 Good afternoon and good evening to everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to the second webinar on open source in energy access hosted by the N-Access Foundation. For those who couldn't join the first part of this webinar series a couple of weeks ago, my name is Gabrielle Pamesperger. I work with the Alliance for World Electrification as it's Africa lead. ARE is the largest international business association for the distributed renewable energy sector promoting the development of a sustainable off-grid energy industry. We are doing this by supporting the private sector and key institutional stakeholders and through a wide range of market building activities aimed at accelerating energy access in emerging markets. Hence it's a great pleasure for ARE to support this webinar series on open source in energy access hosted by our valued member the N-Access Foundation. This webinar we discuss how open sourcing innovation in the energy access sector can benefit the different market players, increase efficiency and hence accelerate the development of the sector. So whereas the first webinar was looking at open source in energy access from the innovators perspective, today's second webinar we discuss open sourcing from the adopters point of view. So how can companies and organizations benefit from adopting open sourced innovations? What are advantages and disadvantages? And how can the whole sector benefit from open source? So we will hear firsthand experience from adopters of open source innovations about their lessons learned and how they benefit from using open source material and we will discuss what is needed for an uptake of open source innovations by the sector. So but let me briefly introduce today's speakers before I hand over to Fabio who will moderate today's session. So I would suggest to do just a very brief to the table and ask each of the speakers to very briefly introduce her or himself just one or two sentences about yourself, your organization and your role in the organization. So maybe I start with Mr. Fabio de Bascale, co-founder of an Access Foundation and who will also moderate today's session. So Fabio please. Hi and thanks for participating and thanks for the panelists for joining. Thanks Gabrielle. I'm Fabio de Bascale. I'm the Chairperson at the Access Foundation and a founder of the Foundation. And I also manage a company. I'm the CEO of a company called Nextvid which does mini grid solutions for companies in Nigeria. And I'm very glad to be moderating today's webinar with our panelists. Okay thank you Fabio. So now I would like to welcome also today's panelists. Maybe I start with Ms. Caterina Adelman, she's a founder and CEO of FOSERA and manufacturer of high quality solar home systems for rural electrification. Catherine please. Hi thank you very much for the kind introduction. My name is Caterina Adelman, founder and general manager of FOSERA and as Gabrielle already described we manufacture of quality solar home systems. We located in Germany having our own factory in Thailand and some of our products you can see here in the back and the connection to the whole webinar is that we have implemented the open paygo token in our products. So very excited to share later more about that. Okay thank you very much Catherine. Then I return to Mr. Vaibha Vaidya, Director of Information Systems and Engineering at Simu Solar, a leading provider of energy, productive use equipment and financing solutions mainly for equi-businesses. Simu Solar is quite recently engaged with and access on really both contributing and adopting on the open source side. We do productive use solutions and our range of say water pumps and the fishing lights that we provide is wider than what's available from regular distributors. So our main interest is making sure that other distributors and the widest product range can be enabled with some of the technology that we have and hence an interest in open source. Okay thank you very much and then I return to Mr. Mark van Nieker, Regional Operations Manager at Fress, a Foundation Rural Energy Services, a Dutch non-profit organization that advances electrification in rural Africa by establishing commercial energy as a service companies under local management. That's a great introduction thank you. Yes so Regional Operations Manager in Uganda, Guinea-Vissal and responsible also for developing a new pipeline of projects in several other countries in Africa and recently in the productive use space as well. So we've got some projects at the moment in Mali and Burkina Faso with that and we do mini-grids as well as solar home systems so recently going into using the open-page token system. Thank you very much. Okay thank you very much Mark. So thanks for for these brief introductions so I will hand over now to Fabio who will moderate the session and yes wishing you all a very insightful webinar and excellent discussion. Thank you Fabio and over to you. I'm pretty excited about today's session because as some of the attendees may know we had another webinar a couple of weeks ago you can find the recording online and that webinar really went broadly into open source and how open source can almost be interpreted and declined in the energy access space. This is something that we are very excited about the fact that clearly open source can have different meanings but today the focus is slightly different and in fact the focus is really on the adoption. What we'd like to show with this webinar and discuss with the panelists is what their experience is where with open source and the adoption of open source and hopefully also have a very candid conversation about that. We tend to think that it's better to just be quite upfront also about the challenges that a certain activity including open source adoption can bring but also hopefully you will be able to leave this webinar with a really good idea about why you may want to start using and adopting open source solutions and how others have done it and what they gained out of that particular work. I'll do a super brief introduction on open source broadly. I keep it very short and I'm gonna effectively just keep it very high level and very quick and the reason for that is that I don't want to take too much time away from the panelists yet I also think it's nice to give us a bit of context around a conversation. An access is a foundation that was born out of the wish to actually