 The point of this fireside chat, albeit absent of fire, is to look at how open source is driving the digital decade. So we have three well-versed, prominent open source champions and also policy leaders to help us understand better what that looks like. I will introduce Marcel when he joins. I'm going to also introduce Henri. Mr. Profan, if you'd like to join me up here, I'll also introduce you. And then we can get started. Now, in the good old-fashioned open source way, if you think my questions are not up to par, then jump in and better those questions. That's absolutely fine. I will do my best not to disappoint. So Henri Verdier is the digital ambassador with France's Ministry of European Foreign Affairs. He's the former state CIO and a passionate entrepreneur who continues to innovate in government and partnerships beyond France in multiple countries around the world. Henri Profan, just sitting here to my right, is the advisor to the vice minister who we were listening to earlier, Mr. Bartosz, of digitization for the Czech government and actively supporting the new Czechia digital agency, otherwise known as DIA, not mistaken, DIA. They're highly regarded computer scientists and member of the open source community. And as you whispered in my ear, also an avid user of Fedora. Is that right? Very good. Super. Okay. And I tell you what, just for the sake of, I'm hoping being the eternal optimist, the master will make it. He is really en route. He's a member of the European Parliament. Again, a computer scientist, indeed an alum, another great alum from this steamed university. He is also several years with Red Hat just up the road. And he was recently elected, or three years ago, elected as an MEP for the pirate party involved in all sorts of policies impacting this digital decade, but also a senior MEP and as a questor, he's also responsible for the daily IT operations. So again, with those two, what Mrs. Gaffey was discussing and mentioned this inter intra EU collaboration and cooperation. And it would be interesting to hear a little bit about that from his side, Leo. I think it was one of the projects which was mentioned, but that, but there are, there are others. So, Mr. Ambassador Valdier, you are, you are there. You can hear me. All good. Fine. Super. So Ambassador, I'd like to turn to you to talk about recent work that you've been working very hard with your colleagues in, in France during the EU presidency. And this was the, the, the declaration of digital commons. It seeks, of course, to build on open source as a, as a global commons. But of course it's much broader than that. And I think it would be interesting just as a context, context setter for you to perhaps just elaborate a little bit more on that initiative, the steps you're taking and also how, again, as Mrs. Gaffey mentioned earlier, how we can engage better with the community both here in Bruno, but, but far, far beyond as well. So over to you, Ambassador. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for the invitation. I'm very sad not to be physically with you in Bruno. The week before the UNGA is not the best week to travel, because I do organize two events in New York next week to, to make it simple and to start the exchange. First, I would love to share with you my convictions that the, the digital revolution as we know it is a revolution of open standards, open source software, free software and open data. The stream of innovation and creativity and economic growth and citizen empowerment that we know for 50 years is, is, is because of this open approach, decentralized, et cetera. That's one thing. The second thing is that we, European, we, we didn't pay enough attention about the fact that this is a very European vision of the world. And that large part of this movement was born in Europe. If you consider clearly, seriously. The first works that I did conduce to TCPIP were French. HTML was invented by an English man in Geneva. Linux is European. Bluetooth is European. ADSL is European. And a lot of other very important free open resources. And we, in France, we think more and more than we have to stand for this legacy and maybe protect it a bit because we do observe a movement of weaponization of internet, of some states that want to control it more and more. Big monopolies built on internet that try to control a bit or to capture a bit. And we consider that Europe has to protect it to, to, to, to continue this movement of economic innovation and growth and this movement of citizen empowerment. And that may, may be as a role of Europe. The new thing is that as you all see, we have now for a few years, these reflections is very important reflection about European digital sovereignty. And we, France, we try to, to prove that an open source approach can be part of digital sovereignty strategy. To make it very simple. The more you have free resources, the more you have open source software, the more you build your countries or your economy on digital comments. I introduce the world. The freer you are because no one can expropriate you, nor change the prices nor impose your technological choices. So we consider that this is an important part of digital sovereignty strategy. That's also why we did introduce in the debates the word commons because we are, we know, and everyone in the room knows that sometimes you can have a predatory strategy if I may capture strategy through open source, open source alone is not enough. If I open the source of my code, but I control the, the commit, I'm still the master of the ecosystem and I can control the ecosystem. So when we speak about commons, it's, it can be a bit more like that than just software. It can be open standards or it can be open data. So it can be a bit broader than just software, but not every open source software can be considered as commons. We want resources that are governed by the community of contributors with an open and shared governance. And last year there was a French presidency of EU and we did propose to our friends of Europe to launch a working group and we actually 18 countries joined the group very easily. That was a first surprise because we had to align ministries of economy and finance and ministries of foreign affairs, which is not so easy in 18 countries. And we did collectively prepare these reports. You know this. I hope that you can have a look to the