 This one's prepared, or better, we can do it like that. OK, but I will leave it at the same way. Yeah, this one either will be OK. So I'll set it up for them. This one is empty. Oh, OK. Yes, perfect. Well, hi everyone. And then welcome to our event, the open-source writing, the European digital decade. My name is Axel Tivni. I'm a policy research analyst at Open Forum Europe. And we are very happy and excited to have all of you here today and all of you participating online joining us for this event. Before we do anything else, let's just go over some basic housekeeping. There are some restrooms. When you go along the corridor after the first doors and the second ones, we also have quite a few programs today as you already know. And just a short reminder, we have a coffee break from 11.15 to 11.45. The coffee break will happen in the courtyard. And just an FYI, you'll probably be told. I don't want to repeat that too much, but please don't bring any tea or tea cups up here for the sake of the room. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Also, I would like to point out this afternoon's expert panel discussion, which takes place after that. We'll be for in-person participants only. For those of you who are online, if you have any questions or comments, please write it in the chat and the performance of your team will bring the attention of the moderator and we will try to incorporate them if there is time. So, the tank I work for, open for Europe or OFE in short, is a Brussels based tank and we are the intersection of open technologies and public policy. But today we're not alone in hosting the event and I would like to introduce my co-organiser today. I'll start with the chairperson of the community of open cities. Thank you, Axelser. Good morning, everyone. My name is Lises Molka and I am a leader of co-organising open cities and open planning. So, we started running this event many months ago in a very modest format. And it evolved into a combination of several elements. Oh, four elements. Good, good, good. Open elements and friends. Yes, yes. And count how many things we lost today. I'm incredibly grateful for the organizations and individuals who came to my base and found them. Find the co-organising of open cities and care about open sources and about the schools. So, that's the crucial thing. Today we are here to discuss high school policy goals that would be to use open soul and as well as the first session of Openness in sharing the future of open source program offices. Also, we would like to discuss all of the space steps and its creation and the first things we have to do. So, I hope you will join us for this conference and you will take over the five points of inspiration. Thank you. Please welcome now Barbara Vinova, Vice Dean for Industrial Relations at the Faculty of Informatics at Madari University. Thank you for hosting this event today. Thank you very much for actually bringing this event to our faculty. We are really happy to be the one who can provide the ground for such an event. The Faculty of Informatics by VR is actually the Faculty of Informatics who was the first one in the Czech Republic like independent faculty of computer science. And also like this room is very nice in terms of the theme of the event today. We can see the difference in Czech cybercrime center of excellence because here in the facility we typically have cybercrime exercises and different teams actually try to experience that kind of protection of a critical infrastructure which can be a nuclear power point and other teams are taking it. Living that experience and thinking about how we can safeguard digitalization is crucial and that's one of the key things that the faculty is trying to do. I'm very happy that also this event is brought here because many different I would say stakeholders that care about our perfected and obliged future are meeting together. That's one of the things that university has always been striving for different sectors and stakeholders who care about the same thing and I really like the open source theme of the event because also as a faculty we strive for open science really doing really progressing these builds together in an open way so that others can build on it and we can do these things together. Thank you very much for coming I will be around during the day I will definitely be around during the break please just catch me whenever you see me I'll be really happy to chat to tell you more about what is happening here and enjoy your day thank you. And finally I would like to introduce the director of the engineering Adred. Good morning everybody I hope you enjoy your day I would like to expand your horizons and go with French ideas and new viewpoints I would like to talk about Red Hat which I represent but I'm not familiar with Red Hat just raise your hands from Red Hat those are the guys super passionate about open source communities we do that at the global level Red Hat is the world's leader and we do a lot to our customers to deploy open source product solutions in hybrid product but like that expands to way more here in the innovative region I'm super proud to be a member of the biggest engineering of Israel which is located in this very city I think 1500 engineers and like all those people are not just about open source but also about communities that actually are the key element of the open source movement and we all know that this goes beyond just so far we have great programs cooperation with universities we run for more than a decade cooperation with both technical universities here that extended to rest of the world eventually we help other educational students we help teaching software and stemming high schools we help charities we do a lot so if you see Red Hat over here just discuss whatever on your part open source up and down from the upside down thank you we're also very excited that today's event is hosted under the host pieces of the Czech presidency of the console I would like to thank them again for this as well this presidency is taking place during a particularly interesting time for as the Czech presidency has already shown it's will to push further the current debates at the level of digital policies in the past few years we have increased strategic focus in open source and technologies from the presidency and we are happy that the Czech government is taking this to the next level today we'll hear from several interesting speakers we'll work with topics right at the end of the Czech Consolidation Bureau first up we'll have the Minister of Digitalization of the Czech Republic will participate with the recorded video every ladies and gentlemen topic is to me open source and its principles are key to modern transparent and innovative operation gentlemen and dear colleague I would like to thank Mr Bartosz for his message and his participation in the event this is off I now would like to welcome our second speaker please all welcome we are very delighted to have you here with us in this event but also an important point is for this of course by introduction Mr Gazi here Pira useful to explain to the audience it's in many ways five minutes with in 30 20 years drive and with and provide a share generation of digital, using open source data. Mrs. Gaffey, please, the floor is yours. Dr. Governor, members of the European Parliament, representatives of the city of Brno, and Masa University, thank you for the opportunity to address this conference. And hello everyone, good morning as well to all colleagues from across the EU services who join us in person online. I'm very happy to have this opportunity to discuss the achievable challenges on our open source journey. For me, it's been a very short journey so far, because I'm only 66 years invited by this course. Later, later, at my first open source, my organization, I'm kind of sad to have over there, so if you want to relax, let's talk to Ken. I only think of response policy. But no, me and you guys can be very, very in my mind, in digits, to sponsor open source events, to sponsor open source. And then, I want to say that more and more was happening in the organization. I said, I got embarrassed when I said I was sponsored. I will have a deep dive into the different areas of digital. In fact, it was the open source colleagues who, at first, came to me for a deep dive. I'm a bit embarrassed calling it a deep dive, because with my expertise, it's more sophisticated. But this conference emphasizes the importance of open source in our digital decade in the interest of European public services for our technological sovereignty and digital commons and global strategic economic relevance. I have learned, and I've heard it last night and this morning, that there are checks after our developers involved in near the bulk of the major open source projects. So check high-tech engineers have been over the past 20 years creating work, leading free and digital source projects. There's a wide range of projects by CZNIC. Its successes include the tariffs and tariffs on the network routes used by consumers in the Czech Republic and several new member states. And I was really impressed with this one, BERT, the Routine Demon. In 2015, it was used by two or three internet exchange points across the world. We checked with them CZNIC last week and they showed us that BERT is now involved in building 85% of network traffic in internet exchange points worldwide. It is very impressive. It shows how indispensable open sources for running the internet and by itself, it already proves the relevance of open source for digital government. Other Czech open source inventors are busy changing manufacturing across the globe. The I3, Joseph Jesus, 3D printer was, and perhaps still is, the world's most used 3D printer. The buzz of free and open source innovation is probably why Red Hat chose the Czech Republic and the city of Renault for its research of the American time, where it found choice. I heard, I figure 2000, I heard another trade-off of first 500, so it's a place in between. Open source engineers. I think these examples, because they think open source software to computer hardware. Hardware, especially computer chips, are strategic assets. And here, as a software, open source hardware is essential for digital sovereignty. And this brings me to the chip side, which was announced by the Commission earlier this year, to create a state-of-the-art European chip ecosystem. And with a target in 18 years from now, that the EU will produce 20% of the world's chips. This is why the Commission is investing in projects working on open processor architectures, such as RISC-PAN. The global growing importance of open source software and hardware is reflected in my own organization, Digis Arts, formerly the Directive General for Interpolasticism. Open source is dominant in our data center, 75% of our server servers run with Linux. We use Grouphold for all machine websites and our internal software development to change increasingly relies on open source. Over the past few decades, the use of open source has expanded from the data center to our desktops, to the web, and our smart phone apps. And really when you see the turn that we have all made in our working lives over the last 20 years, it's quite extraordinary. And in fact, much has also facilitated our being able to continue to work and function effectively over the COVID crisis from different changed way of working. It's not just Digis, all the software shared by the Digital Europe program is open source. And hot spot for open source activity in terms of vision, including Directive General, such as the Joint Search Center, and Neuro Center. And open source is becoming the norm in commission projects. I point to the next generation internet funding framework, funding hundreds of grassroots open source projects and to the cloud middleware project, simple, where open source is a requirement. The progression reflects our growing maturity from an organization that consumes open source to one that builds its own solutions on open source to ultimately a commission that is closely involved in open source. That's why in 2021, we elevated our own internal open source strategy and made it a commission-wide strategy. And we created a dedicated team, the Commission Open Source Program Office, our OSPO, to make it easier to use and share open source and to assist colleagues to build open source into their projects and ensure a focus on IT security, which let's face it for the last six months has never been far from our hearts. I have a few minutes left and it gives me a little time to mention our work with Member States. There is an upcoming interoperable Europe Act, a proposal which has been co-designed with Member States and this cooperation framework supports the digital transformation of our public sector and acknowledges the importance of open source. The Act draws on two decades of knowledge aggregated by the open source observatory, a hub of information on the development of use of open source in EU public services, encouraging collaboration. And the idea in our interoperability actions is that we will pull together the Member States and the Member States are asking for this in order that we can identify what works, what's successful and have that freely and openly available to all. In the Digital Europe Program, we are funding more and more open source initiatives, including flagship projects like LAOS, which is the editor for drafting legal documents, which will be inter-institutional and will involve also the Council and the European Parliament. To our colleagues in the Member States who are taking steps to increase their use of free and open source, to all of the enthusiasts, advocates and community members, it will take dedication and time to become a mature part of the community. But we are taking incremental steps all the time to build and strengthen the support for free and open source. I'm pleased to announce today one such step. In December last year, we got rid of an outdated and complicated bureaucratic legal process that stopped us sharing open source. Now commission projects that wish to share their software with others are free to do so. We created a central code repository, one which I can now announce publicly. You will find our software development platform at code.europa.eu. So code.europa.eu facilitates the open development of software projects from the commission, as well as the other European Union institutions. We start today with just over a hundred projects and 150 developers, but the Osmo is busily onboarding others. All these projects are open to software developers interested in reusing, adapting and helping to extend and improve the software. Running on an open source solution in a data center in the EU, code.europa.eu facilitates code development and sharing and reuse of European public service solutions. It reinforces similar efforts of public services in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in the EU. And we think more and more countries will become active in the near future. And ultimately it is a practical incremental step towards achieving digital sovereignty. I'm really impressed by the achievements of open source in the Czech Republic and likewise encouraged by the progress made in the European Commission. It underscores the strategic, economic and global strategic value of this work. But I'm also aware of how much work there is ahead. I think we've come a long way in 20 years, but I think we need to be quite ambitious in the years ahead. But I close by confirming my commitment and that of digit to further open source and its contributions to a technologically open and therefore sovereign and interoperable Europe. So thank you all very much and I wish you all a really interesting day. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Gaffey for this very interesting keynote. We are very grateful that you have chosen today's events to express the Commission's position and its project on such an important topic as open source within the digital decay. I'm delighted now to turn to our fireside chat between two well-versed computer scientists and politicians. It is a somewhat rare and important combination and the French ambassador for digital affairs behind the European Digital Commons Initiative. Our three speakers will discuss the political goals that can be achieved through open source with the moderation of James Lovegrove from Red Hat. Please welcome them on stage. And... Hello. Ah, wonderful. Thank you for your working. Yes, morning, everyone. Actually, sorry to disappoint, but there will be not three people physically here. There will be myself, Henri Verdier, who's joining remotely, and Marcel Poulaja is en route. So I'm going to on-the-fly reshuffle things, but before we get started, how are we doing for the sound check? Is everything okay? You hear good? Also online, all clear? I'm going to assume that's a yes, otherwise there'd be lots of chatter. Very good. What I will do is I'm going to introduce our speakers and then I'm going to hand over to them as they are available. And as I explained, I think we will slightly reshuffle the order. The point of this fireside chat, a little bit absent of fire, is to look at how open source is driving the digital decade. So we have three well-versed, prominent open source champions and also policy leaders to help us understand better what that looks like. I will introduce Marcel when he joins. I'm going to also introduce Henri. Mr. Profan, if you'd like to join me up here, I'll also introduce you and then we can get started. Now, in the good old-fashioned open-source way, if you think my questions are not up to par, then jump in and better those questions. That's absolutely fine. I will do my best not to disappoint. So Henri Valdier is a digital ambassador with France's Ministry of European Foreign Affairs. He's the former state CIO and a passionate entrepreneur who continues to innovate in government and partnerships beyond France in multiple countries around the world. Henri Profan, just sitting here to my right, is the advisor to the vice minister who we were listening to earlier, Mr. Batos, of digitisation for the Czech government and actively supporting the new Czechia digital agency otherwise known as DEA, I'm not mistaken, DEA, right. They're highly regarded computer scientists and member of the open-source community. And as you whispered in my ear, also an avid user of Fedora. Is that right? Very good, super. Okay, and I tell you what, just for the sake of, I'm hoping being the eternal optimist that Marcel will make it, he is really en route. He's a member of the European Parliament. Again, a computer scientist, indeed an alum, another great alum from this esteemed university. He is also several years with Red Hat just up the road and he was recently elected, or three years ago, elected as an MEP for the Pirate Party involved in all sorts of policies impacting this digital decade, but also a senior MEP as a quester. He's also responsible for the daily IT operations. So again, with regards to what Mrs. Gaffey was discussing and mentioned, this intra-EU collaboration and it would be interesting to hear a little bit about that from his side, Leo, I think it was one of the projects which was mentioned, but there are others. So, Mr. Ambassador Valdier, you are there, you can hear me? All good, fine, super. So Ambassador, I'd like to turn to you to talk about recent work that you've been working very hard with your colleagues in France during the EU presidency. And this was the declaration of digital commons. It seeks, of course, to build on open source as global commons, but of course, it's much broader than that. And I think it would be interesting just as a context setter for you to perhaps just elaborate a little bit more on that initiative, the steps you're taking and also how, again, as Mrs. Gaffey mentioned earlier, how we can engage better with the community both here in Bruno, but far, far beyond as well. So over to you, Ambassador, thank you. Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation. I'm very sad not to be physically with you in Bruno. The week before the UNGA is not the best week to travel because I do organize two events in New York next week to make it simple and to start the exchange. First, I would love to share with you my convictions that the digital revolution, as we know it, is a revolution of open standards, open source software, free software, and open data. And the stream of innovation and creativity and economic growth and citizen empowerment that we know for 50 years is because of this open approach, decentralized, et cetera. That's one thing. The second thing is that we, Europeans, we didn't pay enough attention about the fact that this is a very European vision of the world. And that a large part of this movement was born in Europe, if you consider clearly, seriously. The first works that I did conduce to TCPIP were French. HTML was invented by an Englishman in Geneva. Linux is European. Bluetooth is European. ADSL is European. And a lot of other very important free open resources. And we, in France, we think more and more than we have to stand for this legacy and maybe protect it a bit because we do observe a movement of weaponization of the internet, of some states that want to control it more and more. The big monopolies built on internet that try to control a bit or to capture a bit. And we consider that Europe has to protect it to continue this movement of economic innovation and growth and this movement of citizen empowerment. And that maybe is the role of Europe. The new thing is that, as you all see, we have now for a few years these reflections, this very important reflection about European digital sovereignty. And we, France, we try to prove that an open source approach can be part of a digital sovereignty strategy to make it very simple. The more you have free resources, the more you have open source software, the more you build your countries or your economy on digital commons. I introduced the word then, the freer you are because no one can expropriate you, nor change the prices, nor impose you technological choices. So we consider that this is an important part of digital sovereignty strategy. That's also why we did introduce in the debates the word commons because we are, we know and everyone in the room knows that sometimes you can have a predatory strategy, if I may, a capture strategy through open source. Open source alone is not enough. If I open the source of my code, but I control the commit, I'm still the master of the ecosystem and I can control the ecosystem. So when we speak about commons, it can be a bit more like than just software. It can be open standards or it can be open data. So it can be a bit broader than just software, but not every open source software can be considered as commons. We want resources that are governed by the community of contributors with an open and shared governance. And last year, it was a French presidency of EU and we did propose to our friends of Europe to launch a working group and we actually 18 countries did join the group very easily. That was a first surprise because we had to align ministries of economy and finance and ministries of foreign affairs, which is not so easy in 18 countries. And we did collectively prepare these reports. You know this and I hope that you can have a look to the report. And we are proposing a simple but very committed strategy to EU. So this year and with your friends of a Czech presidency, we'll try to promote the conclusion of the report to make it simple. We suggest to start with very small and engaged policies like open by default in the European administrations. We suggest to think about one-stop shop because what we did discover is that we have tons of commoners, creators, innovators and dozens of tools to help them. But this is a total mess. And one-stop shop to help people to find the good way to receive money or support can be very efficient. The third thing is to inject a bit to give some money because we government, we always pretend to love the communities but we don't pay enough. And maybe it's time to invest a bit. Here I have to say that if we consider that commons are a tool for sovereignty, it's not just commons invented in Europe. Some very important piece of code are not European but they are helpful for sovereignty. So we have to be a bit open there. And we do suggest that it's time to think about one European foundation. So a foundation born in Europe because in this landscape you have very few foundations. Most of them are Americans. We like them, we work with them but maybe our voice and our vision of the world and our energy should contribute to this movement and to be part of the movement. I hope I didn't be too long but that's why I want what I wanted to share with you. Thank you, Ambassador. That was enlightening. I think also it's important to make that very clear about not all open source can be considered as open source. And I think there's never been a more important time to make that clear in terms of getting the right governance, the right IP using those recognized, dismissive and copy left licensing. I think we shall be on guard for those who might claim to have an open source distribution but in fact it's not. And also on the point about foundations, of course, in the audience here from the eclipse, I think it's one such example of a foundation helping drive open source in Europe but also equally beyond. So I'm gonna turn to Mr. Profan, if I may. Again, great to have you by the proverbial fire. Warm your hands. Let's get a little bit warmer with the question to you about something which the minister mentioned earlier about DEA and your own personal involvement in that but also the agency itself. Of course, later on we're going to be exploiting you again on another panel where we'll have Maria from the digital agency, the counterpart. So it'd be good to have a discussion on that panel about that. But really, how do you see this agency adding value? How do you see it interacting with other agencies and really so driving this open source policy agenda? And too, as it's written, European digital decade to realize the European or even accelerate that realization. Thank you, Mr. Profan. I'm gonna give you the mic. Thank you. Hello. Let me elaborate. In Czech Republic, organization of the government is pretty big house right now because now it is responsibility for Ministry of Interior, which is basically Ministry of Policemen, of course. And there is no concentrate focus on digital goals because their goals are security, firefighters, policemen, not digitalization. So my and my Minister's goals is to bring the institution which brings a single responsibility principle, or pretty small institution which has goal to digitalize Czech Republic, to do it in high quality, not just another official task, but goals of entire institution. We are very inspired by the another Czech institution, Nukip, which is cybersecurity institution, which is here in Bernal. Yeah. And only after the start of operation of digital and information agency, the idea, we can finally push our topics, our political topics and beliefs and goals into public sector reality. Without it, it's not quite possible because you have these officers from the policemen and they just, okay, they have some information system, they are running this operation, but there is no goals and enthusiasm and other needed things to achieve something bigger. One of the goals of DR is international collaboration and of course, one of the form of international collaboration is at open source. We are happy that the timing is right and we can directly connect DR with now founded Czech national sport which is now starting here in Bernal. We wish close cooperation between DR and national sport, just yesterday was the first in-person meeting of EURO SPO. For me, this is the great way to connect the across Europe efforts in open source and I am really like, I met a lot of new people like Maria from Sweden and much more. And we can together bring better quality open source in public sector. It's not about quality of open source itself, it's about how to join these two worlds, these two very different worlds. There are barrier of public performance, there are barrier of culture and mentalities, there are barrier of very high level lobbying of the big winners and we have to manage this in some things in soft ways, in education, in upscaling people, some things in maybe hard way and some things in budgeting. So what we do need, open source has wide opportunities but of course, a competition is high. So we need a central support from EU commission of course. But I think Veronica, we knew it that there are some barriers like the procurement that can be a little tricky in adaptation of open source. And in the future, we need to talk about public procurement which, yeah, that's I say now. So that's my first look at the development that's why we are creating our agency and that is how we look to brighter tomorrow. Thank you very much. I didn't appreciate it was the first meeting of the EU Ospo yesterday, in person. Wow, so that's a big deal. And it's somewhat sort of poignant that it took place in Bruno, which I find sound correctly, but I'm wrong. It has in terms of ratio, open source contributed to IT professional, I think it's the highest ratio in the world or certainly one of the countries at right at the top of that list. So somewhat appropriate. And then to your point about the EU support, I think that message has been fully understood and has been responded to in terms of this announcement about the code.europa.eu. So I think things are heading in the right direction. And I think this point finally on the sort of culture piece about inspiring and getting policemen and so on excited about open source because just they're called common, you know, they're called job. They have another agenda and another culture there. So again, later on perhaps we talk about Maria, if I was, I will call, the Swedish places squad is a big user of open source on the front line. And I think that's probably last point we wanna make on this idea that it's not just about the code, right? Open source code. It's much wider and bigger about in terms of the culture. So that passion is needed. Code and processes. The processes are important part. The processes are the difference because every big corporation is very rigid. And the state is very, very big corporation and it's a rigid conservative. And it's hard to change, internal processes, hard to change internal rules to be reasonable. But normal open source software do some reasonable things. What we need to do, if you want to organize your calendars, calendar you organize your calendar. It's no rocket science, but in the public sector, you can create some much more complicated things, right? And a lot of stoppers that stop your adaptation of pretty good software that you can really use in practice, but in some theory with consultation with lawyer, it can be much, much harder. Can I make a two-finger comment? Very great. I was just about to come because we were talking, you mentioned about, you mentioned something which triggered my mind. So I've got to bring in the ambassador on this. You talked about education and upscaling. So that's something I'd like to throw to the ambassador, but before doing so, that's the floor is yours. