 the private sector to take it from there. So part of the message might be don't look for government to do everything we can't afford it, you make the investment. Okay, but fine, but is there not a role there though for government to act as the catalyst to encourage it and create the environment where that can happen? So not necessarily doing it, you know, you don't want to be just led to do everything, but... Well, I guess I would come back to making the same statement, not to be argumentative, but... Oh, please do be. It's an innovative attitude in the marketplace. And if you want government to stimulate it, perhaps you're not likely to succeed. And perhaps sometimes the best thing the government can do is to say, you're the private sector, if you want to exploit this, get on with it then. Don't look to the government. I'm feeling Republican, which is extremely troubling to me, but... Secretly at the moment. Yes, exactly. So I put it a challenge to the private sector. Run with it, don't look for the government to spoon feed it to you. I cannot agree more, I think. If you look for the government to do everything, especially also in innovation, you can wait a long time, I think. It's a role to open up the information that's in there. There's a lot of taxpayers' money and value from taxpayers' money that's in there. So open it up, use open standards, and then try to push the private sector to use it in innovative ways. Okay, but, you know, that sounds great, but we know that government is the largest purchaser of IT, so is actually going to be what you do in government, what you procure, what you actually purchase, what you lead, is going to have the single largest impact on the market and what is happening in the public sector. So whether that's encouraging SMEs, to break sort of the stalemate of the big integrators, controlling the large projects, making it more modular, whatever else, and encouraging that. So I don't think government hasn't got a role, but it's maybe not the role that it's always the one that it's chosen to apply in the past. Disagree, agree? I disagree, I disagree there. Definitely, I think, again, it's not because you're spending, I think in Belgium, the federal level, we're spending less than 3% of our annual budget on IT, less than 3%. I think in most markets, financial markets, telco markets, the IT spend is way up there. But again, we have a large budget that's true, but in looking for services and innovative ways of delivering services to our citizens and businesses, we're always, I think, a couple of years behind the private sector, because we don't feel this competitive push of trying to grab market share, but we need to follow them. And again, we need to open up, see that people use that and see how we can later on integrate it and integrate those new ideas into our government service offering. We don't want to be a bleeding edge, we want to be a leading edge. I think if you look at the pragmatic example, and I take travel as one that's worked quite well in the UK and elsewhere, of where government agencies or funded agencies have, for a variety of reasons, opened up a lot of interfaces to travel information so that third-party developers could innovate around it. You can see a whole host of apps on mobile devices and other things. And that's great, and it shows the innovation of the market, but there's still a lot of contention there about some of the licensing and how open is and the commercial agreements. I was looking recently, and even if you want to write a free app that uses, for example, the London Underground schematic, you have to pay for it, even if your intention is to give away the app and not actually make any revenue yourself. I think there's still a lack of clarity around government's relationship with data that arguably the taxpayers already funded and could be exploited by private sector innovation versus where does government put that line on how open it makes it, if there's a potential revenue stream that could be a benefit to taxpayers, particularly if a large commercial company such as Google started itself building a billion-dollar business off the back-off-free maps that were provided by governments. So would that... But why would that worry government? Well, I just... Well, particularly in the economic circumstances, again, it'd be looking for any opportunity to maximize revenue, so... But we saw that in the past, OK, I'm a Brit as well, so apologies for using that as an exemplar, but we saw in the past is that the vast majority of research institutions didn't release the code that they produced because they were expected to get a return on their IPR with a net result, it never saw the light of day. So the question is, where's the balancing point? Are you looking for a short-term return on IPR for maybe 1% or 0.1% or are you actually looking to widen out the general economy? Because that really takes you into the whole open innovation angle. And actually, the recent changes in the UK are very much around. If you take a taxpayer's shilling to do your research, then it should be put into the public domain and exposed for light of day. But there was an interesting report from Bournemouth University recently that looked at a lot of the evidence and seems to suggest that those companies that keep a lot of their data protected through intellectual property patents and other things actually have a declining R&D expenditure. So it almost seemed to be that those that cease to be open invest less and less in R&D relative to those that remain open in their culture. What about, you know, we've used the term open innovation and he talked about open government. Do those two terms coincide? Are they mutually compatible? I wouldn't call them incompatible, but I do see them as being different. I think that transparency in government is an extremely