The Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) was founded as a team within it@M on the basis of the City Council motion 'Establish Open Source Hub and Open Source Sabbatical' (2023-02-15).

The Open Source Programme Office aims to coordinate and promote open source activities at LHM in line with the IT strategy.
The two dimensions "give" and "take" are taken into account, i.e. both the use of open source software and the publication and release of LHM's own software developments as open source ("public money - public code").

Tasks

The tasks of the team are:

• Identifying relevant communities and solutions: Actively screen and explore open source projects and communities working on solutions relevant to LHM. Relevance is assessed on the basis of the architectural categorisation of open source.
• Shaping relationships with external communities.
• Establishment, management and coordination of a city-internal open source community by an employee of the Open Source Programme Office in the role of Community Manager.
• Clarification of licence issues and regulation of the licensing of LHM open source publications.
• Identify and bring about the clarification of legal issues and support the application of a legal open source publication guide.
• Appropriate synchronisation of activities with activities of the Federal Government, the Free State and other local authorities on the subject of open source (e.g. ZenDiS, OpenCode).
• Evaluation and prioritisation of ideas and initiatives on open source in the LHM in order to invest resources in a focused manner.
• Managing LHM's presence on public open source platforms, in particular on public code repositories (examples: github.com, gitlab.com). The aim is to ensure standardised and consistent communication and an image that complies with the legal framework.
• Development of methodological aids and provision of expertise for colleagues who develop open source software for the LHM, especially if the development itself takes place on public code repositories such as github.com. (Examples: Methodology for integrating such software into the LHM IT environment).
• Development, consolidation and provision (e.g. via intranet) of expertise and awareness on the subject of open source.
• Organisation and implementation of the Open Source Sabbatical.

Procurement consulting

The OSPO offers advice on new software solutions (procurements, replacements, smaller solutions or infrastructure).

• Market research on open source solutions, especially from the municipal sector.
• If features, bug fixes or other (e.g. security analyses) are necessary, we help with the technical or organisational implementation.
• Cooperation if there is no practicable open source solution.

The OSPO only offers advisory assistance, not tender implementation or make-buy-use-compose analyses (MBUC).

Team

In addition to numerous developers from the urban open source community, who contribute ideas, passion and, above all, public code, take care of open source:

Dr. Dirk Gernhardt heads the Competence Center Software Engineering in the IT department of the City of Munich and holds the role of Open Source Representative. Until 2019, he held the role of Chief IT Architect. Before joining the City of Munich in 2010, he worked as an IT consultant for the automotive industry at Capgemini.

Klaus 'klml' Mueller is Head of the OSPO of the City of Munich, which was founded in 2024. Before that, he and his team built the Kubernetes Platform, a world in which FOSS is already standard. Klaus has been a stable FOSS enthusiast since Linux kernel 2.6.0.

Contact: opensource@muenchen.de