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Now, just to add something first to congratulate you for this mission, which is one of the most amazing mission in the state. And I did contribute to this mission in France in my former position. And I want to add to your description that open source and commons are also communities and communities that share a lot of values and goals with the government itself because they are dedicated to general interest. And that's, you can build alliance with them. And in France, we made some very important project of successes with the communities. For example, we did fix a very important issue of, we did need one database, open source, of course, open data of the geographical position of every postal addresses, which is very important for a lot of public services. And we did this with open street map because the National Geographic Institute alone could not do this. And in France, we have the chance to have one million contributors to open street map. So together we are very, very strong. And I wanted to say this is the perspective of the alliance between the state and the communities of commoners is very, very promising. So I did speak about this. So maybe I don't have time to speak about education. Let's decide, please. I'm so sorry, I didn't catch that. Can you just repeat the last sentence? No, I said, I did use my time to speak about this alliance between communities. So if you want, I give you the floor back. Do you know, I think Marcel, being the gentleman that he is, he's still on route. So I think we can use a bit of his time. I'm sure he'd be happy with that. So if you want to elaborate on that, and then also this point about empowering the citizen in, because we talk a lot about default open policy. Yes, that's another important thing. Yeah, I come with the man. Welcome Marcel. So maybe you want to finish your comment and then we'll bring Marcel into discussion next. No, you did trick me slightly about education. That's another important aspect, but I do observe that everywhere everyone want of course to digitalize the educational system. But very often we are just teaching new consumers. We teach to the students to use resources. And from my perspective, teaching to our children to be contributors, to be active. And I quote very often the famous quote, don't teach them to surf, teach them to make waves. That's very important for them as future citizen, but also for our global prosperity because if we are not part of the creative movement, we'll be just followers. So I, and here again, an alliance with the open source and commons communities can be very, very efficient. Thank you, Ambassador. So welcome Marcel. It's great to see you. I'm glad you're not, the beads of spects have evaporated. You've been driving pro-sli through Czech traffic, but welcome. I'm going to bring you straight in on a point which we were talking about earlier about commons and the interaction with the interplay with open source and so forth. Actually, before I do say it must feel a bit weird coming back here as a former student. I wonder whether when you were sitting here as a student, did you ever think one day I'll be sitting here as an MVP? Weird thought. So yes, so I think that your position is being one of the leading MVPs on this particular I suppose technology, but also deeper than just the code, the understanding that we think you're quite unique in the parliament with the grounds to that background, that expertise. So looking at it for your last three years in parliament, and what's your sort of take on sort of Europe's political understanding of digital sovereignty and the extent to which open sources is really understood as being absolutely key to unlocking that digital decade, which we all talk about very often. I can hand you the microphone. Welcome, good to see you. Nice to see you too. Sorry for the late arrival, but yeah, highways in the Czech Republic. Yeah, not only as a student, even though when I studied here, this didn't really exist, but also seeing your red hat. Also worked at the red hat before I got elected in the European Parliament. So quite a familiar environment for me. So on one hand, I would say that it is recognized that the potential of open source is enormous, and that you can see even in studies commissioned by the European Commission where one of it says, and when it speaks about the potential that 10% increase in contributions to open source would generate up to 0.6% of the EU's GDP. Also, when you look at the digital decade targets said by the European Commission, then you will find that EU businesses and citizens should be empowered when using digital tools. And of course, who else is best positioned than open source to actually empower citizens and businesses because it really gives them the control over their data and over their technology. On the other hand, it is still difficult to somehow convince a majority of policymakers that you can achieve these goals by the transparency that free and open source software delivers and offers rather than using close proprietary solutions. And some resistance also comes from the history of ICT procurement contract frameworks that apparently prefer by design proprietary solutions and then slow down the change towards open source in ICT. So in my experience as an MEP, I was for two and a half years Vice President of the European Parliament for ICT. I'm now the Quester of the European Parliament for ICT. I'm not going to dive into the details of the difference between the two roles, but as a bureau member focused on ICT, I see a lot into how ICT works in the European Parliament. And again, on one hand, it is politically acknowledged that open source software is valuable and typically deployed. In many respects, you can see that that applications developed internally are based on open source software. The backbone of the infrastructure often runs open source software, but then when it comes to some other systems, you still see the difficulty and hesitance and some sort of resistance, I would even say, to use free and open source software. It is the case for technologies that use everyday like email, but also when you look to the future, because yeah, there is a strategy to move to the cloud and it looks like that the Parliament of South or Microsoft and Amazon solutions, despite the weaknesses that these solutions entail for data management and for data protection for basically being in control of the data. So there I would argue that hybrid cloud solutions that enable you to be more in control of your data are much better fit for institutions like that. So what can be done to improve it? So every MEP, every member of the European Parliament has the opportunity to initiate or to propose initiation of a so-called pilot project. What is a pilot project? Pilot project is a project with a budget from the European Commission's budget. If that is approved by the European Parliament, then the European Commission has to actually run the project with the budget that was allocated to that. I have initiated a pilot project that I always did at the time, but it is free open source software solutions for you to get public services, concepts. And it's run by the European Commission. Hello. And it consists in creating European open source application, so basically it tries to bridge the burden between free and open source projects and free and open source solutions and the administration that, well, many times would like to use them, but they don't actually really know what to do. And the number of different catalogs that are out there is, you know, the way how this is set up, they are rather scattered. So it's good to bridge this gap with some one catalog that basically bridges all of these catalogs that are out there together. I have also recently proposed a pilot project to be again run by the European Commission, where the aim is to demodify the access to EU applications. So the EU is an institution that have a lot of applications that you can install on your phone, for instance, to make it easier for you to work with the institutions, but no wonder they are all available on the major Google Play and Apple App Store. The aim of this pilot project that I hopefully would be adopted is to make these applications available also on open source repositories like Android to also demodify the access to these applications. And I would also like to mention that recently the EDPS, the European Data Protection Supervisor, launched a project, it's called EU Voice and EU Ideal. And these are nothing else basically than instances of mastodon and peer-to-decentralized open source social networks. The project I was told would soon transition under the auspices of the European Commission to be run as a permanent project by the European Commission. And I think that it's a really great step, again, towards adopting free and open source software. So to wrap it up, on one hand, I would say quite some resistance that you can see, but also there are individual steps that are being done that are very promising for the future. Thank you, Marcel. I appreciate we've got five minutes left. Am I right? Oh, we've got 10 minutes left. Thank you, that man, brilliant. Okay, so yes, I think maybe putting, since it's a fireside chat, I'd like to put some petrol on the fire and talk about the sort of 800-pound gorilla rootless EU recovery fund. I think a couple of days ago, Commissioner van der Leyen was talking about how only 100 billion has been planned to be 800 billion. And there was a growing rise in the sense of frustration in Brussels. I sense that that's possibly the case also at a capital level, given that unfortunately our geopolitical and economic situation isn't getting any better. And yet this digital decade objective still remains. So to be interested in hearing your opinions or free view on that discussion and how that's panning out. Probably I'll go to you, Mr. Profan first, if I may. Thank you. Oof, the recovery fund. In the Republic, we have a problem with recovery fund because our recovery plan was planned by the previous government. And now we have a problem to change the project or change the criteria. We, of course, we can change the project itself but not the criteria. So if the criteria is something, sorry for the word, but stupid, like to buy a proprietary product or it's not so easy, but in some way, this, we cannot change it. And we are fighting with that. And of course, as I previous mentioned, we haven't the digital agency. So we have no our own quality workforce to re-operate these projects. So we have a lot of projects but a lot of our fund might point to you in effective investments in software model and current window openings. It's really hard to change it in the real operation. And of course, we need a lot of this project. There are some e-help projects, for example, but there are no, in Czech Republic, there are no open source infrastructure and a help or a data exchange standards and help we are working on the exchange standards. But they will come after this project. So it's really not, I'm not really optimistic about the new results. Of course, we do a lot of things. We prepare, we can buy some hardware, we can improve some software, but there will be no open source revolution for the from the recovery plan. Yeah. One positive things is that we have in our recovery plan central center of competence that where we can hire experts and share experts across the public sector. So we have a central like this in, we will have an idea one and another in help or in the minister of help. So there are, of course, some positive aspects, but it's quite bureaucratic and it's not easy for the starting government to change all the decisions made by previous government. Thank you. If I may just pass that on that question to you, Ambassador Thaddeus, speakers from Paris. Okay, thanks. So regarding the recovery plan. Yes. Okay. I can say two things because there might be two parts. Regarding the economic recovery, we don't have a specific open source approach because here we are trying to help small businesses and small companies and they have the freedom of strategy. We hope that they know because in France we are trying to rebuild the tech ecosystem for decades. So we know that they have a good level of strategic vision. Regarding the state, it's a bit different because we inject also a lot of money in the governmental infrastructure. And here we have quite open source by default policy because we do encourage a lot to buy or to observe or to first to be able to notify why you didn't decide to build on open source. And I mentioned it on the other side, we have the other open source by default approach. Everything that the government build has to be open source. So we share all of our codes too. And that can be interesting too for the communities. So we can expect that the recovery plan will in the governmental part will be helpful for this vision. Thank you, that was enlightening. So I'm gonna hand over to Marcel. In fact, this is going to be the last intervention. And then if I could ask all three speakers to perhaps just consolidate a statement on this particular sort of high level discussion theme which I think we would enjoy, we appreciate as a takeaway from this far side. So Marcel, close to us. On the same question. Yeah, so I haven't looked too much into the particular implementation of the recovery fund in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the important thing is that there is a share that needs to be used for the exercise action that's good. The problem is, of course, how we actually implement it. And then, of course, member states have the opportunity to use it well, but they can also use it in a wrong way. So that's, I'm coming back a bit to what Andrzej said. So my take from that is that I would prefer that already on the high level definition that comes from the European level, we would already have incentives that would incentivize the use of free open-source software and preference for open-source solution because we also know that they are valuable for our society because they can be reused, they can be recycled. People can collaborate on that, companies can collaborate on that. By definition, the data that it produces are open data and so on. So that, I think, is a missing piece that could have been done better. But as I said in the very beginning of my speech, we really still have room for improvements to actually convince policymakers how important the stress on free and open-source solutions is. Thank you. Final few minutes of this fast side chat. Basta, you want to kick us off and then we'll go in this direction and finish with Basta at the end. Thank you. Yes, I was wondering. So I want to share with you a view. I may not make only friends, but I think that this is very important. Sometimes there is like a confusion because when you think about open-source, you think about one very important economic sectors with companies and that are very important for sovereignty and everything. But you think also about a broader movement with open standards, with contribution. And you did hear me in my words. For me, to teach to children to contribute to Wikipedia or open-suit map, to teach to government to share there on source code, et cetera, is a part of a bigger plan because we want to reopen and to the global empowering machine of the digital revolution. And so I want to share with you that this is not just an industrial policy and we have to work with both side, companies and non-profit organization. And that's very important from my perspective. Okay, I have only quite short message. I think open-source is great opportunity corresponding to it's main goals and visions of the European Union like freedom of knowledge, citizen centric, decentralized, and many more. So it's on us to support open-source to promote independent and free society. Right, so again, to the beginning of my speech, there is still room for improvement. There is a lot of room for improvement. But also we'll not be able to fill in the room for improvement with actually improvement if we don't do individual steps. So I don't think that we can underestimate the impact of the individual steps that are being done in the right direction. Some of them I have already mentioned and I would like to add also that in various legislative files that the European institutions produce in the