Today the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is embracing open source and rolling out a statewide collaboration platform based on Nextcloud – with the goal of reaching more than 50,000 employees across state and municipal administration in the long term.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern follows the example of other frontrunners such as Schleswig-Holstein, the Austrian Ministry of Economic Affairs and the French Ministry for the Energy Transition, among others. The French Ministry of Education uses Nextcloud for 400,000 employees and plans to roll it out to 1.2 million employees. These successful projects demonstrate that digitally sovereign solutions are not a vague concept, but already exist and are being deployed at large scale and that European open source is a genuine alternative to big tech.
The project is part of a broader sovereignty strategy for the German state, which also includes the cooperation agreement with Schleswig-Holstein signed in November 2025.
The state is opting for an open-source platform that it can control, audit, and develop further itself. Responsible for setup and operation is DVZ M-V GmbH, the state's IT service provider, which provides the platform for the public sector in the German state. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's digital strategy aims to increase the digital capability, independence, and security of public administration.
