 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Zuzana Varsa. I'm the Director of Research at OpenFuture. And I would like to welcome all of you to the last panel of this wonderful conference. I know we're standing between you and the final drink, so we'll keep the panel exciting. I have with me a group of excellent experts who bring a wealth of experience and expertise, starting on my right Adriana Groch, co-founder of the Sovereign Tech Fund, Francesca Bria, economist, policy expert, and also former Director of the Italian National Innovation Fund, Paul Keller, Director of Research, not Research Policy at OpenFuture, our gracious host who requires no introduction. Welcome, and last but not least, Mikhail Lenners, who's the Strategy Director at NLNet. And for the next 40 minutes, we'll be making the case for the big EU Open Source Fund. And I'm delighted to be moderating this discussion because we are at a very interesting moment in time. Just two days ago, I attended a conference here in Brussels on antitrust regulation and the New World Order, organized and chaired by the amazing Cristina Caffara. Some of you attended that conference, some of you spoke there, and one of the main takeaways is this absolute certainty that we are at an inflection point and that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how we think about, in that context, antitrust and competition law, but also regulation more broadly, and related to the role of the state in shaping markets, including the digital market. And the common thread running through the panels was that states cannot repeat the mistakes of the past when it comes to digital markets. The states and public institutions cannot stay at the sidelines and hope that the markets will handle everything on their own. So, in Europe, that recognition has already borne fruit over the last few years. We have seen the adoption of a number of laws that were mentioned here already, so the DMA, the SA, etc. And these legal acts at least have an ambition to handle the biggest challenges of digital markets head on, and this ambition wouldn't be possible without the mistakes that were made in the past. However, there appears to be an increasing recognition, at least in some circles, that regulation alone will not suffice. It needs to be coupled with investment and support in digital infrastructure. And this is the topic of this panel. So later this year we'll have European elections and the new commission will have a new work plan, and afterwards the commission will begin preparing for the adoption of the new multi-annual financial framework, so the timing for putting ideas and making demands could not be better. And so my first question goes to you, Mikhail. We've learned in the previous presentation that the huge majority of projects funded under NGI umbrella is open source. So in a way, NGI could be considered a prototype for this big EU fund that we want to discuss today. So could you explain elaborate a little bit more, what do we actually mean when we say funding for open source projects? Because we learned that this, and we heard a lot about innovation, but we know that innovation is not enough, right? We need funding for maintenance, we need funding for communities, et cetera, et cetera. So how does it look from your experience? So if you look at it, obviously every little pile of money has a tag to it. And NGI was R&D money. It came from the hard traditional piles of money handed out in the cascading. So the limitation that we had is that it had to be R&D. But of course, as we know in the whole ecosystem, you have the research part, like the traditional innovation part, but the development part also involves fixing things that are wrong. I mean, a developer that has a burning house cannot be expected, like has technical debt, cannot be expected to innovate. So you need to solidify these efforts. And then of course, we also see that at the scale that we're operating with 80,000 people in the ecosystem, 1,000 projects that are touched, capacity becomes a problem. There are not enough chip designers in Europe. There are not enough open hardware people in Europe. There are not enough protocol experts in Europe. So you need to grow them. So in some cases, we have to actually start whole educational programs just to keep up our own capacity to support the programs. And of course, that's just a proxy of the actual work happening. So I think when we talk about funding, if we have one fund and it has to do maintenance and it has to do research and innovation and it has to do capacity building, maybe we should already be thinking about different funds because there are different problems. One of the problems, for instance, with capacity building is can you afford to become good at something if you're in a minority group and you're already facing hardship? If you're, I guess, over-representing maybe the open source community is typically over-represented in terms of white males between 20 and 55 with a certain higher education. But if we want to build capacity outside of that, we're going to need separate instruments as well. So it really is a big pile of financial need that we have to project. And I think it's a systemic one. Just like the Erasmus programs, we want to make students travel across Europe and learn about Europe and build skills and see across the borders. Well, maybe for the open source community, we need something similar, systemic. So not something that falls apart when, well, say the European Commission