What's working

GOV.UK Notify – shared open-source email/SMS/letter platform

Government Digital Service (DSIT)

By Oct 2026 Notify had sent about 13.7bn messages for 1,764 organisations and 12,877 services across central government, councils and the NHS (scale = organisations). Code is open source; hosting is on AWS and SMS/letter delivery uses commercial suppliers. (Government Digital Service, 2026)

Savings and costs: GDS estimate: £175m saved over 5 years (avg £35m a year), stated Sep 2019

Lesson: Free-at-point-of-use shared component with open code and simple APIs drove voluntary adoption well beyond central government

GOV.UK Pay – shared payments platform

Government Digital Service (DSIT)

Ten years on, Pay serves 600+ organisations and almost 1,800 services and has processed nearly £10bn; 157 councils (41%) use it, handling 3.5m transactions in 2025-26 (scale = organisations). GDS-built, but card acquiring relies on commercial (largely US-owned) payment providers. (Maddrell, A. and Brown, B. (Government Digital Service), 2026)

Lesson: One compliance and PSP contract reused by many bodies removes duplicated procurement; sovereignty limited by underlying payment rails

GOV.UK One Login – government-built citizen identity (replacing Verify)

Government Digital Service (DSIT)

By Mar 2026 over 16.6m people held a One Login account giving access to 220+ services, with DWP data added for knowledge-based checks (scale = accounts). It replaces a market of private identity providers with a government-owned service on open standards (OIDC), though it runs on AWS and lost digital identity certification for about eight months in 2025 after a supplier lapse. (Jones, N. and Stevens, C. (GDS and DWP), 2026)

Lesson: Owning the identity layer in-house fixed Verify's dependency on private IdPs but still leaves supplier and hosting concentration risks

GOV.UK single publishing platform built on open-source technology

Government Digital Service (Cabinet Office)

GOV.UK replaced Directgov, Business Link and about 2,000 separate sites; in its first year it took 425m visits, and all 24 ministerial departments had moved onto it. Built in-house on open-source technology and later reused by New Zealand. (Cabinet Office, 2013)

Savings and costs: Replacing Directgov and Business Link saves up to £50m a year (Cabinet Office, Oct 2013)

Lesson: Consolidation plus in-house open-source build cut licensing and gave government full control of its main citizen channel

Open Document Format (ODF), PDF/A and HTML mandated for sharing and viewing government documents

Cabinet Office / GDS

The 2014 standard required open formats for editable documents; by 2018 GDS reported far fewer closed-format files on GOV.UK and a shift to HTML, but some departments still had not changed workflows and users struggled to open ODF files. GDS launched a renewed push with guidance updates and quarterly monitoring. (UKAuthority, 2018)

Lesson: Standards alone did not shift desktop habits; HTML-first publishing delivered more than ODF attachments

Janet national research and education network (with eduroam roaming Wi-Fi)

Jisc

UK-owned, member-run network connecting 900+ organisations including every UK university and college and the research councils, carrying about six petabytes a day and peering directly with 600+ networks (scale = users). eduroam UK runs over it at 560+ organisations. (Shewry, N. (Jisc), n.d.)

Savings and costs: Jisc invests about £12m capital a year in upgrades (cost)

Lesson: Sector-owned charity operating shared infrastructure keeps control, peering and security visibility in UK hands; optical kit is still foreign-made

UK Access Management Federation (SAML/Shibboleth federated login)

Jisc

Over 95% of UK HE and 90% of FE institutions use the federation to reach about 300 UK service providers and thousands more via eduGAIN, with personal data staying at the home institution. Built on open standards and free open-source software. (Jisc, n.d.)

Lesson: A UK-run trust framework on open standards lets institutions swap identity products without breaking access

Care Identity Service 2 (CIS2) and NHS smartcards / NHS PKI

NHS England

NHS-owned role-based authentication for national systems and EPRs, moving from smartcards to multi-factor options (approved devices, biometrics) exposed via the OpenID Connect standard. National figures for users were not published on the source page. (NHS England, n.d.)

