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ISA² - Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens

Joinup - Your one-stop source for eGovernment collaboration

Georges Lobo and Victoria Kalogirou, Joinup Project Officers, Interoperability Unit, Directorate-General for Informatics at the European Commission

Joinup, the open and collaborative platform managed by the European Commission’s ISA² Programme fosters the collaboration between IT developers, architects, business leaders and academia. It allows these professionals to promote, discuss, and upload their own proven eGovernment solutions, but also find similar ones from others.  It further offers a key repository of shared and reused solutions consisting of more than 2.700 interoperability solutions ready to be used while we write this blog post.

These figures, which are continuously growing, prove that Joinup is steadily expanding, offering further information and accessible interoperability solutions to its users.

As part of this process, on 4 October 2017, a brand new version of Joinup, based on Drupal 8, went live. The migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 pursuing scalability improvements, higher user-friendliness and intuitiveness, brought also major improvements such as:

  • optimisation for use on smartphones and other mobile computing devices, by automatically adapting the content to different screen sizes.
  • new content structure, grouping similar topic-related content into thematic ‘collections’;
  • better way of creating/editing content, simplifying the creation of solutions, news, events, reports, studies, factsheets;
  • improved search functionalities, allowing multi-criteria search;
  • clean-up of inactive and outdated data, improving the quality of remaining content;
  • new design of the whole interface;
  • interactive tool for the ‘user tour’ feature to guide users on how to navigate throughout the main pages and use the platform’s main features.

These improvements helped the platform better accommodate the needs of stakeholders, such as DG CNECT. By closely collaborating with them, and following up on the work of the eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020, we are working on a dashboard to monitor the status of the implementation of the Tallinn Ministerial Declaration by the signatory countries.

But, even if the platform has considerably improved, this is not the end of the path. In the following months we will keep relying on our users' feedback to further improve the platform, as well as, to develop new features.

To give a glimpse of what is to come, we could highlight the following:

  1. Signing in to Joinup will be more consolidated and secure by being replaced by the EU Login service;
  2. Users will soon have access to a dedicated space that will allow them to manage their subscriptions to content available on the platform.
  3. Users will be able to interact among themselves via direct messages, a feature we are sure will boost users’ interest and utilisation of the platform.
  4. A feature allowing the massive import of solutions using ADMS-AP v2.0 (Asset Description Metadata Schema Application Profile) is also currently being finalised, which is of great help for federating new repositories of solutions within Joinup.

The above are just a few examples of upcoming features, with many more to follow!

Where it all began

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Joinup Timeline


Joinup is what it is today thanks to the hard work of many previous colleagues. Szabolcs Szekacs, Corinne Gattegno, Laudi Aldo, Ana Murarasu and Hans Vanderbeke are just a few of the many people that contributed to the platform’s success. In 2013, the platform was merged with the OSOR.eu and Semic.eu by combining the services for open source and semantic interoperability. By 2014, a third major platform also developed by the European Commission, the ePractice, was also integrated to bring together policy makers and practitioners in the fields of eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion.

Have any questions regarding Joinup, or want to find out more about its capabilities and features? Get in touch with us by using our contact form!

Wednesday, 18 July, 2018