 Next, we will move into the second part of the event where we're looking at the public sector perspective. But again, once more, before our panel discussion, I would like to invite on stage, please, Thomas Gageik, who's the Director of Digital Business Solutions for DG Informatics in the European Commission. Welcome, Thomas. Hello, and I will hand over to you for another opening statement to take us to the second part of the event. Take it away, please, Thomas. Thank you very much for the introduction, Claire. And good afternoon, everybody here on this nice day and on this very interesting event. And normally I like to open up with the infamous opening joke, but in times like this, it doesn't really feel appropriate. And just let me say at the very beginning, it feels very good to be here amongst the community that is promoting openness and collaboration. And I'm very glad to be here, particularly today. Earlier, my colleague Piers from DG Connect explained how crucial open technologies are for the digital transformation of society, in particular to achieve a healthy economy, robustness, and autonomy. And I think this next panel is about balancing digital sovereignty and digital transformation. So I look very much forward and to hear the great example that will be brought in by colleagues from Czechia, Sweden, France, with examples from those countries, but also from my colleague from the Interoperability Unit from our own General Directorate for Informatics at the Commission, which is working with the member states on these topics. And let me just start out when we talk about digital technological sovereignty, what do we mean by that? And I see effectively three crucial ingredients. The first one, yeah, that's vendor lock-in and it goes beyond vendor lock-in. Yes, that's avoid the lock-in. So the dependency on the single supplier. But it's also trying to avoid, and I say trying to avoid because practically it's not always possible, to keep clear of IT markets which are best in oligopol or even an IT monopoly. Piers also referred to those winner takes at all situations that we have in some markets. That already, however, if we can achieve this, these things that brings us a bit forward. Second, most important aspect is about availability, availability of partners in, shall I say, nice environments. Being able to work with companies and experts based in Europe, if you wish to do so, or with partners in whatever a good word here is, reliable countries. So it's about having a choice of partners. And we have actually, unfortunately over the last years, we have come across a couple of examples which show that the impact of not being able to choose can be dramatic. If you look into the epidemic, or the pandemic actually it is, we see now interdependent world is and what impact the lack of choice of partners have has on our supply chains. So we are there in a, quite dramatic situation here and there. The other example, as you probably expect in the events of the past few weeks, they made it really abundantly clear how fragile is the peaceful balance between liberal and illiberal nations, between the Democrats and the autocrats, and between the free and less free, not free. And we need to be very, very mindful who we want to depend on. So, however, let me also be clear, being able to work with companies and experts to live and work in Europe, having their choice, it's not about self-sufficiency. It's about being able to act independently to safeguard and promote our own interests and even more our values. And not be at the mercy of a potentially malevolent partner pursuing his own interests at eventually our expense. That's what it's really all about. And that's why the third component of technological and digital sovereignty is, in my view, the most important one, it's access, it's access to technology and standards. And therefore, there is really only one way to guarantee this type of access. And that is by being open. Actually, Seaborn said something very interesting in the opening statement. More openness leads to more control, which sounds counterintuitive, but that's exactly the case. Let me talk about the open source at the European Commission. Our primary tool for the access is open source software. And actually, I think that might have brought me this opportunity to talk to you today as a representative of DG Digit. Because we at the European, in the IT of the European Commission, we're showing great progress. And I'm really proud of what we've achieved over the last two years in particular. You will find open source software all over the commission. Couple of examples. All our commission websites use Drupal, our internal software development environment relies on open source. Our data center runs to more than 75%. And actually that percentage is growing Linux and even more on top of using open source software, we are increasingly sharing our softwares open source with the outside world. And the biggest examples there include the software intended for use between the commission and the member states. A big chunk of the open source software that has been built was under the Connecting Europe facility, which is driven by our interoperability unit, and Max Strockmann, my colleague from that unit will actually represent Digit in the upcoming panel and he can tell you whatever you want to know about this. But on top of that, there are more than 150 other software solutions shared by my general director with Digit, by Eurostat, the Joint Research Center, Digi Mare, the general director for the employment and many others. And I cannot talk about open source at the commission without mentioning my favorite project, which is LIOS, the legislative writing tool, the legal text editor that we as a commission are now actively co-developing as open source solution together with developers from the government in Germany in Spain, soon others such as Greece are going to join that. LIOS has a huge potential to transform the process to create legislation to a much more efficient way, therefore leading to a more consistency across different policies, and last but not least provide an unprecedented levels of transparency. And all these are very important elements to