating bids involving software in general. He stated that procurement policy should cover both free and proprietary software, but FOSS solutions should be treated preferentially with a special emphasis on Open standards.
Mr. Vladislav Iankov from Cisco Systems delivered a presentation on ‘Digital municipality – concepts, elements and applications’. He covered topics such as advantages and opportunities of well built IT infrastructure, the public-private partnership model in developing such infrastructures, regulatory issues, digital divide.
After the lectures, the participants in the seminar discussed their experiences regarding strategic management of IT (and more precisely the lack of it), implementation of FOSS and proprietary software, resistance to change and other obstacles before deploying ICTs effectively at municipal level.
Agenda (in Bulgarian)
Presentation of Mr. Todor Yalamov
Presentation of Mr. Jonas Oberg
Presentation of Mr. Vladislav Iankov
Presentation of Mr. Vesselin Akivanov
Video from the presentation of Mr. Oberg is available in the online edition of Capital weekly
Article about the discussion on the website of Saga Technology
