PloneGov, Plone for public sector

Site	PloneGov, Plone for public sector
Industry	Government
Location
Contact	Zea Partners

Around 55 European, North and South American and African Public organizations participate in the PloneGov project. In doing so, they aim to gain independence from IT services providers by developing, essentially by themselves and in a cooperative manner, applications and websites for their own use as well as for their citizens’. PloneGov strategy mainly rests on Open Source tools: Zope and Plone. PloneGov.org success results from a close collaboration between Public sector (cities, regions and parliaments) and Zea Partners, a non-profit international network of SME building Zope and Plone solutions.

A Zea Partners case study

Objectives

The goal is to share efforts and existing applications between all participants. Apart from a greater independence from IT service providers, PloneGov’s expected benefits are: to enhance the applications’ consistency with the users’ needs; to promote collaborative websites; to use the most recent technologies while avoiding licence fees; to ensure publication of sources with GPL.

The decision to use an open source platform and to adopt a collaborative approach in the development of PloneGov rests on the practical and strategic consideration that this approach is the more likely to build sustainable high quality information systems for Public authorities. The collaborative model sets in motion a critical mass that can be capable of creating economies of scale, while promoting the creation of communities of users to support capacity building and sustainable support.

Therefore, the PloneGov initiative matches and greatly enhances the possibilities to create economies of scale -- by sharing tools and collaborative development -- and at the same time it leads to higher quality software, by sharing of experiences and best practices.

History

PloneGov project results of merging three Plone based e-government initiatives focusing on local and regional governments: CommunesPlone.org (Belgium, France), UdalPlone (Basque country-Spain, France) and PloneGov.ch (Switzerland). Open source experts from the public sector, SME and open source community involved in these projects participated in a two days sprint held on May 31 and June 1, 2007, in Seneffe (Belgium). Due to their complementarity’s, they decided to merge into 1 common project 3 e-government initiatives creating an international project named “PloneGov.org”.

On June 21, 2007, Bungeni, a fourth Plone based e-government project, became members of PloneGov. Bungeni is a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. It is being developed within the context the "Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan" of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). It is being developed in collaboration with 8 national parliaments in Africa: Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

With a focus on Parliamentary and Legislative processes, Bungeni brings valuable expertise to PloneGov: the initiative covers now all aspects of e-Governments, from local governments to Parliaments. It brings together a unique pool of experts from 3 continents, counting years of experience in collaboration and open source development.

PloneGov is open to new participants (users, contributors or observers).

Policy context

PloneGov project meets in several ways strategic objectives on e-government. It already reaches different layers of public administrations in several countries and is raising interest in a number of regions.

No citizens left behind

• 100.000 cities and regions: PloneGov enables the smallest local government to benefit from e-government advantages.

• Promoting knowledge society: through cooperative portals, local communities enable their citizens and employees to really get into knowledge society as planned by Lisbon’s objectives.

• Blind and disabled people : Plone eases e-inclusion for blind and disabled people

Making efficiency and effectiveness in Public services a reality

• Economies of scale : PloneGov eases economies of scale, earns public money by sharing tools and collaborative development

• Beter value : Thanks to PloneGov, local authorities can work in a far better way for a better value for money.

• Flexibility : Moreover, Plone, the software at the basis of PloneGov, makes it possible to constantly add new interconnectable and interchangeable modules. Such flexibility confers an exceptional adaptability to the project

Putting key enablers in place

• SME partners: small local enterprises are natural partners of the project, as their teams size and practices are similar to small local governments.

• Open source communities’ partners: Plone community has a close relationship with PloneGov, to which it brings its experience.

• International: PloneGov project is open to international collaboration.

• Bottom-up strategy: PloneGov not only crosses borders, but reaches also beyond hierarchical divisions between different levels of power.

Strengthening participation and democratic decision making

• Participative democracy: the tools provided by PloneGov enable communities to favor a sound and sustainable participative democracy spirit via e-democracy.

• Digital divide: by reaching small local governments, PloneGov is a solution to fight the digital divide in Europe (commerces, enterprises, schools, associations, etc.) and beyond (North-South collaboration).

Implementing high impact key services

• Electronic ID : PloneGov takes e-privacy and e-security on board. Its technicians are familiar with Belgian e-ID. Other national modules can be easily developed.

Results

PloneGov has generated 14 concrete and usable tools such as a module to order administrative documents on the Internet, a business directory, a certification module (through the eID card), and local government websites (eg www.seneffe.be), a job vacancies publisher, a product with forms where the town administrator can fill out it and show it for the citizens, etc. Other tools are being developed including a documentary management tool, a fine management tool, etc.

On Jun13, 2007, PloneGov won the biggest French award for open source projects during a ceremony held in the town hall of the city of Paris. This award, called "Grand prix du jury des Lutèce d'Or 2007", demonstrates PloneGov work quality and encourages to continue on this way.