legislative process, there can be done a lot of these little steps. So for instance, I will give you one example. This year we have adopted the Digital Markets Act which is a legislation that should give more control into people's hands over their data by actually creating more competition on the markets because we don't have a level playing field. We have large corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon that control large portion of digital markets. And within this legislation, I managed to sneak in an obligation for these so-called gatekeepers to enable interoperability for chat platforms which means that the smaller players, those who very often are free and open source software like Matrix for instance, they can become interoperable with these large solutions and that would make it easier for citizens to change from these solutions of these large companies to free and open source solutions because they could switch from, let's say WhatsApp to Matrix and still be in touch with their friends that are at WhatsApp. So this is just an example, but I think this is exactly the way how we should proceed step by step to improve and to incentivize the use and development in free and open source software. Thank you very much. And actually on that note, thanks. Would you join me in the usual way to show our appreciation of our wonderful website chat. Thank you. It's a real pleasure for us to have here the people that are shaping the open source policies of tomorrow and also to see your different positions on this. I will now invite our in-person attendees to join us for a short coffee break. It will be located in the courtyard. So just up the stairs, down the corridor on the left where you have the registration and the badges and there's a courtyard there for the coffee. We'll start the session again at 11.45 sharp because we have a very slight schedule with our speakers there with the panel on cross-border collaboration and digitization from the point of view of the Czech Republic, the EU and its other member states. And as for our online attendees, I invite you as well to maybe have a tea or coffee at home and join us again for the next panel at 11.45. So yeah, see you then. Okay. I'll do that, ready? Okay. Okay, welcome back everyone. I'll get set again, but we're going to start quite quickly. I hope you all had a nice break. We'll come back to the second part of our mornings panel. I now want to welcome our speaker that already on stage here for the next panel. And this time they will discuss the question how are governments collaborating to create cross-border collaborations and open source solutions and what does the digital government in Czech Republic look like? Please. Very good. Welcome back. I hope you all enjoyed the fireside chat as much as I did. And now we are moving to a panel where we're actually to steal an airplane metaphor. We're getting closer to the runway. I'm not quite sure what altitude we'll see, but we want to kind of get into more of the details from our panel of speakers. Speaking of which, I appreciate Mr. Oczko is joining us virtually. He's under somewhat of a time pressure and I have to leave at 12.15. So I will slightly rejig the panel to make sure that he has enough time to share his thoughts on this important discussion. What I will do though is first on top of welcoming our esteemed panel but also briefly introduce them. So starting with Peter Oczko is the Deputy Minister for Industry and Trade in charge of digitalization and innovation. He has extensive experience as a way for a wide portfolio of various finance, budget, structural funds and co-driving investments into Czechia. As mentioned earlier, I'm introduced earlier of Mrs. Gaffey recently to go over the leadership for those who are joining us online for this particular panel of Digit at the European Commission. Maria Dahlaga, by the way, can you see my cuff links? Pretty good, eh? Yeah, sorry, Mrs. Gaffey, I'll get my Irish ones next time anyway. Welcome. So Maria is the long-standing Swedish civil servant and Swedish government hands-on open source experience, Ministry of Employment and now working at the agency for digital development of the Digit. So the two of you purposely sat next to each other to start collaborating. Actually, that's already happened since yesterday, right? For the first Oslo meeting. And then last but not least, Mr. Profan again, I have introduced him before but I think the important thing is here he's the advisor to the Minister of Digitalization. Mr. Bartosz spoke earlier is very much involved in this digital agency which is recently taken off. So I'm going to turn first to you, Minister, if I may. I think it's fitting to start with a question about competitiveness given your role in industry and trade. How would you assess the understanding and adoption across business sectors, across the public sector, even political groups as to open sources enabling role in driving competitiveness? Welcome and thank you. So thank you very much and greetings to Bruno. I'm able to join you in person as I have to leave and that's another thing I wanted to apologize sooner because I have to go out to the Parliament for a lot of things happening now with all the Ukrainian energy crisis. So apologies for that. And thank you again for inviting me to this interesting discussion. I have to say it's so interesting for me because actually you mentioned some point from my previous career but actually I started like 25 years ago as actually a developer like Coder, like using the risk primarily open source systems and actually I definitely could assess and evaluate how beneficial it was for our small technological startup by the time and also thanks to that the technological startup actually has grown into a big company that was then bought actually by a much bigger company from another country. I will not name but I just wanted to say that I was in business seven years ago. So for us actually, if you play open source is how we can enable the competitiveness of regions. Actually, Bernoulli's example of such a region where actually IT and of course, for example, Red Hat present there. Actually open source is definitely the one of the dive forces of development of IT related to innovation environment in Bernoulli. More generally, actually, I think from the government what we should do here doing course to some extent is that we should actually do some awareness raising and support in the area of innovation and especially in this sense, we speak about innovation in the digital, digital sphere and primarily on SMEs and startups. Again, Bernoulli's is an example of how we can do that well thanks also to the regional and municipal strategies. On the national level, what we are doing is that we have a new smart specialization strategy and this strategy actually speaks about, I don't know if you are familiar with what it is for, actually smart specialization strategy actually says where the country has innovation potential in companies where we have greater research and where are the trends, where these three things meet, there should be our priority to focus on. And actually in this new smart specialization strategy we have a lot of domains related to IT, to the development of applications to digital economy generally and also open source is one of the priorities. How does it work, this smart specialization strategy is not just a strategy that will remain on the table or wherever on our ministry, it's really being implemented and actually all the innovation mechanisms that are implemented on the national or regional level should somehow follow this strategy. So I think in the end it's a really great support because actually for example, all the support in the area of innovation of finance from the cohesion policy is driven by this smart specialization strategy but also many of the national and national national schemes. So we need to actually maybe to do more evidence raising but actually the general strategy is there and the evidence raising actually I think can be done through some mechanisms that we have in place and I think for example, Bruno again, it's an example of activities that now can be actually defined under the heading of so-called digital innovation hubs. Digital innovation hubs are actually institutes that were actually created under the Digital Europe Program and should work as a network of institutions or consortia, private, regional, or even research institutions that are focusing on support of SMEs, especially in digital transformation. So I see a lot of potential in this network and in Bruno or in Cusin, it's next to Bruno, it's an example of such a digital innovation hub and it's a company that is actually daughter company of the Source Monetary Innovation Center and it's called Intemag and they have a great project that is called Digimad that supports SMEs, good startups in digital transformation. So I think open source solutions have a few ways how to be actually distributed and the ideas of open source can be communicated through several channels including digital innovation hubs and maybe we should use these channels more than we did up to now and that might be maybe one of the results of our panel. So that's the answer for the first question. Very good, thank you. I think one of my takeaways from that is open source is great for economic development in the region. Of course Bruno, as you said, is a great example of that in Czechia but also frankly around the world. You mentioned the Digital Europe Program so I see quite a nice link bridge over to Mrs. Gaffey who mentioned it earlier in her keynote around a couple of projects which are being funded by that, one of which is the Laos editor. And also you went online at the time but there was also a launch which again we particularly appreciated the launch taking place in Bruno and Czechia of the EU's code.Europe.EU. So I'd like to ask Mrs. Gaffey a sort of follow-on question on the theme of investment in terms of the status of Europe's or rather either EU as an institution's embrace of open source and perhaps shedding some more light on those kinds of recent investments which you've seen in actually already just six months of your arrival with the help of the leader. I'll give you the microphone. Thank you very much, James. Yeah, I mean the commission's commitment to open source I think it's getting stronger and stronger as time goes on and I think we were talking with the coffee break it is very much an incremental process. When you look back and see that all this work started 20 years ago and we move forward step by step and what the commission is trying to do is build its own capacity as regards open source insights the house and across the most important GGs and then also to identify the funding sources that are available from European funds that can be accessed by developers can be accessed for interesting individual projects and then we have to see how can we draw from what is good and share what works well across the whole of Europe. So I mentioned earlier on the next generation internet funding so that seems to be very successful in reaching open source projects and it's helping to fund open source developers who are working on the edge of innovation and sometimes some of our European funding sources are not so good at supporting innovation so I think this is good maybe some of our big traditional funding programmes like structured funds have not been so good at that in the past I was actually good to hear about the recovery and resilience fund challenges this morning and I was really interested because I spent 15 years of my career in commission working on regional policy so it seems to me that it is the more innovative and a smaller kind of initiatives that are going to support open source projects the better so yeah another area we're involved in in GGs is public entities and hackathons and these came out for pilot project and proprietary action by the European Parliament we heard the faucet project mentioned this morning as well by myself and I was going to tell you what the actual instance for because even though I still have about 10 minutes ago I forgot it already but these pilot projects and are helping us helping to challenge the commission for anything because we're not the most innovative organization but we are finding ways to support innovation through these kind of projects we're doing hackathons with the United Nations as well but we need to think about not just about how we fund hackers but how we find ways to fund the developers in the first place so co-creation sounds good but it's not easy and I don't think we should pretend that it's easy but we are trying hard and so we have to work with our peers exchange experiences and learn from our mistakes but then not only learn from our mistakes more importantly learn from our successes and share our successes but I think there are a quite a number of opportunities and for funding for open source and the commission is certainly committed to making sure that those are exploited thanks great one such example if you look up in the corner there's the European flag it's the Czech side of the prime center of excellence paid for by one of those funds so more to come so I appreciate you have a few more minutes with us I would like to go back to you if I may and talk a little bit more about what you were elaborating around competitiveness but this time in the case of real jobs and of course not the front and center at the moment in terms of projectivity with the hackathons that we're all facing the question here is about Czech news oppressive record when it comes to IT talent that skills development in universities like this but others across the country and a little bit of what Ambassador Daly was saying about the importance of also doing likewise at an educational at a school level but the question is really about this leadership you see here in Bruno and how do you see that sort of evolving not only in Czech news but also given your current presidency beyond across Europe in terms of building out more jobs in open source and thereby helping further the competitiveness and one data point which I think Marcel mentioned was the EU's report on open source which talks about for every 10% increase in contribution upstream you get a 0.6% GDP points uplift so that's a pretty significant link so I'm really interested here more from you on that thank you yeah so thanks and yeah I'm happy that do you assess the Czech but in our ecosystem it's a nice example for all the EUI I think it is very soft the answer is that actually there is no no short way to achieve the success in Bruno and the Sosmolovian region shows that you have to be actually very focused and consequent in your steps for many years to achieve this level of excellent innovation in the ecosystem that actually Bruno and the surroundings actually is now I'm not sure about exactly but I think it was like 2000 or 2001 actually the new innovation strategy in Bruno was actually approved and the important fact was that it was not so much changed by the new political representations every four or even last year so this is really important to have a strategy clear vision and not to not to change this if you change it every few years and I think it's clear success now and no politicians in the Sosmolovian region I think would change the innovative nature of of the city and the region itself so it's one thing that the second thing is that we need to speak about education and of course changing the educational system is not easy I think what works in Bruno but also in Prague and few other parts of the Czech Republic is definitely some part of partnerships between private sector, academia and public sector again taking example from Bruno and we can speak about actually newly established but based on previous cooperation cyber security innovation hub that is actually a partnership of universities public body clusters this hub also helps to