important value. I think we often take a very short historical viewpoint and forget how differently governments that once were trusted have acted throughout the world. And I don't think that transparency is something you can cease to be vigilant about and just assume that because we've turned a corner in the last 30 or 50 or 100 years that we can't go back around that corner again. It can and will happen around the world. And I think we're foolish to pretend otherwise. Open innovation I think is something quite different that needs to be opportunistic. Government can create the areas in which it can happen, but I think when you get to open innovation, then it can become more interactive. In the US, for example, there's a lot of enormous investments in software. The government is seeking to move out into open source communities where the private sector can bear the cost of further development, sell services back to the government, sell services to the marketplace. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of overcoming inertia to make it happen. But the consequences in reduced cost to government and increased value in the marketplace can be substantial. Anyone else want to comment on? Yes, but because I'm quite intrigued. The open government is a phrase that's been well used. But different people do seem to take it and come at it from different things. So one part is very much the enabling the citizen. It's opening up the data for the citizen. It's looking at the citizen-centric, if you like, capabilities and benefits. Whereas I think the open innovation thing is okay, saying there's another role of government which is encouraging the whole market and what can be done there. So I'm particularly interested in seeing what Neely Cruz is going to be saying about that aspect of it because it does start at the research thing, I argue, but it doesn't necessarily has to carry right the way through the political will. So it's not just a yes minister. This looks good on a piece of paper but actually can we flow that through into some pragmatic activities? And you mentioned the Open Data Institute in the UK. Now that's an interesting investment putting in government to encourage an act as a catalyst for that. Yeah, and that's designed to drive sort of economic opportunities within the private sector. But I think when you go back to open government and open innovation, again you've got to be careful what open you're talking about. Because open government's pretty broad church covering transparency, participation, consultation, collaboration. And it depends how far governments I guess want to go in the digital age of a participatory inclusive mechanism for citizens to engage much closer with the policy making and evidential basis of policy making. Okay, let's just open it up for just a few questions because we're quite tight on time. But I know they saw one hand. Is it Nicola, you wanted to make a comment? There is a microphone at the back so if we can, yeah. Myel's gonna bring it to you now, so. As I said, in this section we're not gonna take too many questions, so forgive me. But we wanted to really act as a little bit of a near the front, Myel. We actually just want to act as a catalyst for thinking as we get onto the discussions and the panel once. Nicola, you're welcome. Thank you, one question. So my name is Nicola Petiot. I am also Belgian. A question for Peter Strix. You've spoken about the sharing that is one of the ministerial program. And I was wondering the extension of the sharing that you, that was expected by the minister. Is it a sharing limited to all the ministry, to the administration bodies? Or does the sharing goes beyond that up to the citizens and the companies? Initially, Optifet, Optimizing Federal Government, is limited to sharing within the federal administrations. We have a very complex law and everything that has to do with law about sharing with other authorities. So imagine that at the federal level we develop a software to exchange data between administrations called a messaging system. We did that. Speaking from a pragmatic point of view, in 2003 I think the Wolloon Region asked the federal government if they could just take the software. It was custom built. And then the Flemish Region opposed to that and said, yeah, we just had a call for tender and we're spending some money. And it's not fair that the Wolloon Region is using federal government money basically to do that. And so they opposed that. And the Wolloon Region did their own call for tender just to discover 18 months later that the Flemish Region that had developed the call for tender before was not able to make a good choice. And then the Flemish Region came to the federal government and asked for the same software. And then the Wolloon Region opposed to that because they launched the call for tender later. They bought the software and they said, hey guys, this is not serious. This is the type of problems that we are confronted with. But again, so what we're doing right now and this is not something we did in 2002, 2003 is right from the start, open it up. Open it up to everybody. And so basically everything that FedEx develops, all custom build software is open source from the start. But it's again limited to the sharing of the Fed program is limited to the federal administrations. Yes. Thank you. No, I wouldn't agree with that that it's very narrow. Why? Because in general, I think a lot of the government and citizen, government to citizen and government to business interaction is done with the local governments. So you have regional governments, local governments. A lot of the interaction is taking place there. You have very few interactions on the federal level. I think it has to do with justice, defense, social security, that's a big one, and finance. But a lot of the finance part is already