bring and see more open source in the energy access sector, a sector which is very resource constrained as we all know, a sector where a lot of innovation happens because we need it because we need to develop the tools and the solutions that just don't exist in other contexts and we think that a lot of that can actually be done using open source and then shared with others without actually damaging any of the companies involved in this. Generally speaking, we think SDG7 does require innovation and we think a lot of companies are doing innovation in the sector and in order to do that they're actually using very scarce resources. In a nutshell we actually ask ourselves well if you're using very scarce resources to do some innovation could you and should you maybe just share it with others so others can take advantage of that and avoid reinventing the wheel. This is the high level really the reason number of companies that also realize that using or sharing things in open source allows you to reach a wider market. You start to be seen also as a solution provided by others and others will start knowing your products, your services because they know your open source solution. Additionally you can improve on existing work and what you see here is a quite famous open source tale which is the secret cookies recipe from grandma where grandma has this fantastic cookies recipe and it's secret and nobody knows about it and the kids would like to do the cookies but they can't really because it's a secret sauce and a secret recipe but at some point grandma is no more that happens and now we have no cookies anymore so the question is couldn't grandma instead open source a recipe we would suggest a creative commons license and at that point the kids can actually keep doing the cookies over and over again and also can improve them so instead of using vanilla maybe they can put chocolate chips that's a very typical open source story but it's something that in its simplicity actually tells something very obvious open source is something we already do we share our recipes with others and we improve on them and we tailor them and we make them better or more fitting our needs and so that's why open source is very successful already in other contexts and we think it could be as successful in the energy access sector and then there is a leveraging the community part open source typically creates a community around solutions and innovations and products and that always gives back even if very often that's a bit of an unintended consequence you start having people that talk about what you do and improve on what you do and maybe go even beyond what you initially had planned with your solution but it's actually very nice because it it widens your horizon and typically makes for a better product and finally there is an idea of leveraging data there is a lot of companies that actually share the tools or share a part of of their infrastructure and solutions but either because they are not allowed to share the data or because they prefer to monetize the data they then leave the data as a separate block that can be monetized later so the tools are then open source and can be used by anybody but really if you then also want to access the data that becomes a paid service and so these are all also ways to see that open source doesn't imply no revenues open source actually is another channel of distribution in a sense with a lot of very interesting side advantages that I just mentioned but it doesn't mean that you come to monetize your solution so open source doesn't imply free in terms of no payment that's not a one-on-one association that was that was in in a nutshell what open source really could be in the sector and as I said it was a really really short take on this but now I think it's a good time to actually start talking content and it would be great to start hearing from the panelists what is their experience with open source so I'm just going to follow the same the same order as before I'm going to go with Catherine first and then Mark and then by above and what I'd love to know is what is open source for you and what is your experience with open source and you know if you can give us one specific case or what if I was if you like Catherine and Flo is yours and let me share what open source technology we have implemented in our product it's the open pay go token and I'm sure all of you are aware that pays you go is like meanwhile the distribution method for the home systems especially in rural Africa because it really removes this upfront barrier of people having to pay and we as for Sarah had positioned ourselves in a market in a way that we see ourselves very clearly as system manufacturer so we have great engineers we have our own product production plans so we make great hardware but we're not the ones who would do like the whole software pays you go back and and so the question is like always how do you connect the software to the hardware and in the past it has been like this that there are a few players in the market who offered this dedicated software solution and us as hardware suppliers then had to implement a certain piece of hardware to make the other connection between or to make the system being able to understand what the back end wants from the system and it has been it has been a great first start in the market to get that going but and since as the market hasn't developed and we had more and more players offering those back end solutions making it a bit difficult for us as a manufacturer to maintain for several different back end suppliers and different hardware solutions so we had in the end four different solutions implemented meaning you need to have from each product four different hardware solutions and which made like stock keeping extremely complicated it made innovation extremely complicated because you're not changing one product you're basically changing three or four products at the same time and this was just like the struggle and then we had from NXS that there was this open pay go token which would allow us to implement one piece of hardware and that all pays you go providers could then hook into that and we basically just have like one hardware source and then you could from there feed to different software back ends and therefore it wasn't a long discussion in our company if we would do that or not and it has been really for us a great help making