 All right, technology is set up. Always a challenge. Hey, good morning everybody. It still feels a little bit strange to be back on the stage and seeing people and meeting people face to face. We're really excited to be part of this, I think, first European Osprey Con here in London. Let's start with a quick introduction. I'm Jonas van Bogat, solution architect at Alieander and one of the key members of Alieander's open source program office. And I'm here today with Judith. Good morning. Thank you for having me. My name is Judith Schaefergård. I'm part of the Ospo as a community manager. And I'm also a hybrid, as well as Anna. I'm also a screw master at Alieander. And for those who are not familiar with Alieander, let me give you a quick overview. Alieander is the largest distribution system operated in the Netherlands. We've developed and operate energy networks. And to give you an idea, we have nearly 6 million customer connections. We manage over 90,000 kilometers of electricity get and over 40,000 kilometers of gas grid. And it's our key task to make sure Dutch households and companies stay warm and have access to energy at all times. Today, we're not going to talk about what an Ospo is or why you need an Ospo. Because I think most of you already know if others will talk about that today. What we are going to talk about is our journey building an open source program office. And hopefully, you will know after this talk what that journey looked like. And you will know what we have learned, what will hopefully help you and inspire you in your journey. We'll start with a quick introduction of the key challenges Alieander as a distribution system operator has today. Next, we'll dive into why we started on Ospo, what our Ospo do today, and we're in it. And you will tell you more about our journey and what we have learned. And hopefully, that will be, at the end, still a little bit of time left for a couple questions and discussions. So what are the challenges a distribution system operator like Alieander is facing today? In 10 years time, the way we live, work, and travel won't be the same. And we see the fossil fuels are becoming more scarce and have a growing impact on our environment. And we already see that worldwide new initiatives are emerging to conserve energy and make it more sustainable. This changes the way we generate, use, and distribute energy. And this has a huge impact for companies like Alieander. Because we see that distribution system operates like Alieander is facing major challenges to support this decision. Fossil fuel power systems are closing down in order to reduce CO2 emissions. We see the number of solar panels and wind energies growing quickly. And also, if you look at the streets, the number of electric vehicles is growing expensively. And Alieander, to support this transition, Alieander is investing heavily in new solutions and digital solutions to make our energy network smarter in order to support this transition. And we believe by investing in digital solutions, we can make it possible that our grids are not only ready for today, but also for tomorrow. And one of our themes in our digitization strategy is co-creation. And for those who are not familiar with co-creation, co-creation is a form of collaborative innovation where ideas are shared together and worked on together instead of kept from themselves. And I was really excited that co-creation was on Alieander's digitalization strategy because this was one of the first steps of getting high-level management attention to open source. Because open source is quite connected to co-creation and is more and more seen as one of the means at Alieander for more co-creation in the sector. And this was then further strengthened by the first open source strategy that was drafted. And also Alieander's decision to join Elev-Energy as a member. Elev-Energy, for those who don't know Elev-Energy, is an open source body focused on the power system sector, hosted within the Linux Foundation. And its goal is to bring companies and communities together that work on digital solutions in the focus area of the energy sector. And after joining Elev-Energy and bringing in our first open source project under the umbrella of Elev-Energy and co-organizing an open source bootcamp event, we started to recognize a need within Alieander for a group of people with the know-how and mandate to give structure and organization to Alieander's open source plans and ambitions. And that was the first step of creating an OSPO. Some open source enthusiasts in the company came together and we decided, myself included, to start an OSPO. This was luckily retrieved very positive by the rest of the organization and further formalized. To give you an idea of our OSPO activities, which may differ from organization to organization, let's talk me through with our seven key activities. First of all, our OSPO is set as the center of knowledge for open source and inner source within Alieander. This means teams can come to the OSPO with questions about open source licensing, in what criteria you need to review open source software, and also how to participate in open source community or even inner source communities. Secondly, the open source program office is also responsible for Alieander's open source strategy. And for us, this is not a one-time thing. Our open source strategy, as our OSPO is constantly evolving and updated yearly. And thirdly, together with the enterprise architect team, we advise on a strategic merit of where to use open source software and in which open source projects to participate in. And also which internal projects we actively open source and maintain. This is because we believe that only projects that have strategic merit should be open sourced. And because also open sourcing