decides to take a left turn or a right turn and abandon the next generation internet program, even though it would be stupid to do so because it's the best program since sliced bread. Thanks for that. Diana, how does it look like from your perspective? You're the co-founder of Sovereign TechFound and although it's still quite young, it can't provide a blueprint for what we're talking about today. So how do you see those challenges in funding open source? And can the lessons learned at the national level in your opinion be translated into the EU level, how the two might interact and maybe what are some of the common misconceptions about funding open source, public funding open source? We have 30 minutes and 50 seconds for this answer. No, where do I start now? There were multiple questions, so maybe about the blueprint first. I think what we need is more actors in this field and not less, especially actors coming in with public money for the public interest. It's not about driving anyone out, it's by bringing more actors in, creating desired resilience and also, dare I say it, redundancy. It's a good thing because as you said, you can take turns and then if you have just one or two actors providing support, that is very dangerous for a community that supports on that kind of support. So it's about the actors, how many and what kind of mission they have and the blueprint the Sovereign Tech Fund provides is now just another addition for how we can learn to scale things up quickly. In my opinion, I think it's good to start with a laser focus on very specific tasks in maybe a smaller environment and then to scale up, then to say this is a very big mission, as you said, many questions and come very top down and then learning on the way, oh it doesn't even work, instead maybe start smaller and then combine forces and build up. And I think the learnings do definitely apply because we're not looking with a narrow focus when it comes to location. So the Sovereign Tech Fund is not funding in Germany. We're looking internationally for projects. We heard that also before, I think Gap said it in his words, it's very important to also not limit this international co-creation and cooperation in the community. So also the programs we design need to take into account how the community works. And there was a third question. Common misconceptions, what was the biggest surprise for you when it started? Yeah, absolutely. The common misconception is I think to always look at the end product first and not think about all the underlying work that needs to happen. So really take into account the chain of steps and software components involved and communities involved and have a holistic approach to really create impact. I know it's more attractive to do something you can showcase, especially working with the public sector. They also like that you can showcase things and the more invisible it becomes, the harder it gets. Also there's no glory in prevention. All those things come into play and they make it sometimes really hard to do the work that is very necessary. Also funds are always limited. We're working with taxpayers money, so that needs to be taken into account. Also we work with public procurement laws. That makes it more hard. So look where you can have a leverage effect and do the work that is maybe harder and less attractive. But do it good because it will scale and create some real impact and then see how this fertile ground leads to some really nice effects. But do not just look at one layer and forget about the rest and think it will sort itself out because it will not. Thanks for that. Paul, Open Future has been arguing for a European Digital Infrastructure Fund. And the economic arguments speak to the imaginations when we hear trillions. We imagine very, very, very big numbers. But what other arguments speak in favor of establishing a fund? In other words, what problems would such a fund solve? So I think we've talked about this idea of a public digital infrastructure fund without necessarily having an exact instrument in mind. But I think we need to shift the discussion. I find it very instrumental what Michiel said at the beginning about if you look how we created this opportunity for the NGI. It's carved out of the research pillar of the EU's budget that comes with certain constraints on the logic, as you described. And we will either be carved, like these activities will be carved out of a pillar, or we will need to argue for our own pillar. And in that sense, this idea of public digital infrastructure or digital public infrastructure is very strategic. We need to make a case why there is a part of society, a part of our societies in the digital realm that needs to be treated separately, that needs to be thought at the very beginning of budget discussions. And you mentioned this is essentially the multi-annual financial framework, a discussion that will take place or will become visible in 2027 again. But we need to be strategic about how we want to position ourselves going in there. And I found it very encouraging to hear some of the lessons on the foundations panel earlier today, where it was about reflection on how this community, which is present here, sort of understood that there is a necessity to act together for a common interest in interfacing with policymakers. That's often very reactive, right? But we need to realize that when there is regulatory measures to be reactive is often sort of what needs to be done. What we tend to forget is that the