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Gijs Hillenius

Context for Digital Government

International policy specialist on open source in public services and government digitalisation. I help public services - small, national, and supranational - develop their digital government policies and actions.

I’m an expert in technology knowlegde transfer with more than 32 years of experience. My work has appeared in German, Dutch, and English publications.

  • Economist Intelligence Unit
  • Publication Office of the European Union
  • Computable, Automatisering Gids and other IT trade publications

Professional teacher of Journalism, Creative Writing, and Communications, and experienced Media Trainer.

Interests

  • Open source & open government
  • Government digitalisation
  • Sustainability and sovereignty of IT in Public Services

Education

  • Doing Journalism with Data, 2014

    European Journalism Centre

  • Postgraduate Journalism (PDOJ), 1993

    Erasmus University Rotterdam

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Open Source Policy Advisor

European Commission

Jan 2019 – Present Brussels

Responsibilities include:

  • Policy review and context analysis
  • Drafting and rooting of the new open source strategy
 
 
 
 
 

Open Source Expert

European Commission

Jan 2007 – Present Brussel

Responsibilities include:

  • Main contributor to the Open Source Observatory
  • Advisor to the EU-Free and Open Source Software Auditing Project

Recent Posts

31 Oct 2020 1 min read

Open Source Observatory October 2020

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR.eu) articles I wrote and published for the European Commission in October 2020.

30 Sep 2020 1 min read

Open Source Observatory September 2020

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR.eu) articles I wrote and published for the European Commission in September 2020.

31 Aug 2020 1 min read

Open Source Observatory August 2020

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR.eu) articles I wrote and published for the European Commission in August 2020.

See all posts

Projects

EU-FOSSA 2

Testing the usefulness of bug bounties and hackathons to improve the security of critical open source solutions used by the European Commission

Open source software strategy

Renewal of the internal open source software strategy of the European Commission

Share and Reuse Framework

The European Commission’s knowlegde sharing portal for eGovernment professionals, and eInclusion and eHealth practitioners

OpenGovernment portal

The European Commission’s Observatory on open government and public sector modernisation

ePractice

The European Commission’s knowlegde sharing portal for eGovernment professionals, and eInclusion and eHealth practitioners

Open Source Observatory

The European Commission’s Observatory on open source in public services

Recent & Upcoming Talks

OpensourceLX - Open Source and the European Commission

This talk will get you up to date on some of the new open source plans and actions at the European Commission. These build on the …
11 Nov 2020 00:00 Lisbon, Portugal - Brussels, Belgium

Openexpo 2020 - Critical success factors for open source implementations in public services

The presentation will present the high-level actions that need be taken by public administrations and stakeholders if they want to …
18 Jun 2020 00:00 Madrid, Spain and Brussels, Belgium
Slides Video

Open Source Beyond 2020

Co-organiser of the conference jointly organised by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) and the …
14 Nov 2019 00:00 Brussels, Belgium

Sharing & Reuse Conference 2019

Moderator of the session Coding with Citizens, at the second edition of the Sharing & Reuse Conference organised by the European …
11 Jun 2019 00:00 Bucharest, Romania

From open innovation to open government

Governments are opening up data and code but what does that mean in regards to their innovation efforts to improve public services? …
4 Mar 2019 00:00 Brussels, Belgium
See all talks

Recent Publications

Open Source Observatory Annual Report 2016

This report depicts the main trends in open source deployments by Europe’s public services. We have sorted, systematised and summarised …
PDF

Free and open source software across the EU

Across the EU, there is a groundswell of public administrations that use open source for their ICT solutions. Evidence of its benefits …
PDF

Governments could save millions by reducing their dependence on a single desktop vendor

Europe’s public administrations are needlessly spending millions by not tackling their dependency on a single proprietary system for …
PDF

The Steady March of the European Penguins

This article provides an overview of the advancements and some of the setbacks of the implementation of open source and open standards …
PDF

Popular Topics

AG cli computable Debian digitaalbestuur digitalisation eGovernmennt eHealth EIU Emacs ePractice Gnus Inq Linux_Magazine mt open source Org-Mode Osor public services Thinkpad

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