Deploying Open source applications within the public sector domain: preliminary findings on potential organisational benefits and drawbacks

E-government applications in the last decade have been considered by public administration as a major tool to attain goals in terms of increased efficiency and improved quality of services offered to citizens. Pushed by a growing institutional support both at european and country level, quite recently in Italy local administrations are more and more pursuing their journey towards electronic government by adopting open source applications. This paper is concerned with a preliminary reflection on potentialities of open source applications when deployed at public administration level, especially considering a case study of a municipality that has adopted an open source web portal solution.