other side of what public institutions do, budget plan, is like a very predictable process. We can tell you right now, these discussions will be in 2027. And so we need to have this narrative that says there is a need to invest in infrastructure, which carries with it these notions with a stronger focus on things like maintenance of successful products and essential products, but also maybe carries notions of investing into institutions that can carry this infrastructure with it. That narrative, that discussion needs to start now. And I would encourage like the foundations, the other stakeholders in this space to realize that. The earlier you realize, the earlier you invest into taking position with an eye to these discussions, which are to come the more successful we are going to be hopefully in three to four years where we don't have to carve out something out of another budget line, but maybe we can be a budget line. Can I surely respond to that? Maybe let's do the first round and then a round of responses. Because I wanted to comment on this, because our focus right now is the public funding for open source. And that could be seen as this sign of this new wave of approach towards shaping digital markets, stronger role of the state, et cetera. But do you see a place for private funding in such a European fund? Do you think that these two are exclusionary or could you see like a cooperation between the two sources? Well, that comes down to like a fairly interesting like governance question of this specific fund. But if we take a few steps back and just look at let's say funding into the open source or digital commons ecosystem, I think we need to, I actually use a simpler dichotomy than Michiel with his four. I essentially think of like innovation or new funding, new things and then maintaining old or existing things. And on the question of maintaining old and existing things, the big question is why aren't the companies paying more? And I really want to point out that a bunch of companies do pay a lot. We have open SSF, for example. There are investment vehicles in order to maintain this commons. But just like any commons, there is still a sustainability challenge in that a large number of companies extracts or realize, depending on how you see it, huge amounts of value out of open source. The fact that there is a sustainability challenge while so much value is created, I think begs the question is not like do they have a role? It's just why does the government even have to think about this? Well, but the answer there is you learn it in Economics 101. It's a commons challenge. And so I think if there's something that should come with government funding, it's also figuring out the governance structures that need to be put in place to increase the private funding into the sustainability challenge as well. Because commons are not a private or public thing. It's that peculiar thing in the middle. But then when it comes to funding new things, well, I don't know exactly what will be important decisions made by whoever sets up this fund. But private companies, they are going to fund commons in the future as well. They already are. Companies are building together open source every day. And they are putting resources and money into this. And I think here the important thing that governments also have to understand is that there is a massive ecosystem already in place. And they are in this case joining something that already exists and they're not creating something new. But I'm always here with a word of caution around those things. Thanks for that, Francesca. One of the risks of the greater involvement of states in shaping the digital markets is that idea of a big state. So the risk is that when fighting big tech, we end up with a big state. I recall you mentioning that last time I saw you speak. Can you elaborate on that? What are your thoughts on that? Is there like a middle way, like a third way that we can design? Yeah, thank you. First of all, I think it's quite strange that a panel on money happens at the end of the entire conference. Because I would think, you know, this is why you gather all this big community. The message, I think, to policymakers to Europe, it's obvious, no? It's like, here we need to think how to strengthen, how to scale, how to invest. I think you want to be pretty clear about that from the upfront at the beginning. Obviously what you're all saying is a lot of things are working. We have a lot of initiatives. They are probably fragmented. We want to see Europe stepping up and make this a fundamental challenge for Europe's future. I think this, in my view, this should be the big message. And for a lot of different reasons, because obviously Europe needs a Europe stuck. I think we all agree on that. And that Europe stuck, we don't. Okay, fine. But I mean, this has done a conversation that we should have. Does Europe need to have a Europe stuck that is open, sovereign and independent? And why do we need, why do we understand as Europeans that technological sovereignty is also economic sovereignty, is also political sovereignty, but it is also about, you know, environmental and social sustainability. This is a vision that I think, you know, it's like giving a directionality to technological advancement in a way that you want to benefit society at large. And I think that's the place where Europe can make a difference to say we have an agenda, technology and economic agenda for public interest. For people first, because we understand