Cospa

Cospa (Consortium for Open Source in the Public Adminsitration) aims at analysing the effects of the introduction of Open Data Standards (ODS) and Open Source (OS) software for personal productivity and document management in European PAs.

• 15 European participants from Italy, Hungary, Denmark, UK, Ireland, Belgium
• 3 international "observers" from Canada, New Zealand and UNESCO
• Funded within the IST (Information Society Technologies) Priority of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6)

The University of Sheffield unit will work at:

• Classification and analysis of the use of Open Source in Public Administrations
• Forecast of the risk of transition to Open Source Solutions
• Prioritizations of the requirements for Open Source and Open Data Standards
• Identification of Open Source applications and Open Data Standards to be used by Public Administrations
• Identification of training and administrative support needs and issues
• Framework for evaluation of return/losses of the transition to Open Source and Open Data Standards, including the key criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the transition and the benchmark criteria to determine whether the transitions generate returns or losses
• Knowledge base to share and exchange data on the use of Open Source

Project details

• Sponsor: EU FP6 Programme
• Period of grant: 1 January 2004 - 31 December 2005
• Total value of grant: € 4.033 million project overall (of which € 305.200 to Sheffield University)

Investigators

• Prof. Michael Holcombe, Principal Investigator
• Dr. Siobhán North, Co-Investigator
• Dr. Sarah Chambers, Research Associate
• Dr. Andres Baravalle, Research Associate