 Okay, seems like you can hear me loud and clear. Good morning, everyone. I'm very happy to be opening the last day of next cloud conference, and I hope it's not too early in the morning for a Berlin crowd. My name is Felix Rieder. I'm a former member of the European Parliament, and nowadays I'm a board member at the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. And throughout my political and activist life, I've been trying to convince governments to support the open source ecosystem. And we recently at the Open Knowledge Foundation have some success to report in this field, and namely that is the creation of the sovereign tech fund, which is what I want to talk about today, and why in my view software is part of a public service and therefore part of the original tasks that any government should follow. And when I've been talking to people about their expectation of what government should be doing or what government is doing, I've met sometimes a lot of frustration or not very high expectations. So a lot of people might say, well, the core task of government is to tell us what to do. It's kind of the monopoly on the exercise of power. So basically people sometimes have kind of a negative view towards government as mostly restricting our possibilities, but at least in theory, what government should be is basically a pooling of resources. It's all of us getting together and saying, okay, rather than every single person taking care of their own health care and their own infrastructure, their own fire safety and so on, it's not just a lot fairer for everybody if we work together, but it's also a lot more efficient. And at the end of the day, this is also how open source communities work, that basically by all of us working together on a common project, we're not just going to have better outcomes, but we are also going to decide together and have common accountability. So in the case of a country's government or a region like the European Union, that means that the government should be serving all of us and be accountable to all of us, but also have the important function of providing public infrastructure. So this means in the broadest sense, of course, things like road, things like having access to a water supply and so on. But in my view, it should also include the IT infrastructure, the internet, the software that we all depend on for public life to function. So the kind of philosophy that I would like to see from government is to use open source software, but also to take responsibility for open source software and contribute back to it. I think in the recent years, since the start of the pandemic, this has become a bigger problem because we have really seen a sort of rapid transformation of a lot of areas that used to be pretty offline, like the education system, but also a lot of businesses and public administrations that were not necessarily used to collaborating online, having to improvise and move two digital solutions in a pretty short timeframe, which has not just been an opportunity for open source software, but quite often it also meant that companies, public administrations, schools and so on just picked whatever software solution looked the most available to them and was often conflicting with their own data protection or data security standards and was just used because it was there. So while the government has been fairly good at taking care of analog infrastructures, you can sometimes see that nobody gets reelected for making sure that maintenance of bridges and things is happening. So it's not always the top priority of governments to invest in maintenance, but rather the topic of maintaining infrastructure becomes more important when something goes wrong, like if a bridge collapses, for example. And in a way, the story of the digital public goods is quite similar to the analog public goods. So you have a lot of infrastructure that is not being properly maintained or that is relying very heavily on a small number of volunteers to do so who are not getting the recognition that they deserve and also not necessarily the support. And so in my political career, there have been two instances where I've been able to convince government to invest more heavily in open source software. One of those was pretty much immediately after the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014 and the second one was last year after the Lock for Shell vulnerability. So in both cases, a bridge has to collapse before government really takes an interest in the subject, but at least we're able to make use of those opportunities when kind of what we all know about what is missing actually makes it to the mainstream news, makes it to what non-technical politicians would actually hear about in the newspaper. The problem that we're trying to address with the sovereign tech fund has been very well summarized by this ex-KCD comic, which I think at this point has become somewhat of a cliche. It's being shown so many times, but it is really the perfect illustration of the problem. So there you have this stack of building blocks which represents modern digital infrastructure and then everything is balancing on this one tiny building block which represents a core infrastructure project in this case that in this example, a random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. And when I show this to politicians, they sometimes think that this is a little bit of an exaggeration, that it's not really just one person sitting there in their basement who is doing all the work. Like why would they even do that? What is their motivation to do so? But this is actually pretty much not an exaggeration but a perfect illustration of the problem that we're trying to solve. So in real life, it might look something like this. So this is Daniel Stenberg, the maintainer and developer of Curl, which really is being used by all kinds of software projects for data transfers. And in this case here, you have an interview from just about a little over a year ago where he's been explaining in a podcast how over 25 years he has really kind of become this little building block that everybody else is building their infrastructure on. And a little later, Apple very thankfully described what we call the free rider problem in open source software by referring somebody who had a tech support issue. Rather like don't ask us, a multi-billion dollar company, please ask the tech support of Curl, which is one person. So, yeah, it's very much not an exaggeration. And I think we should all be kind of worried what happens if Daniel gets run over by a bus, God forbid, that we have to think before something bad happens about the long-term