that, you know, artificial intelligence, digitization is massively changing society. We have seen it during the pandemic, you know, what it means for education, what it means for healthcare, what it means for the labor market, what it means for cities that are becoming digital in green. So we know that this is a massive transformation of our societies. And I think that's where Europe can really make a difference. Going to your point, I've been always advocating that you have a third way for Europe to come in, which doesn't mean bad competition, it's good competition. So if you have the tech, the big tech giants from Silicon Valley and you have the big state model of China, I think there is a third way for Europe, which is technology in the public interest. And I think if you look to the regulatory, okay, what are the problems? Maybe we don't agree on Europe's stock, but let's see if we agree on the problems. So I think the first problem, and you mentioned the competition conference and antitrust conference, it's a massive concentration of power. Do I need, we agree on that, great. Okay, so we do have an unprecedented industrial concentration of power in the digital economy. And I think that's a space where Europe is doing its, I think, good role. So we are saying we are regulating the digital economy. You mentioned some of the regulatory standards that we're putting in place. Of course, we hope they're global standards. But I think, you know, now there is an antitrust investigation, for example, on open AI and Microsoft deal. Let's see what comes out of that. I mean, there was Lina Khan from the FTC authority. She was pretty determined and I think our colleagues at DigiConnect will do a good job in trying to, you know, create a much better regulatory framework for the digital age. Now, we also understand this is not enough. The DSA, the DMA, you know, all the different regulations, even the AI Act, they're closing it today. If I'm not wrong, I look at commission people and what's happening. This is not enough. That's why we have a digital industrial strategy. I think this is very much needed. It is really much needed because you know how much investment you need. And if you look at the numbers, I'm sorry to say, we do have a technological sovereignty problem. Over 80%, maybe even over 90% of critical dependency. Cloud, chips, critical raw materials, AI, data. We do not control the key infrastructures layer in the digital economy. So this is a problem. It's a problem of economic security, of competitiveness, but also of social welfare. And that's where I get to the point that yes, digital industrial strategy is good, but it's not enough only to copy the models that are out there. So I'm not advocating for Europe to have its big tech. I think what you're doing here is what Europe should have, which is an open sovereign independent ecosystem of technologies in public interest. But this needs a 10 billion fund. I'm sorry, I just want to throw the provocation because I think we are all aware what it takes to maintain and build good software, what it takes to innovate on top of the infrastructure, what it takes to control from the chips to the software to the data. And on top of that, and I finish, I wrap up, build good digital services for citizens. I've been working as a CTO in the city of Barcelona. I know that the narrative cannot only be for geeks. I'm sorry, we can't just say we comply to EU policy. We want to say we have services for you that will improve your life. You know, we want to have actual pan-European interoperable digital open sovereign services that work for citizens. Do we agree on that? Okay, but do we get there? Thank you. Yes, bravo, amen. Francesca, you called out several elephants in the room. So I think I will give the rest of the panel the chance to either react to what the others said or I will just reiterate two of those elephants. One is the question of scale, right? I keep hearing, which irritates me a lot, that public funding will never match private funding and this is as if the public institutions throw in the towel at the beginning. That being said, the question of the scale just repeats that logic of the private industry where bigger is better, maybe bigger isn't always better, well maybe we don't need to match the private funding, maybe we can find a different way. And the other elephant in the room to me is that even the European institutions rely on proprietary software. And how do we move away from that? So whoever wants to react to the question of scale to anything else, Adriana, your first. Just very briefly, I mean, we have the instruments in place now. We just need to scale them up. I mean, we know what we're doing, right? So we know how it works, we know how to scout for the technologies, we know how to contract them. We have some ideas in pilot stage, we have some things that are running smoothly. So we're ready if there's a commitment. And I think this is coming back to what Paul said and Francesca said about there needs to be an understanding of this mission. So yeah, in other words, what we need is political will. It must be. And what we need to do is generate that political will. So I think if we look at what the commission has been doing, for instance, in its own house, we're one of the smallest programs they've done. And arguably the most successful precisely because we weren't drowned by saying, well, why don't you do all of everything? But instead we do small things at a human scale. So the developers