 Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for the invitation. Taran and I are beyond excited and very honored that we get to speak here today, and very grateful for the opportunity to talk about the Sovereign Tech Fund. The Sovereign Tech Fund is an initiative started with and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Climate Action and Economic Affairs, and our mission is strengthening digital infrastructure and open source ecosystems in the public interest. How we do that, we invest in the development, maintenance, and improvement of open source infrastructure, such as libraries, developer tools, programming languages and infrastructure needed for that, and other components that are critical and widely used. Our goal is nothing less than a well-maintained open source infrastructure supported by many, many actors from the public and private and a resilient open source ecosystem. Well, we're not quite there yet, but we're also just a year old, but we are motivated and committed to move ahead and serve as an example for others. But before we do that, let me tell you a little bit about where we are coming from. So the Sovereign Tech Fund is a year old, but the work that forms the basis of our work and what the Sovereign Tech Fund is started many years ago. A lot of our team members, such as Tara and I and my co-founder Adriana Gro, we've been working in open source programs and open source funding programs before. And we knew about the shortcomings of these programs that oftentimes overlook the building blocks of what software development is and technology development, and that the need for resources to maintain them is also often overlooked. Events like Heartbleed have taught us that infrastructure tends to be invisible until it's not, and then we usually have a really big problem. When everything goes well, infrastructure doesn't get the attention or the resources needed to maintain them. And all this by being the basis of what an open, modern and digital society is and at the core of innovation, research and every imaginable software development. So the research and advocacy into this field has been going on for a couple years and we've been following these discussions and we also followed the call for financial resources to support this important work that's being done by many, many volunteers or not being paid at all. But we also saw the call for financial resources directed towards industry and while we agree with that to a certain extent, we saw another missing piece of the puzzle. So we see the maintenance of digital infrastructure the same way that we see the maintenance of physical infrastructure. It is in the public interest. It is a digital public service to maintain it and so we see the need for public money. So in 2020, a small group of committed individuals, namely us, wrote a small concept to the German government. We've been working in open source funding with public money before so we knew a little bit where to look for and we wrote a short concept for the creation of a new funding vehicle. They got the attention of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action and we were asked to write a feasibility study. In the feasibility study, we outlined the issue and we also mapped out the concept for a new funding vehicle. You can still download the feasibility study from our website. There was commissioned by the ministry. So as it happened, just two weeks after we published our feasibility study, LOC for Shell happened and that may or may not have benefited our cause but in any case, it was a not so gentle reminder why this work matters and why we see a certain urgency there. So at the end of the year 2021, I think in fact one day before Christmas the German government announced the creation of the Sovereign Tech Fund a publicly funded program to support open source infrastructure and why that took a lot of I guess commitment, waiting, talking to lots of people and frankly speaking stubbornness from our end and our unwillingness to let it go. We were also really lucky to find people in the government who understood exactly what we wanted to do and understood the cause and understood why this is important and also frankly gave us the trust to try a pretty novel approach to support open source. So fast forward to last year we finally got the funding to kickstart the Sovereign Tech Fund and we decided that the first thing that we wanted to do with that is kick off a pilot round to showcase a little bit what we want to do and what open source infrastructure actually is because we've been talking to a lot of people and we knew that it wasn't clear to everyone that open source infrastructure is virtually everywhere and extremely critical. So we tried to find out how to harmonize it's called harmonize what we wanted to do with German and EU procurement law and if that sounds hard to you, you are absolutely right but we also get the support that we needed and we're finally able to come up with a good mechanism to support nine open source infrastructure projects. You can see the list of projects here. Among them I guess classics like Curl, also OpenBGPD, Yes, Fortran if you want to talk about that hit us up in the lunch break and many other extremely critical technologies that helped us to make a case and explain why this is important. This also allowed us to understand a little bit better how this works because no one had done this before. Virtually no one could tell us how this would work so we had to find out and we came up with the right mechanisms, processes and operations to provide these people with contracts to work on their important technologies. It also not only helped us to showcase what we want to work on but it also helped us to understand and adapt our operations a little bit. We definitely also made mistakes at this point the moment of silence for all the projects that learned too late that they have to submit time sheets. We are sorry. But you can learn more about what we learned about this, the time sheets and also other things that we realized and learned in an evaluation report. You can also download it in our website that's also available in English. So we've been successful in setting up this mechanism and finding out how that works and then this year we've been able to support to extend our project portfolio and we've been very happy and proud to support more core and foundational technologies. We are, for example, investing in the PIPI ecosystem. We are helping organizations to rewrite critical infrastructure in a memory safe language. We're also very proud about our partnership with the OpenJS Foundation who are doing important infrastructure updates and working on security best practices for their project portfolio. With all that being said, we do firmly believe that money and financial resources are an extremely important pillar of creating a more sustainable open source ecosystem. But it's not the end of the story and Tyra will tell you more about that. Thank you Fiona for outlining the context in which STF was founded and the mission it was set up to achieve. I'm Tyra. I'm one of the many technology experts at STF and I will dive a little deeper into our approach into investing infrastructure. First off, an obligatory XKCD dependency comic time. I'm sure you're all familiar with this one. I would really like to thank Randall Monroe for