 Hello, everyone. Thank you very much. First of all, thanks to the meeting organizer for inviting me. I'm very pleased to be here and Also, thank you for putting me last because I know that this is the last things that you will remember from today After all the data that you've been poured open or not I don't know that you've been poured during the day. I will probably be your last Recollection there is someone else as well at the end, but still I think I'm going to make the most out of it of try to first of all, I would like to Briefly introduce you to Annek. Annek is the association representing consumers in standardization Why do we exist at the European level? Because in Europe standards are used to complement legislation and policies That's not the same in other region of the world, but there is a tradition in Europe to do so and in order to have Democracy in action. You need all parties around the discussion table when standards are set Now I would like to focus my presentation not so much on the open data discussion We had it already a lot this morning, but more about how in general openness and Interoperability can help consumer face challenges that we are all facing and one of the most important challenges It has not been discussed so much so far And I'm quite surprised is the demographic trends that our societies are going to face And it is the fact that the elderly population and when I say elderly, it's Around 80 years old, which is quite important. It's going to be a very important Share of our total population and according to your statistics It's going to be most 11% in 2015 might be in seem quite far away But when we do policy we do it for the future as well And we need to keep that into account and of course with age comes disability Baby boomers generation that was born after the world war is going to be On a pension very soon and when you are retired you change your consumption patterns, of course as well It's going to be a challenge for our health our pension systems, but in general From a consumer point of view, what is the problem is a simple access to information society services This is because of course at present There are some Interoperability issues between some assistive technologies that some category of consumer are using I'm thinking about the blind consumer to access the Internet and therefore It's something that we do not wish to see in the future but we do know that Interoperability and open standards are going to be really the way to solve this problem The example of blind people blind people use a screen reader So you might be aware of it too and they need to be it's a software specific software That needs to be interoperable with the operating system or whatever. It's not as easy as such And because it is an issue there is a Commitment in the digital agenda for Europe to solve this problem to try to address this problem in order to support the commission in this endeavor We have launched a campaign with the dissociation representing people with disabilities with the association representing blind people and also older people and It's a campaign that we call access denied and it is to deliver legislation to ensure web Accessibility based on W3C standards the web accessibility standards And I think there is a consensus to say that those are open standards I think there are even patent-free and royalty-free completely and but also we think it's very important that Accessibility accessibility is to be fostered by openness, but also by innovation by innovative way of Providing services to consumers because we do know that innovation is very much linked to Serving all the segment of consumers in a society Another challenge that has been mentioned early on is energy energy provision energy distribution energy consumption This is something that at the European level has been addressed with an initiative called 2020 2020 and It is about reducing certain sources of Energy and introducing renewable energy One way to do it is it has already been mentioned smart energy systems smart meters smart grids What is this all about? We can describe them very very simply as the energy system that are still built on Steel and copper, but there is an additional ICT layer to manage the distribution and also the use of the energy therefore there is Interface interaction with consumers. This is also part of the digital agenda for Europe but as consumer we are facing challenges and of course The challenges are that there is a new technology you need to adapt to it There is going to be a learning curve of this is normal absolutely, but there are also functionalities which can be designed in a way in order to increase consumer acceptance and one of the most let's say Important concerns of consumer is their privacy protection Personal data and privacy protection. This is something that has already been an obstacle in the rollout of a smart Metering system in some countries. I'm thinking about the Netherlands for example In other countries, it doesn't seem to be the same in Sweden. Everything works perfectly. We've been told but that's the Scandinavian countries They often have a very positive Experiences all the time however, data access and ownership and how to handle this data is really key for consumer acceptance and the Position that we have is that privacy should be designed since the beginning of the system This is actually a general position it is the so-called principle of privacy by design and of course open standards and Interoperability are there to serve this principle however There is another concern is that Too much openness too much Interoperability or let's say interactive in an open environment. Is it compatible with privacy protection? Is it compatible with the principle of personal data protection in the European system? They are called informed consent data minimization. This is something that is especially sensitive for medical data. So Openness of data is yes, of course something that consumers are Supporting but there needs to be a definition of what data is it or whom whose data is it? Because it's extremely important to make a difference between personal data and non-personal data And the challenge is that in an open environment in an interconnected environment the boundary between object data or Non-personal data and personal data is going to become more and more blurred So how do you define and how do you put in place? The policies that you need to do when data is personal and finally I would like to take Advantage of your presence here just to Maybe put it the coin the in context the discussion that we are having on open standards Today because as you know the European Commission has embarked in a revision of the standardization system Commission across mention is this this morning There is a proposal to use more standards coming from different sources for public procurement in the ICT sector This is something that for the time being We are a bit skeptical about and the reason why is that we believe and we fear that this would lead to a certain Fragmentation and we speak as a Prediction of the standard making because our role is to represent consumers in standard making It is very difficult to do your representative job if you have many instances that are developing Standards But the other fear that we have is that open standards are good But they need to come from an open Process of a standard setting and it is something that we do know it's going to be checked and verified but still It's important to keep it into account Finally The aim of open standards is generally Interoperability this is very good. There are other concerns of consumer which are linked to interoperability But they are they are equally important. I mentioned them Accessibility security and data protection. Those are should not be forgotten from Policy point of view. Thank you very much