CIRCABC (Communication and Information Resource Centre for Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) is an application used to create collaborative workspaces where communities of users can work together over the web and share information and resources. CIRCABC will replace CIRCA (Communication and Information Resource Centre for Administrations), an eGovernment application supporting the online collaborative activities of the European Union's public administrations.

Since 1997, CIRCA has been running as an IDA(BC) service and has been used by more than 30 Directorates-General and in particular by the committees and consultative bodies established to support collaboration between the Member States and the EU institutions. More than 100 national administrations have received a free licence and use it for their own needs.

CIRCABC supports the development of eGovernment best practice: it makes public administration documents more accessible and harmonised. With the CIRCABC Open Source release, businesses and private associations are given the opportunity to use this tool for their own needs.

Last update: 11/2008

What is CIRCABC?

CIRCABC is an open-source, web-based application developed on top of the OSS Alfresco platform. 
CIRCABC enables widespread collaborative groups to share information and resources in private workspaces over the web.

With CIRCABC you can:

• Distribute and manage documents and files in any format, many languages and with version control;
• Manage translations: these can be uploaded and modified through version-controlled multilingual editions;
• Search in multilingual documents;
• Start discussion forums;
• Manage both documents and users, easily, through interactive forms;
• Customise the user interface and navigation through templates.

Furthermore, CIRCABC:

• Opens most of its features to visually impaired users (WAI level A compliant);
• Guarantees security: The members of a collaborative group can see only what they are allowed to;
• Provides authentication mechanisms;
• Enables audit trail facilities;
• Offers decentralised and easy management of the individual workspace;
• Allows surveys to be created and managed through the integration of CIRCABC with IPM (Interactive Policy-Making at http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/ipm/);
• Provides authorisations.

Multilingualism: CIRCABC fits with the user's language preferences. The user interface is being translated into the 23 official languages of the European Union. Users can create and version multilingual editions. Documents with several translations are brought together into version-controlled multilingual editions. Even the titles and keywords of pictures, audiovisual documents and sound recordings can be translated into several languages. And the CIRCABC's search engine retrieves information from the properties and full text of multilingual documents.

Wide accessibility: CIRCABC is compatible with the WCAG 1.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), a set of recommendations from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This means that CIRCABC does not use Java script and thus visually-impaired people can actively employ most of its facilities.

Security: With CIRCABC, what users see is what they may access. The user interface is mapped onto users' access profiles. Moreover, CIRCABC is expected to develop encryption facilities and the possibility of trusted exchanges and certificates.

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Objectives

The objective of CIRCABC is to offer a reliable, secure and efficient collaborative application to widespread communities of users to enable them to work on the same subject and achieve common goals in a swift and cost-effective manner.

Moreover, in the spirit of other OSS projects, CIRCABC invites its users to play an active part in its developer community.

How does CIRCABC work?

CIRCABC calls an Interest Group (IG) the private workspace designed for and shared by a community of users, meaning people working together on a specific topic. Each interest group is managed by one or several interest group leaders.
It may be entirely or partly public (no authentication required) or with registered access (access reserved for its members).

An IG is characterised by:

• One or several responsible leaders;
• A group of users (potentially unlimited);
• A set of services (see below);
• A collection of contents brought together under a main topic.

Interest Group services

Library: The library can be described as a tree of folders (so-called 'spaces') filled with content. This is the place where the documents are stored, managed and shared. They can be viewed, downloaded, modified, versioned, sent by e-mail, etc. They can be grouped together with their translations into multilingual editions.

Members' directory: This service provides information on registered users (who can apply for membership in any Interest Group). The members of an Interest Group can ask for their contact information to be hidden from or shown to the other members.

Newsgroups: These groups provide a forum where the members of an Interest Group can discuss a topic or the documents they are sharing.

Surveys: In this optional space, users can build and follow up surveys through the integration of CIRCABC with IPM ('Interactive Policy-Making' available at http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/ipm/).

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How to participate

How to join a CIRCABC Interest Group

Access to a specific Interest Group is granted by the respective Interest Group leader. Public Interest Groups can be consulted without authentication.

Since CIRCABC is a web-based application, only an internet connection and a standard browser (such as the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Opera ) are necessary to access CIRCABC.

How to obtain CIRCABC software

CIRCABC software will soon be available free of charge through the EUPL 1.0 (European Union Public Licence). The EUPL is an open-source software licence approved by the Commission on 9 January 2007 as the licence to be used for the distribution of software developed within the framework of IDABC.

The licence forms can be downloaded from the IDABC website at http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/eupl.

For more information on EUPL, please visit OSOR.EU

How to become a member of the CIRCABC developer community

By promoting the use of open-source software, CIRCABC is in line with the activities of the Open Source Observatory. Becoming a member of the CIRCABC developer community gives you the opportunity to give feedback and to help to improve this tool by sharing your experience.

Feel free to contact DIGIT-CIRCABC-OSS@ec.europa.eu for further information about the CIRCABC developer community.

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About us

CIRCABC is financed by the IDABC Programme managed by a steering committee comprising DG MARKT (Directorate-General for the Internal Market), Eurostat (the Statistical Office of the European Communities) and DG DIGIT (Directorate-General for Informatics). DIGIT is responsible for coordinating development and the user community. It hosts https://circabc.europa.eu and provides helpdesk and support.

For further information, feel free to contact DIGIT-CIRCABC-OSS@ec.europa.eu or visit https://circabc.europa.eu.

Technical Information

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