 Welcome to everybody listening in and we're very excited to have you here to talk about something that we think is sometimes an under-emphasized area of open source, which is the government involvement in it. First, the introductions. My name is Steven Pech. I'm open forum Europe's user director. And I'm Paula Krzegorzewska, policy analyst at RFI. We are a Brussels based think tank that is committed to advancing openness in digital policy. So why do we say in the title, give open source the way it deserves in policy? Here in this virtual room, everybody knows that open source is absolutely ubiquitous and tech. What company working with code isn't using open source software. Nobody would start a software project in 2020 without using open source software components. And for us, it's clear that open source saves a lot of development time. It enables innovative projects and it provides equal access. But the truth is also that open source is a niche. What I'm saying is ask yourself, has your mother ever heard of open source? And crucially, does your local representative, your politician know? Does your typical policymaker know what open source is? Clearly, in almost all cases, the answer to that is no. They know about labor policy. They might even know about data protection today, but they don't know about open source. What we see here in Brussels is that even those who write digital legislation rarely know what open source is. And so we wondered, what do we have to show for after many years of advocacy toward lawmakers around the world? And this is also something we ask ourselves regarding our work. We're currently doing research into this and the answer seems to be not that much. What we do have is a number of laws or norms favoring open source and public procurement. Meaning the government says that when they buy software, they will buy open source if it is of similar quality and availability. This seems like it might be the one thing connecting open source and public policy around the world. This is also the one that seems easiest to understand and implement for policymakers. You can implement it with a few people believing in open source who can influence public procurement policy. A lot of countries have tried their hand in this with though admittedly mixed results. Outside of public procurement, we don't have a lot. This differs a bit between countries, of course. Again, having surveyed this very broadly speaking, it seems that governments in western countries such as the United States, Latin America and Europe, they approach open source purely from a public procurement perspective, hoping that there will also be indirect favorable effects. On the other hand, governments in countries in Asia also do some work in getting the industry hooked up with open source software to support the digitalization. But we were wondering, isn't there more potential in open source than just saying it will save us X percentage of development costs? What do you think? Just as an exercise, we thought about a few policy fields that digital policymakers engage with on a daily basis here in Brussels where we are based and work. It really isn't difficult at all to see what open source can do in these fields. So if we think about open source and cybersecurity, there you have auditability of code, increasing trust. If you think about open source and research and innovation, making innovation more open, increasing access in machine learning, making automated decision more transparent, in high performance computing, breaking existing login effects of dominant suppliers, in telecommunications, ensuring interoperability on all levels of the stack. And if you look at copyright, well, those that know what article 13 is know that we better not talk about this here. But I'm going to be a bit cheeky. I'm going to say that no policymaker in the world working on the latest cybersecurity legislation has ever included a paragraph on open source software or even hardware. And why is that? We think that is because they don't know the role of open source today. They don't know that open source software already plays a huge role in all of these areas. They don't know how important actually it is in digital space. Whenever we talk to policymakers about open source, very few will know what open source is about, and those have heard about it will often have huge misconceptions about it. They don't know that the IT industry is built on open source, that all of these jobs are connected to it, that huge communities exist, and that it is big business as well as a big idea. So this is where we're trying to come in and I'll hand it over to Paula here. So the question might be why do policymakers don't know much about open source? A big part of the answer to this is a lack of cross sectoral research on the issue, and a subjectively noticed by us decrease in the number of those who research, promote and explain open source at some point. Of course, global and structure and by nature free character of open source does not make it easier here. To develop and implement policies in a given area, policymakers need evidence. They need indicators such as a number of jobs that can be created innovation indicators companies turn over and possible economic growth. We do have quite some research on open source but very often it is not easy to use it in a policy making environment. There are some organizations that are highly involved in researching open source and of course the next foundation is one of them. And we have quite some countries that have given a spot to open source in terms of research for their digital policy agenda. So for example we have the Bitcoin study in Germany. I'm going to share the links with you if you don't know these reports, but they issued the open source monitor 2019 which is a quite interesting report on the use of open source software in German economy. And it includes a survey of over 800 companies. Another instance is in France where we have two interesting studies one is from the CNL a French National Council for open source software. And the other one is done by a professor Frank Nagel from Harvard Business School that has researched the impact of changing procurement law in France. And this law requires government agencies to favor open source software over proprietary software in an attempt to reduce costs. What's interesting is that he found out that this policy change led to an increase of nearly 600,000 open source contributors per year