sustain and to build public trust in government and our policy making. And I don't think I need to explain why this is more important than ever. So here is an opportunity for the digital transformation to really transform the way that we have done things traditionally to a totally different level of value. Let me use that example to refer to hot of the press, the ministerial declaration that was following last week's UPAN meeting. The UPAN is the Network of European Public Administration. The ministerial declaration confirmed the important role of open source software solutions in the transformation of public administrations and that open source enables those administrations to pool their efforts and resources to collaborate and all the other things you see coming to play and coming to life in the LIOS project among many, many others. Let me give you one more example because it kind of like sticks out and maybe relevant for some of you here in the audience. Our general directorate for maritime affairs and fisheries, D.J. Mare, has developed a contract as an open source tool, the commitment tracker which is targeting at organizers of series of conference like annual meetings of policy makers, researchers, things like that. And it offers a way to effectively and efficiently keep track on commitments, considerations, milestones, assurances and all these type of things that you need to keep an eye upon when you're running a series of conferences. So you see, we have a 20 year, 20 year plus, I think it's fair to say by now, progressive experience and appreciation of open source at the European Commission. And like everybody else, we started by using, just using consuming open source software. But then we went on to actually build our own solutions based on open source building blocks. And in 2007, this led to the creation of the EUPL, the European Union Public License, which allowed us then to share based on our own values, laws and rules, our first open source solutions. Other commission services followed, most notably the Joint Research Center, which had been supporting open source software right from the start. Eurostart, for instance, shared its first open source solution in 2011. And today, open source is nothing short of being mission critical for the European Commission. We use open source, wherever IT solutions are put in place to help achieve the commission's political goals. So at Digit in 2020, we took our open source strategy, revamped it and elevated it to commission-wide strategy. With this, we went from goodwill to a structural approach towards open source. And with that strategy, we created, as part of this strategy, we created the OSPO, our open source program office, which helps the whole commission to really leverage the strategic value of open source and really confirmed and made that strategic value absolutely clear. One of the first things we did with the open source program office is to make it easier for us to share software as open source. And in that process, also to include a security check. And those household rules have been announced only last December, and we're very proud of having reduced and eliminated that red tape in the process. And that allows us to actively encourage our own software development teams to start new projects with sharing and reuse in mind. And we're also challenging ourselves to review our existing and legacy projects for sharing and publishing those, making those available to the outside world, wherever it makes sense. And very soon, we will launch our own external repository to allow easy public access to the open source software that we are publishing. And therefore, we will concentrate our work going forward even more on the open source side of things. Security, P.S. mentioned security. Open source cyber security, they are intrinsically linked. And our Osmo team has experience in organizing bug-bounding hackathons. Most of you will be very aware of this. And cyber security, as you can imagine again from events of the last week, cyber security is on our open mind 24-7. Precisely, last year, we organized two hackathons, one on JITSI, one on the Connecting Europe Facility component, eDelivery. We organized bug bounties, four of them, Moodle, Zimbra, Metrix, Element, and LibreOffice, and there are more coming. So this is something that we put into our, shall I say, daily open life, to our open source lifestyle that we keep animating the community by offering these type of events. And thanks to the Osmo, we can now help our other commission services, our other general directorates to use the same methods and to use effective proven methods to safeguard the security of our open source software. But the commission is only one player and we will need to join forces with the member states to better protect against malicious computer users and protect our infrastructure from threat. We all have to guard ourselves against unfortunate incidents. We had block 4J, I think, all fresh in our memory and against other security issues, whatever surprises they might come. And thanks to the Osmo and also thanks to the financial support we are enjoying from the European Parliament. When it comes to open source security, we will work with our peers and the member states to find and assist critical projects increasing their sustainability and security. And of course, not just for ourselves, it's open, it's for all of us. So there are a lot of actions with which the commission helps others in their open source journey and also where the commission takes others along on its maturity to become a viable, value-added member of the open source community. And I hope I've made that abundantly clear that it's the most practical way to achieve technological sovereignty because this, the sovereignty, is the outcome of openness. Thank you very much. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. And I just want to again say thank you to the Open Forum York for giving us the opportunity to hear that journey because sometimes I think in these instances, it's as important to be able to have a community to come together to hear those stories. I loved your examples as well. Definitely need to have a look at the commitment tracking thing from the maritime group. So thank you for that. There was one quick question in the chat that came through as you were speaking and I will take this opportunity to ask because it does relate back to C-Van's earlier comments. And it's about how much of your source code that is developed there at DG or is it reused from other open source projects? So that's just a question on the reuse versus build yourself. Jesus, that's a very, very good question. Frankly, we're not counting that. I can only say that we use a lot of open source frameworks. We use Angular, for instance, many others. We use Kafka as an open source solution for our event streaming and how that actually is split. I can't tell you and I wouldn't really know how to measure it as well. The key thing is for us really that what we are adding and what we are producing is becoming available for the public benefit. And one example, we were in need, was it two years ago or something, for a functionality in Drupal that would allow us our hundreds of websites to quickly and more efficiently upgrade them to whatever the latest version was at the time. And we paid for an external team actually to contribute that feature to the Drupal stack. So to have it available as open source to the whole community using Drupal. And it's something obviously that we did for ourselves as well at the same point in time. So this is how we like to go about it, that what we do has a value beyond our immediate need and will help not just us but will help the wider public and the user community. A fantastic approach. Thank you so much, Thomas. And thank you for sharing your viewpoints with us now. At this point now, I would love to invite on stage the next set of panelists, which will be our final discussion before the end of the event. So welcome and as you come on, please do wave and say hello. But welcome to Theresa Gagnon, who's head of partnerships at Sesco Digital. Sebastian Guri, who's the free software officer for free from the free software unit Etelab in France. Johan Linnaker from senior researcher in RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and Max Struppmann, who's the deputy head of the interoperability unit from the European Commission. So welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I know you've probably been listening to all the great input so far, but now we're going to get this perspective from all of you, from the public sector perspective. And I will start with you, Bastien. You're based in France. Would you like to describe, I mean, there was a lot of discussion earlier about the impact for citizens, building trust with citizens. And also, how citizens are being impacted by this whole digital transformation. So would you like to maybe comment about how that is happening in France in the context of open technology? Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. And it's really glad to be listening to all the people talking about open source here. If I can quickly first describe the progress that we've made recently, that would help understand how citizens are in this picture. First, we made a progress by strengthening collaboration with the ministries in France. So we have more experts of free software discussing with each other, recommending free software for all the administration. Second, we have made progress on publishing source code from the administration. We have more than 9,000 repositories and counting. We made progress in contributing to the existing free software ecosystem. So we are now tracking every contribution that civil servants from the French administration is doing to other existing free software out there, some by private companies, some by communities whatsoever. And we made also some legal progress by making it clear for every buyers from the administration how to get the intellectual property on the source code they are buying and paying for so that helps publishing this source code afterwards. And finally, but most importantly, we make institutional progress by having an action plan by the government for free software and digital comments in general. And by spreading this idea that ministries have to organize themselves having their own auspose to deal with all these issues because the administration on part of is not aware of all the issues that the ministries know about. So we have the Ministry of Education, for example, having people in charge of everything related to free software and the Ministry of Research relying on the Committee for Open Science which integrated the dimension of software just last year. And that's quite new because Open Science used to mean open access of research, open data and now it also encompasses source code. That's a huge step forward for European research and we hope that it will show in a few years. So that said, these efforts for more free software in the administration somehow happens to the citizens without them to know because it enhances the quality of the public services, the mutualization of solutions and the reversibility and so the independence of administrations. So citizens don't notice that because that's internal stuff but that's very important. So it also happens with the citizens in the sense that we have the Open Government Partnership, France is part of this initiative and within this framework, every administration has been proposing some very specific actions and some of these actions are about promoting free software. For example, we recently had our administration in charge of data protection, organizing an event just last week discussing with the association of software freedom, promoting software freedom for the citizens. So having this dialogue with the ecosystem is very important. We also set up a free software council that is set up by the free software unit and this council regroups both administrations and representative from the ecosystem, from the Mozilla Foundation, from the Eclipse Foundation, from OWE2, from companies. And having this platform to discuss with each other is key in having this collaboration. And finally, citizens are welcome to contribute to this global effort from the French administration thanks to the blue hats movement that is open to citizens. So for example, we