Summary

This is a project by the Internet Society of Bulgaria (ISOC Bulgaria) in conjunction with other partners to improve the local authorities-people interaction in the south-eastern part of Europe (the Balkans) by the deployment of e-government services. It is hoped that with better and easier access to the authorities in the local municipalities, there will be more transparency and the people are encouraged to participate more in local affairs, thereby strengthening the democratic process in the region.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is chosen as the vehicle to implement the project as the local municipalities in the region can ill-afford to pay for commercial proprietary software. Also with FOSS, an environment can be created whereby local resources are utilized to develop and support the applications benefiting the local economy. Popular FOSS software such as GNU/Linux operating system, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox and GIMP that have been localized are used for the users' desktops while the e-government web portal makes use of customized web applications running under the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) environment.

The initiative may be considered as a pilot project to lay down the groundwork for further and wider implementation of FOSS at other levels, both in public administration (including the central and regional administrations) and in businesses. The project is also unique in the sense that it uses the public-private partnership model to benefit the local economies and preserve/create local skills and capacities as the project will provide business and employment opportunities in the participating municipalities. The direct impact of the project will be better partnerships and cooperation between local administrations and the local private sector and better interaction between local administrations with their citizens. Indirect benefits will be better information and communications technology (ICT) and Internet awareness among the local people as well as the forging of FOSS skills and capacity building for the skilled workers.

The biggest challenge in the project was that many of the municipal employees had little or no computer literacy and so they had to be trained starting with the very basic elements of operating a computer and using an application.

 
Background of Organization

The Internet Society of Bulgaria (ISOC Bulgaria) is the Bulgarian chapter of the Internet Society . ISOC Bulgaria is an independent, non-profit organization that directs its efforts to develop the information society in Bulgaria and promote the rapid adoption of the Internet. It is a primary source of reliable information on the development of information technology in Bulgaria and it is actively represented in government and national efforts pertaining to ICT and the Internet. ISOC Bulgaria is also active in FOSS projects.

Objectives of Project

The primary objective of the project is to utilize FOSS for e-government applications at the municipal level in the south-eastern region of Europe (municipalities from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Turkey participated in this initiative). It is hoped that with this initiative the people in this region can, through ICT and the Internet, participate more in local affairs, thereby strengthening the democratic process, as well as have more employment opportunities in the ICT sector resulting in the political, social and economical empowerment of the local communities. Through this project, awareness of the benefits of FOSS will also be highlighted.

The primary target group comprises the authorities in the municipalities of south-eastern Europe, in particular, the Balkans region, that have limited budgets to purchase commercial software. A second target group is the citizens of the region who will be able to communicate more effectively and economically with the municipal authorities through the use of these e-government services and applications.

The key partners to ISOC Bulgaria for the project are:

• The Government of the Republic of Bulgaria (as represented by the local authorities in the Municipalities of Kardjali, Vratza, Mezdra, Peshtera, Belovo, Dryanovo, Kostenetz).
• 'Interspace' Media and Art Centre, the main consultant under the FOSS Project.
• UNDP Bulgaria, which provided overall support during the implementation of the project, including management issues.
• UNDP New York, which funded the project under the “Capacity development through knowledge sharing and development: Free/open source software for developing countries” initiative.
• United Nations Office for Project Services, an implementing partner.

Other partners include United Nations Development Programme in Macedonia and Kosovo, the Bulgarian Linux community and the Internet Societies in the participating European countries. These organizations provided support for various activities under the project.

FOSS Application

Description

The primary FOSS applications used in the project are divided in two major groups:

• existing available FOSS applications
• new applications for the e-government portal

The main applications in the first group are: GNU/Linux operating system, OpenOffice.org suite of office applications, Mozilla Firefox web browser and the GIMP graphics software. The GNU/Linux system used is a Bulgarian distribution (based on the Debian distribution), named Interspace Linux Distribution (ISLD). The ISLD system is a localized system that has been successfully used in another project in which it was installed and supported in more than 60 Bulgarian NGOs. It is designed especially for end users who are migrating over from other operating systems (MS-Windows mainly) and who need to be able to quickly start working effectively with a new system. The GNOME desktop of this distribution has been fully localized for the Bulgarian language and almost fully localized for the Albanian, Macedonian and Turkish languages. It is thus very suitable for use in the region where the project is implemented.

The second group of applications come under the e-government web portal services and applications. These are developed to provide the interactive communication between the government and the citizens. The web services applications are developed to operate on the LAMP stack of GNU/Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and the PHP scripting language.