in the open source community are humans. And we take their talents. We couldn't scale them up if we wanted to. That's where we need slow and capacity building. We can do more, but if you give us 100 times more budget, I'm very sure we would drown in it. It would literally attract all the wrong actors. So I think the ambition ultimately we scale to a big amount because I think we can pay for our own upkeep. And it's like... Can we afford to wait? What? Can we afford to wait and keep it slow? I think we can scale up and double it and triple it. But doing it 100 times, maybe that's a... In one go, that might be a bit... But also I wanted to take the notion of funding a bit apart because imagine, close your eyes and you can now pick a place where you sleep in an apartment building. It's either Tokyo or Ankara. What do you choose? It's literally simple. There's going to be an earthquake and you can choose. Do you choose the policy where there's no infrastructure? Government has let everything go. There's no policy. There's no structure. What we do inside NGI is a lot of quality assurance. We have audits on everything. We package everything. We do accessibility scans. That's not going to projects. That's funding going to other people checking up on these projects. If there's an earthquake in Ankara, many people die. If there's an earthquake in Tokyo, everybody gets out of the building safe. And I think the digital commons that we're building, if we really want to structure them in a same way, we also have the mechanism steering the quality, steering the whole ecosystem because it's not just funding small isolated things. It's building the whole common ground. I think that was something also said before that publishing the code is just one percent and building the community around it. The ecosystem support for that community is what is needed. As I know, you wanted to comment. Thank you, Francesca. Finally, we've got a number on the table to compare things with. Coming back to my old point about innovation, creating new and maintaining old. The funny thing with the DIT software is that you create new by using a lot of already created software. And that is why I think there might be an important distinction just in the conversation about very clearly different strategies around the maintenance, which is not a big competition question. It is not a zero sum game. We are all depending on this software, be it Europe as challengers in digital markets or countries who have the largest tech companies in the world. We're all dependent on this stuff. And I think that probably politically it will be very valuable to separate these conversations as well because, as I said in my initial statement here today, there is an international space station element of open source sustainability. If it's a 10 billion fund, 2 billion fund, 100 billion fund, I hope that what we're building with, we have made sure to invest into that material and make that stable. It doesn't matter. We need to get that done first. And that is a global challenge and not a European challenge. Paul, over to you. I just want to respond a little bit to that assumption that it's difficult to scale. I think that is one type of work and that doesn't scale what you describe. Or at least not to the scale of 10 billion. But what is missing, when you build infrastructure, you do not have the people who do the building who draw the plans for the infrastructure. You do not have that individual work which scales difficulty, needs to organize on a societal level. It needs to come, it needs to be driven by this idea about the society you want to have and the society that you want to build. And so there is to some degree building capacity to build this infrastructure in an open way. But we also need to relearn as society or we need to reclaim this space of envisaging this infrastructure, requiring the plans that need to be built and need to be filled. And what for me still is one of the things we need to think and come back to the foundations. Foundations are maybe one example, but we probably need to think about other types of institutions for the digital age that help us doing this, that help us building these things. I'm still waiting for sort of, why are we constraining our public institutions, the libraries, the research institutions? Why are they largely constrained by the market? Are pushed out of the digital realm? We need to give them a role back at the center of these types of digital societies that we want to build. We need them to identify what type of infrastructure so that we need. We need to make them the centers of these services for citizens that are delivered, that are useful. And we need both. We need the tools and the ingenuity that comes from developing software, but to some degree we also need to build these bigger lines in which need to be filled by those software systems. That makes me think of a metaphor I've heard recently that Europe cannot be a playground, but must be a player, right? And it seems that these institutions, this public interest institutions have become like a playground for big tech, and now we want to turn them into actual players. Francesca. Yeah, I think I want to mention another elephant in the room. Please do. Just at the very end. So I think we can also agree about the fact... He's going to say no. About the fact that the business model isn't working. I mean, I think this is for me a massive thing. The business model of digital platforms. I mean, I think the question... It