have an open mailing list where we discuss with everyone. That's quite often I would say in the very same spirit for the early free software projects. We have this blue hats semester of code program where we try to attract young engineers and students to contribute not to software that the administration is developing but to software, to free software that the administration is using. So in the overall, I really have this feeling that this is a turning point where we take software citizens freedom seriously and we try to align it with the key values of the public administration. Thank you so much, Bastian. And thank you for outlining that in such detail as well. It's almost like a framework that other countries can then follow. So I really appreciate that. We'll have to write that down afterwards. And I'm sure you already have. So we'll connect right to that. It'd be lovely to see that repeated in Ireland anyway. But thank you for that. So Max, I'm gonna come to you next. We already heard from your colleague in the European Commission but when we think about, I suppose, where we're at right now, we've heard about the great progress that the European Commission has made. But if we would take a step back for a minute and then look at the overall situation with where we're at with digital autonomy and removing dependencies. Where are we at now? How far along the journey are we? Considering all the great progress has been made, how much further do we have to go? What's your point of view on that? Claire, thank you for your question and happy to see you all. And I don't see the audience, but I'm happy to be with you today. And I would love to take my blue hat off for Bastien, but I knew he would have one. I knew. And one day I get one. State of autonomy. My autonomy without a blue hat is not as good. State of autonomy, I'd say in a way we are working on it, well, it is reassuring, but not entirely completely reassuring. And I think a lot of this has been discussed also in the first part of this conference with the first panel. And there is a lot of happening, thankfully, thanks to Pierce and his friends and our friends in DG Connect. And not least also because of the work that you are doing, Ofi and all the colleagues around here. But I would like to pick up something on this topic what earlier Vittorio said, it is very nice looking for and feeding unicorns. That's all very good and I love it because I come out of the startups support movement. But I cannot enough stress, and I think this has come up earlier also here today, the importance of the public sector in this digital transformation journey that Europe is going through and you call it strategic autonomy or strategic open, strategic sovereignty, whatever you call it. In all this voyage, the public sector is extremely important. I think Mike said it, I noted it on earlier. And because it is about fair, inclusive, accountable, value-based, open, digital transformation, lots of stuff, but lots of stuff that we want in there. And the interesting thing is that we have it now, we public sector, Bastien, other colleagues around the table, we have it in our hands collectively, but we will not be able to do it alone, the public administrations without the community, the public sector, the private sector that is around. And just as a sheer weight of the public sector, I think if we digitalize in this fair, inclusive, open, et cetera, way the public sector, this means it's 50% of GDP or even more in some countries. We counted with our colleagues, it's more than 40 billion euros that go only in the public sector digital transformation from the Recovery and Resilience Fund, collectively, all the member states. That's massive. If we can do this open, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we have a different approach and we get to the strategic open sovereignty. Because this transformation and I am, my colleagues were deeply convinced that this does not work without openness, without cooperation, without what Siwan said, open tech. In the public sector, all this open tech is nothing new, but we see it clearly emerging now, stronger, more recognition like ever before as a strategic instrument. Okay, I have somebody coming through with cleaning here, which is very nice. And this Thomas referred to the stress book declaration where I'm sure that Bastian was heavy behind and we had the Berlin declaration before that was stressing the same issue. So it's nothing new. And the idea that I see is to ensure the degree of control of our own fate, which is the core of public sovereignty. And the second aspect that is overlooked, but I think it was part of the Berlin declaration very clearly is the cooperative element, according to our own values and supporting the local needs that we have across Europe, which is in a way powering subsidiarity, so sovereignty and subsidiarity double. The EU is of course a value-based community, not everybody's identical, but we have the same foundations. And this for me is already in itself speaking to a community, an open source community. It can be difficult, all these long counsel sessions, but it leads us to something that is a common foundation. We need to be patient, but this cooperation pays off. And we are also not alone in that in the world. And that's what I would like to take up something that came across also in the third year section. This is not about autarky. We are not about cutting off from the world. We want to keep the doors open because that's the very nature of open technology. So we are clearly interested in linking our partners. And I would just want to say personally, and I think I speak for the colleagues in the cross the institution, I would like to make it clear and loud, yes, to international cooperation. And if you allow me just a minute on what exactly is the next step, because that's what you said, where does it lead us, where do we go? Okay, in our work on public sector interoperability, there is a very long tradition on open source in the connecting Europe facility, the ISA solutions and all of them, if you may know it, Thomas also just now referred to it, what the commission itself is doing. Now to go to the next level. We're working actually, as