Building Greenland’s new data infrastructure as free software
My company Magenta ApS is currently developing a data distributer infrastructure to handle all public data in Greenland and specifically to ensure their distribution between local authorities and the central government. I’m not personally involved in the development (though I might be at a later point, depending on the project’s needs), but I helped estimating and writing the bid. The data distributor must meet some quite high security and perfomance standards and will, as required by law, store data bitemporally according to the Danish standards for public data. As Greenland is a country of 2 million km² with a population of only 56,000, the system will be geographically quite distributed, and connectivity can be a problem, which challenges the system may also be able to handle.
The government of Greenland did not have a requirement that their new data infrastructure should be free software, but Magenta always delivers software under a free license, and we won the bid. The software will run on Microsoft Windows, since GNU/Linux skills can’t be reliably found on Greenland yet; it will be coded in a platform-agnostic way, using Java and Python/Django, so it could be switched to a GNU//Linux system at a later point, either to the government of Greenland or to possible new customers for this infrastructure.
As described on the EU’s free software observatory:
The government of Greenland wants to overhaul its current Grunddata (public records) system. According to the country’s digitalisation agency, one of the aims is to make it easier to share data between public administrations, businesses and citizens.
The modernisation should also increase public sector efficiency, by streamlining processes, deduplicating entries. The new system should also help to avoid requests for data that is already present in the public administration systems.
The new system is to provide high quality data, while passing on savings, and creating opportunities for growth and innovation, the Greenlandic Agency for Digitisation writes.
For Magenta, this is one of the largest orders in our history, and creating a new data infrastructure for an entire country as free software is an important opportunity – and responsibility. We’re looking forward to deliver this in order and hopefully keep working with the government of Greenland for years to come.