Citizens oriented tools

• Associations Directory -Manage and search the different associations present in a city

Every city has its own associations. This product adds a new content type to your Plone to manage the different associations. This product comes with a search form to browse the different types of associations. It has also a tool to manage which information (schema) should be inserted in every Association. There is an export tool to export all associations into a CSV file.

• Complaint form - It gives to the town citizens the chance to complain about whatever they want filling out a form.

Once they send the form, the local administration will receive in the format he set previously (XML, PDF,...). The form is dynamic, I mean, the site administrator will be able to change, add or remove the fields of the form depending on what kind of form he wants.

• CPComarquage - Tag your documents with RSS feeds content

This will add a way to tag your documents with data produced by some servers (server of the Walloon Region for example in Belgium). The main interest of tagging a document is the fact that tagged data will be updated externally by other users than contributors of your website.  Your website will so be updated auto-magically.  This product could be adapted in other situations as it parses RSS datas to show them in some documents.

• Public contract – Product with forms where the town administrator can fill out it and show it for the citizens.

The administrator can upload files that contains requirements for that public contract.

• Job vacancies - Job vacancies let to the local administrations the chance to publish job vacancies.

Oriented to let to local administration publish job vacancies in their web site. It supports csv files (comma-separated values) import. Once a citizen accede the job vacancie will be able to write down his identification number a he will be able to see his situation in that job vacancies.

• Online services - Online services available for the citizen : Population service demands, Civil status service demands, Work service demands

This will give a local authority a way to make some documents orderable through the web by their citizens.  It will also give a way for the citizen to send a request to a service and be able to follow the evolution of it (workflow). The product CPDescriptive (additional user descriptive) is required. The product BelgianEidAuthPlugin (access with the electronic identity card) is optional and can be used to check the identity for some documents and processes.

Internal tools

• PloneMeeting – Management of official meetings

Services can submit items that should be discussed during the meeting.  A secretary produce an agenda with all the items he selected and this agenda is used during the meeting.  After the meeting, the secretary can generate an official report of the meeting with the decision on each item.  We added some more functionalities like correctly formatted PDF printings, follow-up thru the workflow, special simple views for common users, …  This product is in stable production on some places now for years.

• PloneGov Records Management
• PuRe - Public requirements management

PuRe is a Plone product that allows to create and manage public procurements. At present, it supports Belgian “services” procurements, and is specifically targeted to procurements related to the development or acquisition of software products, although it can also be used for other kinds of procurements.

The tool allows to generate an OpenOffice, Microsoft Word or PDF version of the public requirement, thanks to the use of the POD (Python Open Document) library (see http://appyframework.org/pod.html).

At present, the tool is available in french (the code is written in english).

PuRe considers a public procurement as a set of requirements. Those requirements are grouped by deliverables. So when an administration publishes a public procurement, in fact she describes the set of results she expects in the form of deliverables, and for each of them she expresses a set of requirements. The tender is considered as the first deliverable. A deliverable may be a document, source code, tests, or less tangible things like a training or days of consultancy.

General tools

• BelgianEidAuthPlugin - Electronic identity card access

A secure access with a client SSL certificate. For Belgium, the certificates are stored on the identity card. This product adds an authentication plugin in PAS (the authentication system of Plone 2.5+) that gives the user the possibility to use his belgian eID card to log into a Plone Site.

The user has to subscribe before and gives some more personal informations (you can use the CPDescriptive product for that or make it another way), particularly his belgian national register number that will be used during authentication to make the link between the Plone user and the eID card.

• CPDescriptive

Extend the Plone default subscription form by adding additional user descriptive. This product gives the possibility for other products to obtain more descriptive about the Plone subscribed users.  Basically, it adds the address (subdivided in street, number, town, box, postal code) and the National register number.

• csvfinder

A csv parser

• LatexTool

LatexTool is a Plone addon to create PDF output using the Latex software. Latex is a high quality publishing system. Adding Latex support to Plone can enhance document output.

• pod (Python Open Document)

From any Python program, Zope or Plone site, generate your documents dynamically in ODT, PDF, DOC or RTF format by using OpenOffice.org plus some Python expressions ! pod (python open document) is a library that allows to easily generate documents whose content is dynamic. The principle is simple: you create an ODF (Open Document Format) text document (with OpenOffice Writer 2.0 or higher for example), you insert some Python code at some places inside it, and from any program written in Python, you can call pod with, as input, the OpenDocument file and a bunch of Python objects. pod generates another ODF text document (ODT) that contains the desired result. If you prefer to get the result in another format, pod can call OpenOffice in server mode to generate the result in PDF, DOC, RTF or TXT format.