a project can be very valuable and help to bring the project further, it can also be very costly and time-consuming. And fourth, we are enabling co-creation of open source software in the organization through collaboration with open source bodies, like Alavanagy. These open source bodies really helped us to get knowledge from other organization experts both in Europe but also outside Europe to learn from. And also, there's a great way to get connected with other organizations working on similar topics. And fifth, we're also promoting the use and awareness of open source and inner source software at Alieander. This we do, for example, for your blogs on the internet or for your webinars, both organized internally but also externally, and being on conference like this one. And I think this activity was one of the most important activities in our first phase. Just getting the word out what open source means in the organization and inner source means and what it can bring our organization and how it can help us in the things we as Alieander have to achieve today and tomorrow. And sixth, we're also addressing the risks and importance of compliance with open source software. A good example of this is the open source review checklist that we introduced, which get an overview of the commonly used open source licensing and how to treat code under them. We already see that this helps teams to make decisions on what open source software to use. More wisely, saving them time and costs and also reducing the risk for us as Alieanders of all. And seventh, we are enabling community meetings even when possible. This we do both inside the company and bringing teams together, working on similar topics but also outside Alieander to bring teams working in different companies together and sharing IDs and challenges and see if open source collaboration is possible. A good example is a hackathon we organized earlier. To give you an idea who are in our Ospo, let me tell you more about that. Our Ospo consists of two teams, the core team and the expert team. The core team is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Ospo and meets a B weekly. Consists of an Ospo manager and community manager, two architects and enterprise architect and business manager and IT manager. And good to say that all those people are not full-time involved in the Ospo, they also have a role outside the Ospo. Secondly, we have an expert team with experts on different domains, for example, IT, data, security, legal and communication and marketing. And they are consultant when needed. And that both teams are really diverse in terms of background, management levels and departments really helped us in setting up the Ospo and creating awareness throughout the organization, but also tackling the quite diverse topics we came across as an Ospo. Now to tell you more about our journey, here's Judith. Thanks. I hope you'll forgive me for bringing my cheat sheet. I want to be sure I tell you the right things. I'm going to take you on with me through the journey we took as Ali Anders Ospo. As Jonas mentioned, we joined ElefEnergy early 2020 and this book marked for us the moment that we really could start going. We now had a place to find like-minded people who knew more than us and who faced the same challenges as us in the energy sector. I do have to face it the right way. We then organized the hackathon on a couple of our projects, which was a first way to dive our toe into the water and to see what's out there. And next, as Jonas said before, we published the reviewed license list on our Wiki page. This was the first for us, the development of the Wiki page as well. It was a place for people to go and to check out more information on working with open source and the reviewed license list. We want our projects to be compliant, to use the right license, and particularly not to use certain licenses. And we want to have a place where people could go and check if they are using the right license. But still, they had to actively go there and check if they are using the right license. There might be an easier way, but I'll talk more about that later. The Wiki started to expand during 2020. Besides having the reviewed license list, we also published some best practices on the Wiki. We now had some experience working in open source. We could tell people about it, and so we decided to post our best practices on the Wiki, and we could communicate our best practices to existing and to starting teams. Still, to share this knowledge with over 5,000 employees is a bit of a challenge. Unfortunately, not all of them are checking our Wiki daily to see if there's anything new they can learn from us. So we decided to bring the information to our colleagues more directly. And so we hosted some webinars. And the first was on open source itself for the company itself. So not an external webinar, an internal webinar for our own colleagues to come in, to join, to learn more about open source because we felt we needed to tell people about what it is. Even with software developers, you cannot always assume that they know what open source is, what the value of it is, and that they know how to contribute. And especially, they don't always know what's happening in open source within the company because we had a lot, we already had a lot, sorry, a couple of projects working on open source within Alihander, but still with 5,000 plus employees, you cannot always know, the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing. So we decided to host the webinar. It was very basic. What is open source? What can it do for you? How do you work with open source initiatives? And there were also some presentations from projects themselves, telling others why they are working with open source software and how they are