doing so much for our cause with this illustration. I've done this slight variation to help celebrate how much this comic is used in infrastructure advocacy. Thank you. And as much as I love this comic, just a small warning like in coming Rand, I think what this comic does really well that illustrates what happens when there's an imbalance between the reliance on false infrastructure and not having a consumer level of investment being put back into that system or to put it more bluntly, when the goodwill, passion and labour of false infrastructure volunteers is just taken for granted. However, one common pitfall I see is that people interpret this comic as saying that the problem only lies here in this one little tiny block and if you help support that one developer in Nebraska then problem solved. We can go ahead. And I'm not trying to minimize this. We've seen far too many examples of this. One developer over relied on technology, not enough support, and we've seen bad outcomes that can result from that. And it's something that should be taken seriously and also dealt with. But we think that as we understand that this is also a symptom of a larger systemic problem because just like there's one person behind this block, you need to imagine that there's multiple people also behind each of these other blocks. I'm sure some of you can see yourselves behind one of these somewhere here along this tower. You could be, for example, this block that's maintained by three developers across four time zones. Or you could be maintaining this huge block on your own because your company pays you to do so like when you're not supposed to be working on other stuff. Or you could be a consultancy that juggling several of these blocks and sometimes we're not doing paid work. And we believe that all of these different types of blocks need some form of support. And still supporting these projects for a couple of years might stop some of the more immediate important problems, but it will not reverse the negative effects that have been baked in by years of underfunding that have resulted in an uneven and sometimes unpredictably fragile structure. We understand at STF that the only sustainable way forward is to transform how digital infrastructure is built and maintained in the long run. It's not a task we take lightly. Each one of these projects is, like needs to be done with the proper amount of care and understanding what they need. It does feel sometimes like an intense game of Jenga. I'm going to break now our approach into something a bit more concrete. As Fiona highlighted a bit earlier, we spent much of our first year building up these core mechanisms and we've been able to invest in projects that this rabbit buildup was important to us because we're aware of those acute and immediate needs in the field for support and we wanted to roll up our sleeves and get to supporting those needs without delay. I would break down the types of project support that we've provided so far into three broad categories. First, it's critical infrastructure with the dire need for support and maintenance. That includes security improvements and also features that other people wouldn't normally fund because they're not seen as a priority but are needed for those heavily relied upon components to continue to play their critical role. The second broad category of things we've supported are working on technical depth and we're working critical components that are more sustainable to maintain on the long run. The third category is what I would call timely opportunities and those include heavy lift infrastructure improvements where there's a lot of momentum at the moment and where we would like to encourage and support some of the work such as the important work that's happening right now around memory safety and also some of the standardization work that's happening in the field of messaging and federation. There's also other time and opportunities where the consequences of waiting can be detrimental for the public interests such as preparing critical infrastructure for the post-quantum migration or securing the production distribution of open source components. That breaks down most of the work that we've invested in so far and we will continue to invest in these areas as long as that need exists but in a more medium term we're exploring providing more than direct investment. We want to develop a variety of support mechanisms that address the diverse needs of maintainers as they continue to take care of these critical components. Secondly, we would like to help to grow the community of people working on critical infrastructure and ensure that there's pathways and knowledge available for those who are interested. Finally, we believe there's lots of important knowledge out there on how to manage and maintain critical infrastructure and we want to explore how that knowledge and maintenance can be better shared and improved amongst critical infrastructure projects. I think all these approaches will bring us closer to our vision of a strong, robust and well-funded and secure infrastructure ecosystem, one that serves the public interest. We want to demonstrate that investment infrastructure and maintenance is just as important as investing in new stuff. We want to ensure that as technology rapidly develops that the public interest remains strongly represented and firmly we want to establish the concept of public support for public infrastructure be as good public policy. Nobody questions why we maintain roads and bridges. Why would we treat our digital infrastructure differently? Thank you, Tara. So we talked about where we come from and where we are right now. So what's next for the Sovereign Tech Fund? Well, two things are for sure. The Sovereign Tech Fund is here to stay. And the second is this is really just the beginning. As I said, we think that financial resources and money are really an important pillar of a sustainable open source ecosystem. But we also understand that more is needed. So next year we will build complementary programs to support the open source developers and maintainers in a sustainable way, in a reasonable way, in a meaningful way. And we will continue to pilot new projects and learn and share what we've learned and iterate our programs. We will listen to the needs and the community and build our programs accordingly. And we will continue to talk, as we do today, to share our approach. Doing this work is an extremely heavy lift, securing the open source infrastructure and the ecosystems. And this should be done by more actors, by the many and not the few. We need more actors from both the public and the private sector to work on the shared resource together to maintain and secure it. And last year we often say that we are a policy initiative. We practice policy by doing and we show what's possible. We will continue to advocate for the public to take responsibility for this extremely important resource of what basically the fabric of what a modern and open society is and push for engagement. So we want to close by saying thank you to everyone who came, who listens to us. And lastly, thank you to you, the developers, maintainers and keepers of open source infrastructure. We see your invaluable contributions every single day and we are here to make sure that your work gets the support it needs and deserves. Thank you very much.