Lessons from PICS: three years of a collaboration space for customs and tax professionals

PICS, the Programme Information and Collaboration Space, connects 4.935 verified professionals from national customs and tax administrations, the European Commission and external experts. At the Open Social Summit '26, Philippe De Beir, portfolio and service manager at DG TAXUD, shared an open account of its move to Open Social and what the team learned.

A network of administrations

PICS supports the Customs and Fiscalis programmes and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, each as its own community within PICS. Most of the work happens in more than 400 groups on topics such as border control cooperation, administrative cooperation on VAT, training and CBAM implementation.

Trust is built in at three levels. Members sign in with EU Login, become verified once a manager at their own national administration confirms them, and all group content is visible to group members only. Members need to know that what they share in a group stays in the group.

The journey

PICS started in 2010 as a custom Drupal site. In 2021, DG TAXUD and DG DIGIT prepared a business case and chose Open Social's Europa Communities Platform (ECP SaaS), with known gaps to close: files and folders, organisations, shared document editing, bulk operations, KPIs and video conferencing. The new PICS went live in March 2023. In 2024 DG TAXUD began working directly with Open Social, with a service agreement, a support desk and a roadmap based on user feedback. Shared document editing with Collabora followed in 2025, and BigBlueButton and bulk file operations in 2026.

What users said

DG TAXUD surveys its users every year, and Philippe shared the results openly. General satisfaction was 69% on the old system in 2022 and dropped to 59% after the migration in 2023, as users adjusted to a new way of working and early issues were resolved. By 2025, with three quarters of the roadmap delivered, it had risen to 72%, higher than before the move.

Users value having one place for documents and collaboration, a structured workspace for programme management, notifications, shared document editing, and the exchange with colleagues in other countries. Their main requests are easier navigation, better search, smoother access, more engagement outside groups, and fewer separate platforms for sensitive work.

Lessons for other organisations

Philippe highlighted what he would advise anyone planning a similar platform:

• Invest in training and guidance from the start, even for things that seem obvious, such as the difference between a topic and a discussion.
• Write detailed requirements, not only a list of features.
• Understand the system. Open Social is flexible and configurable, and getting the most from it takes knowledge. Better documentation from our side would have helped, and we are working on it.

He also valued the direct relationship with the Open Social team, and noted that hosting in Europe with a European provider has become more important since the original business case.

What comes next

Next steps include search across all content, including files, events supported by BigBlueButton and a campaign to make events part of everyday work, programme KPIs and event costs reported in Lumina Insights, simpler onboarding based on email domains, and automated offboarding with segments and Engagement Studio.

See it for yourself

If you run a network of organisations and want to see how this works in practice, request a demo.