Growing to 100% in 2020

This year, the city of Barcelona is investing 78.7% of its IT budget on open source. By 2020, Barcelona expects nearly all of its IT investment to be linked to open source projects, says Xavier Roca, director of IT development at the city.

“We will continue to work with proprietary software solutions, as we have systems in place that require maintenance,” Mr. Roca said. “One day we hope everything will be open source, but today that is impossible.”

Barcelona has so far made public eight of its IT projects, and according to director Roca another seven will be added over the next two years. All of these projects are published as open source, on the city’s GitHub repository. The city is also making these solutions available using Spain’s national repository for IT solutions, as well as on Joinup, the European Commission’s portal.

A slide from the presentation by Xavier Roca, showing Barcelona’s open source projects

Speaking at the Barcelona Biennale on 18 October, Mr. Roca said the city’s use of open source makes it easy to collaborate with other public services: whether these are local, regional, national or international. In the Cloud4Cities project, the city is working with 23 other municipalities, regional and national authorities.

Barcelona has also teamed up with the Zaragoza city council on its Linux desktop migration project, has joined the Free Software Lab in the city of Rivas-Vaciamadrid, and is working on open source projects together with the city of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), the city of London (United Kingdom) and the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in France.

The capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia embarked on an open source strategy in 2017. The new strategy emphasises working with local ICT SMEs and getting more small businesses to participate in public tenders.

More information:

Digital cities, digital freedoms: digital commons, ethical standards and open-source software for cities

Barcelona’s GitHub repository

Barcelona’s free software guidelines