we speak, on a regulation on interoperability, on European public sector interoperability, that should create a structured cooperation framework across the EU on interoperability. We don't want any more red tape, that's very clear. So rather something like blue tape, if you allow me the algae here or green tape, I mean blue tape is nicer. It's the sky and forward. And for this, and I'm very happy also that we have a colleague from Czech Republic here. We got a lot of support from the French presidency and the incoming Czech presidency, and also then the incoming Swedish presidency. The idea is clearly to create a core role to bind in the central member state digital transformation offices, CIOs of the state, in a guiding role for interoperability across Europe, in a cooperative role. And a second element, a broad community of experts, practitioners, academic experts, private sector experts, civil society, very important, to sustain this cooperation and to push it forward. Sort of a permanent co-creation process around interoperability, open interoperable tools for the public sector across Europe and the world, if the world wants to join in. So openness, open source, a persistent trend. I agree also with Siwan and Thomas, more openness means more joint control. And so what we propose, it's not yet long, we propose to have a share and reuse obligation on public sector solutions as default in that. Of course, not mandating, we can't do that open source, but we want to push it to nudge it as much as we can. We want to collect and to open the door towards existing reusable open solutions at all levels in Europe. And not least, see this as an important procurement support tool for, for example, local administrations. And this procurement aspect, Euclair and other colleagues brought it up, how important it is for SMEs and startups. We want to have strategic areas, for policy areas where we support them so that we don't reinvent the wheel across education, environment, agriculture and so on. Let's reuse things wherever we can. We want to work with the GovTech and the civic tech sectors, public, private. We have a dedicated GovTech call going now and we want more of that structurally. And of course we need clear link to the ongoing data policy work of the colleagues in DG Connect, within the commission, the data governance act, the data act, the data spaces and so on, but also to the multi-stakeholder platform on ICT standardization, structural link to this work. And as a final point maybe here on what we would like, as I say, these are all ideas, the commission has not yet decided to put this forward, but we push and we have a lot of support for it. A final point, also something that was mentioned, OSPO Corporation. With that regulation, we would like to lay the ground, the organizational ground for structural OSPO Corporation across public sector bodies in the EU, not telling everybody to do the same thing, but learning from each other, cooperating, speaking to each other. You said it, Deborah, another said it. I switch off, I stop here. Interoperability, next steps in the policy, hopefully we get through. For me, interoperability runs with co-operability and I think this is the shared story here. I shut up. No, thank you, Max. That's brilliant. I mean, that was a vision into the future in terms of what's coming down the line. It's fantastic. And what's gonna stay with me, I think forever, is the idea of getting rid of red tape and creating a blue tape that binds us together for a better future, which I love, right? That's fantastic. So thank you very much for sharing that. Johan, we're gonna come to you next in the context of research. Based on what you have seen in the research community, how have you seen this trend towards open technology be represented there? And what kind of impact is that trend, if it's increasing, let's hope it is. What kind of impact is that having on the citizens' lives in terms of translation of research? So thanks. So I think that research is advancing. It's research in open source that's mainly being focused on practice, which we can find in the private sector and inside the communities. And I think research has a key role here to play in advancing the state of knowledge, but also in enabling the public sector to use and leverage open source, be it to achieve digital autonomy or increased cost efficiency or whatever the goal is. And I think one important role here is to study and compare and report on best practice, like the great work Bastin is doing and the work that we can find in Italy, like with developers Italia, with the municipal collaboration in Denmark, there was two collaboration. We have lots of great initiatives that we can study and report on and help provide feedback into the public administrations and public sector. And also study how ASPOS actually are working within the private sector and how that could translate into a public sector context. But we also have an important role here to play in studying specific areas. Like we talked about cybersecurity briefly. And I think security and sustainability in open source products is a very important area because as we noted, open sources everywhere, supply chain attacks are increasing. So we have to find, okay, what role does the government have to play here in this co-creation and compared to the private actors, to civil society, to academia and to us the citizens in this co-creation. So we have great, much great work here being done by researchers such as Bogdan Walyscu, Ego Steinmecher, Anitha Sarma, Matt German-Preet, we have collaborations such as the open source security foundation, the chaos communities, sustaining open source community. And so we have all of these collaborations, but we have to get the public sector to come in here as well, because right now it's mostly private sector, civil society and the communities and us the users and developers who are engaged. We need to get the public sector in here as well. And another area I'd like to highlight is the procurement acquisition. We talk a lot about the hindrance and challenges implied by how public administrations need to procure. Public administrations, especially on municipal and regional levels, they