At the end of July, the left-wing majority on the Lisbon City Council approved a motion asking EMEL to be more open and collaborative with the creators of alternative applications for the city's shared bicycle system. The document is just a political position.
It was approved by left-wing majority in the Lisbon City Council a motion calling for the municipality, together with EMEL, to have “an attitude of greater openness, dialog and collaboration with the community of GIRA programmers and users”, and in particular with young people who have created alternative applications.
The motion, which was approved by a majority with Carlos Moedas's leadership voting seven votes against, asks EMEL “authorize and expressly acknowledge alternative applications that respect the principles of privacy, transparency, security and responsible use of the API”, as long as these apps are “open access, non-profit and with publicly available source code” - as with Gira+ and the mGIRA, apps created voluntarily by users of Lisbon's shared bicycles, in response to the malfunctioning of the app official.
The document was presented by Free Councillor Patrícia Gonçalves, urges EMEL to “remove the use of restriction mechanisms such as Google's Play Integrity (and iOS equivalent), which currently prevent many users from accessing the official GIRA app, even on legitimate devices, severely limiting access to the public service”. This mechanism prevents people who, by choice, have an Android phone without Google services from using Lisbon's shared bicycles.
The text of the motion presented by Livre and signed by the councillors of BE and Cidadãos Por Lisboa (CPL) states that “the European Union has affirmed its digital strategy based on principles of openness, collaboration and reuse” and that “the ‘Public Money, Public Code’ principle, promoted by the Free Software Foundation Europe, argues that software developed with public funding should be made available as free and open source software, allowing transparency, public scrutiny, and reuse by other public entities”.
The document even advocates transforming the official GIRA app into open source software, which, according to Livre, “would promote greater security, efficiency, innovation and citizen participation”, and would allow “fixing faults, involving the technology community, reusing solutions between municipalities”.
Moedas explains vote against
The motion was presented at the public meeting of July 30, the last before the usual August break. Carlos Moedas, Mayor of Lisbon, gave an oral explanation of vote to justify his and his team of councillors' vote against, saying that it was because of “technical and data protection reasons”. The mayor began by explaining that if restriction mechanisms such as Google's Play Integrity were removed, “we would be taking an IT risk”, i.e, “daily personal and financial data of users could be at risk”.
On the point of EMEL having a more collaborative stance, Moedas said that the municipal mobility company “she was always open and available to talk” with the creators of the alternative applications, but stressed that “we can't disrespect public procurement”. The Mayor of Lisbon also explained that applications such as Gira+ or mGIRA are open source, “they may be developed with good intentions but they don't have the same legal obligations that EMEL has to respect”.
Despite the votes against by Moedas and his councillors, the motion was approved by a majority, with 10 votes in favor: those of the PS, BE, CPL, PCP and Livre councillors. It should be noted that a motion is simply a political document in which the councillors express a position on a particular issue and recommend a certain course of action. Unlike a proposal, which implies an immediate executive decision by the municipality, a motion has mainly deliberative and symbolic value: it does not oblige the council or its municipal companies to act, but it does constitute a clear political orientation and a public signal of the position of the majority that governs a given municipality.
EMEL is developing a new app for GIRA
EMEL is developing a new application for GIRA, with the aim of definitively solving the problems of the current one - the public tender was launched in December 2024 for the sum of 1.5 million euros and has been awaiting publication on the Base portal since January of this year. EMEL considers that “the current IT solution, which has been in place since the beginning in 2017, no longer provides the necessary response, both in terms of technical performance in relation to the number of bicycles and stations, but also in relation to the growth in user customers that has been seen”, can be read in the specifications.
The competition concerns not only the development of an application for the end customer, but also an application for internal use, as well as a backoffice, among other more technical details. EMEL wants this new solution to “based on modern technologies and architectures” and allow the municipal company to “flexibility and the ability to evolve by creating new opportunities for improvement”.