viability, the long-term sustainability of our IT infrastructure. And having open source is great. It means that everybody can contribute to it. Everybody can check the security of it, but it doesn't mean that this actually happens in practice. So we have to make sure that if all of us benefit from this software, that actually all of us are also contributing to its maintenance. And this is really the core government function. This is what governments are here to do to make sure that if something benefits everybody that all of us are contributing to its future sustainability. So in the past, at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we have tried to support the open source infrastructure through government funding. So basically by building public funds that are run by civil society groups such as us, but where the government is contributing financially. So on Saturday, you may have heard my colleague, Marie Gutbub, talk about the Prototype Fund, which is one such initiative that we run at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Prototype Fund is a really kind of low level, easy access way of supporting new projects in the open source field. So basically if you have an idea and you want to get from that first idea to the first prototype within a short time frame, so something like three to six months, you can apply to the Prototype Fund. You're not going to spend hours on the application process and then you can get money, but also practical support with things like bureaucracy to make that first prototype happen. So this is obviously a great program, but its limitation is that since this is supported by the Ministry of Education and Innovation, the idea is okay, you have to provide something new. There has to be an innovation, there has to be a prototype. So this is not designed as an instrument that actually helps with maintenance. And quite often it's also more difficult to convince politics of investing in maintenance because at the end of the funding project they want to be able to show, look, this is the great new thing that we developed. And if it's really just, well, we made sure that nothing bad happened, it's a more difficult sell. So we need something in addition to the Prototype Fund. Looking at what else is out there, we've also come across the Open Technology Fund, which is also a great program that we all benefit from, which is financed by the US Congress, but still a lot of governments in the EU, a lot of companies and definitely civil society all over the world, benefit from the existence of this program because it has provided financial support to the messaging app signal, to the browser tour, to WireGuard, the VPN software. So a lot of things that are really critical for secure and censorship-free communications and also a lot of infrastructure that end users rarely see. So you might say, well, okay, we have the Open Technology Fund, everything is fine and we don't necessarily need European governments to build something on top of that. But the problem that we saw two years ago when we came up with the idea for the sovereign tech fund was that in the case of the Open Technology Fund, there's also a single point of failure. So at the time in 2020, Donald Trump tried to defund the Open Technology Fund. So there was an attack from Donald Trump for political reasons to try to get this program shut down and he was unsuccessful with this, luckily, but there was a short period of a couple of months where we didn't know whether the Open Technology Fund would continue to exist. And it shows, well, at the same time, a lot of governments in Europe were talking about so-called digital sovereignty. So this is this idea that we shouldn't make ourselves dependent on a single point of failure, whether it's a single government or a single large technology company, but rather we should really build a decentralized infrastructure with lots of small companies, lots of different public service infrastructures and also, for example, governments shouldn't basically have to shut down tomorrow if their Microsoft Office Suite doesn't work. So that's kind of the basic idea that everybody was talking about. At the time, the German government was in charge of the presidency of the council at EU level and they even had digital sovereignty as one of their goals at the time. So we were able to point at this attack on the Open Technology Fund in the US and said, look, the US is paying $20 million a year for the provision of the Open Technology Fund. This is maybe a lot of money to us, but it's not a lot of money to a government. Any European government could easily provide that money and create redundancy. So a lot of different funding programs that would be able to continue supporting the ecosystem if something fails. If, for example, a program like the Open Technology Fund gets shut down. So we entered into a dialogue. Back then it was still the old German government consisting of conservatives and social democrats and we were able to convince them to commission a study from us where we were basically making the case for why we need such a funding program in Germany and in Europe. And this first step was kind of encouraging. We were able to start working on the study and there was also a promise from the new government. So we had elections at the end of 2021 and just after the new government entered into government, the Greens were in charge of the Ministry of Economy. One day before Christmas tweeted, we're going to have a sovereign tech fund next year. So we were quite happy about this. But then the draft budget for 2022 came out and there was actually no money allocated to the sovereign tech fund, which was a little bit of a setback because obviously you can't promise to start a funding program and then not allocate any money to it. But after a concerted lobbying effort, we were able to convince the parliament to provide 3.5 million euros this year. And the good news is that for next year, the draft budget is out and this time they didn't forget the sovereign tech fund. So next year there's going to be 10 million euros available in the budget to make sure that the sovereign tech fund is going to be able to support open source technologies. So I want to present to you a few of the results of this feasibility study that we did for the Ministry of Economy last year. So this was done by several people who have worked both on the prototype fund but also on the open technology fund and it was hosted with us at the Open Knowledge Foundation. And the studies offers did expert interviews with different people in the open source community and also held two workshops to gather input for this. And the funding