Lesson: Keeping the clinical identity and credential authority in national NHS hands allows supplier-neutral integration via OIDC

openEHR vendor-neutral clinical data platforms (OneLondon, Plymouth, Salford, Wales CDR)

OneLondon and NHS trusts (with Better)

The openEHR register lists 16 UK deployments including OneLondon (40 trusts, 5 ICSs, 1,400 GP practices), Plymouth, Salford Royal and The Christie; Digital Health and Care Wales also chose an openEHR-based national clinical data repository in 2021. Data held in an open, vendor-neutral model separate from applications. (openEHR Foundation, 2026)

Lesson: Separating data (open standard) from applications reduces EPR lock-in, though most UK deployments rely on one non-UK vendor (Better)

Moodle open-source VLE at scale

The Open University

The OU chose Moodle in 2005 and invested in a near three-year development programme to serve nearly 200,000 students and 7,000 tutors, contributing many enhancements back to the Moodle project (scale = students). Moodle later lost ground in UK new implementations to Canvas and Brightspace. (Sclater, N., 2008)

Savings and costs: Development programme about €8m over nearly 3 years (cost)

Lesson: Large institution funding open-source improvements and upstreaming them made the platform viable for the wider sector

BBC micro:bit open-hardware coding device for schools

BBC / Micro:bit Educational Foundation

The BBC shipped about one million open-hardware micro:bits to Year 7 pupils across the UK in 2016; the later 'next gen' campaign reached over 90% of UK primary schools, and 11.5m devices are now in use in 85+ countries (scale = devices in 2016). (Micro:bit Educational Foundation, 2025)

Lesson: Broadcaster-led public-interest design with open hardware built domestic skills and a UK-originated export

Time Addressable Media Store (TAMS) open API specification

BBC Research & Development

BBC R&D published TAMS, an open specification for storing and accessing segmented media over HTTP, which AWS, Sky, Adobe and others adopted in the open-source Cloud Native Agile Production project. Gives broadcasters a vendor-neutral media store interface regardless of cloud. (Priestley, J., 2024)

Lesson: Publishing an open interface spec lets the BBC shape industry tooling and keep portability across clouds

Crown Hosting – joint-venture UK data centres for government on-prem estate

Cabinet Office / Crown Hosting Data Centres Ltd

Cabinet Office (25%) and Ark Data Centres (75%) formed a JV to pool government data hosting in UK secure sites. Ark has been controlled by US hedge fund Elliott since 2012 and was reported in 2025 to be up for sale at over £3bn, a sovereignty caveat on a 'UK' asset. (Cabinet Office, 2015)

Savings and costs: Up to £105m over 7 years (Cabinet Office claim, Mar 2015)

Lesson: Pooled UK-sited hosting delivered savings, but minority state stake leaves ownership of the operator outside UK control

Cloud-first estate and in-house IT team that sustained services after 2020 ransomware

London Borough of Hackney

Hackney's earlier move off on-prem and the PSN to cloud email and productivity kept email, website and file access running during the Oct 2020 ransomware attack, though housing and social care systems took up to three years to restore and the council later chose an off-the-shelf housing system (scale = staff users). (Say, M., 2022)

Savings and costs: Direct recovery costs £12m in 2021-22 (cost)

Lesson: Architecture and in-house skills aided continuity, but reliance on US SaaS trades one sovereignty risk for another

GOV.UK Verify – federated identity via private providers

Government Digital Service (Cabinet Office)

Verify reached 3.6m sign-ups against a 25m target, 19 services against 46, and a 48% verification success rate; the IPA recommended closure and it was replaced by government-built One Login (scale = sign-ups, Feb 2019). (National Audit Office, 2019)

Savings and costs: Spend £154m (2011–Sep 2018); forecast benefits cut from £873m to £217m (NAO, 2019)

Lesson: Voluntary adoption, optimism bias and dependence on private identity providers with high per-check prices undermined it

National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – centrally procured proprietary EPRs

