A platform for sharing knowledge, good practices and IT solutions in the public sector

What is this action about?

In the past, information on IT solutions for the public sector used to be scattered across numerous repositories and websites, making it hard to find data and to reuse already available tools. The European Commission answered this problem by establishing Joinup, a platform that gives the opportunity to share and reuse IT solutions and good practices with other professionals across Europe and beyond. The platform, set up with support of the ISA Programme, is freely accessible and facilitates communication and collaboration on common projects between public administrations. In addition, Joinup works as a catalogue, where users can easily find and download already developed solutions.

Under the current ISA2 Programme, the Commission is aiming to further enhance Joinup's functionalities. The main focus is on:

1. Making the platform more user-friendly by improving the user interface and user experience, adding better support for mobile devices, and improving features for creating, editing & posting content
2. Revising the catalogue, while applying a stricter quality check that will result in a significant reduction of solutions and help promote high quality and well-documented projects
3. Implementing the European Interoperability Cartography within Joinup, to offer a structured set of building blocks and solutions (according to the European Interoperability Reference Architecture), thus supporting public administrations in providing interoperable services
4. Implementing the European Catalogue of ICT Standards for Public Procurement on Joinup
5. Improving the European Interoperability Framework Toolbox on Joinup 
6. Developing, hosting and enhancing the Joinup Licensing Assistant

What are the benefits?

For public administrations and European Commission services

• More affordable development of IT solutions, as well as enabling communication related to them through Joinup
• The possibility to focus on the actual development of IT solutions instead of spending resources on building individual platforms for specific projects
• Easier searching for information on available IT solutions in the public sector
• Interoperable IT solutions that can contribute to improved coherence of public services across Europe, making it easier for public administrations to cooperate
• The possibility to grow the professional network

For the European Commission

• The promotion of the European Interoperability Strategy, the European Interoperability Framework and related concepts and ideas
• A more precise view on the landscape of different IT solutions for the public sector

For citizens

• More efficient public services thanks to sharing and reusing of IT solutions in the public sector

For the private sector

• The possibility to access Joinup, learn about the actual needs of public administrators and develop more suitable products

What has been already achieved?

• Implementation of a federation pipeline for adding Member States’ repositories to Joinup using the Asset Description Metadata Schema Application Profile (ADMS-AP). Repositories that have been already federated include: the Spanish Technology transfer centre – CTT, the Slovenian National Interoperability Framework Portal – NIO, among others.
• Identification of candidate repositories and scheduling next phases for federated them.
• Introduction of persistent URIs (PURI) – in collaboration with the Publications Office – for the Architectural Building Blocks of EIRA, so that each user can navigate through the entire EIRA definitions in Joinup without opening a session in CarTool.
• Development of the Joinup Licensing Assistant under the EUPL, a unique tool allowing everyone to find, compare and combine open licences based on their content.
• Joinup’s development team has contributed to the open source community of Drupal (via the Joinup GitHub repository) more than 20.000 commits.
• A Roadmap for developments with a specific overview on new features, functionalities and improvements following stakeholders’ recommendations. User requirements properly captured and followed-up on a day-to-day basis.
• Execution of numerous communication activities such as webinars, news items, newsletters, social media posts, User Group meetings.
• Increased user engagement and awareness activities which aim to retain existing users and attract new ones.
• Development of the EIF Toolbox under NIFO, as a guidance tool for national public administrations that wish to align their National Interoperability Frameworks (NIFs) with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF).
• Integration with EU Login, the European Commission's user authentication service which allows authorised users to access a wide range of Commission web services, using a single email address and password.

What are the next steps?

• Share and reuse interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens.
• Improve the platform’s user experience.
• Further enhance the catalogue of solutions, by federating new repositories managed by public administrations in EU Member States and other standardisation bodies.
• Foster the reuse and co-development of the platform by further promoting the Joinup platform as an authentic source of information around eGovernment and ICT in the EU public sector, and as a one-stop-shop for sharing and reusing IT solutions for EU public administrations.
• Maintain and update the Joinup Licensing Assistant.
• Ensure the smooth integration of Joinup in the Digital Europe Programme (2021 – 2027), especially supporting the accomplishment of its Specific Objective 5: ‘’Deployment, best use of digital capacity and interoperability’’.