report. And we are proposing a simple but very committed strategy to EU. So this year and with your friends of Czech presidency, we'll try to promote the conclusion of the report to make it simple. We suggest to start with very small and engaged policies like open by default in the European administrations. We suggest to think about one stop shop because what we did discover is that we have tons of common earth creators, innovators and dozens of tools to help them. But this is a total mess and one stop shop to help people to find the good way to help to receive money or support can be very efficient. The third thing is to inject a bit to give some money because we government, we always pretend to love the communities, but we don't pay enough. And maybe it's time to invest a bit. Here I have to say that if we consider that comments are very important, the tool for sovereignty is not just comments invented in Europe. Some very important piece of code are not European, but they are helpful for sovereignty. So we have to be a bit open there. And we do suggest that it's time to come to think about one European foundation. So a foundation born in Europe, because in these landscapes, you have very few foundations, most of them are Americans. We like them, we work with them, but maybe our voice and our vision of the world and our energy should contribute to this movement and to be part of the movement. I hope I didn't be too long, but that's why I want what I wanted to share with you. Thank you, Ambassador. That was enlightening. I think also it's important to make that very clear about not all open source can be considered as open source. And I think there's never been a more important time to make that clear in terms of getting the right governance, the right IP, using those recognized, missing copy left licensing. I think we shall be on guard for those who might claim to have an open source distribution, but in fact it's not. And also on the point about foundations, in the audience here from the eclipse, I think it's one such example of a foundation helping drive open source in Europe, but also equally beyond. So I'm going to turn to Mr. Profan, if I may. Again, great to have you by the proverbial fire. Warm your hands. Let's get a little bit warmer with the question to you about something which the minister mentioned earlier about DEA and your own personal involvement in that, but also the agency itself. Of course, later on, we're going to be exploiting you again on another panel where we'll have Maria from the digital agency, the counterpart. So good to have a discussion on that panel about that. But really, how do you see this agency adding value? How do you see it interacting with other agencies? And really so driving this open source policy agenda and to as it's written, European digital decade to realize the European or even accelerate that realization. Thank you, Mr. Profan. I'm going to give you the mic. Thank you. Hello. Let me elaborate. In Czech Republic, organization of the government is pretty big house right now. Because now it is a responsibility for ministry of interior, which is basically a ministry of policemen, of course. And there is no concentrate focus on digital goals because their goals are security, firefighters, policemen, not digitalization. So my and my minister goals is to bring the institution with which brings a single responsibility principle or pretty small institution with his goal to digitalize Czech Republic to do it in high quality. Not just another official task, but goals of entire institution. We are very inspired by the another Czech institution, New Keep, which is cybersecurity institution, which is here in Brno. Yeah. And only after the start of operation of digital and information agency, the idea, we can finally push our topics, our political topics and beliefs and goals into public sector reality. Without it, it's not quite possible because you have these officers from the policemen and they just, okay, they have some information system. They are running this operation. But there is no goals and enthusiasm and other needed things to achieve something bigger. One of the goals of DR is international collaboration and of course, one of the form of international collaboration is open source. We are happy that the timing is right and we can directly connect DR with now founded Czech national sport, which is now starting to heal in Brno. We wish close cooperation between DR and national sport just yesterday was the first in-person meeting of EUROSPO. For me, this is a great way to connect across Europe efforts in open source. And I am really like I met a lot of new people like Maria from Sweden and much more. And we can together bring better quality open source in public sector. It's not about quality of open source itself. It's about how to join these two worlds. These two very different worlds. There are barriers of public performance. There are barriers of culture and mentality. There are barriers of very high level lobbying of the big winners. And we have to manage this in some things in soft ways, in education, in upscaling people, some things in maybe hard way and some things in budgeting. So what we do need open source has wide opportunities but of course a competition is high. We need a central support from EU commission, of course. But I think that we knew that there are some barriers like the procurement that can be a little tricky in adaptation of open source. And in the future we need to talk about public procurement as well. So that's my first look at the topic. That's why we are creating our agency. And that is how we look to brighter tomorrow. Thank you very much. I didn't appreciate it was the first meeting of the EU in person. Wow, so that's a big deal. And it's somewhat sort of poignant that it took place in Bruno, which I find sound correctly wrong. It has in terms of ratio, open source contributed to IT professional, I think it's the highest ratio in the world, or certainly one of the countries right at the top of that. So somewhat appropriate. And then to your point about the EU support, I think that message has been fully understood and has been responded to in terms of this announcement and direction. And I think this point finally on the sort of culture piece about inspiring and getting policemen and so on excited about open source was just that they're called common, you know, they're called job. They have another agenda and another culture. So again, later on perhaps we talked about, as I will call, the Swedish place this word is a big user of open source on the front line. And I think that's probably last point we'll make on this, this idea that it's not just about the code, right? Open source code. It's much wider and bigger about in terms of the culture. So that passion is needed. Code and processes. The processes are important part. The processes are the difference because every big corporation is very rigid. And the state is very, very big corporation and it's a rigid conservative. And it's hard to change internal processes, hard to change internal rules to be reasonable. But normal open source software do some reasonable things. What we need to do if you want to organize your calendars, calendar you organize your calendar. It's no rocket science. But in the public sector, you can create some much more complicated things, right? And a lot of stoppers that stop your adaptation of pretty good software that you can really use in practice, but in some theory with consultations lawyer, it can be much, much harder. Can I make a two finger comments? Very great. I was just about to cut because we were talking, you mentioned about. You mentioned something which triggered my mind. So I've got to bring in the ambassador on this. You talked about education and upscaling. So that's something I'd like to throw to the ambassador. But before doing so, that's the floor is yours. Go ahead. Yes, thank you. Now, just to add something first to congratulate you for this mission, which is one of the most amazing mission in the state. And I did contribute to this mission in France in my form of position. I want to add in your description to your description that open source and comments are also communities and communities that share a lot of values and goals with the government itself because they are dedicated to general interest. And that's you can build alliance with them. And in France, we made some very important project of successes with the communities. For example, we did fix a very important issue of we need, we did need one database open source, of course, open data of the geographical position of every postal addresses, which is very important for a lot of public services. And we did this with open street map because the National Geographic Institute alone could not do this. And in France, we have the chance to have one million contributors to open street map. So together we are very, very strong. And I wanted to say this is the perspective of the alliance between the state and the communities of commoners is very, very promising. So I did speak about this, so maybe I don't have time to speak about education. Let's decide, please. I'm so sorry I didn't catch that. Can you repeat the last sentence? No, I said I did use my time to speak about these alliance between communities. So if you want, I give you the floor back. Do you know, I think Marcel being the gentleman that he is, he's still on route. So I think we can use a bit of his time. I'm sure he'd be happy with that. So if you want to elaborate on that. And then also this point about empowering the citizen in, because we talk a lot about default open policy. Yes, that's another important thing. Yeah, I come with the man. Welcome Marcel. So maybe you want to finish your, finish your comment and then we'll bring Marcel into discussion. Thanks. No, you did trigger me slightly about education. That's another important aspect. But I do observe that everywhere everyone want of course to digitalize the educational system. But very often we are just teaching new consumers. We teach to the students to use resources. And from my perspective, teaching to our children to be contributors to be active. And I quote very often the famous quote, don't teach them to surf, teach them to make waves. That's very important for them as future citizen, but also for our global prosperity, because if we are not part of the creative movement, we'll be just followers. So I, and here again, an alliance with the open source and commons communities can be very, very efficient. Thank you, Ambassador. So welcome Marcel. It's great to see you. I'm glad you're not the beads of spects have evaporated. You've been driving proiously through Czech traffic, but welcome. I'm going to bring you straight in on a point which we will talk about earlier about commons and the interaction with interplay with open source and so forth. Actually before I do say it must feel a bit weird coming back here as a former student. I wonder whether when you were sitting here as a student, did you ever think one day I'll be sitting here as an MEP? Weird thought. So yes, I think that your position is being one of the leading MEPs on this particular I suppose technology, but also deeper than just the code, the understanding. I would think you're quite unique in the parliament with the grounds to that background, that expertise. So looking at it for your last three years in parliament, what's your sort of take on sort of Europe's political understanding of digital sovereignty and the extent to which open sources is really understood as being absolutely key to unlocking that digital decade, which we all talk about very often. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice to see you too. Sorry for the late arrival, but yeah, highways in the Czech Republic. Yeah, not only as a student, even though when I studied here, this didn't really exist. But also seeing your red hat also worked at the red hat before I got elected in the European Parliament. So quite a familiar environment for me. So on one hand, I would say that it is recognized that the potential of open source is enormous. And that you can see even in studies commissioned by the European Commission where one of it says, and when it speaks about the potential that 10% increase in contributions to open source would generate up to 0.6% of the EU's GDP. Also, when you look at the digital decade targets set by the European Commission, then you will find that EU businesses and citizens should be empowered when using digital tools. And of course, who else is best positioned than open source to actually empower citizens and businesses because it really gives them the control over their data and over their technology. On