don't have the technology resources that as comprised companies do. They need to procure these resources and we need to find ways in how we can use existing frameworks because I don't think necessarily it's anything wrong or broken with our current frameworks. There are different variants that we are exploring like the dynamic purchasing systems that could ideally enable an agile and open procurement of technology. So how can administrations collaborate on acquisition maintenance of open source projects such as DOS2? How can national, how can we from a central location like Bastien is doing help and nurture and build a culture within public sector generally? How can we formulate tenders so we don't end up in lock ins and unnecessary dependencies? So these are all areas where I think research can go hand in hand with public sector and help. But I'd just like to also highlight the general problem here that much of the knowledge that is created and both within practice and research, it doesn't reach practitioners within the public administrations or they are not receptable to it. There is no absorptive capacity to actually suck it in. And yeah, there's a lack of culture, there's lack of knowledge, there's lack of resources. I mean, and again, especially on the municipal and regional levels where I mean, the municipality in Sweden of 5,000 people have the same responsibility and the need to deliver as a municipality of 100 or a million individuals. So you can't expect these small ones to have the same capacity. So we need to find ways in how to build the culture and build the absorptive capacity and may get the public administration more receptable to research and practice from industry and the communities. There are different ways like this gospel network, I think is one key way in how we can collaborate across these different tech pools and have a joint conversation and knowledge sharing. Research calls mandating collaborations as part of the research project. Or even as we're working on, as an example with Rice, we're working on a research and development project in an open source setting, engaging both with entrepreneurs and public sector administrations directly through the open source project. So not with this funding agency as a proxy. So we're doing it in an open way. I think we can learn much of how this new way of collaborating. No, that's fantastic. And before we move on, can I just ask, because it piqued my interest there, when you were talking about the examples of shared procurement across various different government bodies, I mean, are there examples of that in action today? Because again, this is exactly the kind of thing that I think many people are looking up at. There are examples, aren't there? So obviously you've seen Max nodding there. Examples of folks that actually have collaborated with multi-agency or multi-department procurement and maintenance plans, are they in existence? Yes, they are there. Like I mentioned, there's one example in Denmark. They are OS2 collaboration, OS2.eu. We have about 60 or 70 municipalities that come together with, like they could spin up our project based on one or two municipalities and then it may grow. And then they put together our technical councils and then they procure the development by this ecosystem of different vendors. So function much like an open source foundation. And you can find examples in Belgium and Holland and also in Sweden. Fantastic. There are examples too to learn. That definitely sounds like a pattern. We need repeated abroad. So yeah, completely hear you on the challenge to actually get that knowledge out from folks that are in the ecosystem to the broader set of folks that might be able to benefit from it. So thank you, Johan, for that. And I'll move now to Theresa in the context of civil society and your experience in terms of working to make an impact from a civil perspective. So how do you think civil society can get involved? Because we've heard from Bastien that the Blue Hats love that, by the way. But apart from that, in a broader sense, how can civil society get involved in fostering the use of open technologies as a way to actually transform our entire EU society? Thank you, Claire. And thank you for having me today here. I'm happy that I can represent a civic tech organization on this event because we are kind of playing the role to bridge all this ecosystem that you just mentioned. And I'm very happy that you mentioned a lot of things that I might be repeating again, but our role is a little bit different. We are representing the organization that is neutral, that is kind of citizen-driven, that is like a community of tech experts that are trying to bridge the gap that is basically the technological gap that is in government or public services and non-government and geo sector. We believe that these players have a super strong impact on society. So that's why we feel that it has a value to give basically like a private time, to bring the expertise to these areas. And just to make a little background about the network. So we are basically like an organization that is typical in any country in the world. There is a global chain of civic tech organizations. And I believe that we all try to work together because there is definitely the technology that is the layer that can interconnect not just different players within the country, but also basically across the globe or that's what we try for. We do advocate open technologies. We do believe that what is custom developed by government should be basically open. We believe that this brings definitely the security part of the benefit and also the reusability. As you mentioned that this should be the big focus on right now. So we do promote it, we do advocate it. We work with other organizations, expert organizations from open source area like also with the software developers. So we try to bring everyone to the table as we work with the government and non-profit sector to maybe mention a few examples. We believe that the change should be really complex. It should not be just driven by the government. It has to be like an open table. So we do organize like open discussions about vendor locking. We do organize hackathons or