 Thank you, so I think that was the signal to say we are good to go So welcome everyone to the session on open source in Irish government Welcome to everyone in the room and welcome to everyone online who may be viewing us. My name is Claire Dylan I'm the executive director of inner source commons, which is a community for folks who want to do open source practices Inside organizations behind a firewall and but I am also the co-founder of open Ireland network Which is a community for individuals and organizations in Ireland who want to come together around the principles of open source and understanding how we can Support open source community and ecosystem in Ireland, and I'm delighted to be joined here today by three esteemed panelists with Apologies from our fourth who couldn't make it at short notice. So we'll send Tim our regrets And I hope wherever you are Tim everything is going well but we we are here today to talk about Open source in the Irish government And a little bit about what's happening today a little bit about what the opportunities may be And a little bit about what we heard this morning, perhaps because we had some exciting announcements this morning as well So we might get into that as well if we have time So we will start by getting our panelists to introduce themselves And maybe give a very brief overview of your own experiences with open source in the context of Irish government John would you like to kick start please? Sure. Good morning, everybody John Concanon is my name I'm the director general of the global Ireland program for the Irish government based in the Department of Foreign Affairs And the global Ireland program was launched in 2018 And the objective to double Ireland's impact and influence in the world by 2025 And there's a range of endeavors that we've undertaken to do that For example the opening of a whole series of new embassies and consulates with 80 at the start of our program We've we've planned open 26. We've done 23 The announcer opened the most recent three last week Munich Milan and Islamabad So big big program and in addition to that I suppose the reason why I'm here on the panel is in addition to these these these missions These physical buildings we which we call Ireland houses where the full collective of Irish government is present overseas We're a major program called digital Ireland house, which is to bring it all together into the cloud and have a have a much more Robust enhanced dynamic digital presence Internationally and in doing that we're working through with Tony and the team and ogco With an open source platform wag tail So that's my but but my experience in the technical open source world is almost zero But I I I have a big believer in conceptually and and we can maybe talk more about that. That's brilliant. John. Thank you Next car mccree stuff. Thanks John That's Tony. I'm gar so I'm gar mccree's thought I work as a digital advisor in e-health in the hsc So hsc is the health service executive. So it's responsible for delivering health care services to the population of Ireland um, I guess So my role is kind of varied so I cut across lots of different things lots of different programs But the I guess from an open source perspective and from a hsc perspective it really started with cova tracker So at the start of cova 19 It was trying to solve a problem of finding two people who were too close together for too long where one of them had cova And hence so cova tracker is the is the irish implementation of it and cova green is the Linux foundation public health project That stemmed from that that's in five states in the us a number of other jurisdictions in europe And bits of it are in the new zealand app so it's kind of it kind of stemmed from that and I guess the I think we'll we'll dive a bit deeper kind of in subsequent pieces in terms of the why and the what and what we did with that But that has led to kind of an exploration in terms of where we can collaborate and how I guess that and you touched on the philosophy of open source So how the philosophy of open source changed the way we thought about solving bigger problems And how do we work together and that's turned into both locally in Ireland But also internationally within the eu and then internationally more broadly globally with other governments And how how that has kind of worked and how that's kind of it's helped us But it's fundamentally changed the way people think about it And I think that's probably more so than the software It's more just the philosophy and the community around it is kind of where where I see the biggest impact from some of this So that's me gar Tony Thank you. Hi there, and tony shann. I'm head of digital services here in the office of the government co in the government of Ireland um, I guess I could say I'm an advocate for open source in government. I Got that from my background as a medical doctor I ended up in the national program for it in the nhs pushing open source About 15 years ago. There wasn't much appetite for that then But over time we've seen open source taking over the software industry It is slowly coming to places like healthcare linux foundation public health, etc Doing some great leadership work. I was involved in a non-profit open source foundation before I came into this role Um, I do think that the challenges we face in government to be that at a local level A regional level a national level or an international level or are kind of a fractal There's a there's a pattern a set of patterns there. Um, they're the same all over the world Um, there's a big challenge. We have be it, you know People improving the lives of the people are saving the planet to cooperate and collaborate Around some of these wicked challenges and I think open sources is the ideal medium to do that And so, you know, that's why we're here today to kind of talk about some of the stuff we're doing locally in Ireland But also, you know, we're I'm very pleased to hear the news today about the european launch of linux foundation I think that's a that's a good move for from a european point of view Great. Thank you, tony and I'll come back to you john I think what we'll start with with