Department of Health / NHS Connecting for Health

The programme was dismantled; by Mar 2012 about 98% of estimated benefits for the London and Southern programmes, EPS and Summary Care Record were unrealised, and some NPfIT-era systems (e.g. Lorenzo) are still being migrated away from. (National Audit Office (reported by Digital Health), 2013)

Savings and costs: Estimated total cost £9.8bn; £3.7bn benefits to date vs £10.7bn expected (NAO, 2013)

Lesson: Large, centralised proprietary contracts with little local ownership created lock-in without delivery

StarOffice/OpenOffice migration and reversal to Microsoft Office

Bristol City Council

Bristol moved 5,500 desktops to StarOffice in 2006 but by 2010 reverted to Microsoft Office because document exchange with councils and central government in .docx lost formatting and ad hoc Microsoft licences proved costly (scale = desktops). (Buss, A., 2010)

Savings and costs: Expected 60% cut in office software costs over 5 years (2006 plan)

Lesson: Going alone without a shared open-format mandate across partners left the council isolated on interoperability

NHS England public code repositories made private by default

NHS England

In May 2026 NHS England told teams to switch hundreds of public GitHub repositories to private by 11 May citing AI-driven vulnerability risks, after removing its open-source policy pages in Dec 2025; it called the step temporary and said it would still publish code with a clear need. It contradicts the NHS Service Standard on open code. (Jones, C., 2026)

Lesson: Security fears about AI code scanning overrode open-by-default policy without a published risk case, eroding reuse and scrutiny

GC Notify – reuse of UK GOV.UK Notify open-source code

Canadian Digital Service (Government of Canada)

CDS adapted GOV.UK Notify's open code (adding bilingual features) and by early 2026 GC Notify had sent over 277m notifications for more than 895 programmes and services (scale = services). (Canadian Digital Service, 2026)

Lesson: Open code from another government cut build time to days and created cross-border reuse

Login.gov – government-run single sign-on and identity proofing

General Services Administration (Login.gov)

About 190m users used Login.gov in FY2020-23 against about 60m for four commercial solutions combined; in 2026 OMB directed agencies to adopt it as the universal public sign-on within two years (scale = users FY2020-23). (Federal News Network, 2026)

Savings and costs: Agencies spent about $32.5m on Login.gov vs $209m on commercial identity solutions, FY2020-23 (GAO)

Lesson: A mandated government-owned identity layer outcompeted commercial providers on scale and cost; NIST alignment gaps slowed take-up

GovCMS – whole-of-government Drupal/Lagoon open-source web platform

Department of Finance (Australia)

By Dec 2019 GovCMS hosted 318 websites for 97 agencies on open-source Drupal and Lagoon, with hosting moved in 2018 to an Australian small business (Salsa Digital with amazee.io) (scale = agencies). (Department of Finance (Australia), 2019)

Lesson: Shared open-source platform plus domestic hosting contract built local supplier capability; savings asserted but not quantified

State-wide move from Microsoft Office/Outlook/Exchange to LibreOffice and Open-Xchange/Thunderbird, Linux to follow

State Government of Schleswig-Holstein (Digital Ministry; Dataport)

By Dec 2025 almost 44,000 mailboxes had moved to Open-Xchange and LibreOffice was the mandatory standard on nearly 80% of workplaces outside tax administration, with new Microsoft licensing below 10% (scale = mailboxes). The 2025 email cutover caused outages (e.g. judges briefly without email) and a ministerial apology; Linux desktop remains at pilot stage. (Staatskanzlei Schleswig-Holstein, 2025)

Savings and costs: More than EUR 15m in licence costs saved (ministry claim; reported as annual from 2026) against EUR 9m one-off migration and development investment in 2026

Lesson: Political mandate plus a phased, component-by-component plan delivered savings; rushed email cutover showed the cost of under-resourcing change management

GendBuntu – Ubuntu-based standard desktop after earlier OpenOffice and Firefox switches

Gendarmerie nationale

After moving to OpenOffice (2005) and Firefox, the Gendarmerie migrated its desktops to an in-house Ubuntu build; about 103,000 workstations (97%) were reported on GendBuntu by June 2024 (scale = workstations, per public compilations of Gendarmerie statements). It is the largest known public-sector Linux desktop estate in Europe. (Hillenius, G., 2013)