doing that, which was very interesting. It built awareness within the company and it also made it a bit more tangible to see what we're doing and why. The second webinar we hosted was on Operator Fabric, which is one of our projects that we are doing or working on with RTE, which is a similar company as us in France, and we hosted this with LFNG. Having this webinar really helped our project, Operator Fabric, to have something to point to when you have people coming at you, asking, hey, what are you doing? What is your project? And then having a webinar that people can check out before going to GitHub can really help explaining what you're doing. During 2020, we realized that inner source is actually might be a better way to introduce people to open source. Inner source can be a smaller step for people to interact or to cooperate with others instead of going into open source directly. Even with 5,000 plus employees, as I said, it's hard to see what the other one is doing and the step outside your company can be a really big one and that's why we decided to put more focus on inner source. And it's a way to work together within the company. And well, we decided to post the best practices on the wiki page we mentioned earlier and to have an inner source workshop in which we took one of the departments and we told them about how to work together within inner source. Next, the open source strategy developed further. As Yonah said, it's something we developed quite early on but it wasn't something we had to finalize before going further in open source. It's still developing and it's still growing but it's not something set that we want to have first before going any further. It's still developing and still growing. One of the big milestones for us was to have our very own website on open source. This is something I'm very proud of. It may sound small, I mean, what kind of effort does it take to build a website? But I must say, it was some effort and we now had a way to tell others outside Ali on there to about what we're doing with open source. We're not only talking to our own company now but we're talking to the rest of the world. Still, they have to check out our website and still we had a place to point others towards. When I'm talking to one of you, I can say, hey, check out our website and you can see what we're doing which is very great for us and for us as well. It's also important for us to tell why we do open source. Ali Under is a public company funded by public money and that's also one of the reasons why we feel open source is very important because we cannot just spend money recklessly and just, well, see where we end up. We have to spend it consciously and that's why open source is so important to us. So far, all of our projects had also been part of LF Energy and all of the information on the projects had been part of LF Energy's website and now we had a place of our own to tell about our projects and to tell about what we are doing. With the key message of not keeping it to ourselves. We don't want to keep our open source business to ourselves. The main reason for us to get involved in open source is that we can work together and we can cooperate and find others who face the same challenges and work together to face them. So that's why our website is very useful and I'm very proud that we achieved that. Moving on to April of this year, licenses. I will get back to you on that. We feel it's very important that our projects use the same or the right license and now we built a way of using the right license and we've built a way of including the license checking process into the CICD pipeline which makes it a lot easier for our projects to see if they're compliant which is a very nice thing I think. Next was a webinar on the weather provider API. This is a very small tool that we built ourselves and we decided to open source ourselves. As I said, so far all of our projects were part of or had been part of the LF Energy Foundation but the weather provider API was something we open sourced ourselves just to try and to see what's out there and what's, well, if we could do it ourselves and to have a webinar on that was very nice. It was one of the first webinars we did ourselves as well. I know open source is about collaboration and we really want to collaborate with everyone and organize things with everyone but it was a really good experience for us to see if we could do it ourselves as well and the footage is on YouTube if you want to check it out. The webinar or the website we used to promote the event which is very easy or handy that we had published it before and we made a lot of new contacts which was great for the project itself. One of the final things I want to say in our journey or would like to mention is the inner source portal that has been launched in or was launched in August of this year. When we started doing open source and inner source it sometimes felt that we were shouting in the desert that we have found the source of water. We really felt inner source and open source were the way to go but you have to build a mindset, build culture change, make people aware that this is the way to go. In August or I think a bit earlier because they launched it in August a couple of software engineers built their very own or our very own inner source portal. If you put the correct tag on your GitHub topics your repost shows up in the inner source portal and people can just check it out if there is anything to contribute to or if there is anything they can use that already exists. These developers were not part of the Ospo and I don't mean this in any bad way but we don't want them to because the Ospo is the center of knowledge and we want ambassadors in our organization who are going to build these things for themselves