this discussion is a little bit about the why you would go with open source So just to put some context on this particular discussion There have sometimes been various different debates about about, you know, open source Why you should always use open source or no, let's not always use open source Let's always use proprietary code And I think that one of the things that has been most interesting about recent discussions is that this is a continuum, right? There are certain scenarios where open source obviously makes more sense So i'm really interested to hear from the panel today about why where you've used open source What were the reasonings behind that and what was the impact and outcome you were trying to achieve? Thanks, I my experience of of the I suppose the principles of open source are much in the wider big big some of the projects I've been involved in not so much in the technology And I'll give you one of them Which which I've really seen the huge benefit of an open source approach to things. I'll give you one example in 2016 here in Ireland. It was our centenary of as in 1916 we had a leader rebellion We were up to that point for part of the British Empire. We subsequently became an independent state So in 2016 it was a very big important moment for the country and the government decided to Have a program a centenary program to do it and it was tricky because it's very political very different views There's multiple narratives of different interpretations And I was asked to be the project director for it and working on that project And the principle we took was a very much an open source idea So and in so far as the government we set a framework For the for the strands of programming we're going to do and all together. I think we created maybe you know Maybe about two or three hundred events here in around the world But what we did was go out to the community around Ireland there's 26 counties in Ireland We had meetings with people we asked people ideas we encouraged that look these are the principles we're trying to do These are values about our identity about what democracy is what does citizenship mean? How do we get people engaged and We were absolutely blown away with the response In it like so many ideas came to us, but actually that executed things that happened What we had about 200 will say 250 events there was over three and a half thousand events designed and curated by the public And and other and lots of stuff So just that context of you know people really igniting innovation In fact coincidentally gar here was one of the ideas because they came up with an idea Which was to use a minecraft concept called rising mind rising which was engaging young people They were interested in minecraft to build the 1916 buildings, which was fabulous But government we would never have thought of that in a million years So that context of open source innovation is something that throughout my time in my career is really And and there's lots of other examples. I could draw on but that's one so come into this project of the digital arland house I was involved in in in in 2017 with the With the prime minister's office here at the department he shook about the move to gov.ie with ogco In the government's chief information office and we worked a lot with the british government at the time And their project was gov.co.uk Which was open source and it was very clear to me the speed of speed of innovation was very very fast And the the mindset of sharing building collaborative Teams was really really impressive for lots of different reasons that didn't wasn't how we progressed with gov.ie But when the opportunity came for us to build arland.ie So the gov.ie platform is a very big platform on arland. It's the most traffic site in the country It's really about services to the citizens But when we were developing that we thought okay, we've another platform It won't be as relevant for people overseas because arland, you know, it's we're very We're we're we're very active internationally, but we're small So we have to be much more publishing pushing our content out. So we needed a more of a publishing platform So hence arland.ie is about bringing together a sense of arland as a place to live visit work study invest And very importantly, it's the platform for 94 or 94 open missions that are open But in total it'll be for the 106 when they're all open So there are missions embassies concepts the publishing platforms for those which essentially would be microsites As well as a platform for our consular and travel information passports and so on So it's a really important window to the world and in conversations with tony Who's who I wasn't expecting it at all when we started talking about how will we develop this? We want to partner with ogco that principle of collaboration was of course at the core of it Open to that point department foreign affairs that done all of this development itself but partner with ogco made a lot of sense and Immediately tony was talking about open source. So that was just a fantastic opportunity and we just The you know as tom peter says when the window of opportunity opens don't close the curtains So we really went for it and Subsequently took a lot of the leadership from tony's team and now we're we're full steam ahead on I think a really interesting and exciting open source project Using wagtail is the software we're using To develop this site. We're going to be fully operational. We're in beta format at the moment We're fully operational for patrick's day 2023 Which should be this, you know, very strong strong presence of arland around the world very very exciting That's brilliant john and I just want to kind of You know Click down on some of the themes you were talking about there because I think what's been really interesting From talking to representatives in irish government is that there's a cultural shift happening within government organizations at the moment This idea of collaborating across Departmental boundaries is something that's happening anyway It sounds like open source can be one of the things that can help that happen And then of course the idea of collaborating across national boundaries is something that we have learned a lot about in the last number of Months and years in terms of the need for that sometimes add a very quick pace when something urgent happens Or sometimes when you're strategically looking at something that will evolve Brilliantly over the over the coming years when you want to bring innovation coming from many different countries So we may be a small country, but the irish are everywhere So we want to be able to enable them everywhere. Um, so thanks a million for john and good luck with that initiative Gar, can I ask you to maybe elaborate then on your reasoning behind an open source journey? I guess this started for me a long long time ago So 25 years and it was more trying to solve problems across in many different organizations in many different domains and I've worked an awful lot in the public service and it's It's trying to like one of the challenges we face is there is a tendency to Think we know everything and not and analyze things So we spent an awful lot of time analyzing and documenting things and figuring it out But actually building to learn is a much better or much more effective way of doing it And actually you brought me all the way back with mind rising which was the past present and future of Ireland But it was a building activity. It was like a creation lacked And I think having these building blocks and having the the ability to pick something up And quickly turn an idea into something that people can see touch feel understand Interact with it's a very powerful concept and it's a very powerful way of doing it So rolled forward to what we were doing from a covet perspective So covet tracker started with trying to solve a problem finding two people who were too close for too long We're one of them had covet that was an exploration into how could technology help with that? It wasn't an app It didn't start there But I think given the privacy considerations that came out of this the primary driver originally was around transparency So people wanted to know right? I'm looking back in the back left hand corner of this We have many conversations But so there were an awful lot of people who were very interested in because I mean the opportunity to Engage with and interact with a large population of citizens and the implications of that from a privacy perspective are huge And so actually understanding what that means and opening it up So the transfer so the first bit was open sourcing the the code so people could see it And then publishing things so people could interact with it and then being available to interact and having those conversations and being open to it That was the first bit the secondary effect was that and we've had a constant Collaboration with northern Ireland. We've had a very consistent collaboration Really across the Celtic fringe as uh as one of our scottish colleagues calls it So it's yeah, so scottland. Wales northern Ireland. So we've been having this ongoing piece So there was an immediate sharing of that and it was sharing and we had open sourced it And all of a sudden it was much easier for them to pick it up as opposed to us trying to give them it in a different way So then you roll forward from that and then other people became interested in this So new york, pennsylvania, new jersey They wanted to pick it up and then so moving in so you need a vehicle because the HSE has no experience in open sourcing things So I set up the the github repo right so I set up the organization set it up It was the first one there we published the code and it was like, okay, that's great But in terms of actually building a community around it or supporting it in any meaningful way That was the hard bit so enter lfph So the conversation started with the linux foundation public health project How do we get this into something into a vehicle that other people can pick up? Consume use how do we support and how do we grow and that's been an ongoing pursuit And it's kind of followed through with some of the other covid stuff that we've done Like nearly everything that we've built on top of covid all of it's been open source Some of it's been reused some of it hasn't right and I think that's one of the challenges that this is It's finding things where it works or where it doesn't work And I've always considered myself to be both digitally promiscuous and digitally pragmatic Right, so I I I don't care if we're trying to solve a problem That's focused on the problem we're trying to solve if it fits it fits for me I think we're open source fits perfectly well as if this fits into UN sustainable development goals So it's a big problem that we're all fighting and it's a big problem that we can all get in behind Then this totally makes sense as a way of looking at solving those kind of problems Both from a problem solving perspective and from a software and distribution perspective So it's across the board with that so that's kind of where I'm coming from on a player Yeah, thanks Cara I'm just going to add into that because the whole idea of the transparency thing I think one of the maybe I don't know unintended consequences was also the opening it up to citizens Right, so not just from a privacy concerns concern perspective But making them feel like they had agency around what the technology that was coming out to address these kind of big global problems And I just remember the I was looking at the repo when it was put up and I had started and I was saying that it's open What amazing innovation is going to happen on top of the you know, COVID tracker app And I remember one of the first pull requests that went in was like you're spelling cahorsavine wrong Which is like this tiny town in like the Corner of Ireland and I was thinking okay. I wasn't expecting that as an innovation point But you know what it really gives agency to people in cahorsavine to make this the right thing for them And for me that was a huge part of It that people felt like they had an ability to impact the technology that was impacting them And I think that was one of the reasons why it was so popular in terms of people then downloading it as well as the Mark of mark of okay for the trust folks in Ireland. So thank you for that car Tony Thanks. Yeah, so I mean to me open source just makes sense on so many levels that you know I could be talking here for quite a while. I mean, I think in terms of people process tech I mean John's made a very good case from a people point of view Why the open governance around working in an open way and governing a project in an open way is the right thing to do I mean, particularly in the public sector It shouldn't be done much in any other way and Gar's made the point about the kind of the co-creation that that enables That again, you know, wouldn't be it doesn't possible without the open source dimension or at least that's been a barrier to it and from a tech point of view, I would say that A couple of things there there's a There's a lot of money thing that in this part of the world I would say they're richer part of the world that we're lucky to live in that has been wasted on poor tech Um, I think, you know, we're now coming to a crunch or we've been talking about a crunch For a while and how we can spend our money more smartly I think if you look at the leaders in open source in the government sector, they are from the low and middle income countries And we have a lot to learn from from them actually and how they spend their money I think part of that is that, um Again coming back to how the tech is built, you know, my my early years were in medicine And you know to to look at that field, you know Medicine is a science where you have to publish your findings or you don't get taken seriously And again software I would would argue with with with folk here Is a relatively immature discipline in terms of the first master's degree in software engineering was in the 1980s or something like that So software is kind of exploding and growing But it isn't mature yet in many ways in in if you take the long long view And so how can you judge what's good software? The only way you can do that is to see the source code So, you know, if you look at an open approach to the source code And you then realize that actually An open source way of Getting your source code published and then cooperating with others means you can actually save money and reuse things Um, it's the only sensible way really in my mind to make Uh software now and I think the the the explosion we've seen in software and just seen the last 10 years has shown It makes sense from a commercial point of view just as much And so that's why if you look at the the the vast challenges that any government has And if you look at the leaders, um internationally, there's probably bringing your attention to gov stack Which is this idea of identify 25 building blocks that are common generic building blocks and and try to collaborate on those And one of them is the cms and we're talking to john about the the cms that we're using white tail That's actually been used in our set here with our department got john's and the hse They're using that open source building block We're also talking to garr and the hsc And tim who isn't here today, um from the garr d the police force about one other building block around data collection forms So we're looking at at at at how we could do that better and guess what? The singaporean government who are leaders in digital government have actually released an open source engine called forms sg We're looking to learn from that So on so many levels from a people point of view around the governance from a process point of view on the procreation And from a tech point of view in terms of quality and value for money of code There's just only one way to to sensibly do it. I would argue Thanks, tony and and and thanks for all that the exploration about the why so i'm hearing themes of innovation collaboration across borders and and organizational and national borders and speed Cost savings governance and maturing of how we build software all together and an ability to address the big world problems So then if we if we think about that as a set of opportunities And then look to see how we might be able to I suppose accelerate those opportunities in ireland Can you maybe have a comment about what you think might help us in this journey and help all governments in this journey to Be able to achieve those outcomes. Do you want will we start again with with john just for Um, that's a that's a really good question. It's a hard one But I think you know innovation is very hard in any organization and um But innovation in government is very very hard because the appetite for risk is is very different than than in in a commercial entity So I think you do need You need leadership which we have clearly got very great leadership with tony now coming through and that thought leadership But you know validation of the ideas continuous case studies To talk to people about it, but innovation is hard. The tried interest it is much easier to as as um You know, but but I think the idea of how do we do it? It's really welcome by the way that there's a european Chapter of the linux foundation that really validates the whole organization ireland By the way is celebrating this year our 50th anniversary of the european union Which in in the context of collaboration is a huge collaborative endeavor that has transformed our society So that's an organization. We'd like to play a big part of and and be very much involved and so that's that's very good news and You know linking things into big big ideas like our talk with sustain and development goals Of course, just again another fun fact ireland in 2015 co-chaired the negotiation that led to that at the un in in 2015 But one of the in the in the in the General Assembly, which is on next week by the way in new york It's like the plowing championships for international diplomacy That's an Irish thing. Look it up. Which is also But but and Tony Gutierrez two years ago said, you know, we have 17 stg's and they're all very important But without the final one number 17, it just won't work the number 17 is really about what we're talking about today Which is put numbers that partnership for the goals. How can we collaborate? How can we bring things together? So I think the the context is fits really well into that macro policy but validating it and and and That idea the car said there, you know, just innovate as we go keep keep little iterations keep As against just building these massive systems that may or may not work at the end but You know, it's but it's it's I suppose it's it's a continual journey of both developing great software and Apps and technology, but also the the education of we find that's a big role in In our world and in the foreign service because Almost all of our teams or diplomats aren't technology people So how do we get them to engage and get them communicated with and trained but that's that part of it and I'll add into that I'm glad you brought up the the the topic of education because I mean you learn so much at conferences like this But therefore the open source community and and I personally think like I've only came into the open source community in the last few years And there's a huge opportunity to bring the messages and techniques and methods that we learn here To a much wider audience who are open to looking for ways to collaborate better And we recently just did a research report with ICT technology Sorry technology Ireland ICT skill net around the open source skills gap in Ireland And it was noted what surprised me was that it wasn't just technical skills There was a huge call out and a need for a bigger understanding in business leaders in sales and marketing talent in legal talent in in so many different areas that you wouldn't automatically think of And what are we doing to educate everyone around these principles around how to do it around why to do it around when to do it And indeed the pathway to doing it successfully. So thanks for bringing that up. John. It's a great one Gar ways in which we can support the journey I couldn't remember what the question was. Yeah, that's why I prompted you there. Yeah So I guess there's it's nearly a perfect storm. So So some of the stuff that's happening at the european level. So that report Openform Europe some of the other work that's going on there Like invariably all of the EU projects that are kicking off at the moment. They are all embracing that They're all going down that particular route regardless of who they're affiliated with or how it's working Everybody's kind of beginning to work in that way And I think so forget the software for a second I think the community piece is really interesting because so if you take when the covid certs were first proposed And so it came out and it was the e-mail directors across europe and everybody got together and they agreed the format and the standards and everything else But it quickly migrated from a from actually a knowledge sharing and collaboration perspective It moved over to slack channels that were on the fly set up in the line of foundation public health project And that's because that was the easiest place for people to actually get together And it was epidemiologists from around the world. It was technologies. There was data scientists There was you name it anybody you needed an answer from they were there And they were there and they were helpful because the community ethos is there And I think typically what happens in like in a lot of organizations So I think like so some of the collaborations we've had over the past couple of years Tony as well Our illustrative of this is that there is a tendency for organizations to optimize locally and to try and solve problems on their own And I think that the shift is to begin to look across boundaries And so how do we collaborate with each other in a more effective way and this helps so and again It's a it's more a philosophical shift than it is a software shift the software gets dragged behind it And it's a useful way of of manifesting some of these changes But it doesn't necessarily start with that sometimes it can but it doesn't always have to So I think that's kind of one of the biggest things here. I think at a like at a national level It's like some of the approaches that have been taken to kind of drive open source It's in some in some cases it could be problematic because like you're pushing water uphill Like it's it's really hard to kind of push it in and say you must do this because in some cases Look, I'm an architect. That's what I've spent my entire career being and architects are about trade-offs So in all cases there's a trade-off. So it's like I can have this or this I can't have both So when I look at that then I'm making choices all the time and these are choices that we make so frameworks around how we make choices And thinking through that rather than mandating kind of blindly saying you must or you mustn't Those kind of things are that that kind of external constraint can be problematic because it kind of drives a different set of behaviors And actually you can you could subverse the entire process that we find interesting and new ways to Get around all of these things and get around all of these regulations Which happens in nearly every other Like entity or domain or any other problem space once you put that in and put that hard constraint in it has Potentially unexpected effects. So I think the problem will be it's like how do we do this in a way? And I think the education piece is the way to go because it's showing why it's useful and demonstrating the value of it That's where to start with this stuff. It's not at the other end of it in my mind I'll just comment as well because that that idea of Bureaucracy busting like that open source gives you a pathway to to kind of collaborate before you get like all the formal like Government has a lot of formal structures about how to do things Open source if you're into it almost gives you that permission to collaborate before how you have to actually You know tackle the the bureaucracy around these collaborations And we've heard certainly from some of the examples we've seen in the auspil plus plus network Which is for open source program offices in public sector that they've they've commented about how these cross border Collaborations can happen because you've got Individuals in different countries All able to collaborate on open source platforms without necessarily having to go through nda's and ip transfer Agreements and all this sort of thing so they can do that much more easily So you actually brought me back to something I forgot about so at the start of the whole process with cova tracker Singapore had released a contact tracing app at the very beginning and They said they were going to open source it And actually this is where so the foreign service came in because the immediate thing was now this poor guy Over in Singapore poor steven actually got landed on by I'd say 40 or 50 different countries coming through various different channels Everything from Interpol to like local ambassadors in different countries who were knocking on different doors saying can we get it? Can we get it can we get it and it it's it does become It was a really interesting place where we all kind of met together in the middle Now the guys in the foreign service so that the embassy in singapore were they didn't know what they were asking for They just knew they had a question to ask for and this but again It kicked off a collaboration that we worked with those guys probably for the next six or seven months And they were incredibly helpful because that's where they were coming from as well Now the problem they had was they were trying to deploy an app at the same time as satisfy the needs of 40 other Countries who are all knocking on the door going. This is great. Can we have it right? We didn't end up going that particular direction, but it is kind of one of those interesting side effects or much It's a it's a great one. I hadn't thought that we'd come up with using the irish diplomatic service as an actual Avenue for exploring evangelism around open source, but perhaps we'll have a chat about that later john That might be a good one. Tony Okay, so the question being again how we can promote and guess What sort of things can help us on the journey to being able to Accelerate these outcomes Sure, I think um You know, we have to be conscious that we're talking about what technically would be called a complex adaptive system at play So there's a lot of elements going on here a lot of people a lot of different projects A lot of take all in the mix and you can't you can't control all that from the top down You just have to um You know, I understand that there's going to be patterns that are at play and and and you're also going to see Stuff emerge from the bottom up, but I think um You know carrots and sticks can help with that complexity and kind of can encourage good behavior and the right outcomes And I think you know The good news is that you know, you're all here. This is a bigger crowd You know that we've seen before in in Ireland and Dublin around open sources conference Is a bit of a landmark event in that extent and you can tell there's momentum behind us now On this move. So, you know, what what kind of carrots and sticks do we need? um, you know, we obviously and I'm making the case, you know internally that we need to um invest in this area and you know You all can take that message back that you know that that wherever you're working the Investment in open source is a good thing and that's something that we need to be encouraging at at a governmental level Um, and and we don't need a lot of investment to kind of try to to move the dial forward But just a little bit will it will help Sticks if I mentioned sticks now the european union has a tendency to bring in regulations Um to kind of encourage us to do the right thing if you like and I'm not always convinced that's the right thing to do But it does have a serious effect if you look at gdpr And if you look at what's coming now around, let's say there's going to be european legislation around a digital wallet That's coming So if you put the the carrot of investment with the news that came out today around the open wallet foundation With the with the stick at a european level around, you know the need for a digital wallet that should be open standards based Then you've got the mix there to actually really make major change in people's lives Within this decade on an open source based digital wallet infrastructure That will probably change the game really. Um, and I think that's that was my immediate impression when I heard that news today That's going to definitely change the dynamic and it's a good force for the good We just need to be spreading that word and trying to work out how we can make that a win-win for all concerned I think so I I wouldn't be Talking too much about trying to control this from the top too much We can we can set, you know the right kind of environment to encourage this But then we have to let you know the state and the market collaborate together to make this work, you know And I'm going to explicitly now I mentioned earlier things like um, open source program offices And and obviously there is a there's been, you know, auspices here today or at the event And and we know that there's a big trend in europe in terms of actually an explosion of of folks Actually looking at this as a construct that can perhaps help the journey And do you maybe want to comment about how you see that fitting in from an arland perspective? If there's you know, would it help that kind of thing and we've talked about an auspice in arland before And and we've been kind of hesitant as to when to do that because we didn't want to we don't want to be making Announcement just for the sake of it as I think the keynote speakers said this morning the whole point of all of this here Isn't about, you know numbers or dollars or yours. It's about impacts on people's lives And and that's really the driver if we're going to do that set that up We want to see an impact out of it. I think um, you know It may be that we're coming towards the time is right on that that it does help Perhaps set the foundation, you know, set the seeds of the of the of that ecosystem environment That I said would make for fertile ground here You know, I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to talk about If you were to put an auspice together in arland That was to bring the main tech players that are just down the road here together With government players and other SME players together Then and you were to look at we had content management stuff that we have to do or digital credential digital wallet stuff We have to do um with one impact in mind, which is to to have an impact on on the citizens lives And even if I'll just go back to one story that that shows how easily we can do that Which is what happened with the digital code covered certificate And the european union released some open source code and last year We were involved in releasing that and over about a month's period Not only did we release the digital credential certificate that allowed people to travel across europe But we also released the validator app that allowed people to get into the restaurants and the hotels that we released that over a weekend weekend And again, it just made a major impact on people's lives So I think, you know, it won't take too much to have an impact We needed to be focused and and goal orientated But I think the conditions are coming right for that pretty soon now. Thanks a million tony So we have about five minutes left So I just want to open it up to see if anyone has any questions. Would you like to share your question? Hey, brine So I'm brine millner if I leave the open source security foundation John, I imagine your holidays were fine, but gar and tony I imagine your holidays might have been disrupted by the entire government's perception of open source software as either security risk or or or on the other side, you know, watching the community respond to it as an advantage And then what where do you see the higher government making investments in that is security and open source software And might I ask you to just briefly repeat the question just for the recording because they may not have heard brine there on the on the camera It's about log 4j Yeah, so so in general the question was around log 4j as a disruptive force What was the feelings about that in the Irish government? What responses are our changes made? They'd be making on the back of that particular event gar Thanks, brine Bomb with that one Um, I guess I mean the immediate thing is it's around visibility So do we know do we know who's using it? Do we know where it is? And I think that's software supply chain. Do we understand the our vulnerability and the exposure to it? I think that's one major thing. So it did highlight that and I think that's kind of the key bit So like from a hse perspective it's where it's being used and who's using it and how what version where are we at? What's the exposure to it has anything happened? So they were they were the kind of things that kind of came from that I guess we had a bigger issue So the log 4j was kind of minor in comparison to the middle of May last year when we got hit by a cyber attack That collapsed the health system in Ireland So it was the log 4j piece was kind of it's on the back of that So it's not that it wasn't important But it paled in comparison to what we had to deal with in the middle last year Which is turn everything off turn it all back on again. It's like okay, right and anybody who is Like anywhere near this and every citizen of Ireland this touched you somehow, right? And so I think it has highlighted that fact of understanding software supply chains Understanding the assets that we've got understanding where things are are and it's not necessarily a technology piece This is a knowledge management problem more so than that all right So I think it's changed the way people think about what we need to know and how we need to know it and when we need to know it So I think that's it's but I don't think it was the log 4j event that caused it I think it was actually prior to that It was a bigger event that kind of brought it to light and brought it to everybody's attention So that that was kind of the impact from my perspective That's obviously locally within in the hse. Luckily at that point I had escaped cyber recovery activities So the log 4j thing was no longer my problem, right? Other than do you know anything about it? I know how to spell it So, um, Tony Yeah, I think you covered the key area there, which is the context in which that news landed here Which was post the on-premises proprietary software derived cyber attack that crippled the service You know, this was a relatively relatively small news. So there wasn't that much of a storm about it I would add though that you know perfection is the enemy of the good So I don't worry about open source software being perfect I mean my background is in emergency medicine critical care So, you know, you have to be honest with people that life is full of risks and you know, you will not get perfect Software you won't get perfect care. You won't get perfect government services. Let's just be honest about that There will be a risk with open source software But there's a risk with proprietary software And we just need to be honest and say at least when it was open in the news Everybody knew about it. Um, and we were all able to get on with patching our stuff ASAP and we that's what we did Um, do we know how much risk there is right now today with other stuff that's out there where those kind of Universities have not been publicly declared You know the answer to that And at least we know that if there is an issue that we can all be working on it together So, um, I think we're uh, we're running to the end of our discussion here today I just want to say it's great to hear that that there is momentum behind the open source journey for the Irish government That's that's good news for everyone in the open source ecosystem in Ireland And also for everyone else because we're here ready to collaborate and I think that that's that's a really great Kind of place to go forward with and hopefully we'll get some more opportunities to do that based on these wonderful gatherings here in Dublin So, um, I wanted to say a huge thank you to our panelists today. Thank you, John. Thank you gar Thank you, Tony. Um, and a huge thank you for everyone in the audience and everyone online and uh, hopefully Thank you and welcome again to Dublin. I hope you're all having a great time and uh, hopefully we'll see you all again soon Thanks very much