Savings and costs: Gendarmerie reported total cost of ownership about 40% lower (2013); earlier estimate of about EUR 7m a year savings (2009 OSOR case study)

Lesson: Incremental path (apps first, then OS on hardware refresh) and an industrialised, centrally managed desktop kept risk controlled

La Suite numérique – state-built open-source collaboration tools (Tchap, Visio, Docs, FranceTransfert) replacing WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom

DINUM (Direction interministérielle du numérique)

Tchap (Matrix-based) had about 250,000–300,000 monthly users and became the required messenger for state staff from Sept 2025 (scale = Tchap monthly users); Visio, hosted on SecNumCloud-qualified Outscale, had 40,000 users in Jan 2026 with a target of all state agents by 2027. In April 2026 CNAM began moving 80,000 agents to these tools and DINUM announced its own move from Windows to Linux. (Beurnez, V., 2025)

Savings and costs: Visio development co-funded EUR 2.3m by ministries; government says it saves several million euros versus non-European tools (reported c. EUR 1m a year per 100,000 users)

Lesson: Prime Ministerial circulars mandating use plus in-house product teams built on open source (Matrix, LiveKit) drove adoption

Replacement of Microsoft Office/Windows with OnlyOffice, Linux and PostgreSQL plus the Territoire Numérique Ouvert collaboration suite

Ville de Lyon

Lyon (almost 10,000 staff) announced in June 2025 a phased switch away from Microsoft Office and Windows, using OnlyOffice and the TNO suite (Jitsi-based video and office tools hosted in local French data centres) already used by nine local bodies. Progress figures for 2026 were not found. (Sharwood, S., 2025)

Lesson: Shared local-government suite (TNO) with national grant funding spreads build and hosting costs across councils

Ministry-wide replacement of Microsoft Office with LibreOffice (Windows retained)

Ministry of Digital Affairs (Digitaliseringsministeriet)

Minister Caroline Stage Olsen announced in June 2025 that half of staff would switch to LibreOffice that summer and all by autumn, with an option to revert if needed; Windows stays for now. Danish trade press reported significant user frustration after five months (Dec 2025); 2026 completion status not confirmed. (The Record, 2025)

Lesson: Small flagship ministry signals intent but formatting and font compatibility issues hit staff quickly; needs fallback and support

Municipal moves to reduce dependence on Microsoft

Aarhus and Copenhagen municipalities

Aarhus replaced Microsoft with a German provider in its culture and citizens department, while Copenhagen began reviewing Microsoft as a main supplier citing cost, monopoly and geopolitical risk. Danish municipal Microsoft costs reportedly rose from DKK 313m (2018) to DKK 538m (2023). (The Local Denmark, 2025)

Savings and costs: Aarhus culture and citizens department: annual cost cut from DKK 800,000 to DKK 225,000

Lesson: Savings were real but staff saw the replacement as a downgrade; start with contained departments

openDesk – federally governed open-source workplace suite (Nextcloud, Open-Xchange, Collabora, Element, Jitsi, OpenProject)

ZenDiS (Centre for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration); RKI; BWI

openDesk underpins the RKI-run Agora platform used by most of Germany's ~400 public health offices (about 7,000 users; scale = users) and BWI signed a seven-year framework to deploy it for the Bundeswehr (2025). The ICC chose it after US sanctions cut off its prosecutor's Microsoft email, and German social insurers validated it as an emergency workplace across IONOS, STACKIT and T-Systems clouds (July 2026). (heise online, 2025)

Lesson: A state-owned integrator assembling existing European OSS products and offering them via frameworks lowers procurement friction

Public fund for maintenance and security of foundational open-source infrastructure

Sovereign Tech Agency (subsidiary of SPRIND; federal funding)

