Denmark's ministry of digital affairs: "The Ministry of Digitalisation is launching a pilot project on digital sovereignty"
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Press release in Danish: https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet
Translated with Libretranslate's instance: https://fairtranslate.eu/
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The Ministry of Digitalisation is launching a pilot project on digital sovereignty
Published 19-06-2025
News Press release Digitalisation
Denmark must be less dependent on the big tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalisation is now going to test new open source solution.
The Ministry of Digitalisation is launching a new pilot project this week, where a group of employees start testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office package.
Specifically, this is the open source platform Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The staff of the Department of Digitalisation included in the pilot project will be replaced by Collabora in their case handling system.
"As Minister, I have spoken about the need for a dispute with our digital independence. Now we are taking the first step of the Digital Ministry with the new pilot project. I do not think that we are ready to put the tech giants on the table tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that in the future our IT systems will not be dependent on a few large companies," says digitisation minister Caroline Stage.
The Ministry is testing a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case-handling system based on the Open Source platform Collabora based on LibreOffice. This means that the Ministry's employees are testing an alternative to the Microsoft Office package and using open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft's solutions like Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
The solution is rolled out for wide testing in the Department of Digitalisation 19 June 2025. Here a group of the department's employees will be replaced with the open source alternative with their Office package in F2. During the months thereafter, the Ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can adequately support its work and needs.
The upcoming test work is about functionality in relation to the Ministry's templates, format of government cases, use of track changes, tables etc., as well as whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without changing the document setup.
If the test period is successful, the next step is expected to be a broader roll-out of the open source alternative across the department.
Please note that while this in principle is a good initiative, it only regards a small part of the staff (in a small ministery) which is to experiment with collabora as an alternative to microsoft office (apparently only during the parliament holiday, i.e. until mid-October).
Contrary to the efforts in Schlesvig-Holstein (Germany), this is not a plan or part of a roadmap. It is a try-out. Due to the political environment i Denmark, I personally worry that this might back-fire: If the experiment is not prepared well and taken seriously enough, we will end up with a minister of digitalisation who claims that while 'we' pursue digitial sovereignty, 'we' have to ackowledge, that the alternatives are not mature. Hence, 'we' will have to double down on ms office etc...
Let's hope my skepticism will be rediculed.