really engineering a lot easier because you're not developing any more for-products it made innovation cycles a lot harder because you could basically really focus on getting new innovations to the market and not more or less yeah doing the groundwork of implementing something into products it actually already had it made warehousing a lot easier for us and so those are really I would say the main benefits from us as a as a manufacturer and there is then of course also our client side and in the past our clients always had to choose from the very beginning with which backend provider they wanted to go and this was more or less nearly a decision for life because if you already have products in the field and you cannot really change that backend anymore you're more or less stuck with this company and as your business model evolves especially if you're a young company and you might figure out that different parts and what a company offers is becoming more important to you or you're maybe not satisfied with your partner anymore or maybe the company you've been working with goes bankrupt and if open pay go token it really became like super easy for our partners to even have the option to change within the field and providers which made their life a lot easier so if you decide you want to go with a different backend and you basically just could do that on the back on the back end and it was not anymore a question of changing hardware going to every single client collecting the system exchanging the pcba and basically just like you changed that already over the back end the user of the system would not even realize and so you have a lot more flexibility and it really also had to increase competitiveness in the market and what Fabio also asked what are the downsides of implementing open source and I discussed a little bit of our engineers about it and there are not really a lot of points which came up maybe one very brief point and we had during implementation one or two moments where it would have been nice to just pick up the phone and call someone but nothing really severe and something we could have figured out in a couple of hours of self there's a very good documentation openly available and the second disadvantage we came across was but I think this is more like an early adopter disadvantage and that the pay go back end providers did not had implemented open pay go token so we were ready with our solution but and some of the back end providers were not so this was in the beginning and a little bit of yeah back and forth of getting everything working but right now we have everything running we have everything set up and for our new products we're just using open pay go tokens I would say overall it's a great success story and thank you very much for doing that for us in the whole industry wow thank you and and it's it's I think there is a lot to unpack and what you just said and and first yes we're super proud of the open pay go token work and and I think I think that's something that Solaris off grid did a great job on I also want to mention a similar effort by Angaza in fact around Nexus channel key Nexus key code I think it's called and that's that's in fact a similar implementation but with effectively around the the token the token system but one thing that you did touch on is sometimes we would have wanted to have someone to just you know call someone to help and and that's it's not one of the things I did mention earlier but that's actually one of the things that we see companies see as a surprise when they do share an open source solution not everybody wants that but some companies are actually happy to also start a bit of a consulting side gig because they can because they are the best to help with implementing a selling solution and so companies are actually ready to say hey let me just pay you know a few hundred dollars and get this right and so let me go to the creator and I'm happy to pay them a small fee to to make sure I'm doing the right thing and then you know I keep going on my own I can do the tweaking on my own and so forth that said though we've also been trying to help a bit on that front because also we recognized there was a bit of a of a need for more support when you adopt open source solutions and for that reason we had recently launched what we call the the open source community you can find it at community.access.org and one of the things we really wanted to do with with the community was in fact to allow people to have a place where they could go and just ask like-minded people hey have you done this and we are having this trouble with particular challenge as anybody encounter the same and how did you fix it how do you solve it and so on on that front and I'm looking at ViBub I am pretty sure it's going to talk about later you can see like this is just a screenshot of the of the community you can see that the very first thing appearing is the Bluetooth application layer development on exo's channel and this is something that ViBub is working on and there has been a lot of conversations between Angaza and Simo Solar on that on the platform we actively asked ViBub if he could keep that conversation on the platform specifically for one reason we wanted to create a stream of information that would stay longer in time so that if someone else wants to actually implement something around exo's channel in this particular case they would already find the same questions with the answer from Angaza and and and build on that effectively so we're trying to help on the on the support side with this community as a way to connect people so that they can help each other but thanks so much Catherine um Mark do you want to take take it and uh and go on your experience um so so we really started with SHS as I said which are really antiquated systems I mean we if we've had systems in the field for the last 20 years and our challenge was that um everything was was collected on a cash basis um so we had no visibility of really what was going on in the business and we wanted to first of all reduce our operational costs and have more insight into to what was happening with the business and then encourage customers to pay using mobile money so initially we looked at doing that ourselves um that is probably about five years ago um we came up with a database solution um having not gone to the industry in the past which turned out to be be quite cumbersome and