Joinup is a

collaboration platform Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them." Regar ...

created by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

. It is funded by the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

via its Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations Programme (ISA Programme). Joinup was launched on 9 December 2011. It replaced the

Open Source Observatory and Repository The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) is an online project launched by the European Commission under the IDABC programme, to support the distribution and re-use of software developed by or for public sector administrations across Europ ...

(OSOR.eu) and the

Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe The Semantic Interoperability Community Europe (SEMIC.EU) was an eGovernment service initiated by the European Commission and managed by the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens ( ...

(SEMIC.eu), themselves communities funded by the ISA Programme. These two became Joinup's initial communities.

Objectives

The site aims to let public administrations promote their

e-government E-government (known for electronic government) involves utilizing technology devices, such as computers and the Internet, for faster means of delivering public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offer ...

systems. More specifically, it offers a meeting place and a

collaborative working environment A collaborative working environment (CWE) supports people, such as e-professionals, in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves focusing on organizational, technical, and social issues. Background Working practices in a coll ...

for the development of

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...

. Joinup hosts

communities of practice A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by Cognitive anthropology, cognitive anthropolo ...

, such as the community for the Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications (CAMSS) and the community for the National Interoperability Frameworks Observatory (NIFO). The platform also raises awareness on

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

and

semantic interoperability Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable Logic in computer science, logic, inferencing, knowledge discove ...

in the

public sector The public sector, also called the state sector, is the part of the economy composed of both public services and public enterprises. Public sectors include the public goods and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, pu ...

. Joinup offers a catalogue of open source software, interoperability assets and models such as the Interoperability Maturity Model (IMM). The target audience includes those using, developing and implementing e-government systems. The site focuses on the European

, but the projects are open to all others.

Platform, repository and federation

The platform has three main functions: * Sharing of information, by publishing news, case studies and listing relevant events; * Cataloguing re-usable interoperability software, taxonomies, vocabularies, code-lists, licences, organisational assets and guidelines; * Allowing public administrations to collaborate with each other on development projects. Joinup provides access to a

Federation A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a political union, union of partially federated state, self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a #Federal governments, federal government (federalism) ...

catalogue hosted by public administrations in EU member states and standardisation bodies such as the

European Committee for Standardization The European Committee for Standardization (CEN, ) is a public standards organization whose mission is to foster the economy of the European Single Market and the wider European continent in global trading, the welfare of European citizens an ...

(CEN) and

European Telecommunications Standards Institute The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization operating in the field of information and communications. ETSI supports the development and testing of global technical ...

(ETSI). Joinup is also used by the European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics to make available all of its applications. Examples include Circabc, a document management system, Open e-Prior, a tool to help manage electronic procurement, and OnLine Collection Software for ECI, to help organisations gather signatures that support their request to the European Commission to propose legislation. In December 2014, the ISA Programme added the ePractice community to the Joinup platform. ePractice offers services for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners. In January 2015, the OpenGovernment community was added by the EC's

Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (also called DG CONNECT) is a Directorate-General of the European Commission and is responsible for European Union investment in research, innovation and development of ...

A detailed list of all the potential services someone receives by registering at this platform can be found at JoinUp's website. A list of all the software contributions made by the community are at JoinUp's website.

Open source technology behind Joinup

The Joinup platform is powered by a tailored version of the

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

content management framework Content management systems (CMS) are used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them are built on top of separate content management frameworks. The list is limited to notable services. Open source software :''T ...

(version 6) and can be downloaded from the Joinup web site. Its latest version is 1.7.2 (released on March 15, 2015). The source code of some past versions can be found at JoinUp's website. The development of the platform is done on hosts running

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

Linux. The Joinup platform runs on 10

hosts A host is a person responsible for guests at an event or for providing hospitality during it. Host may also refer to: Places * Host, Pennsylvania, a village in Berks County * Host Island, in the Wilhelm Archipelago, Antarctica People * ...

in the EC's

datacentre A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for business co ...

Luxembourg Luxembourg, officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is a landlocked country in Western Europe. It is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France on the south. Its capital and most populous city, Luxembour ...

. It includes a load balancer, some network-attached storage and a reverse-proxy. The main part of the platform is on three

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

hosts, running

Apache webserver The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. T ...

and Drupal. A fourth Linux host is running the

Apache Tomcat Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

Java server, the

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features ...

search engine and

Apache Maven Maven is a build automation tool used primarily for Java projects. Maven can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other languages. The Maven project is hosted by The Apache Software Foundation, where it was ...

build automation tools. A fifth Linux host is running the

Apache Subversion Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name ''svn'') is a version control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files su ...

software versioning and revisioning system. There is a sixth Linux host running the

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

relational database system and a seventh for

GNU Mailman GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists. Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Abhilash Raj. Mailman is free software, licensed under the GNU General Pu ...

Similar services

The platform's software is used to offer similar services involving public administrations in other regions and countries. In

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

and

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

, the Openray platform is being piloted since June 2012 by the Open Technology Foundation (OTF), a research organisation supporting the government sector in the research, evaluation, trialling and uptake of open technologies, standards and methods. By 21 November 2013, all semantic services were federated and show up in the Openray repository. Also on 21 November 2013, the government of

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a States and territories of Australia, state in the southern central part of Australia. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, which in ...

announced that it would start piloting an internal version of the Joinup platform software and test the use of the EC's Open e-Prior. Its aim is to improve collaboration and procurement activities. Openroad is a similar collaboration platform, begun by

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

's Ministry of Science and Technology in January 2013.

References

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External links