Choice of FOSS

In the Balkans region, the e-government solutions developed by the central administration are not applicable in most of the cases at the municipal level. In addition, the municipalities in the Balkans region do not have the funds to buy the latest computer hardware or pay for commercial proprietary software, hence FOSS is a natural choice for the project as it can be deployed on older computers and is available without licensing fees. The use of FOSS provides an opportunity to demonstrate that local e-government initiatives can be more efficient and cost less if FOSS is used instead of proprietary software. Furthermore, the FOSS environment encourages the training and usage of local experts to support the project, thereby contributing towards enhancing the skills of the people.

For the commonly used desktop applications, FOSS is chosen as localized versions for the various states in the region exist. Another advantage of using FOSS is that it is very easy to have several localized versions of the desktop co-existing in the same installation.

And last, but not least, the Balkan countries have a high incidence of unlicensed software usage and using FOSS will help reduce this problem.

Development and Implementation

All of the applications used, both existing and newly developed ones, had to be localized. This is a requirement as most of the countries participating in the project require localized products for use in their Public Administrations. The design of the e-government portal and applications follow the general guiding principle that they are meant to be deployed in many types of different municipalities and so they should be open and flexible enough for easy customization to suit the needs of an individual municipality. To achieve this, the development of the web services portal complies with certain specifications that include:

• platform independence
• multilingual support
• modular in structure and easily extensible
• easy installation and easy to transfer to another site
• use of FOSS only
• database used should be either MySQL or PostgreSQL
• forms used for the web applications have to be identical to the paper versions

The web services applications were developed using PHP and they were made available on the Internet by Apache web servers running on GNU/Linux operating systems. Data was stored in MySQL databases.

The ISLD Linux distribution implemented for the users contains only the necessary packages for simple usage; in particular there were no multimedia and games packages installed as these were considered irrelevant to the needs of the municipality. This also resulted in less demanding hardware requirements making it possible to use older computers. This ISLD distribution is suitable for the needs of the project as it has already been tested for use in over 60 NGOs, including ISOC Bulgaria. Local experts are available to support it and package repositories are available too.

Specific hardware was not bought or installed during the project, because the main goal was to use already existing infrastructure and build over it to demonstrate the advantages and flexibility of FOSS solutions.

Deployment

The deployment at most of the participating municipalities followed the main steps below:

• Linux was installed for desktop usage, as dual boot, on users' computers that were not running any specific applications that needed to work in an MS-Windows environment; the set-up for these Linux computers was such that they were able to connect to an MS-Windows network on the local area network (LAN).
• OpenOffice.org was installed on every workstation. Mozilla Firefox was installed on every workstation with connection to the LAN and/or Internet. GIMP was installed on every workstation that had the minimum hardware requirements.
• The web services portal was installed on a web server, this can be either one that belonged to the municipality or the server belonging to ISOC Bulgaria.

In order to ensure the usage of the Linux-based PCs, special training was provided to the users in which the benefits of using FOSS and Linux were highlighted.

The project was deployed in nine municipalities from the Balkans region – Kardjali, Vratza, Mezdra, Peshtera, Belovo, Dryanovo and Kostenetc (in Bulgaria); Gevgelija (in Macedonia); and Klina (in Kosovo). OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox were installed on 200 workstations and these represented between 50 to 100 percent of the workstations in each of the municipality that took part in the project. Linux was installed on 45 client workstations, representing between 16 to 25 percent of the workstations in each municipality (depending on its size).

The web services portal was installed in four municipalities - Kardjali, Vratza, Mezdra and Peshtera. The portal for Kardjali was hosted on the ISOC Bulgaria server while the rest used their own municipal servers.

Impact

The project offers fully functional e-government services that can be implemented at a low cost because they are developed using FOSS. Before this project there were no freely available e-government applications that could be replicated at little or at no cost in other administrations. The web services portal developed allows easy and cheap distribution in all municipalities that are interested in using it. In addition, it is easily customizable, both in terms of web interface and functionality, and is multilingual.

The project provides a platform for cooperation between the local administrations and the business sectors (in particular the local ICT businesses) as well as NGOs. This is because these organizations and companies are called upon to support the FOSS software used by providing services such as migration and training, as well as to customize the applications or develop new ones. This results in enhanced local cooperation at the business level, as well as raising the level of local IT skills.

Another important impact is increased transparency in the work of the municipal authorities as the availability of the e-government services facilitates people-government interaction. This should result in less corruption at the municipal level.

Although the project involved only nine municipalities, over 20 municipalities expressed interest in taking part in the project but the project budget did not allow for their inclusion. This indicates that if it was possible to extend the project and more funds were available, the impact will be much greater.

Lessons Learned

Several important lessons were learned from this project. They are summarized and discussed below.