from France, an increase in number of companies that use open source and increased number of jobs, while bringing benefits such as higher competitiveness of the country's digital sector both domestically and abroad. And these are some of the largest pieces of research that have been done in recent years on the impact that open source software has in European countries, but a long time ago, we asked ourselves, what was actually the last time a research of this sort was conducted on the European scale. And the answer is 2006. And the economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the information communication technology sector in Europe, and it was procured by the European Commission. It did find out that there is a great potential lying in open source for Europe's digitization but of course the reality in 2020 is totally different than it was almost 15 years ago. I remember the European Commission as one of the few institutions that could procure such a study that takes a look at the whole EU and aims to capture the nature of open source while taking into consideration so many countries. The European Commission seems to notice the potential in open source for the welfare of its citizens competitiveness of its companies and transparency and speed of digitization efforts. So this needs evidence to do so, including understanding if it is indeed such an important possibly beneficial tool for the whole Union. So, having said that we were very glad to hear that the European Commission issued a call for tender to conduct a pan European study on the impact of open source. And needless to say we at OFE have been pondering the idea of a European study on open source for quite some time now, and pushing for it quite a bit as well. The European Commission has made it clear in 2016 with its communication on ICT standardization priorities for the digital single market that it intends to promote the use of open source elements in cloud standards. It aimed at promoting the interoperability and portability of the cloud. This study shows that the Commission is committed to collaborate with stakeholders in open source communities and plans to include open source in its future digital policies, which of course makes us very happy just like the fact that we got the opportunity to conduct this study together with the Research Institute from Hover ISI. And even more, we are analyzing both open source software and hardware, which is quite particular. Maybe some of you know, but there is virtually no policies on open source hardware, and very, very few who studied the subject from policy perspective. So we were very excited to start this work. And the question is how are we doing this. So the first part of the study is the studying the economic impact analysis of open source. Second, we research digital policies that relate to open source and actual open source policies in European countries, but also in a couple of other countries such as the United States, China, South Korea, India, Japan and Brazil. On top of that, we conduct case studies that focus on different technological areas such as AI, high performance computing and cybersecurity throughout different industrial domains such as manufacturing logistics and health and others. But what I think might be interesting to you, we would like you to get involved. We have had great feedback and great involvement from different types of communities and experts. And we had already mentioned this on quite some conferences, when those in real life were still allowed so now we are usually doing it online. We are conducting a big survey of open source companies, projects and organizations. We developed the survey with the aim of capturing the real face of open source within companies both small one person ventures and tech giants, those that are fully open source and those that just use some open source components. And now the deadline for the survey is extended to 5 November. And what is important to note, we don't want to survey on the open source companies open sourcing compass is much more than open source companies we don't care about using open source frameworks and large companies developing proprietary product. We talk about the use of open source hardware both in local maker spaces and chip design. The data that we gather within the survey includes some numbers on the usage of open source within companies, such as what kind of companies and organizations are using and contributing to open source. What is the open source related turnover. The employment related to open source innovation indicators. Subjective and quantified benefits of open source. Does it make some developers happy to work on the open source project in their job, or maybe it's still more about the cost saving possibilities. So these are some of the questions we search the answer for with highly appreciate if you participate in the in this survey and also share it with your networks. We have received quite some answers right now but of course we think that's the more the merrier. So let's go to our website and take a look at the survey and share the information about it. And there's one more thing that that we would like to mention. It's the event that we are organizing on 5 November. And it's the event during which the study team will for the first time present first results of the of the study. And we'll be joined by Frank Nagel that I've mentioned the professor at the Harvard Business School, who is going to contextualize the study results with his research and further keynotes as well as panels will be announced soon. Of course the event is fully virtual. As you see it's at two Brussels time. So the first steps that we are going to try to answer include how much does open source software contribute to the European economy. What should European policymakers learn from successful and failed projects. What is the potential open source hardware and how can Europe gain an early foothold here. What have governments around the world succeeded with open source policies. We have many more questions that are going to be answered answered and we have a bit more sessions but you will be updated about this soon. Of course we invite you to visit our new website it actually launched very recently. You can contact us on Twitter. You can also write us an email. This is the general email that we use. Here you see my email and C1's email. And thank you for the thank you for joining us at this presentation. Thanks everybody.