actually increasing the importance of education also in open source in the region we need more of these partnerships actually in the Czech Republic I have been a bit self-critical the educational system I think although universities work very well but the elementary and high schools so it's more difficult and if the region is active and supports the transformation on the level of high schools it works well but we have a lot of regions where it is not so much and it doesn't work in that way as in the first region so we need more focused national strategy to actually actually produce more IT talents and of course also IT talents that are aware of the benefits of open source so this is difficult of course the regional or the elementary and high school education is not something that is of course too much harmonized on the EU level so what we can do is to actually support increasing increasing the best practice in change supporting the partnerships supporting the network of digital innovation hubs that also can work with the schools this is something very important and because I will have to leave I just say a few words that are not so much non-direct to the jobs question but are linked to the presidency of the EU that we have now I just want to say more general terms that actually I know that this is not what Derek is speaking about open source but what is really high priority of the chief presidency is to push the digital legislative files that are on the table that of course can actually help to develop new solutions new applications that can help to increase competitiveness and improve the lives of the citizens we have AI act we have the type and now also thanks to the French presidency we have already approved data governance act and this is something that I think we should take care about quick implementation because data governance act brings a lot of measures how to actually facilitate reuse of data from public sector and how to generate new data intermediaries and of course the data are blood for any applications for the data economy so this is I also wanted to mention I know that this is not directly to the point open source but I think speaking about open data is also really important and data governance act as well as data act to some extent can really help to increase the sharing of data in you thank you great excuse me thank you I think on that point on skills everybody in this room everybody online absolutely stands ready to help develop and involve those kinds of partnerships on the presidency France point taken the lot of lot of legislation which has been adopted myself talked about the DMA earlier but also there's a there's a raft of legislation coming through and a lot of it potentially very positive for open source yesterday was the cyber resilience act which has been launched with an exemption for open source so I think again the default open approach is there and it's good to see and more of that to come I appreciate you need to drop now so I'd like to thank you for your time and your participation and look forward to working with you on behalf of everyone in the next few months your presidency but also after that yeah thank you very much it was a real pleasure and I've got more guys to relate and I wish you luck to your panel thank you bye thank you so I'd like to go turn to Maria if I may talked about this whole essence of sharing and reusing and the importance of helping one another at a country level or a company level civil society level the I mean Sweden is well regarded in terms of its digital slash open source credentials yes there's more to do as often as the case but it'd be interesting to hear a bit more about what you see and what you saw as as key drivers in Sweden's success and then a little bit sort of forward looking in terms of your own digital agency and projects which you have underway thank you first I would like to elaborate a bit on as open as possible and as close as necessary because we're talking about open by default which is a very important principle my authority agency for digital government Dick we have a policy an open source policy which is saying everything we procure should be open standards and open source and everything we develop should be licensed with an open source license and this is also accordingly to the Tallinn declaration 2017 so this is nothing new this is something we already know but still it's difficult for the public sector to reach to that level and we are working really hard on that and what we see is that it's rather difficult when it comes to procurement and the procurement departments how do they work with open source because you don't have to procure open source it's just to download try out and use so that is rather good also on the same topic we have a very old law in Sweden it's from 1766 it's a public access to government information so transparency is very important for us but more important is actually the dialogue so what we have which I'm very proud of it's an open forum it's a community forum on our national data portal where people can anybody citizens companies academia anybody can ask questions or discuss topics about our digital commons the apis open source some people would like to start working on a project together and they do it I even have the app on my phone so every day a couple of messages coming in people asking for contributions and we are helping each other out so far we have 60,000 visitors and we have over 2,000 topics and this is I think a key success factor that we start communicating we start a talk we try to be as transparent as possible but everything is not to be transparent the other side is as close as necessary and we too need to work on that some information in some systems are critical functions of our society some information is the information about our citizens so even if we would like to use the cloud to scale up and scale down it's sometimes difficult due to GDPR and also due to that it's not suitable so we are collaborating again a couple of authorities so the Swedish Social Security Agency they're hosting the IT operations of some of the Swedish authorities and success story for this is also of course open source using an open source infrastructure to make it possible for digital sovereignty and this has been ongoing since 2017 like a trial but now we are seeing great results so our government has a proposal that my agency will start to look at the next step to make this a more permanent solution so stay tuned thank you very much we will stay tuned I think this is a huge opportunity not only for Sweden but also for other member states to study and emulate in the open source way and I say when I said Sweden was digitally advanced I now realise if you started off in 1766 I mean look further good well Mr Profell I may bring you into the discussion so we've talked a little bit about your role within the new digital agency appreciate again in the aeroplane metaphor getting a bit more detailed about some of the achievements some of your plans some of the challenges in terms of accelerating this effort and of course it would be interesting to hear how you see the Swedes as an agency as an inspiration but others which are particularly noteworthy thank you thank you so I have to describe the Czech organization of digitalization the government is a new position of vice prime minister for digitalization it's new in this government that this government is set about let's order it out later we are in the process of founded the central authority for a government called digital information and agency now the government is led now the government is led by minister of interior as I speak the digitalization of business is supported by minister of trade by minister Očko we have very robust laws and very invasions for example we were one of the first state went more about clouds in the public sector of course this approach can be very and in the flexible our central shared information system like the basis registry the high exchange and so our good paper about where and all and even the hardware is all and it's because the organization because it's not priority of current minister of interior and that's one thing that we are changing and and bringing a more stable budget in this area and more expertise because one of the problems why there is no update for example of hardware which is easy to just buy hardware it's not some rocket science is that there are no experts so a lot of prokurmen are bad and criticized and cancelled and things like that the rest of the government is decentralized every institution is prokur its own software and hardware only thing is that there are some central enterprise architecture so to the goals our goals are until the end of this year found the digital inform and information agency change the procurement law to be to be to be more flexible we are solving the issue of horizontal cooperation between the state department like if you want if you want to buy something from another ministry you need to do a procurement in Czech law and that is absurd because you are one state one institution in the end of the day so of course you can do some internal internal things so we are changing the procurement law in this way to be more flexible and the last goal for this year is our own budget chapter in national national chapter for the next year so on the national level you will see the budget for this institution that's now not transparent because you see the budget of ministry of interior and the digitalization is so small that there are some item like rest it's absurd and our plan for the next year set up proper modern working culture in our agency that's important because we need a young talent we need to be flexible and for this we need a proper modern working culture and this is not common in our other public institution to have some good working culture home office, sick days and think like that the next goal is set up collaboration between DEA and other institution this is crucial we're building central authority and we need to collaborate with another institution so proper collaboration is key of course cooperation with the Czech New Lake found Ospo to promote the open source and without the agency the Czech Ospo where we all make NGO without a partner in the public sector next goal is to build our national club another goal is to stabilize the situation about central share so far as I mentioned all there are there are all and it's items for episode I think so we need to prepare some projects to renew this software and I hope in some modern way in that we we can use a gyro actually we can use open source and so and the last but not least prepare preparing to the EU wallet from EID there is a lot of things that the member state has to prepare for example the data sources the wallet itself it will be some technical specification not so complex but the data source can be a little tricky for example in Czech Republic we have no information about about the students on universities or in as the government the universities are independent and they have students of course we financing them but only the neuroscience only per capita it's not it's not it's not good for some recognition of status of student or to to describe the expertise or something like this and we have to manage to collaborate with our universities for example and another that sources to prepare to your finality so this is our plan fantastic thank you I guess you're not alone in terms of trying to update procurement or I think that's there's there's a lot of will to do that and I think what I see in some some member states there are inadvertent outcomes which are unexpected so for example you're luckily an idea from from from from thin air if you're selling services many of the procurement models are engineered for proprietary services and therefore with different viability caps and that really makes things likely to open to us yeah it's one of the biggest problem in the current IT of course the procurement law and so the budgeting law capex or supex it's a big problem in transition to cloud and on this topic we need a collaboration of minister of finance so it's not so easy because of course it's a rigid and their their rules are good without the command and we cannot change them because they are the best so this will be another challenge for us great thank you you mentioned the capex or pex and and that makes me think of someone else on the panel I will come to the second but also you mentioned around proper and working cultures and this is something which again european commission i think that digits be doing for a long time in terms of acting as it kind of spoke in the in the sorry in the hub in the wheel of member states so the interesting miss gaffer if i can hand it to you about the your your now vision going forward around digits of enabling meaning role when it comes kind of further developing that default open posture thanks thank you very much yeah i mean i i mentioned earlier all the various funding sources that there are for open source and i think there never will be a fund focusing on open source by itself so i think but then the open source community is a very agile flexible community so i think they need to be creative in finding their way through the european union funding sources and i think we at digits are happy to help them but what we are going to do our next initiative we are going to take is to see how can we bring the community of open source together and we think we can help to do this through our interoperability european act which we hope we will be able to publish our proposal before the end of the year in time for the check presidency to initiate discussions with them with with council and and parliament and so this is a regulation that has been prepared by the commission in close collaboration with the member states it's it's based on a on a decades long cooperation between member states but the vision is that we have to find a mechanism where we can pull it together the good practices and the learning that have been generated among public administrations at local national and european level and we think this will help to validate give value to the work that is done on open source and will help identify the really good examples and we we mentioned as well the code.eu.eu this morning that will be a repository for many of these examples but basically we see it working across all member states across cultural borders and transcending different sectors so basically we want to create a culture of open cooperation and transparency and that for us will be the future interoperability policy for europe and it's quite interesting in the discussions we've had within the commission some people across the commission I said oh what are you doing what are you trying to do and all the other and we will propose a regulation but we are not we are not making it a requirement for every member state to participate member states will participate at the level they wish to and to the extent they want to but it's member states asked us for regulation and so it's just it's just interesting how some people in the more traditional parts of the commission found it's hard to understand how we want to go about this and I suppose in the end as everything in this area it's been an incremental process over 20 years so we'll make a proposal we will have a discussion with member states with parties and then of course we'll have to implement it and it's only as we implement it that we will really see what needs to be improved how we can work better so that's that's our ambitious ambition thank you super thank you very much just listening to you talk about culture of open collaboration in one of the resources which I use very often is the commission's open source cemetery and back in Sweden Maria if I'm safe drive a similar repository or similar collaboration platform because no sad is not not happy with no sad dot point of essay