The Avoinkoodi.fi website saves the government’s and developers’ time and money
The digital business consulting company Solita has established the Avoinkoodi.fi website, which, for the first time, gathers together all of Finland’s public administration IT projects for which the source code has been openly published on the internet. The service provides information on the open source projects, the source codes and their owners.
Finland’s public administration has actively come out in support of open interfaces and open data in its IT projects. Information on the published open source projects has not previously been available under a single service, from which software developers can easily find the projects and make use of them. Solita wanted to provide a solution for this problem and promote the use of open source codes in public administration projects. All projects taking advantage of an open source code can now be reported to the Avoinkoodi.fi website, either though the version management software GitHub or via email.
“The Avoinkoodi.fi website aims to facilitate system implementation projects and planning. This is also about transparency in the use of public funds. In the public sector’s ICT projects implemented with an open source code, the property bought with the taxpayers’ money is in shared use,” says Timo Honko, Solita’s Vice President in charge of business systems and the public sector.
According to Honko, Finland is a pioneering country in open source codes. Finland is the source of many successful open source stories, such as the MySQL database, Linux operating system and Git version management.
“While the use of open source code has many benefits, the achievement of its full benefit requires us to share knowledge and learn from past projects. It is great that the Avoinkoodi.fi service makes all this information available to all parties,” says Aleksi Kopponen, Special Advisor of Digitisation at Public Sector ICT in the Ministry of Finance.
Avoinkoodi.fi gathers information in support of developers
The use of an open source code saves both time and money, that of public officials and software developers alike. It also speeds up the creation of innovations and advances open competition, given that supplier traps between customers and IT suppliers do not arise. Open source codes are often of a high quality and well tested, and do not involve licences subject to a charge. Solita recommends that its customers use an open source code whenever there are no special reasons, due to the competition, for example, to operate differently.
“While there are a number of different lists and web pages of companies’ open source projects, information about the public sector’s open source projects has so far been scattered and unavailable through Google searches, for example. With our Avoinkoodi.fi site, we want to help the day-to-day life of software developers and support the use of open codes,” says Software Architect Antti Virtanen of Solita.
The website will later be published in English, too, since it is expected to arouse interest in the officials and software developers of other countries. Estonia, for instance, lacks an equivalent listing, even though it, too, has taken a strong stand in favour of open source codes. The service is meant to serve both information searches and sharing, and the project list’s data is easily embeddable to some other environment, due to which it can effortlessly be displayed on another site as well.
Get to know the Avoinkoodi.fi site.
Further information:
Timo Honko, Vice President, Solita, tel. +358 40 5454 878, [email protected]
Aleksi Kopponen, Special Advisor of Digitisation at Public Sector ICT in the Ministry of Finance, Finland, tel. +358 29 553 0145, [email protected]
Antti Virtanen, Software Architect, Solita, tel. +358 44 507 0050, [email protected]
Solita