Since Oct 2022 the agency has invested EUR 41.1m in commissioned work on 118 technologies (e.g. OpenSSH, PHP, systemd, GNOME, FFmpeg) from 195 identified as critical (scale = technologies). Programmes now include a Fund, Resilience (bug bounties), Fellowship and Standards. (Sovereign Tech Agency, 2026)

Lesson: Funding maintainers directly for maintenance and security, not new features, addresses a market failure that procurement alone cannot

LiMux – Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice desktop migration

City of Munich (Landeshauptstadt München)

By 2013 over 15,000 desktops ran LiMux, but in Nov 2017 the council voted to return all c. 29,000 PCs to a standard Windows client by 2020 (scale = PCs). A 2020 coalition and 2024 five-point plan with an Open Source Program Office revived open source for new projects, not the desktop. (heise online, 2017)

Savings and costs: City previously reported c. EUR 11.7m saved (2012); return to Windows estimated at EUR 86.1m over six years, incl. EUR 49.3m for the Windows workplace

Lesson: Mixed estate, fragmented IT governance, interoperability pain and political change outweighed licence savings

OpenOffice migration, abandoned for Microsoft Office

City of Freiburg im Breisgau

In Nov 2012 the council narrowly voted to stop its OpenOffice migration (c. 3,000-staff administration) after users reported crashes, conversion problems and weak spreadsheet tools under a costly dual-suite setup. (Computerwoche, 2012)

Savings and costs: Licence savings c. EUR 800,000 vs EUR 730,000 introduction cost; reviewer estimated c. EUR 2.5m productivity losses; return to Microsoft c. EUR 900,000

Lesson: Running two suites in parallel with an unmaintained OpenOffice version and no exit from legacy templates undermined the case

Switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice with ODF as internal standard

Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) / Federal Ministry of Defence

About 16,000 users moved to LibreOffice, mandatory for internal collaboration since Dec 2024 after a voluntary phase (scale = users). The ministry funds upstream LibreOffice improvements and published a military-symbol extension. (Militär Aktuell, 2026)

Lesson: Driven by resilience (must work offline and without cloud), with gradual rollout, weekly tips and training rather than a big bang

X-Road – open-source (MIT) secure data-exchange layer, co-governed with Finland via NIIS

Information System Authority (RIA); Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS, with Finland)

X-Road carries about 2.2bn transactions a year across 3,800+ e-services, with some 78,000 organisations as indirect users (scale = organisations). Code is MIT-licensed and jointly developed by Estonia and Finland through NIIS (2017), with cross-border federation since 2018. (e-Estonia Briefing Centre, 2026)

Savings and costs: RIA architect estimated over 820 years of working time saved per year (2017)

Lesson: Decentralised architecture, mandatory once-only data reuse and joint cross-border ownership of the code base

National e-identity (ID-card, Mobile-ID, Smart-ID) and qualified digital signatures

Information System Authority (RIA)

In 20 years more than 800m digital signatures were given, reaching about 123m in 2021 (c. 350,000 a day); 1,085,791 people had signed at least once (scale = people). (Riigi Infosüsteemi Amet (RIA), 2022)

Lesson: State-issued PKI with legal equivalence of e-signatures made digital the default for citizens and business

MijnBureau and DAWO – government open-source workplace on Linux laptops combining La Suite, openDesk and Nextcloud

Ministry of the Interior (BZK); SSC-ICT; VNG

Four municipalities ('s-Hertogenbosch, Zaanstad, Ede, Amsterdam) are piloting an early version until end-2026 to test integration and identify first user groups. Follows 2025 parliamentary motions to reduce dependence on US cloud. (Digital Government (BZK), 2026)

Lesson: Reuses French and German open-source suites rather than building from scratch; cross-border reuse cuts cost

Nextcloud-based alternative to Microsoft 365 collaboration

SURF (cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions)

30 SURF member institutions joined a Nextcloud pilot with room for 2,000 test users, the first 1,000 active, ahead of a decision at year-end on adding it to the standard offering (scale = test users). (Erasmus Magazine, 2026)

Lesson: Sector-owned buying and hosting cooperative can pool pilots and negotiate as one