was mentioned a little bit, but I think not too much. So the question that monetizing and manipulating personal information and data is undermining European democracy, is undermining democracy overall, but it's certainly very, very concerning. This is still the main business model of the digital age. It is also a question of digital trade. Nowadays, if you look at digital trade, the core is data. It's not even trading. Products and services is the trading of data. And we have seen the massive effect that this has on democracy, on all of us. Not only because it discriminates, but also because massive disinformation, massive... We're going to see also during the election this year, which is a very, very important part for us as liberal democracies. Very clear also in the AI Act, obviously. So how do we turn away this business model that creates... Because it's the business model that creates these problems. So if you say, yes, we're asking companies to actually clean their platforms and to monitor and so on, but if the business model isn't working, then we have to change the business model. And I expect this community to move away from that kind of surveillance capitalism, which is a business model that doesn't work, into a very different, more sustainable business model that also redistributes and creates public value. And yes, that benefits small companies, small businesses, workers, citizens, and a variety of people, because there is massive concentration of power there. And the data is at the very center of this power. We're absolutely running out of time for what I see. We have two and a half minutes. We have two and a half minutes. So let's organize a conference on that topic, but before we do that, closing remarks, let's start with you. Okay, closing. No, no, no, we have to. We are also the ones who are holding back drinks. So then maybe I come, I pick up what Astor said and just as a reminder, we have a number and we identify a need and now it's like, how does this fit in? What is the mission? What is the strategy? So just to tell briefly the story of the sovereign tech fund, we are with the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Germany. So the money is coming from them and we were incubated as a new organization that is having this new mission of investing in the foundations for many other players at the Agency for Disruptive Innovation. So it is not two separate things. Definitely not. And I think this is one of the angles that we need to understand and that we need to talk more about. It's not like handing out some nice easy money gifts to some people who do really valuable work. No, this is really critical and we need to have long-term goals and a strategic mission how to support the individuals, the organizations, how to tie together different actors and do match funding. It's also about the companies, of course, and there needs to be some real vision in this field. Thanks, Mikael. Over to you. Your final remarks. Okay, final remarks is... 15 seconds. Yeah, okay. So, hey, I'm very much looking forward to big society instead of big state or big... So I'm a big fan of doing this the way through civil society and the second thing is we also need to clean up and the cleaning up of basically when new projects come into the world, old projects have to die and we have to learn how to do that and just maintenance of everything is impossible. We will have octogenarians ruling the world, the big masterminds and we need this to have a healthy system where we understand how to, well, evolve the ecosystem and deprecate decade-old technologies that are still dominant and that is a challenge that is extremely hard, intellectually very challenging but we need to solve that in addition to all the other things that were mentioned. Great. Thank you, Esther. Yeah, I may be correcting... I started talking about, oh, this is a global challenge, etc. Sometimes when you say that something is a global challenge some nation states shy away from taking it their own it becomes like a common problem in and of itself so let me revert back from that and just kind of put a challenge to Europe. We might be challenger in the digital markets but we're not poor. Why? I would be incredibly proud if Europe went out, even if it's not Europe's job and we went out and took the lead and secured open source for the world and we did that and that will require so much innovation of auditing there will be maintenance there will be understanding what we need to leave behind but let's just do it. I would be incredibly proud if we just took that responsibility on ourselves. Beautiful call to action. Paul, your call to action. My call to action was to some degree in the first intervention, right? It is a call to action to this community that we need to think strategically about securing the nascent support for these infrastructures which brought us here which brought like all of these thousand projects that we heard about not into being but like allowed us to support them to grow them, to nurture them allowed some of them to fail and we need to think strategically about the learnings from this and then building on the learnings we need to make the case for expanding this that's a challenge for all of us in this room for the next three years. Yeah, I'm very simple just change the narrative be strategic put together what works now the initiative that works connect them put forward a plan and turn NGI into a 10 billion European tax sovereignty fund it's very simple. Thank you.