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Open Source is a form of licensing agreement that allows users to freely modify an existing project, generate a new project, or even derive a larger project from an existing projectone,   making enhancing the original work more advanced. Working in open source, however, also means working within the culture of open source. This means being equally open to an exchange of ideas in the community to make something more creative, user-friendly and flexible. Works which use these licenses are often made collaboratively, and over time a culture of practices and norms have developed to facilitate this process. At its best, this open source culture enables the equal exchange of ideas within a community to harness group creativity, ease of use, and flexibility.  Open source software is often typically free of charge, and often so too is a world of support through the communities surrounding each piece of software. It’s main advantage is support, provided on a community-driven and best effort basis. Using (as opposed to making) open source software often incurs a lower total cost of ownership when compared with than its closed source and proprietary alternatives.

At GIZ and openIMIS, our diverse network of partners and collaborators means demands that we work with a variety of software tools and platforms. This lack of standardized information output often results in licensing and diversity can result in incompatible standards and licenses being used, causing compatibility issues when working across different groups. This manual intends to solve at least a part of this problem by outlining best practices we can follow to reduce friction as part of our collaboration provides best practices for reducing friction and avoiding incompatibilities during collaboration, drawn from our experience at openIMIS. This guide also understands the advantages of using proprietary tools solutions such as those provided by Microsoft or and Adobe software , and provides compromises without completely shifting your software stack. We recommend using desktop applications for creating documents and assets, however we know that some guidelines and rules prevent you from installing additional applications onto a device. In many of these cases, we provide alternatives such as using open formats or even offering online tools that can be used from a web browserdescribes working compromises which minimise inconvenience and disruption. In places we recommend the use of desktop applications for creating documents and assets, while providing web-based alternatives in case installing local software is not possible. We prioritise widely supported standardised data formats throughout.

Following these guidelines whenever possible will improve the interoperability across openIMIS contributors and partner projects, including other GIZ projects.  The goal for these guidelines is to provide a pragmatic approach in order to create an impact across the openIMIS open systems. Fully switching to open source is not likely or practical for many organisations and this guide provides best practises.

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In a world where paper documents increasingly get replaced are being rapidly supplanted by electronic records, long term access to the data becomes critical. This is especially the case for legal contracts and government documents that stay valid and relevant over decades, or even longer. GIZ is also facing this challenge. Just as paper and pens have been pens and pencils are available from multiple many manufacturers and vendors , document file formats and the applications creating these file formats which use them need to be supported by and available from multiple vendors. This guarantees long-term access to data, even if individual vendor companies disappear, change their strategies strategy, or dramatically change their prices. The formats digital format in which information is published stored can either be “open” or “closed”. Open format means the software and format are available to anyoneAn open format is one which is available for everyone to use, free of charge, and available for people to build into their own software and products without limitation set by intellectual property rightscapable of being built upon – for example into new software products, without any limitations. Developers can use these to produce multiple software packages, services, and products by using these formats. 

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There are lots of tools available to create visual assets (graphics) for any need. While the current industry standard is Adobe Creative Cloud, we try to keep proprietary software to a minimum. When this was not possible or difficult, the minimum we aim for open formats. In the following we will go through recommended tools, the various file formats they support, and limitations they pose in different conversion settings.

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