There is an on-going debate over the last years as to whether the public sector of a country (Greece in our case) should incorporate open source tools for the citizen services, or the best practice should be with commercial tools. In our opinion, open source tools is the best fitted choice for the public sector for several reasons, such as low deployment costs, wide supporting community but most importantly: freedom and independence of choice. In this manuscript we describe the use of open source tools for an on-going project that the Central Union of Municipalities & Communities of Greece has announced.

The architecture of the system will incorporate the following infrastructure:

• Main Infrastructure (Datacenter), which will be hosting the operation and the control mechanisms for administrating all the services that are implemented by the platform
• Citizens/businesses, who will be connecting to the main infrastructure in order to be served for their affairs and who will be receiving the improved services of the platform.
• The public sector organizations (Municipalities), which will possess the needed information for the dispatching of the citizen affairs. Information will be submitted to the main infrastructure in an automated manner.

The platform that is being developed is based on an n-tier architecture and it will be developed by the use of existing open source solutions or by implementation of open source tools. Examples of the tools that are deployed are Shibboleth, Asterisk, Gforge etc. 

Additionally, following the … and the … the whole infrastructure will be implemented upon open and widely accepted protocols that enable accessibility, portability, and easiness in data exchange.