• For the success of FOSS initiatives and projects it is important that adequate policy and legislation be developed for them, as without political support the processes will be hindered and adoption rate decreased.
• The low level of computer literacy among the older municipal employees can be a serious problem, due to the lack of understanding of the benefits from the migration. It has been recommended that meetings are held with this group of people at the initial stage followed by relevant training. After that, if it is possible they should undergo testing and certification.
• In general, after the training, certification should be carried out. People will be much more motivated to use software, for which they have an official certificate.
• Public awareness is very important for the implementation of the project; media coverage of the activities and the work done is also important.
• Collaborative work with the local FOSS supporting organizations and international ones should be carried out.
• The development and implementation of the FOSS project should not be limited strictly to the initially planned outputs. If there is an opportunity to widen the impact of the project, or there are important functionalities that can be embedded in the developed tools and applications, this should be supported without hesitation.
• A mechanism for fund raising should be developed for the project.

Current Status of Project

The project is in its last phase and work is ongoing in the neighbouring countries on promoting the project. The initiative has also been extended to the Municipality of Bahchelievler in Istanbul, Turkey, upon request by the municipality authorities there.

Statistics on the usage of the web services portal in Kardjali and Vratza showed much higher interest from the citizens there in comparison to other similar websites running in other municipalities in Bulgaria. This is a sign that the e-government project has been successful among the targeted citizens.

Another important task that had been accomplished is the development of additional e-government services that support digital signatures for the portal of the Kardjali Municipality.

Benefits and Challenges

The usage of FOSS addresses a key problem faced by the municipalities from the south-east European region regarding ICT - that is the lack of funds to buy hardware and legal software. On the one hand, the municipalities are obliged to use licensed and localized software, but on the other hand they have no suitable hardware to use it on. FOSS helps to deal with the above-noted problems in a very elegant and efficient manner. First, it deals with the localization problem because there exist in the region big teams and communities to translate the end-user software, and to keep the latest versions of it available under the country's official language. FOSS also allows the end users, and the administrations to possess legal products that can run on slower hardware configurations.

The e-government solutions currently available are mainly designed for the central administration only and are not applicable at the local level. These solutions require the end users to install specific proprietary software in order to use the governmental services, and to have the latest versions of proprietary software in order to send documents to the government electronically. The implementation of the e-government services using FOSS overcomes this problem. The administrations can use an up-to-date software at almost no cost. Support can be obtained in a more cost-effective manner from the FOSS community or from local organizations/companies, and local people can be trained to perform the support. The municipalities can also customize the software they are using, keeping them current and without having to upgrade their hardware. As the end user requires only a web browser to access the e-government services, they can easily do this from their FOSS desktop without having to install any special software. All this will enable a significant improvement in the manner of communication between local authorities and the citizens, which will result in better quality of services and confidence in the authorities.

The biggest challenge in the project was that many of the municipal employees had little or no computer literacy and so they had to be trained not only on how to work with a new operating system or program but also to be trained on very basic things.

Surprisingly, there was resistance initially from the employees to working in a localized interface. It turned out that when they were working in the non-localized environment previously, as they did not understand the language, they learned by heart the computer operations while working with a specific software. With the new localized interface, since the software used was not the same, the majority did not know how to work with the programs, although they were able to understand the meaning of the commands and options, hence the resistance.

Other Information

As a result of the positive experience from this project, ISOC Bulgaria is continuing its work to popularize the usage of FOSS, especially in public administration. It is actively involved in initiatives that make use of FOSS to implement ICT and Internet solutions for the interaction among the local authorities, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and the people.

Conclusion

E-government services for several of the municipalities in south-eastern Europe have been successfully implemented using FOSS tools and applications. The use of FOSS has resulted in a fully functional e-government web portal that can be implemented at a low cost and can be freely replicated in other municipalities. This will enable better interaction and communications between the authorities in the municipalities and the people. The availability of localized versions of the FOSS software used allows the end users and the administrations, which have a constrained budget, to possess legal products that can run on slower hardware configurations. The project has also provided a platform for the cooperation between the local administrations and the business sectors, as the latter can be utilized to support the FOSS software in various ways. This will contribute towards the capacity building process for skilled ICT workers in the region. From all these considerations it can be seen that the project has benefited the local communities politically, socially and economically.

Contact Information

Project: Local e-Government Initiatives in South-Eastern Europe (the Balkans)
Organization: The Internet Society Bulgaria
Contact Persons: Veni Markovski, Dragoslava Pefeva, Julia Velkova
Street Address: 31 Tzar Ivan Shishman Street, Floor 3, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria
Postal Address: P.O. Box 71, Sofia 1164, Bulgaria
Emails: veni@veni.com, julia@isoc.bg, dpefeva@isoc.bg
Phone: +359 2 401 8009

Websites

FOSS project: Support to e-government initiatives at local (municipality) level through FOSS in South-Eastern Europe
http://www.foss.bg/foss.php

Official FOSS Project profile from the website of UNDP Bulgaria http://www.undp.bg/user_files/en/documents/projects/GLO_foss.pdf

The Internet Society Bulgaria Website
http://www.isoc.bg