model that we designed was built on the experience of both the open technology fund and the prototype fund. So one of these principles that we learned from these existing funding structures is that it must be really easy to apply to because the people who are good at writing code are not necessarily good at writing funding applications. They might also see it as a waste of time if you don't know whether you're actually going to get funding at the end. The first kind of contact to the program must be really low effort so you don't end up spending a lot of time on an application and then finding out that this is actually not the right funding source for you. There has to be very low overhead so we wanted to avoid that the government pays some consultancy that is not really integrated in the open source community that doesn't really know how open source logic works but rather that the fund should be run by people coming from the community, from civil society and it should not be limited to innovative projects but really focus on the maintenance and usability improvements in open source software to get funding. There should also be a focus on sustainability so this is especially a problem with projects that have one or two core maintainers, they might have life changes, they might take on a new job, they might have a baby, they might have some other reason why they may not be able to maintain the software forever so there needs to be support for projects to come up with a long-term sustainability plan and it's also really important that the government should be providing the funding for it but there should not be a centralized kind of government decision-making over which projects to fund because then it would be extremely vulnerable to for example only funding the things that are easily explained to non-petechnical people or that have some application and whatever is in the news that week but rather there should be no expectation that this funding instrument would be used for promoting this particular government's policies for example because ideally this fund should exist longer than any one particular government and so it should just become as natural for the government to fund this as it is natural to pay for the maintenance of bridges or for fire services. Finally, this sounds kind of logical and shouldn't really deserve mentioning but it's sometimes a problem when it comes to government funding it should be possible to pay individuals and it shouldn't matter what nationality those individuals have so you shouldn't have to have a German tax ID in order to be able to receive this funding because of course a lot of open-source communities are really international and they don't always have a company behind it or an association that can actually receive the funding. So for the sovereign tech fund we identified what is really needed is to focus on what we call open digital base technology so not necessarily user-facing kind of end-user software but looking at okay what does this end-user software need in terms of interoperability in terms of programming languages, in terms of libraries so what we mean by open digital basic technologies is technologies that enable the creation and execution of software so everything that is sort of one layer below that where a vulnerability would really have also a drastic effect on IT security but where the maintenance also benefits lots of different companies lots of different projects that are building on top of that so that means anything that is required for operating the internet and other communications media security tools like certificates but also things like compilers, libraries, programming languages, operating systems and so on and we think that funding these open digital base technologies is going to support the entire ecosystem but the target groups of where the actual funding would go would be the maintainers and contributors on the one hand or intermediaries who are providing services to them so for example designers or security auditors that might help those developers improve their products before we actually made the proposal for what exactly the funding should look like we had to do a mapping so basically look at what is already out there in order to be able to convince the government that there is a need, that there is a lack for funding for these open digital base technologies so what we ended up doing was to look at 44 different funding programs in the technology field and looked at whether they are suitable to support the maintenance of these open digital base technologies and we found that out of those 44 in principle 26 of them it would be possible for such projects to get funding but most of those 26 didn't actually explicitly mention that they wanted to focus on infrastructure or that they wanted to focus on maintenance so if we actually looked at which ones of these funding programs actually have the goal of supporting those there were only five left and out of those five there were only two that actually offered financial support directly to the projects one of them being the Open Technology Fund in the US which we already mentioned has a certain weakness to political pressure we really hope that what happened under Trump is not going to repeat itself but clearly having this one program is not enough to say okay the open source ecosystem is safe and it's also a fairly small program with 20 million dollars a year and the second one being an LNET in the Netherlands where at the time of the study it also looked like it might be phased out in the future so the results of this mapping exercise showed that to the extent that there are funding programs for open source software they either don't focus on maintenance and safeguarding of existing software so quite often they fund innovation or if they are able to fund maintenance of basic technologies the funding designs of this program doesn't necessarily fit what is needed so for example they might not be able to directly support the communities or you would have a really cumbersome application process and so on so having identified that there is a need for a sovereign tech fund we made a proposal for what it should look like so what should the funding modalities be and our proposal says that there should be a possibility for individual projects to receive between 15,000 and 500,000 euros over a duration of six to 24 months so this was kind of arrived at on the basis of the experience from the prototype fund which is at the lower end of this spectrum so the prototype fund provides just under 50,000 euros over a period of six months and on the other end the core infrastructure fund which is part of the open