 Welcome, everybody, to today's Open From Europe event. My name is Sivan Petch. I am OFE's research director, and I'm very glad to kick things off today. We have some very exciting presentations and panels coming up, which will be moderated expertly by Claire Dillon, executive director of the Innersource Commons Foundation. I'll give it my shot at setting the scene in terms of our topic for today's discussion, open to the autonomy by presenting our latest paper. For those who don't know us, Open From Europe is a Brussels-based think tank working at the intersection of open technologies and public policy. Just a bit of housekeeping before we get started. Our events are a space for open exchange, and we are very happy to take questions from the audience. If you'd like to ask a question during the panels, please write your question in the chat. To write in the chat, you need to be logged in with a matrix ID. A matrix is an open standard for real-time communication that is aiming to bring email-style interoperability to chat, video conferencing, et cetera, meaning you can talk to anyone with a matrix ID, even if you're using a different client or server. Today's event runs an element which is based on matrix, and you can create an account by clicking the green G in the top left corner if you don't have one already. Please take note that this event, like all OFE activities, is covered by the OFE Community Participation Guidelines, which you can read on our website. And a reminder, this event is being recorded. So we call today's event Open Strategic Autonomy Public and Private Sector Perspectives. So clearly we're going to get some interesting discussions from the two sides, but we wanted to provide our view too and add a little bit of food for thought to structure the discussion. There are many terms associated with Open Strategic Autonomy. There's digital serenity, there's digital autonomy. Some people even talk about autarchy. What do these terms mean? All of these terms stem from the widely accepted view that Europe is on the back foot when it comes to digitalization to digital economy. We wanted to make a contribution to a possible approach how to address this, focusing on three core concepts and ensuring access to key enabling technologies, reducing dependencies and increasing capabilities. And lastly, of course, we also make a few policy recommendations. You can find the paper I'm presenting now on our website. First, I want to outline a few key concepts and considerations we put forward, focusing on dependencies and capabilities. For the paper, we interviewed a number of stakeholders from different perspectives and I'll be highlighting a few of their views on the next slides. You can see the whole list also on the paper because we're going to the next slide. As Alfa says here eloquently, we're now living in a time when digital matters so much it is difficult not to understand a certain uncomfortableness when it comes to control over these technologies. Ideally, an interconnected and open technology sector in Europe would provide the content with cutting edge competitive solutions, well-paid jobs and a turnover that contributes to Europe's tax base and public welfare. It will provide a strong geopolitical position that would allow Europe to set global technological standards promote European values as well as maintain and grow European economy. But clearly things are not quite as rosy as we'd like them to be. Many positives that have been taken but there remains a challenge to policy goals. Now clearly based on policy maker statements digital sovereignty or technological autonomy are policy goals but how are these concepts defined? From our perspective that we think is a pragmatic approach to address this challenge risk to achieving the following four main policy goals are relevant. Economic competitiveness, digital transformation of society respect for European values and laws and continued access to critical technologies. Clearly these policy goals are interlinked but arguably also a layout stem from a view that Europe while having a strong industrial base has struggled to convert this into the digital domain. So if you want to make a sovereign decision in the digital domain, what does that mean? A sovereign decision dependent on the decision maker's ability to make it freely and then also implement it. Thus if sovereignty is reduced this is because dependencies restrict the ability to make the decisions. Such dependencies are ultimately due to missing capabilities missing own code capabilities. We suggest two dependency dimensions that should be addressed primarily on the one side technological dependency and on the other side supplier dependency. Europe has structural one-sided dependencies and technologies and suppliers that reduces ability to provide competitive cutting edge full stack services. Technological dependency needs to be addressed first is a necessary condition for the reduction of supplier dependencies. Yet at the same time sovereignty does not mean auto key while interdependencies help drive equilibrium in a system issues developed from an over dependence. Interdependencies will always exist an interconnected economy and an international one too but the reduction of one-sided dependencies is the crucial approach to increase sovereignty. At the core of this paper lie dependencies Europe has in the digital domain. Here I wanted to highlight something Peter Ganten of OSPA says OSPA the open source business association. Digital sovereignty does not mean protectionism or auto key or something like this. I don't think there's a conflict between trade with other countries and other regions and digital sovereignty but we need a level playing field for trade and to negotiate the rules under which we trade. And the European Commission has defined things rather similarly regarding open strategic autonomy specifically saying the terms strategic autonomy refers to the usability to chart its own cause and line with its interests and values. This does not mean going it alone but rather accepting and managing our interdependence in the best possible way. The addition of openness shows that the EU will be open to trade and will promote stable rules in order to be strong and economically a strong economically and have geopolitical influence. Well, having said that I'm gonna sort of hit you with this relatively big graphic now that outlines the approach that we're taking with this paper. Open technologies at the heart and their increased usage increases the ability to handle technology, reduces technological dependencies, increase know how increases capabilities and reduces supplier dependencies. All of that contributes to achieving our policy goals. So that's all good, but you might ask me why and how do open technologies enable this? It's not realistic to attempt to develop European competing proprietary solutions. In Europe and the world for that matter is a lack of manpower capacity and access to IP. Without them it's unrealistic for Europe to attempt to develop these competing proprietary solutions and expect to reduce supply dependencies. As said in technological access is a necessary condition to achieve this. Here, open technologies should play an ever more critical role. Like the EU, open technologies are based on time-tested legal framework that ensures collaboration and open access. Open technologies are developed internationally and collaboratively. While open-source software alone is already contributing between 65 billion euros and 95 billion euros to Europe's GDP, the potential of open technologies is still not taking full advantage of. Many of the key open tech projects are being steered without European involvement. Open technologies are already present in many IT projects and what needs to change is that they become part of an organization's culture, a deliberate leadership-driven approach to transforming the way innovation is done. This will allow Europe to profit of the collaborative work, multiplying its own investment. By engaging more with open technologies, European suppliers can gain access to, know how in and influence over key enabling technologies. European suppliers can then build their own solutions on top to differentiate their services and use these gains to offer cutting-edge scalable services, contributing to an open, competitive and healthy European ICT market. Now clearly open technologies will not be a panacea to achieve European digital sovereignty, but with these steps we think Europe can strategically reduce both technologies and supplier dependencies while maintaining an open, innovative and competitive digital economy. But regardless of one's view of digital policy strategy centered on open technologies, the reality is that they are already underpinned digital transformation globally today. There are virtually no complex software projects that don't rely on open technologies, be that open source software components that often make up the base technology of software packages, open standards among them file formats, specifications and APIs and other open collaborative methods, mentioning open access, open data, open government, et cetera. According to Synopsys, the cybersecurity company 70% of code they scan is open source and 99% of programs they check have at least one open source component. So the point we're making is not only use more open tech since it's already being used clearly, but use open tech strategically and influence it. Open source software has profited from being clearly defined by the open source initiatives, open source definition. In general, open technologies can be inspected, used, modified and sold by anyone. Unlike when relying on other, more closed forms of intellectual property, for open innovation, the value lies in zero transaction cost collaboration and legal certainty for reuse. Rafael here has also highlighted the philosophical underpinnings with how science and innovation works. Today, no organization has the ability to develop all layers of a complex software stack on its own. Coloration is a necessity and open technologies are the most efficient way to do it. That is why the world runs on it. If developing, even developing a typical industrial application such as predictive maintenance requires a huge amount of different components, then nobody can just redevelop. And European companies cannot afford to try to reinvent the wheel. They need to rely on the infrastructure available to them. Reinventing the wheel would be a waste of the already scarce resources. And as European industrial players realize they gradually need to become software companies, they also realize the normative of the task in front of them, especially for a company that does not have expertise in software development. There's no European digital transformation without open technologies such as open source software, open standards, open APIs, at every level of the technology stack. As bathroom from Daimler says here, the days of building proprietary IT infrastructure are far gone. Companies that are used to an IP heavy model may not find this transition easy. The freedom attached to open technologies are essential to their advantages. Countries and companies in global technology competition are concerned that they could lose access to key enabling technologies, important for the economies, for the businesses and thus reduce the ability to make sovereign decisions. One possible answer is to try to develop domestic technologies or obtain through economic or legal agreements secure and stable access to such technologies. But when relying on open technologies, the freedoms attached to them mean that access to these technologies virtually cannot be impaired. Silicon Valley companies, as Peter points out in this quote here, have effectively and strategically employed open technologies, innovation and scaling power. The calibration and zero cost access characteristics of open technologies have proven to be a combination that has enabled businesses to grow in immense size. Europe needs to catch up and use open technologies strategically. And in many ways, Europe's cultural and organizational model used United University is a very good match for the collaborative and cooperative model brandy of open technologies. Europe prides itself in its win-win approach to trade and policy, seeing itself as the flag-bearer for multilateralism in the world. On the other side, United States and China have often monolithic markets, companies that often have a winner-takes-all approach on a unifying language in the market. The European Union has 24 official languages, it has 27 markets and many local rules and customs. Today, it might be easier for European companies to offer products in the United States in some ways than in all member states of the European Union. To be active in every member state, especially smaller companies need to form alliances. This is also the case for the successful development of open technologies. There is therefore a direct link between the European cooperation model and the open technologies cooperation model. European suppliers need to cooperate to compete in Europe and abroad. European suppliers tend to be smaller. Take the German mittestand, for instance. These companies are typically defined as very localized, medium-sized companies. Instead of offering a broad range of products, they really are leaders in their specific niche and they cooperate with other companies often of a smaller size, too, to provide their value proposition. These companies are currently under a lot of pressure to develop software capabilities. They will need open technologies as a basis for the development, building differentiating products on top of existing components. They will also need to cooperate to build products together that work together. So, open technologies provide the foundation for that from a technical, from a process and from a legal perspective. Because of open technologies, the transaction costs on all of these levels can be radically reduced. So, to round things off, I have eight policy recommendations that we think can support the process and transition we have outlined before. Firstly, for many organizations, it is not intuitive that more openness provides more control. An organization needs to go on a journey from realizing the potential to analyzing the impact on the organization and implementing a rethinking of some of the base assumptions of how value can be extracted. In reality, open innovation represents a huge change for the working methods of an organization and such changes are difficult, even more so if the business model of an organization was built in control over intellectual property. In short, therefore, culture is necessary to use digitalization backlog. Once we compare this to the formation process of the EU a bit, EU member states realize limits to their capabilities and pool their resources and sovereignty to achieve more together. And a similar culture shift is necessary in the business domain. Many companies and governments still need to make the switch at the cultural level. The past has shown that for such a shift to be successful, the organization's leadership needs to have understood the value of openness, the needs to drive the process from the front, especially in those environments which have been traditionally more conventional. Now, secondly, one of the ways to affect such change is creating an OSPO. The open source program office has quickly become the key institution that enables an organization's transformation into an open technology savvy powerhouse. They are more expansive than an open source competent center. OSPO's handle not only the legal compliance work, the integration of open source components and help desk services, but they contribute to the larger organization's strategic goals, privacy, security, trust and collaboration with other organizations. Creating an OSPO should be seen as a new level of ambition and understanding of the power of open technologies. They are about more than only code. They help transform the culture of an organization. This proliferates across the organization's goals and activities and transforms processes that have been in an organization for years. Additionally, the task of an OSPO is also to consist of building networks and communities around priority software. European stakeholders should join efforts to standardize what an OSPO is. European Commission can support European organizations by creating and funding a network of European OSPs and contributing efforts to standardize the creation and running of an OSPO with information on, for example, the necessary legal steps, IP requirements, tax frameworks and labor laws. The open source initiatives open source definition has ensured that there's legal clarity and certainty for the use of and contributing to open source software. The legal certainty is enabling the low transaction costs inherent in using open technologies. Weakening this definition would lead to uncertainty about how to handle open source software and question the framework that is underpinning economic activity in Europe and also in the world and the basis for the world's digital economy. European suppliers and European institutions should clarify whenever possible that open source software is defined by the OSI's open source definition. European institutions