Working Open Source requires that we are able to find other Open Source projects and codebases within the European Union.

Instead of building software themselves, organizations should first explore the landscape before they take any further steps. However, not all OSS projects within the public sector (and at suppliers) are findable.

There is a positive trend now in Europe: several OSS catalogues have been launched in the EU in recent years. These catalogues (FR/ DE/ EU/ and IT) have one thing in common: their underlying data-schema is publiccode.yml.

Currently some types of Open Source projects are not easily described by the publiccode.yml standard. These are smaller building blocks like APIs and components/modules. The “categories” property for example, now only contains categories that are applicable to large applications.

To be able to cooperate we need to improve the publiccode.yml standard! Create issues/discussions and we need to add a publiccode.yml file to our projects. I would also like to invest in tooling around the standard. For example by building a publiccode.yml bot which automatically creates pull requests with a prefilled publiccode.yml file. By doing so, we will be able to find other organizations, just like us, solving the same problems! And that; will be an adventurous journey.