goBerlin – Marketplace for trustworthy governmental and business services

In the future, citizens of Berlin's will be able to easily find and use the online services of governmental offices and businesses in a cloud-based services marketplace that makes it possible to offer and to combine public and commercial services.

In conjunction with the Trusted-Cloud-Project "goBerlin", the IT Service Center Berlin (ITDZ), the Senatorial Administration of the Interior and Sport of Berlin (SenInnSport), the Fraunhofer Institutes FOKUS and ISST, the HSH Soft- und Hardware Vertriebs GmbH, Immobilien Scout GmbH and Atos IT Solutions and Service GmbH are building a joint cloud platform for public services and supplementary commercial services. For this purpose, the IT Service Center Berlin (ITDZ) is establishing a trustworthy cloud infrastructure that meets the privacy requirements of eGovernment in particular. However, the primary objective goes well beyond the development of the joint cloud infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) for administration and commerce. The ultimate goal is to establish a technological marketplace platform based on this infrastructure that will also allow public authorities and companies to provide and connect secure and trustworthy IT services.

This services market place allows for new forms of cooperation between administration and companies and provides the basis for new online services for the citizens. The IT services of public authorities and companies offered on this marketplace can be linked by application developers to create new innovative apps for specific circumstances. The “goBerlin” platform provides the application developers with basic components and tools that will for example help them to guarantee the interoperability between different services or to securely manage the user data. Citizens will then be able to access the newly developed apps through a "life situation" portal. The objective is to provide the citizen with a compilation of applications “at a glance”, which are relevant for his or her current life situation. The first pilot application on goBerlin is an app for the scenario “moving” that includes administrative processes of governmental authorities and supplementary services by private providers. One can imagine that for example the citizen will be able to hire movers or to make an appointment with the banking consultant at the local branch in addition to actual re-registration.

The project does not only include the technical realisation of trustworthy and safe IT services in a cloud environment but also addresses the associated legal, business and organizational questions. In addition, the project partners are developing specific solutions and recommendations for action to help public IT service providers open up to private sector actors and to shift from a mere infrastructure provider to a platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service provider. Another objective of the “goBerlin” platform is increased collaboration between business and government in terms of the open government idea.

Based on its competences in the areas of cloud computing, open service engineering and eGovernment, Fraunhofer FOKUS is primarily performing the requirements analysis and the conception of the goBerlin market place. The project is an award winner in the nationwide “Trusted Cloud” competition and is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Economics.