troublesome um so when I actually took over as operations manager we looked at what industry had to offer and open source really provided the solution we were looking for so we've now started implementing the open token system um in conjunction with Solaris so we've we've had to adapt our current SHS offerings by installing a pay go switch into all of them and in that there were obviously many challenges I mean because we've we've had to train up staff we continue to do that in the use of well the installation of that so there's been some technical challenges with the equipment um as well as technical challenges with you know the adoption of this new system and customers now paying with mobile money so I mean have we got around that it's really just continuous training um and you know with the help of with the help of all our implementers in the field um basically and yeah why not open source from scratch well since that there's I mean as I said we did try it um and it wasn't successful and the fact that there are these solutions and continuous improvement with what's happening in the field all the time so in future we'll move away from um having our own systems we have modular systems as at the moment um but as these systems age and we've they've come to the end of their life we will then reach out to people like um for Sarah like Catherine to install systems like that yeah I'm wondering how many uh you know the audience are are distributing and actually installing uh uh these systems um and if you are then you're like us we're Simu Solar flash that logo there but we actually are in the business of installing and distributing and warranty and and taking care of customers and things like that so so so when I when I think of you know maybe if it's if you're someone like me then you're thinking of okay should I adopt or not um and and my counter would be you know the adoption is is not the biggest problem you're trying to solve I'm sure um the problems you're trying to solve are what is the right product market fit you know what quality can we affordably bring to the market what is the segment that's going to help us scale how do we cover for all these uncertainties on the government side and on the worker output there's a knowledge gap maybe there's logistics issues how do we engage across cultural divides we have at least four different cultures in my company itself including the customers so when you're trying to solve those problems I think you don't want to solve the expensive engineering problems really and those are the ones that um I guess this this group of people is trying to solve together um because I think engineering can be shared you know I think every engineer thinks that they have a brilliant idea and that's going to be a solution of everything that's that's that's how we you know put ourselves through hard courses at school everything do our little cubicle jobs because we think we're going to change the world that way but but it really takes more than that than as I think most most of you guys have seen it's it's all these other problems to solve and then and engineering is an expensive skill it's an expensive problem to solve and but it is a collaborative problem that that you know technology can move across different places and sort of so be a common common denominator so that that brings I think potential to what we're trying to do um we are being definitely on the adoption side uh pushed by an access to make sure that we generate material like videos or anything that makes it easy for someone to start from scratch so that I think that's that's really a good push uh and then we're on the other hand are pushing an access to see hey are you guys doing the governance side you know are you making sure that any changes to be made is someone is looking at it and and so on and and and you all should too so so I was thinking if that that's what really brings it all together if there's a community but then there's a direction that the community is able to take together I think that that's what's going to take this forward I didn't have three quick stories to tell us adoption I mean the challenges that are bigger than option one is just venture scale you know we we initially were looking at okay who can make a pay-as-you-go solution for us and we can't like contacted companies in china us or the we got quotes like $60,000 $120,000 just for like a little something you don't even know if it's going to work right that's that's kind of the scale of the cost so if you're a venture in this space that is that is a big cost because you're trying to start small and trying to be nimble and try to figure out okay it's their market here um the other one is a development we finally did you know get into pumps we have our pump manufacturer now actually contacting our server they designed the electronics for us and now we're like okay so we want to do bluetooth and and they said we haven't even recovered the cost from your first development we're not going to do a development again for you so again scale like we have unless you have market scale right in the beginning it's really hard to convince people to try to get on the whereas if there is open source then what I'm trying to say to them is basically if you do it for us you're also doing it for a lot of different potential markets in this in the space so the more the people adopt the more sort of negotiating power you have with manufacturers who are used to big markets so that's that's kind of an important one and then there's there's the risk like if you're if you have the one person who's making a you know token managed we do have one of our products that we're dependent on their server to manage tokens well the product is used for productive use that's what we do you know solar does only productive use which means our clients make money when they use our product which means as a product is not working just because they couldn't get a token they're losing money by the minute so this is not something we can rely you know and if we get repeated failures from this supplier on their server for whatever reason because they make products they don't make software whatever the reason is we have no choice there's no one else we can just switch to saying okay there's the same technology let's try a different provider so so that risk reduction I think also becomes so important in in our space so yeah that's my take it's