for example the next I'm just looking at the website actually the next session dealing on business models open source business models we're bringing in all sorts of different players to talk this through so I think that more of that is needed both at the new level at the member state level to kind of clarify and illustrate what the what the state of the art is actually on that front conscious we're running out of time so so I'm going to ask you to sort of find the question then I'll leave the fellow panelists to to provide a closing statement so if you'd like me to elaborate more on this out in the sense of collaborative tools but also of course we mentioned before the Deputy Minister especially the Czech presidency of course it's Sweden's term next if there's anything you want to share with us in advance that would be great in a particular answer of focus and potential option I appreciate recent election dot to dot but the open source it's a enablement as you would continue as a as a as a theme and it's to be seen how how much of a priority status that receives so Maria yes thank you yes of course continue with open source and the great work that we are achieving now and here and it's been here for two days taking being part of all interesting discussing the discussions seeing all great opportunities that are out there I have a colleague of mine he always say the first day of starting to share is actually today and I think that this is something we should do so the first thing I would do is to share my contacts with you so we can start collaborating on Fritz and cyber security because that is something very important and another thing I would do is I will try to summarize this event I will put down the Swedish community forum so everyone else can also take part of what we have been discussing today so these are the two things that I would like to do and then I would like I know it's not so much time but I will try as I say one more thing we have a saying in Swedish share the integrity and the second and since you know some Swedish maybe you would like to translate okay that's do not buy the pig and the sack before I was talking about a law from 1766 but this this goes back to the Medibles before we knew that when we are doing procurement we need to check what we actually are buying and I think that is something we can work more on and also cross-border so I would like to do forward cross-border coding so let's put out our code let's package it in a way that we can actually collaborate cross-border Sweden check public that is what I would like to do yeah I I'm very happy that we can collaborate and we will do and this is the open cities of course because I think we have a lot of common and in we challenge the same problem in the organizational state and in the mitigation of our Wendorf audience so so I think I think that's that's we've got three minutes on the clock yep thank you so I think that's that's a fairly open I think challenge invitation perhaps that we explore how to take this event step it up into the next presidency and of course in the meantime there'll be a huge amount of collaboration and through the years Ospo and other another another forum so I think that's a really exciting opportunity for us all to continue to scale this conversation so we're three minutes to go I'm just going to hand back the microphone in that direction just to have as a final statement till we close our panel thank you keep collaborating keep having the diamonds I think that's the most important thing oh I hope no more but I think another important thing is a strong community and to continue the dialogue between all the stakeholders thank you I think it should be clear from what I've said already today that commission recognizes the globe strategic and practical value of free and open source we're committed to advance on establishing a working culture based on the principles of open source and we look forward to the increased pace of work with our peers and the member states with the open IT service providers and with open source software developers because I think we've got huge potential that we can eliminate if we get this right thanks so I've got an easy job to ask you all to put your hands together and show you a appreciate for a brilliant panel thank you again to all our speakers and to our moderator James for this particularly interesting discussion I will now have the privilege to introduce our final panel of the morning or almost morning now with a particular focus on the Czech Republic and its place in the heart of connected Europe please welcome our speakers on stage for this panel and our moderator the CS Molka who will introduce our panelists yeah fingers for this panel my name is Lucia Smolka I'm your moderator for this panel and this panel is called how can the Czech Republic be at the heart of a connected Europe well a little about me I'm an IT law attorney and founder of NGO content and I also as a chairperson of open cities I hope you will enter our panel and also the after lunch part of this conference so I'll start with the short introduction of this panel and then I will introduce our their speakers so it is clear that open source software has been an essential element of the European technology ecosystem for decades around the world companies and public services are using open source collaborative metals to innovate and create new solutions it is likely that in any new project involving software a large part of the code will be based on open source the use of open source in the Czech Republic is quite high especially in companies and IT communities and it's also becoming a large part of public administration we can even find dedicated open source portal which we've already talked about we have a lot of open source conferences we have a lot of enthusiasts, professionals and so fans and we also have the drive to make the difference however in order to really make a difference in Czech Republic when it comes to the use of open source applications we need to go further and unify our efforts and create a body like we say Czech national OSPO open source program office to enable knowledge transfer between stakeholders and similar partners across Europe to leverage existing knowledge and also the best practices so I welcome the speakers of our last one today to discuss these topics and to draw inspirations so I will first introduce Mr. Yichihavenko regional representative of South Marivan region investor and also author of many publications and articles since 1990 he has been involved in many areas of business he co-funded the specialist publishing host computer press and launched the country's first online shop of Vltava.cz since 2005 he has been investing more in innovative technology startups and since 2016 he has been a representative of South Marivan region and also chairman of the South Marivan region council commission for information openness and Yichih is also a member of the open cities committee and its expert advisor so thank you very much for joining us today please welcome Yiri okay I'm now pleased to introduce Mr. Petra Zirovchenova the first chief innovation officer in Bratislava she is responsible for preparing the innovation strategy for the city creating a network of stakeholders from academic business and also civic sectors she has a business background she is a professor in the startup Freyaker and help companies with business development marketing strategies and innovation efforts Petra was the founding executive manager at the Slovak Alliance for innovation economy she was responsible for setting strategic vision vision recruiting members and building networks among policy makers in Slovakia and on the EU level thank you for thank you very much for joining us today Petra our next speaker is Mr. Jakob Onderka security analyst at the government's computer emergency response team which is part of the national cyber and information security authority and plays a key role in protecting critical information infrastructure and other system under the cyber security act his work includes critical information infrastructure controls and related technical measures and drafting cyber security regulations and dealing with the most serious cyber attacks taking place in the Czech Republic Jakob is also an experience open source developer and he's dedicated to increasing awareness of open source capabilities uses and benefits thank you very much for joining us today Jakob and last but certainly most least I'm pleased to introduce Mr. Karol Minajik chief technology officer in Czechs for digital Karol work as a graphic designer project manager lecture of interactive design at the Institute of Digital Media lecture of introduction to programming at the department of new media studies faculty of art Charles University and he's a and as a chief software engineer and software architect he also created many websites and applications and also contributed to many open source projects as part of this career he now has taken up a position at Czechs for digital where he takes care of the technical competence of the organizations and its overall increase his goal is to take the digital transformation in Czech Republic to the next level thank you very much for joining us today okay so I will now start with the question to Jiri Hlavenka so Jiri open source is becoming an increasingly important tool at the various level of state and local governments would you please share your insight with how about open source open standards and principles of open collaborations are taking shape from a point of view as a governor of South South American region for innovation and digitalization okay thank you yeah perfect well just first I'd like to say that I'm a real supporter of open source software and principles and as Lucia meant my former sins I have to it came some funny story that my publishing house published the first books about open source in this republic I'm one of the first because I see many guys with the red heads pass about the red haplinux it was in years 2000 I don't know if you have the books in the library I see Lupe Schmitt as a general director of the company if not you can buy today still for 30 crowns two crowns which is one euro 40 cents yeah it is memorably actually if you cannot use it if you can't I maybe I have a private library I will give it to you well back to the back to the open source maybe a comfortable view is that I view open source not only as a goods of resolution itself but as a tools or set of tools to foster and increase the speed of digital transformation to increase the speed of the innovation because those tools in principle how they are built are encouraging innovation and encouraging transformation however to penetrate them in the let's say public administration I'm responsible for the IT in the in some other region which is the office with 800 people which is a lot of face with 200 schools with 400 social institution and so on so it is it is pretty complex things it is difficult because if I may use the wartime terminology in these days the enemy is strong has a big deeper and is well well fortified yeah especially when you see this the the logbox software is deeply integrated across the department it is very difficult to replace I think that everybody knows what would I mean yeah what do we what do we have built so how to approach how to address it what we did first is that we will be I say that okay this is long term and difficult what is maybe easier and short term is data so opening the data is something we could do rather easily rather quickly so we now are publishing some several hundreds of of data sets in the intelligent form with API to for everyone to use as I came here I came across past across the Moravia Moravska and Skatnihovna the Moravian country library we for example helped to digital digitalized cultural heritage of so Moravia we are right right written papers couple of hundreds of years ago to digitalize and to put some money to digitalize them and to make them accessible to the public yeah so those are just things to the examples of the of the how we approach the open data still what remains are the are the open software systems and really this is things that needs a lot of time we do step by step so it means that sometimes we can replace some fragment sometimes not and obviously we we are trying we need we actually need help because administration is here just a customer we don't have powers to develop and I don't think that like regional office should be at software developer I don't think it is this role but we are encouraging developers to provide us with solutions that we can and even with the ways how to implement and this is not only just just just to so help us to to penetrate with the open source of their better in the administration but this is a really long work and I'm happy that they initiated that we'll cover it from from the down this is very important thank you this is a bit difficult it's the movement but we'll manage exactly thank you it was very insightful and we would like to help in open cities this is penetrating the open source to public administration so thank you as we speak about the public level at the cities and the regions I'd like to ask Petra so as we consider what open means at the municipal level can you tell us about the work of your team part of your job is to prepare the innovation strategy for Bratislava what role does open invention play in your plans could you maybe tell us also about your city website and the open source impact thank you thank you Lucien it's good afternoon everyone so working out in the open is crucial for us it kind of changed the position of being the municipality and telling everyone the top-down approach like this is how we're going to do things so we started to work out in the open it's very vulnerable position because you're going out there and you're trying to talk to people and ask them what they think and engage them in the process so we're not showing them something that is finished we are trying to co-design our services and what the city offers with residents and our stakeholders I actually would like to follow up what Maria was saying and we are facing one of the biggest challenges on our time so climate change is happening and it's kind of a step up from looking just at technology because technology can be an enabler to help us solve these problems but we need to look at it more broadly open thinking and co-creation and collaboration can help us solve these big challenges I know that there are many cities in Sweden that are involved in the mission of 100 climate natural and smart cities and it is really really important to co-create solutions and try different types of solutions pilot them and find frameworks for cities the size of Bretzel, Auburn or any big ones to try out solutions that could be open that could be transferred to other cities and create portfolios of several solutions that we can spread out to other countries and other cities across Europe and across the world so that's the way we are trying to think about it it's more broader than just thinking about open source technology and websites of course we are working on our websites as well and I would disagree with the Yuri actually because we do have our own development team in-house just because we realize that we need to take ownership of how we develop technologies we need to have those brains in-house to say these are the technologies we wanted to use these are the standards we want to use and that team works with our collaborators with our suppliers and they are kind of leading the change and without them we wouldn't be able to be an effective partner for the outer world we have just finished our website it was a long process and it kind of shows how we work with stakeholders so at the beginning we really tested every single step of the way from the way the side map is designed from designs to setting up processes