and to take these things with them to their own departments. For us, they did consult the Ospo by the way which was nice but they built it themselves and for us it is a sign that the mindset is catching that people know and see the value of inner source and spend their time building one of these portals is one of the signs for us that we're moving in the right direction and that people are moving with us. Currently, we're open sourcing two more projects with LF Energy I think we'll publish about those very soon on both our website and on LF Energy's website and we're really looking forward to that. We've asked a couple of colleagues what they think of the Ospo you can read it yourselves, I'm not going to brag but still, the overview is that the Ospo helps the company in building an open source capability and mindset it is now a place to go to, a recognizable institute and we are very happy that we've accomplished this. To sum up what we've learned for us, perfect is the enemy of good. You don't have to have a 20 plus page business plan with very detailed roadmaps and such. We started and we tried to see what the company needed in order to move forward and that's where we focused on. There are some things that really helped us along the way. Business sponsorship from high level management, for example and I don't mean money, yes. Sponsorship in regards of money is very handy but it's not the most important thing. It really helps if the words open source are being mentioned in all layers of the company. It also helps to have a group of enthusiasts people who have a passion for open source. As I said, these developers building the inner source portal were not part of the Ospo, but they're ambassadors for our cause and they, well, we allow them to get to work and just go out and inspire others as well. Our first reaction was, OK, let's get them involved in the Ospo but that's not what you want. You want to have various people in the organization that you can ask to, well, build your Ospo in your open source capability together. We think the Ospo works best if you're at a center of knowledge and that people outside the Ospo get to work and do the thing and are open source ambassadors. As you can see in our journey, the movement comes from within the company now instead of only from the Ospo. The last thing I would like to mention is communication. Open source, which has been mentioned before, is a mindset, a culture change. It doesn't happen in a day, unfortunately. We have to be patient and we have to build awareness. It's from the software developer checking out other repositories. To see if there's anything that he can use to the sales department checking out if there is anything open source available before checking anything else. As long as you keep communicating and telling the story about open source, you keep the fire going and that's what we're aiming for. As I said, it takes time to change, but be patient and go for it. Thank you, Judith. Today, we talked about the challenges of a distribution system operator like Alienum. We shared the importance of co-creation, open source and the Ospo for Alienum's digitalization ambitions. We dived into what our Ospo does, we're in it, and we shared our story and what we have learned. We really hope that telling you this story today will help you and inspire you in your journey. And also, please check out our website if you want to learn more about open source or stay up to date. And also, check out our GitHub community if you want to get started with one of our open source projects. And if you're excited about L of Energy and work in the sector or are related to the sector, also check out their website. I want to say thank you very much for your time and interest. And I think we have time for still a couple of questions. Yes, it's the last one. So we started, especially in the beginning phase, we really started as an informal team with people from different parts of the organization. Having a full-time job besides that, we're really bringing open source further. We now see in the movement two years that at least some members have a little bit more dedicated time, like 50% of the time for the Ospo, myself included and you included as well. But still, we think it's important to maximize that 50% because it really helps that you're not only part of the Ospo, but also take an active role in one of the digitalizations effort in Elienda because it helps to bridge the gap between the teams working on solutions and developing solution in day-to-day business to the Ospo. To add, I think what's also key for us is that the people in the Ospo are not only part of IT, but also part of business. And the manager of the Ospo is also part of the business and not IT especially, which helps for us to get a really diverse group and to see both sides. Yes. It's an interesting follow-up from that question. So there's a real misconception that open source is just software. And if you consider taking on grid strategy and open source and batch, getting all the energy companies to buy into multi philosophy, how do you run the grid? I fully agree that, and that we also see in the collaboration with other companies, it's not only about working together on software. And I think it's an important part, of course, also in the energy sector because software is also an energy sector taking a large role. But it's also just by sharing ideas on how to tackle the challenges we have with the energy transition and sharing vision on that. And we also have sessions on that, which doesn't lead to any code, can be very valuable for us as a company, but also for others. So you have already published some of your papers. I'm interested because there's no real framework. Because you haven't got software, which is a framework. And