technology fund which provides up to 500,000 euros in extreme cases and the expectation is that most of the projects would be somewhere in the middle of that but it shouldn't be structurally excluded that there might be particularly really maintenance intensive projects that might meet more support and in terms of the duration it really depends what you need so for example if you have a single developer working in a company who wants to take a sabbatical so to speak so sometime where they are freed from their day to day tasks in the company and really want to focus on improving or building a new functionality for an open source tool that the company can use but then gets also fed back into the ecosystem six months might be the ideal period to do that and then the expectation is that sort of the maintenance of this project would also continue to be part of their tasks but you would basically pay a company to set aside time for a person to work on something like this whereas 24 months is more suitable if you have a project that wants to do long-term planning and kind of come up with long-term viability maybe also apply for future grants but not have to stop development after a certain period because they've run out of funding. In terms of the financial volume, we applied or recommended that there should be 10 million euros a year support from the government which is also what we now are going to receive for 2023 and this is based on an estimation that we would like to be able to fund a maximum of 30 projects a year when average funding amount could be around a quarter of a million and the additional money would go towards support measures so these additional support measures are non-monetary things that a free software project might need for example legal advice or security audits that would be conducted by selected partners that the sovereign tech fund would also put the projects in contact with, for example, advice on developing such as sustainability strategy, usability improvements, communication and so on and the idea is here that the sovereign tech fund would have sort of a portfolio of those additional support measures that would be continuously updated based on the communication with the projects see what they actually need and then regularly adapt these additional support measures and in terms of recipients we really want to provide support for the whole breadth from a single individual developer to a company and non-profit association and everything in between and very importantly it should be possible to fund beyond one country, beyond one region in order to also correspond to the way that open-source software is actually being developed. So the funding recipients should be individuals because in some cases this is the only funding recipient there is especially with a lot of smaller projects there is no company behind open-source tool there is no non-profit association so you don't actually have a legal person to work with but rather individuals who might be recipients of the sovereign tech fund support but there should also be a possibility for organizations and communities to form with the support of the sovereign tech fund so this could take the form of a foundation or a non-profit so in Germany you might have eingetragen nach Verein in other countries you might have other legal forms. The funding should also in principle it should be possible to go to companies there usually the idea would be that the sovereign tech fund would subsidize staff position at a company and then that staffer as part of their core tasks would maintain a particular open-source project and provide contributions to it as part of their regular work time. And finally some of the funding could also go to service providers such as security auditors or designers who are working on improving open-source projects. So now in 2022 so two years after the idea was basically first formulated by us and we started writing to politicians we started talking about this idea writing in the press and so on now the sovereign tech fund has actually been founded so the budget for 2022 has been adopted by the government and the sovereign tech fund is now incubated at Sprint. Sprint is the German federal agency for disruptive innovation and they're basically saying look if you want to have innovation you have to have this infrastructure in place because this is basically what we're all building on so we were able to convince a rather innovation-minded government that maintenance and infrastructure is actually part of their core task. I'm now kind of out of the picture so at Open Knowledge Foundation we provided this study, we provided the idea we're not actually running the sovereign tech fund. So the sovereign tech fund is now with Sprint and it's being run by Adriana Gro and Fiona Krakenburger whom you can see here. Both of them worked at Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and or the Open Technology Fund in the past so they have this kind of own practical experience with running the prototype fund, running the Open Technology Fund and are now in charge of the sovereign tech fund at Sprint. This is their mission statement so what is needed is for the development, improvement and maintenance of these open digital, open basic digital space is the sovereign tech fund and the goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem with a focus on security, resilience, technological diversity and the people behind the projects. So what does this mean? First of all, maintenance is very important so the sovereign tech fund unlike a lot of other funding projects, focus is not only on the development of new technologies but really on the maintenance and improvement of existing software standards, libraries and so on. Open digital basic technologies are what is being funded by the sovereign tech fund so this means the software components on the basis of which new applications can be developed and of course the open digital basic technologies that are being funded should be highly relevant for the ecosystem as a whole. Sustainability means that after the funding period ends the project shouldn't kind of be left with nothing but rather the funding period should be used to really think about long term strategies, how can the project exist and be funded also beyond the end of this initial funding period. Resilience means on the one hand IT security so there should be a focus on improving the security of open source components but also technological diversity so basically there should be different alternatives for the same task, there should be interoperability between those different alternatives and all of this we argue would contribute