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GO (Gazette Online) has learned that under a government-funded initiative to speed up the use of open source software in the public sector, Shepway District Council will head up the project.

The initiative, known as the Open Source Academy, is funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's e-Innovations investment programme. It is due to be formerly announced later this month.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium (OSC), which is one of the organisations involved in the initiative, said the UK public sector is lagging behind other European countries in terms of open source take-up, but claimed this project is likely to change that.

"This project is critical to allowing us to crack the public sector in the UK," said Taylor.

The Academy includes various projects, such as a platform based  open source technologies that will allow local authorities to get together on open source software developments.

This project, which will be run by Shepway District Council, will be similar to Sourceforge.net, a web site which catalogues thousands of open source applications. "It will be a Sourceforge for councils," said Taylor.

Local authorities can already share code through web sites, such as the Local Authority Software Consortium, but Taylor claims the collaborative effort is limited as it runs on proprietary Microsoft technology.

"We want to prove that open source is what the winners adopt," said Taylor. "There have been suggestions that only poorer councils adopt open source — this is not true."

Organisations involved in the Open Source Academy include Bristol, Cheshire, Birmingham and Shepway Council, the National Computing Centre, the University of Kent, the Institute of IT Training, OpenForum Europe, the Open Source Consortium and Socitm — the professional association for public sector IT managers.