Common general documents for the ESSnet
v1.0 Oslo 25-27 July 2022
Authors: Harri Lehtinen harri.lehtinen@stat.fi, Romain Tailhurat romain.tailhurat@insee.fr, Jon Folkedal jon.folkedal@ssb.no, Neville De Mendonca neville.demendonca@ons.gov.uk, Trygve Falch trygve.falch@ssb.no
Original Google Docs document is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdANdMFZigtkykAoGvxvtyv3ILjILdnutoe6PdQ1d5A/edit?usp=sharing
A draft proposal for an ESS open strategy (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/system/files/03._os_ess.docx) has been presented at the DIME-ITDG meeting in june 2022. The participants of the meeting have validated the strategy and proposed that an informal group or a task force be created to convey additional work on the subject.
The goal of this document is to provide a very short summary of the strategy and to propose a roadmap for the task force.
This roadmap is presented as a non prioritized list of topics that could be addressed by the task force. It is structured around three main domain:
As much as possible, this roadmap will point to existing documentation and references that will be starting points to the actions taken by the task force. This document will also specifically make recommendations on different topics that should be taken into consideration when moving forward. The recommendations are based on industry wide best practices, but also rely on previous work from various ESS-Net projects, like SCFE (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/projects-deliverables_en) and I3S (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/projects-deliverables-0_en), as well as from extensive work done by the UNECE community, specifically CSPA (https://statswiki.unece.org/display/CSPA).
1) OSS is recommended as the default option (“OSS by default”) 2) Possible to derogate from the default OSS option in justified cases 3) Adoption of OSS should be encouraged and promoted through training, hackathons, conferences, etc. 4) All code developed by the NSI should be published as OSS 5) A culture of openness and transparency
We believe that going Open Source in general and for the ESS in particular is only possible with the right culture - which may or may not be already existing at NSI. This section is pointing at action that could help understand what is this cultural environment and to build one.
The ESS-OSS strategy will benefit from an integrated communication capability, meaning that it will manage to promote the strategy itself at different levels and communicate results (e.g. reuse and collaboration).
Fostering here means helping non Open Source savvy people get on the train and also building a perennial community.
Open Source projects could benefit from opening their management, which may include product thinking as any other software product.
We propose that some kind of peer review process should be part of the ESS-OSS in order to build trust especially regarding statistical packages.
ESS OSS projects should handle evolution with care and keep users from dealing with breaking changes.
These principles are proposals, and are listed in no particular order. They should be strongly considered, as they represent the best practices used in the IT industry.
All services should be secure by design in that they will perform the required functionality but be resistant to misuse or exposing data to unauthorized parties whilst supporting operational management and diagnostics. (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/cyber-security-design-principles, https://www.oreilly.com/content/dont-build-death-star-security/)
Use principles like “API first” when building products (https://swagger.io/resources/articles/adopting-an-api-first-approach/) Strive for simplicity and robustness in the code (readable, testable, extendable)
Use Domain Driven Design principles when designing services and components. (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainDrivenDesign.html)
Create user interfaces that follow accessibility guidelines, and requirements. (https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility)