 Please welcome to the stage Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of Fintech Open Source Foundation and General Manager of Linux Foundation Europe. Good morning, everyone. How are you guys doing? Good? Did you have a good day yesterday? Did you enjoy the sea lions? I actually missed that part, but I heard it was pretty cool. So thanks for making it till Friday. I am actually struggling, but we have a great day today. I would like to start with a couple of housekeeping. Make sure you don't miss the Ask the Expert session, which is going to start at 1.30 p.m. today in the Ocean Foyer on the West Level 1. We have Shu Akan, Dom Foster, and Tom Calloway. This is an amazing opportunity to talk one-on-one with some of the long-time community leaders. After two years stuck at home, I think this is a huge and unique opportunity to connect in person with folks. So please don't miss that. With that, we're going to start our programming for the morning. Our first keynote is actually me. So I will actually start the conversation. How many of you can I get a show? How many of you know that we have a Linux Foundation Europe chapter? Okay. Well, I guess my job is done. I'm leaving. Now, about 50 percent. So maybe it makes sense to give you a little bit of an idea as to why we created Linux Foundation Europe and what is it about? Before we dive into Linux Foundation Europe, I think it's quite pertinent to share a little bit of my personal experience. I divide my time between Linux Foundation Europe, was launched about seven months ago, and actually almost eight now, and Finos, the FinTech open source foundation. In case you're wondering, not Finops, it's Finos. We bring together some of the largest financial institutions in the world collaborating on open source. I have to say that when we started seven years ago, this Italian guy going up and down Wall Street telling banks there was a good thing to share their intellectual property, arguably, at best, the reaction was lukewarm, let's say. I was born and bred in open source. I started contributing to Apache when I was just out of college. And just throwing the open source way at banks, open source for open source sake, wasn't really sticking at that time. And so quickly we realized that we had to change our message. We had to start, as a vertical foundation, we had to start from why? We had to start from the business value of what open source could bring to all the different constituencies. Whether you're a bank and you can get cost efficiency, talent, better interoperability, whether you're a FinTech or a technology company and you want to better integrate in the financial system, whether you're an individual, it's certainly a very sought after workplace in terms of very high paying jobs and so getting a next step in your career. And more recently, whether you're a regulator or part of the public sector, this is an industry that as we are seeing this year could benefit by more and more transparency and the open governance that open source, you know, that on top of open source brings these companies to collaborate together. The reason why I'm saying that is that what we're trying to do in Europe is very similar in terms of bringing all the different constituencies of the community together. In fact, the business of open source is only one of the reasons why open source is eating the world. As I said before, when I started, I had no idea. I mean, nobody was paying me to do so. Nobody was, I had no employer telling me to contribute to open source. We are social animals solving problems together and bigger than what we can do individually. You know, it was what drove me at that time, the conscious aspect of open source that keeps me gravitating towards it. More recently, we are seeing a number of initiatives and you've heard it from Hilary Carter yesterday. We'll talk about it throughout this presentation. Governments are starting to take more and more action into using open source to, you know, solve problems from climate to financial inclusion from DEI. There is an undeniable value of open source and really bringing together our mindshare across individual, private sector and public sector to solve some of the most pressing issues that we have out there. If you guys haven't seen this report, I warmly recommend to check it out. The Linux Foundation research is an amazing tool for us as project leaders, as community members to really be data-driven. This report was published early in the year, maybe late last year, and we call it the fragmentation report because one of the main findings of this report, which was basically, by the way, produced in partnership with Eclipse Foundation and LFAI and Data, LF Networking, was really that many degrees of fragmentation, many types of fragmentation are threatening the global impact that open source can have. What were the key findings? Well, first and foremost, you know, language, culture, bias remain a pretty big issue, preventing to unleash the value that open source projects could actually deliver. Without going into the specifics, I think we're all familiar on how technonationalism, you know, how geopolitics are creating fragmentation in open source communities that, you know, by default are global and are open inclusive to everyone. I mean, as an Italian focusing on Europe, you know, the effect of the war in Ukraine is very much felt in every community. The outcome of the report told us that ecosystem leaders, whether, you know, individuals, corporates, governments want us to do more to work together on common issues, whether it be, you know, policy, cyber security, open source sustainability, these are all areas where across foundations, across nations, across projects, we can do more together. And so that is why in September last year, we launched at open source summit Europe, Linux foundation Europe. Our tagline is collaborate locally, innovate globally. This is really the idea of enabling regional collaborations, but without fostering the fragmentation, without creating silos in the community. The reaction was pretty positive. I'm sure you can read all these different languages. Our website is in five languages, by the way, talking back to the sort of language barriers here. And we were very, you know, encouraged by a super strong reaction in Europe. So what effectively is Linux foundation Europe? First and foremost is a neutral governance entity. It is incorporated in Brussels. It allows us to create projects directly in European territory, in EU territory. And therefore that means that we can create and host our assets in Europe. We can have a better collaboration with European members. And again, whether those be, I call them Europe strong projects, whether they're trying to solve a problem that is specific to Europe, whether they have a strong collaboration with the public sector in Europe and national or at EU level or UK, Switzerland, whether it actually solves a specific problem that Europe is very interested in. That said, Linux foundation Europe is open to any organization in the world. We want to make sure that not to mistake regional collaboration for fragmentation, for vulcanization of technology. I think the Linux foundation is uniquely positioned as the global community that we are, to start local, but bring projects to the global scale. We have a unique footprint across the world. And so we're very encouraged to see that within only seven