to the government goal of digital sovereignty that basically means in this context the independent and self-determined use of technology not just by the government but also by companies or by individuals and finally the focus on people we think is also really important because at the end of the day a lot of open source software development is going to continue to be intrinsically motivated and that is a good thing so we don't want by basically injecting money into a project sideline the volunteers and we don't want to kill the volunteer spirit behind a lot of open source projects so it's really about talking to the projects and finding out what it is that they actually need and this may not always be direct funding in the sense of money but it could also be training it could also be support with more administrative tasks and not the actual coding so the goal is really for the sovereign tech fund to be in a direct conversation with the developers and find out what kind of support they really need most so we are now in the face of the pilot round this means later this month the sovereign tech fund is going to officially launch its pilot phase so in this pilot phase basically the team of the sovereign tech fund has picked a very small number of projects to test the methodology so basically these are maintainers or organizations of open digital basic technologies that are going to receive part of this initial funding which is smaller for this year to basically test out how the process works like there is a broader theory of what the funding mechanism is going to look like in the future this is currently being built and to make sure that this actually works in practice sort of this pilot round is going to run in parallel to the development of this methodology so next year the sovereign tech fund is going to go out of bed so to speak it's going to be important to convince politicians based on this pilot round that the sovereign tech fund is something that is needed and that is working and then the goal for next year is to implement the full methodology so this is kind of what it's going to look like basically at the core of the sovereign tech fund there is going to be a database of critical open digital basic technologies and this database is going to be filled by two methods basically one is that the members of the sovereign tech fund team are going to actively go into the communities talk to people, talk to projects and find out through a quantitative and qualitative analysis what are critical components that are sort of under maintained or that need support and then in parallel to that there is going to be just a regular open application process the way that you might be used to it from other funding projects so it's basically going to be possible to apply next year to the sovereign tech fund with your project but the idea is that this should not be the only way that people learn about the sovereign tech fund so one possibility is that you apply the other possibility might be that you get approached by people who are part of the sovereign tech fund team so based on this database then the sovereign tech fund team is going to look at okay who is the natural home for this project so if it's let's say an open source project that is basically being maintained by one person it's pretty logical that that is going to be the person that should be a funding or support recipient for that but if it's a broader project where you have a mixture of individuals, organizations and companies all contributing to it part of this scouting process is to find out who is a good implementation partner and this could be individual developers it could be a team, it could be an agency but it could also be a company that receives a grant that is then going to allow their on staff developers to work on the project so basically you're going to have these two streams of both open applications from the outside and the scouting process from the inside to then hopefully be able to fund up to 30 projects with the sovereign tech fund next year so this is kind of what hopefully is going to unfold over the next year I invite you to keep up to date especially when it comes to the announcement of the pilot phase which is going to happen later this month you can learn about that at sovereign tech fund DE there's also an English version available and get in touch with the sovereign tech fund team directly which I'm no longer a part of if you're kind of interested more generally in how to convince politicians how to do something like this also feel free to get in touch with me directly through Twitter or through my email address so I hope that this is encouraging news for you and also I think the sovereign tech fund team is going to depend very heavily on kind of feedback from the community how this should be developed in the future so I thank you for your attention and yeah if there are any questions and follow up feel free to approach me thank you thank you very much Felix for this insightful presentation for introducing the sovereign tech fund and talking to us about software as a public service if there's any questions I'm very happy to come up to you and Felix to answer them will the database of eligible software projects be on the website like so that you can see which they consider so basically I think they want to use the methodology of the Open Technology Fund I think they have something like this where basically the methodology, the software and so on is made open source I'm not sure if they have decided on how this database is going to be presented but I encourage you to kind of yeah keep a look out for that I think also not everything is decided yet in detail because they need to basically work with the government to find out okay what is the government able to do and so on I hope it's going to be as transparent as possible thank you are you aware of our initiative from over European governments? so I know that the French government which had the council presidency at EU level at the first half of this year they ran an initiative on the digital commons and as part of that they kind of made a study where they collected examples like what are different governments doing for the digital commons and there was definitely a lot of interest in the sovereign tech fund usually things happen relatively slowly I know that at EU level when I was in the European Parliament the European Commission supported security of open source software and at the time we mostly did this as bug bounties and I think part of that is still running not necessarily because bug bounties are the most ideal or useful way especially when it comes to kind of long term sustainability