with our colleagues so we engaged 100 people from the city hall to take part in this process so they take it from as their job and as part of their work to have a successful presentation and at the end of the day we've published the code for the website on GitHub which is one of the first institutions in Slovakia to do so and we're really glad because we already had someone contributing and improving what we're trying to do so we'd like to go this way forward and let me check my notes I might have something else I want to share with you yes innovation policy that was also a very interesting journey because we as a city we're very close up we didn't really collaborate with our academic partners not as as good as in Bernat because you have a really nice collaboration here but we didn't have that and we are trying to identify what are the key areas of research and business exploration because we are losing many talented students to Bernat they choose to come here or Czech Republic in general and we would like to keep them and explore and kind of enrich our research opportunities and have Brett Slovak grow as strong as Bernat and other cities in Czech Republic with collaborating together so that's another way of opening up and adhering to the principles of collaboration which I think we can see in open source as well thank you very much it's really interesting about the website because a lot of the cities in Czech Republic especially the small ones are looking forward to some solution which is open source and they can use it easily and we would like to try to help with that but it's a big process and a big task to make happen also part of the open source is definitely cybersecurity and my next question is for Jakub so when you have open source software a lot of different people are contributing to the software and they can possibly search for errors and they can propose modifications so what experience do you have with the open source software in cybersecurity which should be taken into account in the terms of cybersecurity when working this open source in public administration? Good afternoon so directly in the cybersecurity field open source and open standard are crucial for securing communication for data not just in critical information infrastructure but in the world internet for example many tools that we use for securing communication data are just open source even if we want to use closed source software there is not that not the software is comparable with open source because many many people that works in that field are really fans of open source and they collaborate even when for example they are home after work or during their holidays and the time is also key factor during handling cybersecurity incident for example we are going to place and we want to help them with to fight with hackers and you don't have time to call your economic department and ask for money for buying license for some software or hardware so deploying open source tools to fight hackers is sometimes the only way how public administration can do that maybe in commercial sector it can be different they can be some organization has like money directly assigned to this usage but in the public sector it can be very hard to do that because of many stricter law that public sector must hold and from perspective like cybersecurity then somebody wants to use or or release open source software I think it's two things it's so different but because using open source software in public sector or in critical information infrastructure is just normal it's a long time that this is possible there is no law that's telling organization that it is not possible for example in Czech Republic energy sectors use redhead test operation system so without this open source energy will not work in Czech Republic but the security of open source can be sometimes tricky as it was in the question that many people can collaborate in that software and it's not sometimes you can read in when somebody wants to promote open source software they said it's more secure than closed source it's not true all the times it can be but it can be not and it depends on many factors and one of the advantage of open source software is it's possible to do software audits but on the other hand and from my experience companies even in very companies that has even a lot of money more than public sector don't do software audits because it's very expensive and it also takes time so if you want to deliver software for your citizens citizens fast it's it's not a good idea to do code audit and it's also a problem with cybersecurity because sometimes you have if there is like zero dates so that means there is critical vulnerability and you have to you have to deploy a new version very fast to fix that vulnerabilities there is no time to do software audits so my recommendation not just for public sector is to start something like back bounty program that means that anybody from your country or from other countries from the world can send you a report that something wrong is in your software there is there is software vulnerability a security vulnerability in your software or in software that you use and you the organization will pay money that's for example european commission do that they chose 15 or 20 software and if somebody find and that software is that is used by european commission or organization in european union and if somebody finds a software vulnerability they pay them for example for key pass if you know that software they pay 71 000 euros so this is the way how if you want to use some open source you can check if somebody already opened that program back bounty for the software that you want to use or if you want to release open source software I can make your own program but I understand that it can be hard for public institution not just because of a lack of funding but also from the legal problems that can be there thank you Jacob you have mentioned that open source can take a lot of time a lot of money a lot of people contributing so now I would like to ask Carol so how does volunteering fit in open source software development in the context of governments do you see any obstacles that need to be overcome thanks for the question it's actually a question that just close to my heart I would first like to maybe address what is actually open source because we are talking the whole day here about what is open source is it a javascript library for padding string let's zeros or spaces or is it something like Linux or Apache Kafka this is completely incomparable and it's really important to keep this in mind it's not just the you know big projects they're using it's small projects they're using but it may might be also the services and applications which is produced by the public institutions also there's a lot of big businesses you know based around open source Red Hat is one of course there's a lot of people here my former employee elastic which makes elastic search Kibana also you know does good business based on open source right so what I think is important to understand is that underneath there are some core values you know and if I would kind of pinpoint to it's openness which means everybody can contribute I mean not every crazy contribution will get into the main line of the projects but you can do that you can usually open a pull request or something and there's some kind of discussion around it the other big you know aspect to me is transparency because everything happens in the open you know every discussion every feature request every buck report that is transparent GitHub other service like that these two values are really really important when we talk about open source either in terms of like pre-made solutions like let's say Apache Kafka or specific applications and services you know so to me the other thing to address is that it is human nature to cooperate it is that that's just the fact you know of course people like to lie steal kill that's also true right but we are successful as a species because of the cooperation not because the ability to kill right any other animals kill and they are not as successful as we are you know and that addresses the part of your question about volunteering because that is what we see in civic tech organizations around the world and that is actually what we see in just digital in this aspect people are really keen for this reason it's not for no reason it's for this reason of the ability to cooperate to really you know contribute to something and that might be writing code but that might be writing you know a nice twitter twitter text or contribute in documentation or something like that you know so to be this this is really important to keep in mind it's not just a technical discussion and not just about when they're looking that's important that might sideline these importance of rates as for the obstacles you know ironically the most obstacles we see here and you know encounter is the argument about security which you kind of trust and I see that is ironic because you know the original mantra of Linux is given enough eyeballs all bucks are shallow and that is still true you know and understand what I could be saying of course there are vulnerabilities in open source receiver ones at times but they are addressed you know and it's completely delusional to think that you know commercial software doesn't have vulnerabilities like that that's just delusional like people are people coders writing commercial software are the same powers in many cases as the open source coders right so and I like that Petra mentioned that they actually do publish you know part of their website part of the applications or services is open source because that that is something I increasingly increasingly see as more important than the vendor looking etc discussions you know now let me close with just one example so the official COVID dashboard for the UK is completely open source is the official dashboard used by it was used during the pandemics by the doctors politicians journalists everybody the public you know and by completely open source I mean it's based on open source technologies it uses Postgres SQL with the Citrix extension so it's a distributed but database pretty sophisticated system it's not just the website this is a real application you know it's also completely open source in the sense that all the code is at GitHub the official you know organization for that particular department of the UK government and by code I don't mean just the front end you know a bunch of JavaScript and HTML files I mean all the services all the data transformations because they did a lot of cleanups etc etc and also the terraform definitions for building the whole infrastructure so that's to me you know is what we should strive for and when you look up that dashboard at github you will see external contributions sometimes they minor you know it's fixing a bug like when I click this button it doesn't do what it should but imagine how a developer at the public institution will be happy when somebody just fixes their bug so that should be great to strive for this thank you very much it was really interesting you talked about values and motivations and I think all of our who are here we share these values but I think we have to also to spread it to other communities and other people maybe other governments and so I would like to ask Yuri so we have seen open source and open open innovation identified as foundations element for government's futures from economic recovery to slowing day-to-day issues to helping citizens so what's your view on how open source and the policy context is key to creating successful outcomes for connecting people and governments across the Europe thank you well I see that we have some depth here yeah that we don't too much communicate too much across the governments across the countries that maybe even across the different offices in the Czech Republic everybody just loves to to look inside his office and work inside his office so we truly have some depth we need to start talking start communicating maybe the these conferences may be very good very good start here yeah and well I would like to speak about two things first is to to obviously to share the solutions say to share the solutions somebody has developed this is principle of open source absolutely which is maybe the a little bit difficult things because okay the solutions are mostly tailor-made on on individual legislations cultural you know things difficult the different stages of the evolution in the in the different countries and and the government structures of the government each country has a completely different structure so this is not not very easy but it should be done if we talk enough and we learn both other country what in Sweden in the Netherlands where has has developed and get a very good experience they had results yeah we need to look on the solutions with great results say hey should we somehow adopt it should we somehow use it this is something we should we we should do so maybe a little more than just just to take over what is done by the way who is a developer here raise of hand okay a lot of yeah so we know that what the developer allows most to write code right write code this is your job this is what you love yeah to take over others code understand the thinking of what the developer this is not nobody likes it yeah but okay sharing thoughts sharing the let's say best practice case okay you develop something in Sweden it works well let's take just an inspiration in spite let's let's do it himself this is also the sharing of the and this is the connect connecting and communicating so I believe that we we could look at the smart solutions that had developed around us take inspiration and try to think how we can learn from that and adapt it by the way we in the South Marawi I also trying to reply of OVO OVO speech launch an agency because we need to somehow a little bit separated from the from just from the administration is called the YINAC this is short for probably nothing but it sounds good but this is agency for promoting modern solution for the public public sector so we have some three or four main directions one is let's say modern energetics that is mobility and one of them also third solution yeah so so this is this is a tool or this is vehicle for for delivering the solution solutions to the public sphere to the municipalities to the other organization so this should be let's say a vehicle to to do it yeah and I believe that this officer is a right subject to communicate with others as I think that this is this model is replicated to many countries so it is not inside the administration so it is some agency or office which is a little bit separated to have more autonomic yeah this is maybe something that Sondra mentioned this agency so we we will not put it in directly as a member of the office but we it will separate it give it an an autonomic give it a budget let them work yeah so these institutions should work together and try to learn from the best experience inspire and and bring that solutions thank you yeah communication is super important and we would like to create the space here at the conference and also after the conference so hopefully we'll be able to share more and talk about our challenges and problems so but then is your experience as a CIO what challenges have you had to overcome what advice would you give to other cities looking to innovate their operations and looking for inspirations and maybe you can share also what not to do maybe well before I answer the city questions I would like to say Carol it's true when my developer team gets a pull request from the outside they're the happiest so it's it's really nice to have people contributing but let's get to answer your question or questions I think the biggest challenge was building trust with my colleagues public servants are usually not really trusting new things and when you