IMIO wins European Commission prize, donates to the Plone Foundation

IMIO is a leading provider of e-government solutions using open source software used by 260 localities in Belgium

Award and Donation

On March 29, 2018, the European Commission awarded IMIO the €15,000 first prize in the local government category of the Sharing and Reuse Award.

IMIO has generously donated €10,000 of the prize money to the Plone Foundation.

The Sharing and Reuse Award, for interoperable solutions for public administration, businesses and citizens in Europe, recognizes government agencies that have set up and shared IT solutions with broad potential for reuse.

Of the 16 nominated projects, 10 (including IMIO's) are open source.

Governments are able to realize substantial savings and efficiencies when they reuse "cross-functional" components such as authentication systems and electronic invoicing. 

IMIO's Statement on Plone

"If IMIO has won the Share and Reuse Award of the European Commission, it is due not only to the support and unconditional collaboration of its members, but also to the innovative aspects of its approach, be it organizational or technical.

This latter element, namely "Plone", is often unknown because the close relationship between IMIO and local governments masks the activity of a host of other private and public actors who created this technology that is the basis for most of IMIO's tools.

However, without them, IMIO would probably not have reached this technological maturity and nor have been able to respond as effectively to the needs of local authorities. Given its limited capabilities, IMIO has not been able to contribute directly to Plone core software. The software is indeed "free": no funds in the form of license fees were spent on this technology. Nevertheless, IMIO contributed to the community in the form of our team's services during international sprints, creation of generic modules, community support (contributions to forums), presentations at conferences, and evangelizing, either directly or through our subcontractors.

The prize money donated by IMIO is a token of appreciation for the hard work of the Plone community and its Foundation, with which we have worked for 11 years. The €10,000 donation will allow the Foundation to continue supporting its activities."

About the Plone Foundation

Plone is 100% funded by sponsorships from forward-thinking organizations and individuals. With the help of these financial contributions, the Plone project has continued to thrive and maintain an astonishing level of activity and innovation for 17 years.

The mission of the Plone Foundation is to protect and promote Plone. Foundation expenses are primarily related to:

  • an ambitious support programme for organizing and attending strategic sprints, conferences and marketing events
  • paying the Plone release manager a travel stipend to evangelize, plus a small stipend for major and minor software releases
  • registration of Plone’s trademark in countries around the world
  • legal work to secure Plone’s intellectual property in the Foundation’s “software conservancy”
  • the development and production of marketing materials
  • provisioning servers for our web sites, community forum, testing and continuous integration processes
  • a stipend to support the Plone marketing/communications team lead's attendance at Plone and related events

In order to continue this work, the Plone Foundation relies on sponsorships to create and sustain a reliable stream of income.

In recent years, we have aggressively supported strategic sprints, which are designated by the Framework Team as being significantly important to the continuing development of Plone. These include projects such as the headless CMS initiative, the porting of Plone to Python 3, the new Pastanaga UI, the integration of Angular and React JavaScript frameworks, and the REST API. Each of these represents important avenues for Plone's future growth, and these have been the primary expenditures of the Foundation, funded by vital sponsorships.

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