but at the time it was more because it's easier for a government to pay and a company that runs bug bounties than it is to pay individuals and this has to do more with the funding rules because governments have to be very strictly accountable over how they spend their money and so on I hope that the sovereign tech fund is going to show other governments how to do this like how you can pay funding to individuals or to small projects without breaking any public tender rules funding rules and so on and then hopefully other governments that are interested in this will be able to copy the methodology this is definitely sort of the idea the sovereign tech fund wants to be copied because yeah, 10 million euros is a lot but it's definitely not going to cover the entire need so hopefully other governments that have sort of said nice things about it like the French government will actually take it as an example and maybe create their own versions Thank you Yeah, this is great what you do indeed, however, I see kind of an elephant in the room and let's name it, it's Github it's a privately owned, freely available place where a lot of open source projects are running at the moment and for the resilience of the open source movement as a whole this is probably one of the areas that would need to be addressed as well Yeah, I agree, I think the European Union has paid a lot of attention more recently to issues of competition so we have the Digital Markets Act which is a new law that kind of puts some obligations for example on app stores because there is a recognition that there is a huge market concentration in something that we all need if we want to operate a modern smartphone, for example but I feel like with Github politics were not really there yet at the time to even, first of all, know what a repository is and then to know that it might be a problem if the biggest one is owned by a private company or especially a company of the size of Microsoft so I mean, we can't really turn back the clock on that I think it's a reality now I think of course individual open source projects can try to also build some redundancy and also host their code elsewhere but of course this is extremely cumbersome if everybody is kind of used to using Github well, it's very difficult for an individual project to move away from that or to build redundancy but I hope that in the future competition law is also going to pay attention to that so I mean, as long as Github stays open it's sort of working but I think, for example, if Microsoft decided to make changes to the policies of Github that would be really harmful to the open source community or to the public interest I think that governments and competition law should also step in there I don't think it's necessarily something that the sovereign tech fund can address because I feel this is more of a regulation issue than a funding issue but it's definitely something that we should keep a lookout for Any other questions? Yeah, Otto Hi, thanks Our question just goes into a similar direction but rather than on our small computers in our pockets so what about the stupidity of Google and Apple on the smartphone market is there also maybe initiatives or maybe it's also the fund useful for companies and communities to drive forward the Linux smartphones So I would say that the definition of open digital basic technologies is sort of large enough to also encompass something like that as part of infrastructure I think we have to be careful to make sure that there is enough sort of focus on maintenance simply because there are very few other funding projects that focus on maintenance and building something new building alternatives I think is also really important but yeah, I think there we have to kind of look at the balance inside of the sovereign tech fund So something else that I think might be relevant for this is once again the Digital Markets Act which at least forbids software operating systems from kind of creating a monopoly of application stores so they will have to allow alternative application stores to the Google Play Store and the Apple Store and I've been kind of trying to encourage the European Commission to also think about what that means because it was a little bit of an ironic situation where the EU had said okay you need to have alternatives to the two large app stores but then even the European Union itself wasn't even offering its own applications like for EU funded applications for government services outside of the major Play Store So this is something that is now being proposed by the European Parliament also an idea that we contributed to to at least kind of make sure that public service applications are actually going to be available like in an asteroid store or outside of the big Play Stores So yeah, I would say in principle it should be possible to apply with things like that to the sovereign tech fund or even the prototype fund if it's something that doesn't even exist yet because the idea with the sovereign tech fund is less to fund the creation of entirely new projects but rather to help maintain and improve already existing ones Thank you Yeah, thanks for that presentation I had a question about the five last good projects that were available for that Sorry, about what? In your presentation there was this graph with various potential available projects that would fit the prototype fund not the prototype fund, the fund You mean this one? Now a bit lighter, it was Circles There was multiple integrated Circles and we ended up with only two that were really fitting Yeah, exactly this one I was wondering if you had a few names in which project would actually be in that Yeah, so if you go to sovereigntechfund.de you can download the entire study and you're going to find a slide that looks pretty much like this with a lot more text but basically we've included all of these 44 funding projects in the annex of the study so you can look exactly at which projects were considered and why we thought that they don't provide what we're trying to do with the sovereigntech fund Yeah, and this also applies to other details like the funding modalities and this flow chart and so on This is all part of the study that you can download at sovereigntechfund.de It's available in German and English and yeah, it's kind of the basis for what the sovereigntech fund is planning for next year, which print Most definitely interesting reading materials then Are there any other questions for Felix? I don't see any so it's time for me to say thank you very much Felix, it was an absolute pleasure to have you thanks for your time and the very useful information that you gave us this morning Thank you