Public services in the Slovak Republic will request open source when purchasing software and related services

This is one of the recommendations of a case study published in April last year by the Public Procurement Office of the Slovak Republic and Slovensko.Digital (a non-profit organization that promotes the modernization of the Slovak government).

Slovensko.Digital and the Public Procurement Office worked together to prepare a tender for the IT services of the procurement office. The case study is in no way meant to focus only on open source. However, specifying that the software should be available under an open source license is an appropriate method to help others, including future service providers, gain access to the products.

Slovensko.Digital: We want the state's digital services to be simple, to make sense and to have normal prices. We urgently need to increase the transparency and efficiency of spending on public resources, as well as the participation of the professional public in e-government.

We are a civic association and in our attitudes and proposals we are inspired by the experience of the countries that are at the forefront of the quality of electronic public administration. Since 2016, we have been promoting quality electronic state services. We believe that Slovakia has the potential to use this experience to its advantage and to become one of the world leaders in this field.

The Slovak government has acquired consulting services from Slovensko.Digital as part of its project "Better e-government solutions in the Slovak Republic".