then you try to put the strategy out of how the people then do it, pull the question against that, and it becomes quite complex. But it's got to be a really good way of sharing an idea. That's a good question. You see now that we, yeah, it's mostly still a bit traditional there, just sharing up our points and ideas. But you can also think about it and we haven't think about it that way. But I think it's a very instinctive way. We can also organize that in a sort of way where you can just do pull requests on the strategy, share strategy, and commit some reviews. That's an interesting one. Yes. I mean, I'm not starting to say that you started with inner source, then you're moving in parallel into an open-source way of producing software. So at the beginning, in the developer journey, you have someone working in agile mode, maybe in a squad, producing, you know, repeatedly software internally in one corner of the company. Then this person, there are like two steps. One is becoming public for the corporation, which is a challenge for the developer or developer team. The second one is becoming public to the rest of the world. So the question is, have you have you have you seen this journey for a developer or a project in the company and how long does it take? Typically, and what are the usual challenges by middle managers and developers that you see that you are helping with? It really depends on the teams. So we originally really focused on open-source because we had a few initiatives, which really and the teams were really open to that really open-source it. We also see for other teams, which were not that familiar with open-source, that was quite a huge step. And we also more when we get a better understanding of the open-source best practices, we also see that it is greater for collaboration outside, but it also gets great ideas for collaboration inside the company and still see today, unfortunately, because we have quite a large organization that a lot of people work on similar topics and sometimes are building similar solutions and the same solutions. So we see and that helped to also bring in the inner source intention from, hey, let's see if we can get that collaboration internally up and running. And that makes it a lot of easier because if you do it internally, we don't have the legal and the IP discussions which have help source, which makes it a lot more easy to just get started within a source. And later on, we can really have a discussion if that's successful to bring it even a step further, but what requires a little bit more high level management attention. In some cases, I have to say that it's even more complex to collaborate in inner source and the restrictions across countries or even continents compared to open-source because open source is there and it's working. But with inner source, with taxis and all of this thing is, I don't know if you've faced similar things in the case of Aljander, but that's my experience. It's kind of even more complex sometimes to collaborate in inner source because of those constraints. I reluctantly focus in the Netherlands so that saves some things. But I agree, inner source has its own challenges and it's not per se easier than open source. It's not always a solution. Other questions, Medek? Sorry. I can give an example. I think one good example is, I'm not sure if you're all familiar with Kafka, which is a technology for messaging, which we're using quite diverse throughout Aljander's organization with multiple teams working on Kafka and including that in their solutions. What was kind of cool is that we organized that inner source workshop, that one of the teams working on Kafka thought, hey, this is cool, we are working on Kafka, but others as well. Let's start a community around that and organize a day around Kafka and just sharing ideas about how to connect to Kafka and all the challenges I had. And one of the results of that is that we now see that we have a sort for different languages, like Python or Java. Kafka clients emerging, which are used by multiple teams. And teams are really now knowing which teams to connect to if they start with Kafka and can learn from. So I think that's a great example of how, and we are not there yet, so this is one of the examples, but we see that by sharing the story of inner source and open source, it inspires people to seek if they can build communities around topics like that, for example. I still think being out there as an open source program office really makes us recognizable, I think. So we have over the last couple of months, we've had several projects coming over to us asking, hey, I'm going to open source or I want to open source my project. How do I do that? I did see the best practices on the Wiki, but how do I move forward? Or even some people thinking, hey, maybe open source is a good way to go. They hadn't thought about that before, but then decided to go in that direction, which is, well, some way for us to see that the mindset is sketching. And I think one of the challenges for us was when you're so involved in something, for example, with open source, you're tempted to mention it everywhere and assume people know what it is and what it does and why we use open source. But the amount of times I had to explain what it is, well, far increases every day. But yeah, it's just something you have to keep telling people about. And I think for us that was something we learned that we cannot assume the knowledge is there and by keeping the communication open and keeping, well, by keeping on telling people about it really helps developing that knowledge. I think... I think we're out of time. You can ask afterwards and I think you will be happy to answer any questions during the break. So... You're all day. Thank you so much. Thank you.