Sovereign cloud tender for EU institutions under Cloud III DPS, assessed against a Cloud Sovereignty Framework

European Commission (DG DIGIT)

Contracts worth up to EUR 180m over six years awarded in April 2026 to four European providers: Post Telecom (with CleverCloud and OVHcloud), STACKIT, Scaleway and Proximus (with S3NS, a Thales–Google venture). The framework scores eight sovereignty objectives and accepts non-EU technology under strict operating conditions. (European Commission, 2026)

Lesson: Explicit, scored sovereignty criteria and multiple parallel awards avoid single-vendor dependence

Hybrid 'trusted cloud' offers licensing US hyperscaler technology under ANSSI SecNumCloud

S3NS (Thales/Google Cloud) and Bleu (Orange/Capgemini with Microsoft)

S3NS's PREMI3NS offer gained SecNumCloud qualification in Dec 2025 (about 17 months after application); Bleu, offering Azure and Microsoft 365, had slipped to end-2026 for its first services. These improve residency and legal jurisdiction but code and roadmap stay with the US vendor. (Gavois, S., 2026)

Lesson: Hybrids can satisfy jurisdiction rules quickly but certification is slow and technology dependency remains

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 operated in German data centres by a German operator under BSI requirements

Delos Cloud GmbH (SAP subsidiary) for German public administration

Planned for productive use from Jan 2026, the platform runs Azure in German data centres with cleared German staff; by June 2026 it had 15 reseller partners, with the Federal Employment Agency reported as an early test customer. Critics question whether it delivers sovereignty beyond residency. (heise online, 2024)

Savings and costs: Price premium expected at 10–20% (about 15% on average) over Microsoft public cloud

Lesson: Residency and operator control come at a premium while dependence on Microsoft technology and roadmap persists

Pilot of openDesk as alternative to Microsoft 365 for critical federal processes

Swiss Federal Chancellery (Bundeskanzlei)

After a 172-user proof of concept found the federal workplace can run on open source, the Federal Chancellery plans about 3,000 users by end-2027 (about 6% of federal posts; scale = users). Large video meetings and Microsoft-bound specialist apps remain limits. (Muanza, A. and Jaun, R., 2026)

Savings and costs: Budget about CHF 9m for the first phase

Lesson: Framed as crisis continuity for critical processes, starting with a defined user group and reuse of German openDesk

pagoPA national public payments platform (with app IO and SEND)

PagoPA S.p.A. (state-owned) with Department for Digital Transformation

A joint study by the State General Accounting Office and PagoPA found municipalities adopting pagoPA increased collections, with notable gains for waste tax, traffic fines and school canteen fees. The platforms are built and run by a state-owned company under open-source policy. (PagoPA S.p.A., 2026)

Savings and costs: Additional municipal revenue collected estimated at EUR 243m–469m over 2021–2024 (not cost savings)

Lesson: State-owned delivery company with mandatory adoption by public bodies creates a national payments rail

LliureX – Ubuntu-based Linux distribution for schools, with LibreOffice across the regional administration

Generalitat Valenciana (Conselleria de Educación)

LliureX ran on more than 120,000 workstations by 2019 (scale = workstations) and is still maintained, with LliureX 23 released in Feb 2024; LibreOffice is used across the regional administration including courts. (Vilas Gomez, A., 2024)

Savings and costs: About EUR 36m saved over nine years from LliureX (regional government, 2014); LibreOffice about EUR 1.5m a year in licences

Lesson: Long-term in-house distro team aligned to school curriculum and regional language kept it sustained for 20 years

Moodle BW – open-source learning platform for schools, run on a European cloud

Ministry of Education, Baden-Württemberg (SCHULE@BW)

Moodle BW serves about 620,000 daily users across 1,600 instances (scale = daily users) in a state of 4,500 schools; since a 2023 tender it runs on Kubernetes on T Cloud Public, Deutsche Telekom's EU cloud. The state had earlier dropped a Microsoft 365 school pilot over data-protection concerns. (T-Systems, n.d.)

Lesson: Open-source core plus containerised, portable hosting lets the state retender operations without changing platform