Registered users of the OSOR will have limited access to the site between this Friday, 2 December at 14:00 and next week Friday, 9 December, 14:00. Between those dates the OSOR web site will be migrated to its new location at Joinup. To ensure data integrity, login will be disabled to avoid modification of data during the migration.

The regional administration of the Italian island of Sicily is to consider a law nudging public administrations to use of free and open source software. The proposal, by Massimo Ferrara, a member of the Democratic Party, might also help prevent the break-up of a school on the island, the Instituto Majorana, involved in producing instruction videos on this type of software.

A public sector organisation should only refer to a software or file format standard if the standard has been implemented in a sustainable open source software implementation. Without such implementation there is significant risk for the organisation, recommends Björn Lundell after a review of public administration's policies. Lundell is a researcher at the University of Skövde in Sweden.

Public administrations that want to move to vendor independent open source applications need to put a lot of effort in communication, recommends Massimo Carnevali, until recently the IT manager of the municipality of Bologna in Italy. "Communicate to everybody, from users to management. Explaining where users can find help could be more important than actually providing it."

The city council of Valmiera in Latvia is saving both energy and money by migrating its physical servers to virtual servers using open source virtualisation tools, says Kaspars Urbāns, head of the city's IT department. "You will be pleasantly surprised by the electricity bill. With the amount Valmiera saves this way, it could buy a new server for the cluster every six months."

The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to publish more of its software using open source licences. It is considering to use a source code tracking system to help untangle code that can be made available as open source and programs that, for whatever reason, can not.

European universities and employment agencies are increasingly making use of a Europass Curriculum Vitae, an open standard for creating and managing résumés (CVs). Also increasingly popular is the European Union's web service to create such CVs: this year the service is used more than a hundred thousand times, according to the European Centre for Vocational Training (Cedefop) based in Thessaloniki, Greece.

The French government just published a request for ICT service providers to offer support including Debian and Centos based Linux systems, Le Monde Informatique reports. The three-year contract is worth two million euro and involves 16 of the country's 22 ministries and the Court of Audit.

Software that combines geographic information systems (GIS) with zoning regulations and other country wide sources of information on land use, and offered online as an interactive map, was made available as open source software by the Dutch ministry of the Interior last week. The tool, titled Geozet, is hosted on the OSOR Forge since 1 November.

The Coordination Team for the Flemish e-Government (Corve) has began building a an open source system to electronically process building permits, from application to approval. The system can be used by any Flemish public administration, but will be implemented first by the city of Antwerp and a handful of other Flemish municipalities.

Tools to help public administrations procure open source were published by the UK government yesterday. The toolkit is part of the cabinet's ICT strategy to "create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions".

Advocates of free and open source in public administrations are getting worried about developments in the autonomous regions of Extremadura and Andalusia. They fret that an upcoming feasability study on a proprietary cloud-based office suite and a proprietary database server will spell the end of the open source initiatives by the Extremadura regional government.

GisContent, a new community plug-in developed by CRS4, Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia for the open source web platform jAPS 2.0 Entando was released and is available to download on sourceforge.net.

The desktop IT systems of many public administrations in Belgium are 'completely locked-in by one proprietary office suite', public IT administrators said at a conference on open source, which took place in the city of Schoten on 18 October.

Osepa, a project on open source in public administrations funded in part by the European Regional Development Fund, is calling on public administrations to help with their survey. "The results of this survey will help the Osepa consortium to understand the key factors relating to the use of free and open source software, and influence its future use by public administrations."

A three-year project by the Turkish government to get get all schools in the country connected to the Internet, provide students with computer hardware and to jump-start e-learning, could be based on mostly open source software, according to a source close to the project.

The administration of the Hungarian city of Miskolc is moving to a desktop system based on open source, in order to become less dependent on a single proprietary IT vendor and to reduce costs for its desktop PCs. Already 60 percent of the civil servants use Open Office and Libre Office, two closely related open source suites of office tools.

The European Commission wants to develop guidelines to help all public bodies when procuring ICT products and services. It is asking IT companies and those in public administrations involved in IT procurement for input, using two surveys.

Portugal's Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA) is asking citizens to comment on several open standards, including document formats PDF, ODF, interoperability standards, standards for geographic information systems and standards for electronic invoicing. Comments are welcome until the end of this month.

The Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) has recently announced that Open e-PRIOR, the open-source eProcurement platform, will soon include a web portal for eInvoicing allowing Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and individuals to submit electronic invoices to their customers who have already installed Open e-PRIOR.