The federal government's efforts for digital sovereignty and open-source applications in authorities are apparently short on staff, as can be seen from responses from the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) to inquiries from Bundestag member Anke Domscheit-Berg (Die Linke). Accordingly, the Center for Digital Sovereignty, or ZenDis for short, founded by the federal government for this purpose at the end of 2022, only has nine employees. Three of them each took care of the two main products, openDesk and Open Code.
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openDesk is a suite of open source web applications for office and communication that is intended for use in authorities and ministries. The basis is the dPhoenixSuite from the public, northern German IT service provider Dataport, which combines tools such as Collabora, Jitsi, Open-Xchange and Matrix. According to a response from the BMI to an earlier request from Domscheit-Berg last December, widespread use should actually begin in 2025.
Domscheit-Berg: Can we do it?
Domscheidt-Berg described it as “completely mysterious” as to how this goal could still be achieved given the human and financial resources. According to the BMI's response, ZenDis, which was founded as a GmbH, has not yet received a federal commission for openDesk. A fixed budget is apparently not planned for ZenDis. According to the BMI, 1.2 million euros have been spent on the Open Code project since it was founded. This is a platform for exchanging open source code for administration, which is already in production.
This year, around 19 million euros are expected to flow into another contract, which includes the further development of openDesk, another product called OpenConference and the continuation of Open Code. When this order would come, however, remained unclear. In any case, in the federal budget approved at the end of last year, the funding for open source in administration was reduced from around 50 million euros to 24.7 million euros.
Furthermore, according to Domscheit-Berg, the federal states have not yet participated in ZenDis, even if states such as Thuringia have declared their willingness. “It is foreseeable that the traffic light government will no longer be able to achieve one of its most important digital policy coalition goals by the end of the legislative period,” criticizes Domscheit-Berg. The result is “less IT security, ongoing dependencies, especially on US corporations, extremely high license costs (the federal government’s billion-dollar license agreements with Microsoft expire in 2025) and a missed opportunity to promote a globally relevant ecosystem for open source software. “
ZenDis: Yes, we can do it
At ZenDis, however, the situation is assessed completely differently. Interim managing director Ralf Kleindiek described the start in 2025 as a realistic goal to the iX editorial team. openDesk already has an advanced release status and will be introduced to the first organizations in the next few weeks. The software suite should then be offered as Software as a Service; a tender is currently being put forward.
“openDesk integrates various open source solutions, some of which have been on the market for a very long time and have reached a high level of maturity. So the functional starting point was already very good,” said Kleindiek. The integration and implementation of a uniform interface have also been largely completed. In the past, ZenDis worked primarily together with the providers of the individual components and external partners. In the future, our own employees will be added to manage the entire project. The code for openDesk is stored on Gitlab. If you want to test the deployment, you need a Kubernetes cluster.
Order from the federal government coming soon
As far as the federal government's official order for openDesk is concerned, a few details still need to be clarified, but this should be completed shortly, Kleindiek explained. Regarding the lack of participation from the federal states so far, Kleindiek pointed out that they are in very good discussions with “almost all the states.” It is not a question of “if” but of “when” until the countries join.
openDesk is the result of an initiative by the federal government and nine federal states. They got together in November 2021 to reduce the public sector's dependence on Microsoft under the project name “Sovereign Workplace”. According to the BMI's original announcement, the software package should actually be ready for use at the end of 2023.
(sigh)