\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, called
Code.gov\footnote{\url{https://code.gov}}. It 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 (Content Manager System)
features, as well as, other communication resources.

The European Commission (EC) assists the Open Source Observatory
(OSOR)\footnote{\url{https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor}} that 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.  Previously, from 2007 to 2011, the EC promoted
the QualiPSo project that aimed to support 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. 

In Latin American there is an initiative called ``Software Público
Regional''\footnote{\url{http://softwarepublicoregionalbeta.net}} that provides
just a customized Gitlab instance to share source code and documentation of
projects developed by the involved countries.  Moreover, Chile has also its own
portal named ``Repositório Software
Público''\footnote{\url{http://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.