the other hand, it is still difficult to somehow convince a majority of policymakers that you can achieve these goals by the transparency that free and open source software delivers and offers rather than using close proprietary solutions. And some resistance also comes from the history of ICT procurement contract frameworks that apparently prefer by design proprietary solutions and then slow down the change towards open source in ICT. So in my experience as an MEP, I was for two and a half years Vice President of the European Parliament for ICT. I am now the Quester of the European Parliament for ICT. I am not going to dive into the details of the difference between the two roles, but as a bureau member focused on ICT, I see a lot into how ICT works in the European Parliament. And again, on one hand, it is politically acknowledged that open source software is valuable and can be deployed. In many respects, you can see that applications developed internally are based on open source software. The backbone of the infrastructure often runs open source software, but then when it comes to some other systems, you still see the difficulty and hesitance and some sort of resistance, I would even say, to use free and open source software. It is the case for technologies that you use every day like email, but also when you look to the future because there is a strategy to move to the cloud and it looks like the Parliament opts out for Microsoft and Amazon solutions despite the weaknesses that these solutions entail for data management and for data protection for basically being in control of the data. So there I would argue that hybrid cloud solutions that enable you to be more in control of your data are much better fit for institutions like that. So what can be done to improve it? So every member of the European Parliament has the opportunity to propose initiation of a so-called pilot project. What is a pilot project? A pilot project is a project with a budget from the European Commission budget. If that is approved by the European Parliament, then the European Commission has to actually run the project with a budget that was allocated to that. I have initiated a pilot project that I always mention at the time, but it is free and open source software solutions for unification of public services, concepts. And it's run by the European Commission, it consists in creating a European open source application pedal. So basically it tries to bridge the burden between free and open source projects and free and open source solutions from the administration that, well, many times would like to use them, but they don't actually really know what to do. And the number of different catalogs that are out there is, you know, the way how this is set up, they are rather scattered. So it's good to bridge this gap with some one catalog that basically bridges all of these catalogs that are out there together. I have also recently proposed a pilot project to be again run by the European Commission where the aim is to demodify the access to EU applications. So the EU institution, they have a lot of applications that you can install on your phone, for instance, to make it easier for you to work with the institutions, but no wonder they are all available on the major Google Play and Apple App Store. The aim of this pilot project that I hopefully would be adopted is to make these applications available also on open source repositories like Android to also demodify the access to these applications. And I would also like to mention that recently the EDPS, the European Data Protection Supervisor, launched a project that is called EU Voice and EU Ideal, and these are nothing else, basically, than instances of Mastodon and peer-to-decentralized open source social networks. The project I was told would soon transition under the auspices of the European Commission to be run as a permanent project by the European Commission. This is a really great step, again, towards adopting free and open source software. So to wrap it up, on one hand I would say quite some resistance that you can see, but also there are individual steps that are being done that are very promising for the future. Thank you, Marcel. I appreciate we've got five minutes left. Am I right? Oh, we've got ten minutes left. Thank you. Brilliant. So, yes, I think maybe since it's a fireside chat, I'd like to put some petrol on the fire and talk about the sort of £800 granite group, this EU recovery fund. I think a couple of days ago, Commissioner van der Leyen was talking about how only £100 billion has been spent with £800 billion and there was a growing rise in the sense of frustration in Brussels. I sense that that's possibly the case at a capital level, given that unfortunately our geopolitical and economic situation isn't getting any better. And yet this digital decade, the objective still remains. So it would be interesting to hearing your opinions or three of you on that discussion and how that's panning out. Probably I'll go to you, Mr Profan first, if I may. Thank you. The recovery fund. In the Republic, we have a problem with recovery fund because our recovery plan was blinded by the previous government and now we have problems to change the project or change the criteria. Of course, we can change the project itself but not the criteria. So if the criteria is something, sorry for the word, but stupid, like to buy a proprietary product or it's not so easy but in some ways we cannot change it and we are fighting with that. And of course, as I previously mentioned, we haven't the digital agency so we have no our own quality workforce to re-factor this project. So we have a lot of projects, but a lot of them are for my point of view in effective investments in software model and current window openings. It's really hard to change it in the real operation and of course we need a lot of this project. There are some e-help projects, for example, but there are no and in Czech Republic there are no open source infrastructure or data exchange standards in health. We are working on data exchange standards, but they will come after this project. So it's really not, I'm not really optimistic about the new results. We do a lot of things, we prepare, we can buy some hardware, we can improve some software, but there will be no open source revolution from the recovery plan. One positive point is