tender tone. We recently did kind of proof of concept of kind of government contracting template for the municipalities or for public institutions because there are a lot of barriers and fears also. So we try to bring the helping hand with the help of technology experts to bring everyone to the table. And the surprising moment on that tender tone was that actually even the commercial sector, even the players who are trying to solve the vendor locking thing, they started to understand the government officers, the fears that they have, and they now can better communicate. There is a lot of barriers in communication. So we believe that we need to do it, do the transformation in a complex way. So it is about education, about open panels, about bringing also methodologies from abroad. We are bringing, for example, like manual or best practice about running a large government IT project like the risking them or being able to drive them in an agile way. So this is something that we step by step work on, try to connect all the players. And that's what we believe in, that will be the way how to do the change. Another example that we went through was in the COVID pandemic time. There was the big effort around bringing new technologies that will help to solve the chaotic situation. And we were building with the government COVID portal, the same initiative happened in the UK, for example. And again, we use the open technologies. So for the government, it was a very nice example to try it, to try it, to publish it as a government open source code. So this is like the first steps, how to deliver software that is public but licensed as open source. This was definitely like a nice moment because this whole situation that was chaotic required to support or help the government to bring trust. And building these tools also like COVID tracing apps, it is about trust. There is no more important thing than this. So we believe that doing it with open technologies in a transparent way, collaboratively is the way how to do it. So with these examples, I would just summarize that what we believe in is that using open technologies needs strong product owner on the government side, collaboration and also empowered or digitally enabled citizens. So this is another element that we are trying to build and help with. Well, thank you, Theresa. And I think it's a fantastic example of like how you can give citizens agency over their own future. Like sometimes when you hear about everything around digital transformation, it always feels like it's being done to you. Oh my God, what am I being transformed into? But the idea that you actually can take a meaningful role in that. And like with the blue hat group, but also like what you were doing to help facilitate that. I mean, that's what's often is what's necessary. So that all that positive energy that can be leveraged, but actually directed in a meaningful way and in a useful way rather than spread out, spray guns at various different efforts. It's fantastic work you're doing, so congratulations. And I'll just follow up with a question that came through on the chat. And it's in the context of everything you talked about, the importance of connecting between people, between agencies and individuals. And one of the points that was made earlier is the role that an institution like an open source program office could play in that. And the rise of, for example, open source program offices in public sector organizations as well as in corporations. And it was, I think following on from Johan's comment about this idea of people being able to gather together and municipalities being able to gather together. And I'll note he shared some resources there that I hope it's going to be shared afterwards so we can dig into that in more detail. But the question was specifically, do we see that, is there an opportunity for people to actually collaborate on pool resources to build an ASPO? So rather than this idea that everyone has to have an ASPO, which again might be an outlay that many people don't want to commit to upfront, is there a potential for, for example, municipalities to come together, have a centralized kind of institution that would help them get over those goals that were mentioned earlier? Anyone want to take that one? I've seen nodding. Is that a, what could be done to help that happen then maybe Johan? There are different versions. One way is municipalities coming together forming like their own open source foundation you could call it. And definitely, I mean, if we want municipalities to really start adopting open source this is what needs to be to happen. In Sweden we have 219 municipalities ranging from 5,000 to 1 million inhabitants and they need to collaborate because a vast majority don't have the knowledge and culture and so on to make this happen. So we need to centralize and there is this real shout out for centralized initiatives in this. And this is not limited to open source but talking about the digitalization and digital transformation in general. So yes, there is need and there is potential for this. So creating a common open source foundation quote unquote could be one way. Going top down, like from the central national agency like the public agency for visualization and going down to regional levels maybe one way. Also there's the foundation for public code Dutch based non-profit that helps municipalities like in the case in Holland and the open sack and open source project and more. So civil society can provide this neutral area as well and also academic and other neutral institutions can be this central point to help the collaboration happen and work as the knowledge sharing and arena for conversations between the vendors and the public sector. So there are different models here that's very much our need to, we need to see, we need to experiment and learn from which one works best and what cases and so on. Brilliant, well thank you for that and guidelines. Max, would you like to come in on that? Yes, I'd love to because this is something that for us is extremely important. I think it came out in all four of us in a way and so it's interesting that the question comes up there also. Just to add, I mean completely endorsing