A case study of the use of Open Source CMS in Public Administrations

The use of Open Source Content Management System (CMS) on the Web is increasing thanks to the flexibility provided by these systems and the simplification of the management operations. The use of CMS is simple for non programming experts. Many Public Administrations have adopted Open Source CMS for their websites, greatly reducing operating costs and ensuring scalability, advanced performance and privacy to the users. A special opportunity for a case study are the Italian municipalities. In fact the Italian Government, since January 2011, has required all municipalities to develop a website publishing all the public acts and everything related to the citizen-municipality communication (information regarding office hours, salaries of public employees, news and so on). Our study aims to quantify through empirical studies, the use of Open Source CMS in Italian municipalities websites in response to government regulations. Our results show that the number of Italian Public Administrations that use Open Source CMS is increasing, and our case study highlights how the adoption of Open Source CMS has increased about 5% in a year, leading to the 21.2% the percentage of Open Source CMS, with respect to the 15.8% registered in 2011.