\section{Related Projects}
\label{sec:related}

The new SPB platform is a fully integrated environment,
very advanced in comparison with related initiatives.
%
For instance, the USA government has a platform designed to improve access to
federal government software\footnote{\url{https://code.gov}}.
Code.gov is an interface to organize USA government projects,
making it easy for users and developers to obtain information and to access their
source code repositories at GitHub. However, it does not provide social networking
and CMS features, as well as, other communication resources.

The European Commission supports the Open Source Observatory\footnote{\url{https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor}} (OSOR) that is a
community hosted in the JoinUp platform.
OSOR intends to exchange information, experiences, and best practices around the
use of FLOSS in the public administration. It supports the discovering of FLOSS projects made
available by public agencies, providing information about these projects, such
as news, events, studies, and solutions.
It also offers discussion forums and community mailing lists. But it
does not have an integrated source code repository manager, so for each
project there is a link to its own external repository.
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Moreover, in 2007 the European Comission published a study examining the impact
that the development and distribution of FLOSS by public agencies have on eGovernment
services and the economy~\cite{ghosh2004}. And, from 2007 to 2011, there
was the QualiPSo project, whose objective was to provide FLOSS
users, developers, and consumers with resources and expertise on FLOSS quality.
The QualiPSo project also had planned to
develop a platform called QualiPSo Factory, but it was not fully completed. 

Finally, in Latin American there is an initiative based on the SPB project
called ``Software Público
Regional''\footnote{\url{http://softwarepublicoregionalbeta.net}}. 
It provides a customized Gitlab instance to share 
source code and documentation of projects developed by the involved countries.
%
Like Brazil, Chile has its own portal, called ``Repositorio Software
Público''\footnote{\url{http://www.softwarepublico.gob.cl}}. In the communities of the portal,
users can create content such as news, documents, and wiki pages, but source code
repositories are available at the Bitbucket
platform\footnote{\url{https://bitbucket.org/softwarepublico}}.

The Brazilian government needed to evolve the SPB platform that existed since
2007. When we started this project, the SPB Portal had about 200 thousand
registered users. We could not just do something like contacting these users and asking
them to register an account at Github. Moreover, after the Edward
Snowden's case, the Brazilian government issued a decree
(8.135/2013) requiring public
agencies to host their information systems by themselves, 
avoiding the usage of private platforms, especially the ones provided by foreign
companies. Therefore, we needed to develop our own solution to cover all the
requirements, producing a complete governmental integrated platform for
collaborative software development.