The site aims to let public administrations promote their e-government systems. More specifically, it offers a meeting place and a collaborative working environment for the development of interoperability. Joinup hostscommunities of practice, such as the community for the Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications and the community for the National Interoperability Frameworks Observatory. The platform also raises awareness on free and open source software and semantic interoperability in the public sector. Joinup offers a catalogue, of open source software, interoperability assets and models such as the Interoperability Maturity Model. The target audience includes those using, developing and implementing e-government systems. The site focuses on the European public sector, but the projects are open to all others.
Platform, repository and federation
The platform has three main functions:
Sharing of information, by publishing news, case studies and listing relevant events;
Allowing public administrations to collaborate with each other on development projects.
The site offers software development tools including a software repository, Apache Subversion and an issue tracker. Joinup provides access to a Federation catalogue hosted by public administrations in EU member states and standardisation bodies such as the European Committee for Standardization and European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Joinup is also used by the European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics to make available all of its applications. Examples include Circabc, a document management system, Open e-Prior, a tool to help manage electronic procurement, and OnLine Collection Software for ECI, to help organisations gather signatures that support their request to the European Commission to propose legislation. In December 2014, the ISA Programme added the ePractice community to the Joinup platform. ePractice offers services for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners. In January 2015, the OpenGovernment community was added by the EC's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology A detailed list of all the potential services someone receives by registering at this platform can be found . A list of all the software contributions made by the community are . A new version of Joinup is currently being developed. One of the features of the Joinup platform, the creation of the maven repositories for new projects, will disappear.
The platform's software is used to offer similar services involving public administrations in other regions and countries. In Australia and New Zealand, the Openray platform is being piloted since June 2012 by the Open Technology Foundation, a research organisation supporting the government sector in the research, evaluation, trialling and uptake of open technologies, standards and methods. By 21 November 2013, all semantic services were federated and show up in the Openray repository. Also on 21 November 2013, the government of South Australia announced that it would start piloting an internal version of the Joinup platform software and test the use of the EC's Open e-Prior Retrieved 2013-11-24. Its aim is to improve collaboration and procurement activities. Openroad is a similar collaboration platform, begun by Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology in January 2013.