what you said and what also Teresa and Bastien said in insisting in the inclusion of civil society and all of that for which digital tools are perfect in the end if we make them open and accountable and accessible. But one element maybe just as for information also to bring in that the colleagues in the commission in DG Connector they have a dedicated unit for smart cities and communities. And they are very actively engaging with quite a number of communities, so cities usually but also regional authorities across Europe in a sort of very bottom-up movement that is called Living in EU. But the whole idea is actually sharing expertise about public sector digitalization. What works, what doesn't work? Learning from it, pooling, setting, trying to define common interoperability mechanisms what they call minimum interoperability mechanisms which I find is super exciting. So I've been part of some of the discussions there and they exactly touch on what all of you have been saying the link between the civil society and the public administrations. They need to link to my neighboring cities or departments because it is not only a geographic issue it is also a sexual issue from the education department to the environment department to the buildings department and the mobility and so on. And this of course also cross-border in many parts of Europe this is essential. So I think this is a very interesting aspect and we try not to go too far on the interoperability policy but try to build something that supports also these movements where Europe does not tell anybody what to do but that I as a local body organization department can tap in the expertise that is there ideally through like Ospo type of foundations or whatsoever. Thank you, thanks for that Max and that's a great addition. Well, we have about five minutes left so a very short round next but I just want to ask each one of you based on everything we've heard today and thank you for all your contributions just there now but if you had to choose like what are the milestones we should be looking out for the next set of milestones in terms of progress towards a goal of open strategic digital autonomy and everything we have described here in terms of these collaborations and a shift towards more public goods all and more trustworthy services and citizen engagement for everything we have described here what would be a milestone you would look for in the coming say a year or two that would show that we're on the right path. Kastin, I'll come to you first. Well, I would mention two milestones the first one is to see each other because we've been collaborating online for the last two years and lots of things have been done. The next one would be because if we talk about Europe and values from Europe we cannot talk we have to talk about democracy and the next milestone for me would be to have very visible project to get institutions, public sector closer to the civic initiatives so that we empower citizens when it comes to the digital transformation that they have to be part of and software freedom movements for the last 40 years have been all about this and the same as individual freedom is a risk and a chance for democracy you have to bet on individual software freedom to build the larger digital sovereignty of democracies working together that would be the next milestone for me in the next few years. Thank you, Bastien. Teresa, what about you? I would just summarize it as we have freedom which is like resiliency which goes very closely with security so I feel like open source can play a fantastic role here what I would also promote is like public-private slash citizen partnership so making the bridges to connect all the parties and start with the small steps in alignment with the top-down strategies. Thank you, Teresa. Max, how about you? I like both the first speakers, Teresa and Bastien what they said and I'm not sure I have really a milestone but something that gives me a lot of hope that I have the feeling out of our discussion out of this new approach also through crisis to digital transformation that we get to a digital public sector digital transformation based on true co-creation that is not an elite project driven by some powers whether private or public it is not an elite project but it is our common course and stupidly like in an old term the race publicize ours and actually that we sustain this drive of building giving ourselves the digital tools to do this, to run the race publicer. Brilliant, never waste a crisis. Thank you, Max. Johan, what about you? What's the milestone you look forward to seeing? I'd like to see both on the European and about the special national levels throughout the countries that we explicitly identified the challenges that we have in terms of open source adopting and collaborating on open source really pointing them out and then laying out strategies for how we want to address them in terms of what we mentioned collaboration and acquisition of open source how we can sustain and secure them our common digital infrastructure this is not just on the national but also the European level and international level what role does government can governments have to play here? So really pushing that conversation to become explicit. Well, they sound like a great set of goals. So I want to unfortunately wrap up now because we've come to time but this has been an amazing conversation. I think it is only laying a pathway for how we need to have more of them and I would echo Johan's comments about how we need to share our challenges and the potential solutions. It sounds like a lot of people have made great inroads into addressing these challenges and I look forward to doing that at some point in the future again with you but without further ado I would like to say a huge thank you to Bastion, Teresa, Max and Johan. Thank you all for participating in the second panel and thanks to all the audience for listening in and thank you to everyone at Open Forum for giving us this opportunity to have these discussions. It's really appreciated and look forward to more hats or blue hats and blue tape which will bind us all together for a great open future. Thanks everyone. Thank you Claire. Thank you.