come as part of design thinking first thing they learn on the first workshop is trust the process and it's it's open it's messy it's iterative and it's it's really really hard for people who are kind of used to one way of doing things so that was one of the biggest challenges but now the people that went through the process with us really trusted and really enjoyed and they always come back to us and they ask us what problem are we trying to solve what is the reason we're doing this thing and that's the most important thing and for whom also that's what we need to ask every single day is the solution beneficial to someone does it solve their problem really crucial problem they're facing so those are kind of the very important things we're trying to share with anyone who's thinking about starting the way to work out in the open because I think it's crucial to be very transparent about it and part of that is is communication so when we were working on the website every single month we had something internally called show and tell where we presented what we are working on what's the progress of the website with our colleagues and we had a couple of setbacks as well so we had to communicate some unpleasant things but we tried to tell them okay some things didn't work out some things took longer than we expected but we want to invite you to be part of the process we want you to understand that it is not a piece of it's not a notebook it's not a statue it's something that changes and involves in time and we want you to be part of that so that's kind of changing mindsets when you're part of software development or development of any other service or product it's not something that's set in stone that kind of evolves with with needs with changing circumstances we've seen that over the past for the years how things change so we have to be very transparent about it what we have learned as well is collecting data and measuring impact of what we are doing and it's also really important to kind of set the the KPS at the beginning like what do you want to measure is it money saved is it people making things faster is it I don't know for example with with our tax pilot where we launched a service to pay your tax for property really really fast the KPI for us was how fast people paid and also how happy they were to pay their tax because no one's happy to pay their taxes but we had net promoter score of 90 which is through the roof we didn't really believe that but that was a lot of people happy to pay their taxes and I had people messaging me like I did it on a waiting on the lights when I was in my car and I'm like please don't tell me that so and there was procurement mentioned as well so that's kind of a challenge in a public institution also kind of setting up the rules that you can open up to smaller companies and not delivering it's called I'm not sure how it's called in English but it's it's a software as it is yellow not true if you know what I mean so it's more about yeah your piece of work rather than working with your partner as as a collaborator with your service and one last thing I wanted to mention which was really good for us so we started a city hackathon called Clamathon and we had lots of different people contributing and we're starting through pandemics so the first one was fully online and we had people coming to us and trying to solve our challenges and we are still working with the teams from the first year so these are kind of our volunteers they're they keep coming back to the city and it builds a relationship with the city as well even though it's it's much harder to kind of work with the broader ecosystem thank you very much I maybe I do one more challenge because what we experience is sometimes people like to start projects maybe it's not open source specifically but people like to start projects and the finishing is the hard part so that's what we dealt a lot of this and also back to the Yakup to Yakup what are some major cyber security challenges that governments face when collaborating on open source software and open content do you have any advice you can you can offer on how to overcome these challenges what is what is your opinion maybe on the upcoming European Union legislation and could you give some examples how to address this or where to get inspiration from thank you as I know there is no really good problem as we said when using or contributing to open source open source project as public sector in Czech Republic or in some or from legislation of European Union so that's okay but the main problem as I see in public sector in Czech Republic is a lack of knowledge lack of experts in that field because Czech public institution usually outsorts do outsorts all of the development all of the expert work so inside of the institution there is nobody that can said that that software is good that software is not a good day outsorts that work and when you end the problem with open source in as we talk about that in previous panel in procurement according to some lawyers in Czech Republic they said it's not possible to request your the external company to deliver you open source software you cannot put requirements deliver the code must be open source because they said this is discrimination so if everything is outsourced and everything and you cannot request open source it's a problem so and you don't have internal people that can develop software but one public institution one city maybe two years ago they want because they somebody some external entity code one application for making grants and the city wanted to release that code for other cities so they can use that and with cooperation with open cities and that city we receive that code and check it before they release it for public and we find out that there are many security vulnerabilities so if the city released that code I think the their system will be heck in one or two minutes because there was really basic security problems so the security is really important because if you have closed source the vulnerabilities are there but nobody it's it's it can be harder to find them if you have code it's it's much easier for potential hackers to find to find the vulnerabilities and they can report to you or use and get the money from you for example from and so there so that's the reason why I said in the first part of my presentation that the backband they are one of the solution for that and another solution is you need expert knowledge inside the organization and check if the code is okay and it's a reasonable for anybody for public and to make it this think easier our agency release recommendation for public sector that they can use not just that they can use when they when they want to release their products as open source currently is available just in Czech language and it's available on our GitHub but we plan to translate that recommendations to English in near future and the organizations can use that for not just to check the code according to the rules but they also can provided recommendations to their external partners so they will follow the rules by themselves thank you Matt yeah the cyber security question is a big one and we need more people who are able to help with it yeah hopefully with your help we will we will make this better so so Carol you have experience from different types of projects both commercial and non-profit so what do you think the biggest advantages of the Czech environment are and maybe do we have any projects we can export to to the other states and yeah built on them for further cooperation yeah thanks I know we are short on time so I'll keep it short when when the projects would be in the context of public or government services I'm afraid it's the other way around we don't have much to teach anybody and this is paradoxical right it's again you know ironic Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia you know it's really historically a technically advanced country you know there's a lot of technological innovation happening here there are many successful technological companies as Jakub usually says e-commerce in Czech Republic is really you know a high standard for everybody but when it comes to the public sector services public sector applications that's you know just a disgrace you know we had a good goal a couple of years ago for instance the data boxes that was a like semi successful project at that time but when you think about it it's a glorified file sharing system and all that notifications it's it's crazy you know it's for sharing pds right so that's that's the paradox for instance in Greece which I don't think anybody here who describes it historically technically advanced country I'm not talking about 2000 years ago right like the the last century they had a pretty sophisticated system for tracking lockdowns etc etc maybe we were lucky we had no such application so you could do whatever you want here but you know the point stands so another good example which is kind of ironic or paradoxical is bank id you know and I always say bank id that's an absolute success and an absolute failure you know for some of the maybe foreigners I don't know what bank id is it's a way how you can authenticate to government services online through your bank account because obviously the bank knows who you are right so we had some half-baked solutions for that here provided by government but the usability is so you know crazy that actually the local banks they formed a conglomerate of banks and did this service for everybody huge you know which you can say that's a huge success but also the state should probably provide a service like this in the same way you know in the same usable way right so on the other hand to you know and to not have a note I think that that is maybe something to export you know to not be afraid of cooperation with the commercial or business sector because this is a really great solution like everybody who uses bank id in this country they're like this is great I love it you know I will never ever use anything you know else again so maybe that's one thing where we can share some some success here yeah thank you thank you for the positive ending yeah the bank id is the thing we could show up to other people and so we are we are nearly at the end of our panel so my last question is to Jiri and so we are in the middle of european presidency of european council check presidents of european council so do you see something we can do to encourage the connection between the EU member states and the Czech Republic do you see anything that this is a check to do it well thank you obviously presidency is very very short time frame it is half a year this is not a time to achieve significant but to start things yeah this is good good good good timing and good place to start to timing as you ask for what is unique and it is difficult to to answer I would maybe say that we are the the best country best place to to host the conferences for various reasons first we are in the middle of Europe second that we here in Bernal we have an airport with no flights which is also unique and we have the best beer wine and spirits together this is a paradise of BSM but on the more serious note all country is let's say IT heavy we have we have really are maybe one of the largest number of IT specialists coders compared to population in Europe for some historical reasons I really think I really mean that yeah and we have a lot of great team lot of great companies there are areas that we are I would not say that we are the best but we are strong yeah which is I would like to point out the AI and big data yeah we have a lot we are great teams and great companies great companies in these two areas and you know that in public sector this is all about the great great data we have a lot of data we we have no smart tools to analyze so to to have some outcomes from all politician decisioning yeah this this is something we need but we have something to offer and we are also very strong in cyber security as as actually you mentioned yeah again I would say that we are one of the strongholds of security cyber security man not as good as Israeli guys but they are keeping secret so we are we are willing to share a little more we have also some nice organization here maybe this is not unique but it is a nice contribution like it's like a Chesco digital like otter renami so like is open out that are contributing we update university as we are on the premises here that are very strong in open software the faculty of informatics is is stronghold of of open software I have another funny story to say but not not here not now so those are things that we can we can contribute maybe not unique but we are strong in the in that perfect thank you for much for the closing note and this is the entire panel I thank all the panelists for the insights and expertise I think it was a great panel so please be ground of applause for the panelists thank you very much and I think we have some more instructions to make I'll keep with mine yeah no thank you again to all our panelists of today and all the one prior to that it has been really a pleasure to listen to all of you and I hope our audience here in verno but also online as appreciated the high quality of the intervention and the discussion between them as a last remark I would like again to thank also all the organizers of today's event and the numerous persons that I work for months to make it happen today it has been a good work and I'm really really really proud of all of us it's it was an amazing effort seeing how open source is a strategic digital policy driver at national annual level and the commitment of our speakers and our audience as well to its value and utility for the grand digitization challenges lying ahead it has been a pleasure to share the scene with you today I would also like to thank all our attendants for the presence their interests and how it shows the importance of these topics on the political scene today okay thank you for the thank you so I also like to thank everyone for amazing first part of today's conference I would also like to thank our speakers who have been amazing and I'm really glad that they share their insights and their wisdom with us and I'm sure that these foundations we have laid here today will be great stepping stones for the development of the EU level open source corporations and also to the future Czech open source program office so this will definitely require some further further close cooperation on the EU level and within the organizations and Czech government and also involvement profits also some businesses maybe universities and also all the people who are interested in developing this with us and we will discuss these next steps in the afternoon expert discussion so thank you very much and see you in the afternoon yeah so before letting you all go and enjoy the lunch which will by the way happen also in the courtyard just like the coffee break for your information just a quick word about this afternoon discussion on action plans to establish the Czech National Osco for public administration it will be facilitated by Jacob Green from the Osco Plus Plus network and as well I'm very sorry about the pronunciation of your last name but Mara I guess and just a quick word the Osco Plus Plus network is a global network and community of collaborative open source program offices they focus on supporting the commission objectives of universities government and civic institution and they have a great experience supporting the setting up of Ospos and they foster collaboration between them and build a co-collaboration infrastructures for today challenges yeah I hope you will all join us this afternoon for this as well and I wish you all a great lunch and as for our speakers of the day I'll invite you to follow Niaji to the outside also for a quick group picture and yeah that's all thank you all very much for your attention and enjoy the lunch