should also enshrine this in legal acts. Open technologies have to be used strategically and should be part of a concerted effort to build technological capabilities. Today, most of the base technology already exists or is being developed in many cases in open technology communities. To duplicate code along a geographically defined ecosystem would be an unnecessary drain on scarce resources. European organizations should join, contribute to and take leadership roles in foundations and standards organizations and engage directly with organizations that have similar issues and that build open technology solutions. European organizations can actively initiate and contribute to shared efforts, prioritizing resources of like-minded organizations to common issues and providing solutions in everyone's interest. Existing solutions should be reused and not redeveloped from scratch. European has an SME heavy industry and therefore also needs to consider how to support SMEs in particular. This is a well-known fact. This includes both SMEs that supply IT services as well as SMEs that need to digitize their processes and products. Funding research is important and the use cascading grant structure of the NGI, the next generation internet program has achieved a lot in reaching smaller companies due to its reduced complexity. However, SMEs have also been clear on what they need. They need to be able to sell their products and services in the EU single market as well as global markets. European organizations should prioritize public money to strategically buying products to build capability. The work of European institutions to make public procurement more accessible to SMEs needs to continue and better take into account the change from the acquisition of software licenses to products to acquisition of software services. In addition, tech SMEs employing open technologies should receive specific support for business development. The European Innovation Council here could play a specific role in supporting this process. The current EU recovery grant program could also play an important role in accelerating the shift to open. Open standards reduce dependencies on single suppliers. Especially within complex value chain. Relying on an open standard, which is freely available without IP implementation cost, meaning restriction free, creates an ability to switch suppliers from a more easily with lower cost. So once suppliers stop business in a specific area, a new supplier can continue the work due to open documentation. European suppliers and institutions should prioritize products and services building on open standards wherever possible in the organizations. European institutions should continue the work to ensure standard space procurement is the norm. A step in this direction would be the European multi-stakeholder platform on ICT standardization continuing its work on identifying ICT standards relevant for public procurement. Europe is an open economy that profits from access to the most advanced technologies at market prices. The efficiency of such a market is difficult to beat and Europe would lose access to cutting edge technologies if an approach would be adopted that would exclude non-European suppliers as Europe does not have the capabilities to replicate these technologies without open technologies. So international cooperation here is important. Open technologies are global and excluding certain suppliers would have a chilling effect and negatively affect the ecosystem. This could threaten Europe's access to important open technology based components. Instead, a practical approach to address dependencies is to analyze what policy outcomes are aimed for and set uniform requirements for every supplier that corresponds to these aims. Every supplier that wants to be active on the European market has to conform to these requirements. Positive examples can be found in the Digital Markets Act and the Data Act which attempt a regulatory approach to address locking. Their focus on addressing ex-anti gatekeeper dominance and strengthening regulatory requirements to ensure smooth switching and porting of data and digital assets is a welcome step forward. In combination with building own technological and supply capabilities this would be more effectively addressed the broader issues at play. And the last recommendation, many of the recommendations we set out here will require some time to show an impact. So we suggest rethinking the way, because we suggest rethinking the way innovation is performed understanding that with increased complexity and scaling to hundreds of millions while also having limited resources collaboration is necessary. But in fact, the most efficient approach, reducing technological and supplier dependencies requires building and continually growing capabilities. Past experiences have clearly shown that such a culture change takes time, leadership and stamina. Thus, European organizations and institutions need to follow a long-held EU mantra. Do not let a good crisis go to waste. Consider long-term strategies on how to institutionalize them in order to make them future proof. The digital and green transformation goals coupled with significant EU recovery funds provide a unique opportunity to build and scale sovereign digital solutions which not only respond to the needs of European citizens but also drive European values and competitiveness. Yet the digitalization and decarbonization challenges will outlive any current crisis and the European approach to these challenges does needs to keep that in mind. So I'll finish it here. If you want to talk, send me an email. You can see my address here. I will not say the word open technologies any more for the next two weeks, though, since I will be on vacation. So I will respond after.