that we have in our recovery plan a center of competence where we can hire experts and share experts across the public sector. So we have a center like this, we will have one and another in health, in the ministry of health. So there are of course some positive aspects, but it's quite bureaucratic and it's not easy for the starting government to change all the decisions made by previous government. Thank you. If I may just pass that on that question to you, Ambassador Thaddeus, speakers from Paris. So regarding the recovery plan. Yes. Okay, I can say two things, because there might be two parts. Regarding the economic recovery, we don't have a specific open source approach because here we are trying to help small businesses and small companies and they have the freedom of strategy. We hope that they know because in France we are trying to rebuild the tech ecosystem for decades. So we know that they have a good level of strategic vision. Regarding the state, it's a bit different because we inject also a lot of money in the governmental infrastructure. And here we have quite open source by default policy because we do encourage a lot to buy or to observe or to first to be able to notify why you didn't decide to build on open source. And I mentioned it on the other side, we have the other open source by default approach, everything that the government build has to be open source. So we share all of our codes too. And that can be interesting too for the communities. So we can expect that the recovery plan will in the governmental parts will be helpful for this vision. Thank you. That was enlightening. I'm going to hand it over to Marcel. In fact, this is going to be the last intervention and then if I could ask all three speakers to perhaps just consolidate a statement on this particular sort of high level discussion theme which I think we would enjoy appreciate as a as a takeaway from this far side so Marcel. That's the same question. Yeah, so I haven't looked too much into the particular implementation of the recovery fund in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the important thing is that there is a share that needs to be used for digitization that's good. The problem is, of course, how we actually implement it and then, of course, member states have the opportunity to use it well, but they can also use it in a wrong way so that's, I'm coming back a bit to what I said. My take from that is that I would prefer that already on the high level definition that comes from the European level, we would already have incentives that would incentivize the use of free open source software and preference for open source information because we also know that they are valuable for our society because they can be reused, they can be recycled. People can collaborate on that, companies can collaborate on that. So that's the question, the data that it produces our open data and so on. So that I think is a missing piece that could have been done better. But as I said in the very beginning of my speech, we really still have room for improvements to actually support these policy makers, how important the stress on free and open source solutions is. Thank you. So final few minutes of this fast side chat. Basta, you want to kick us off and then we'll go in this direction and finish with Basta again. Thank you. I was wondering so I want to share with you view. I may not make only friends but I think that this is very important. Sometimes there is like a confusion because when you think about open source. You think about one very important economic sectors with companies and that are very important for sovereignty and everything. But you think also about a broader movements with open standards with contribution, and you did hear me in my words for me to teach to children to contribute to Wikipedia or open sweet map to teach to government to share on source code and start is a part of a bigger plan because we want to to reopen and to the global on power, empowering machine of the digital revolution. And so I want to share with you that this is not just an industrial policy. And we have to to work with both side companies and nonprofit organization and that's very important from my perspective. Okay, I have only quite short message. I think open source is great opportunity corresponding to it main goals and visions of the European Union, like freedom of knowledge, citizen centric decentralized and many more. So it's on us to support open source to promote in the independent and free society. And so, again, to the beginning of my speech. There is a lot of room for improvement. But also, we'll not be able to fill in that room for improvement with actual improvement if we don't do individual steps so I didn't think that we can underestimate the impact of the individual steps that are being done in the right direction. And then I have already mentioned, and I would like to add also that in various legislative files that the European institutions produce in the legislative process, there can be done a lot of these little steps. And for instance, I will give you one example. This year, we have adopted the digital markets act, which is legislation that should give more control into people's hands over their data by actually creating more competition on the markets because we don't have a level playing field. We have large corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, that control large portion of digital markets. And within this legislation, I managed to sneak in an obligation for these so called gatekeepers to enable interoperability for chat platforms, which means that the smaller players, those who very often are free and open source software like Matrix, for instance, they can become interoperable with these large solutions and that would make it easier for citizens to change from these solutions of these large companies to free and open source solutions because they could switch from, let's say, WhatsApp to Matrix and still be in touch with their friends that are at WhatsApp. So this is just an example, but I think this is exactly the way how we should proceed step by step to improve and incentivize the use and development in free and open source software. Thank you very much. And actually on that note, thanks. Would you join me in the usual way to show our appreciation of our wonderful five side chat. Thank you.