Joinup's Reusability: The European Interoperable game-changing platform
Europe is becoming more interconnected and data-centric, relying on the exchange of information between institutions and governmental bodies. The development of the Joinup platform is precisely to answer the rising question of interoperable systems and ways we can potentially reuse them.
Due to its structure, the Joinup platform satisfies multiple necessities. From finding interoperable open digital government ICT solutions to an online space for sharing and learning about digital public services and initiatives, Joinup incorporates a dynamic yet well-structured catalogue of solutions. What’s more, Joinup is an interoperable solution on its own, offering an interactive, functional and reusable system to reuse its source code.
Your own, custom collaborative platform
Whether you’ve used Joinup directly, or have heard about it from colleagues, you can also take advantage of the numerous benefits the platform already offers by setting up your own collaborative customised version based on Joinup’s freely available source code. Your organisation, administration, or department can customise the system to its needs – following the comprehensive instructions – reducing considerably the costs and deployment times.
Moreover, Joinup is in constant development allowing you to take advantage of new features and improvements that make their way in the source code. Of course, you can – and are encouraged to – contribute back with your own customisations and improvements, too, allowing an extra exposure venue for your organisation or administration. Your custom-built, Joinup-based platform will represent the ideal online place for your information exchange and reuse, implementation of policies, projects and initiatives, among others. And all this, safely encompassed by Joinup’s reliable, tested, and secure code base.
Check out – pun intended! – Joinup’s source code by clicking on the button below.
And there’s more! The Joinup Development Team has also contributed more than 30 reusable modules to the Drupal community (Joinup is Drupal-based). Here are some notable ones:
- Show a user-friendly page when a fatal error or an exception occurs (Error custom pages);
- Reference both local and remote files by URI (File URL);
- Provides a widget allowing users to upload or choose an existing image from a library (Image Library Widget);
- Allows to federate and manage the SPDX licences (SPDX Licences).
You can contact us for the full list.
Mission… possible: Building a platform in 3 weeks (the EASME case)
Reusability is not only a core principle but also a goal, and Joinup aims to implement this principle by providing the means to accomplish it. Its freely available source code allows a fast and efficient setup for custom, online collaborative platforms.
That is why, in May 2020, the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Task Force selected Joinup’s source code to build a platform for their initiative to find innovative solutions to the COVID-19 challenges. The Joinup platform’s solid tried and tested source code was a perfect match that helped save time and resources for this endeavour. Christoforos Korakas Senior Advisor for EASME’s EIC Task Force and Joinup user explains in his interview that, Joinup’s code provided most of the required functionalities facilitating the deployment and the migration of data, ultimately translating into high efficiency and time savings. Joinup’s code allowed EASME to provide a platform in 3.5 weeks which is an outstanding result both at the development and policy level.
You can visit the European Innovation Council Platform (EIC) for more information regarding their activities.