months, we've passed 100 members. Existing Linux foundation members can join for free. And it really, of course, increased footprint on the ground. We have launched two projects. If you haven't heard about them, Silver, an open wallet foundation, I think two very archetypal, let's say, examples of the type of projects that we can have in Europe. Silver brings together some of the largest telco vendors in Europe on a very specific vertical collaboration. And again, I'm quite biased running a vertical financial services foundation. I think there's a lot of potential as open source move closer and closer to the end users. And then open wallet foundation, much more horizontal, very much aligned with the idea of building a wallet engine that is not just about transactions, but it's about identity, it's about credentials. And again, very much aligned with some of the goals that they use as in rolling out ADOS 2, the European-wide ID. So I think two really good examples and we'll see many more hopefully coming throughout the year. Not only will we agree on members, we agree on membership and projects, sorry, but we've grown a local presence. I mean, to be fair, the Linux Foundation already has almost a third of its members, its community based in Europe. This is actually trying to coalesce and grow the impact that Europe can have on a global scale. We'll be hosting a member summit this year ahead of Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao. Hope to see many of you there. And to the point of foundations working better together, we're actually hosting in Geneva and Open Source Congress in July that will bring all the ecosystem leaders from the different foundations to really try and tackle some of those horizontal common problems that the fragmentation report has uncovered. Last but not least, and this is I think very also sort of a reflection of how much the public sector is much more involved in technology in Europe from the standpoint of regulation, from the standpoint of policy. We've been engaging much more with the European Union in, I would say, good and bad in a couple of ways. On one hand, we're doing a lot of research and I'll show you later our research that is upcoming. But what we've learned is that in this interaction with the public sector, that of course Open Source is a cornerstone for the European Union. It's a cornerstone for digital sovereignty. It's a cornerstone for technology excellence. They message, they fund, there's plenty of grants in Europe that deliver, you know, could deliver acceleration to many of the projects that we start. And oftentimes the last week we launched, we announced actually there was a big announcement from the German tech sovereign fund funding OpenJS to address sustainability. So you see actually money where the words are. But on the other hand, we see sometimes inadvertent effects from some of the regulation that is coming down. How many of you are familiar with the Cyber Resilience Act? So if you don't know, you can get in touch, take a look at that page. But in short, the Cyber Resilience Act is a very, I think, well-intended regulation to bolster cybersecurity in Europe. On the other hand, the way it's been written risks to pose a pretty strong burden and liability on potential individual contributors, foundations, package managers, the fabric of the Open Source supply chain as we know it. We are working closely with the other foundations, with projects out there, and with the EU to continue educating. And to be clear, this is clearly primarily having an impact in Europe, but it risks to really foster that fragmentation and that sort of preventing that global innovation that we're used to as open source contributors and maintainers. So if you want to get informed, you know, you got a QR code there, take a look. So where do we go from here? There's really two words in my mind, community-led and data-driven. Europe is a, just the EU, it's a combination of 27 member states, and that is not including, you know, UK, Switzerland, rest of Europe, the eastern part of Europe. And so one of our first steps was to create the Linux Foundation Europe Advisory Board. We have over 20 advisors from some of the, I think, most active and relevant European companies across technology, industry, telco, as well as we have representation from our projects in the advisory board. I am very amongst 23 folks. I'm very excited to also have Greg Croahartman, the maintainer of the, you know, stable kernel branch helping us. So ultimately, the advisory board is going to help us identify our priorities, our focus, and, you know, how we increase our footprint in Europe. As I said, education, and therefore data, is going to be a big sort of focus for us. You're probably familiar with the to-do group. You know that at this conference, we had OpenGovCon to really help educating the public sector into how they can not only consume, but also have an active stance in driving, funding, achieving technology and social goals through open source. Last but not least, if you're not familiar, one of our, we kicked off last year thanks to the amazing Linux Foundation research team, the world of open source moniker. Last year was a Europe spotlight. This year we're going global. Once again, fostering this idea of not having fragmentation. We are launching, we actually just launched a couple of weeks ago, our world of open source global spotlight 2023. It is a global survey. We will be able to segment information across the different regions and really understand trends on a regional basis, on a year-in-year basis. So if you take a chance, if you have, you know, probably 10 minutes, take a chance, fill the survey, help us grow the sample. This is really supposed to help us focus and, you know, not only lead the direction of Europe, but really provide very useful information, hopefully to all of you, as for every Linux Foundation research piece, both the report and the data sets are always open for you to use. And then last but not least, going back to the idea of aligning our efforts within the Linux Foundation across the broader open source ecosystem. For those of you who were here yesterday, you've heard Hilary Carter, again our head of research and comms, announcing the Linux Foundation Sustainability Initiative, which is really about aligning all of our projects to, you know, the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I am particularly fond of this initiative, of course, as an individual, but also as a European. The EU has a very strong focus on aligning on, again, social and societal outcomes that we can drive through open source. Of course, we have already many projects that work in this area, AgStack on the agriculture side, OSClimate, LF Energy. These are already projects that are very European strong. And of course, we hosted Sustainability Con here this year for the first time, and we hope to replicate it. And so I'll close with a slide that is very similar to the slide that we started with. Ultimately, open source, whether you are an individual, whether you are a producer or a consumer of technology, whether you are, you know, a member of the public sector can really drive, and I hope you guys agree with that, not just technology outcomes, but truly the betterment of an industry, of the betterment of some of the most pressing challenges in the world. And we think that we can play a role in that. And with that, thank you so much.