it's it again there is a there's a lot of good points in this and I think the risk element is something that is interesting you mentioned while this is not very much appreciated I would say yet in the in the energy access space there is definitely an element of open source does reduce somewhat the risks around in particular around you know financial transactions and things that do involve you know is there perhaps is the good solid is is the good for that particular you know piece of communication a piece of unlocking you know pay go tokens solid that's that's for instance something we put a lot of effort on in our work with Solaris on open pay go token our effort there was well we want to make sure that whatever is being developed can actually survive a essentially a crypto audit we wanted to make sure that people using open pay go token you know in the coming years could actually just trust the fact that it was a solid piece of software something they could you know blindly rely on without having to worry about and I think this goes very much to your point by above in the venture scale it would not have been possible to do that if we had not in our mind the fact that we were doing that for the sector then it you know pretty much any cost was justified it was because we didn't just have our own let's say a little garden to maintain it wasn't just our own say one thousand or ten thousand customer we're talking about we were talking about you know countless customers because countless people could in fact adopt open pay go token and so we were very happy to put resources into this particular project because of that there is another thing that hopefully you know we will start seeing over time and I think it is the cross pollination with other with other sectors and as much as we live and breathe energy access the reality is energy access is a relatively small sector both in terms of age it says arguably needs infancy and and also like as as a financial weight is is only limited and and I think for instance we are now fostering a relationship and a partnership with Linux Foundation energy efforts at f energy and they are very much focused around utilities and very large energy systems and we're talking with them on what can we bring from what you're doing down there to the energy access context which is very different yet they're doing a lot of open source and what can we adopt to this question actually going back to Catherine um is do you have any other thing that you see on the horizon that you think might be useful to you guys or do you have other things that other you have already spotted that are sort of thinking about or that you dream some of us to open source because you would love seeing them like how much does this open source and but I would like to see more standardization and in the sector and I think open source can be a part of that and starting by really simple things like for example connectors and starting with lamps that you can have solar system from company A and connected lamps from company B and this becomes especially important like when we talk about high power nodes like TVs fridges maybe also productive use that it's not anymore like you're more or less locked in one ecosystem and you can just use whatever is coming with your system but that you can grow you can upsell you can also maybe replace a device by another one just as we do that basically also know now with our grid saw a power plug it we don't draw down our complete house if you just want to get a TV and and I think their open source especially when it comes like more to like higher power plants is like for example fridges where we also need like to have certain intelligence in and I mean this is also definitely something we're working on and implementing that we have like more this communication protocols implemented and I think in this sense this is definitely one very interesting part and there's like another thing which I just come a couple of days across and which I'm really excited and very curious to learn more are the so-called directs so those energy certificates which are generated and by usage of solar energy on a non grid connected basis so yeah very excited to learn more about that and see if this is maybe something also open source could play really a part in just just actually comment on both things so the first one is standardization as as you're surely aware there is a very nice piece of work done by gogla it's a gogla connect and we are honored to be part of that that group and it's a group that is definitely looking at the first standardization at connected level and really how to foster interoperability on a physical level but definitely there is more work coming I see that we are you can actually download the white paper which is very interesting you can find the link in the in the chat and that's an a gogla connecting and I think that's that's coming it's it's technically not an open source work as we would intend more classical but it's definitely that's a spirit and I think a lot of the core components are going to be open source talking about directs in fact directs is we're super proud of directs because we were the very first supporters of directs and when we saw it our thought was this must be open source it cannot stay closed we have to have people able to freely implement the directs work and their protocols so they can start actually effectively directs through the hardware and there is still a lot work to do that's for sure but yes we we're super excited about directs that's that's for sure and you can you can actually see some work we already did on promotion of the directs initiative and there is a podcast on that too so you'll you'll find enough materials hopefully but feel free to reach out if you have any questions mark what's your your dream open source release what's that you really need and what's that you wish was there already or what's already there you're thinking about adoption and for for appliances and leading on to what Catherine said as well you know standardization in that in terms of appliances that are solar ready that we can play useful productive use applications because we're really expanding in that market now at the moment and I mean our experience with adoption as I said earlier has been really tricky because we've had to adapt our analog systems essentially to a pay go solution so in future it would be nice to you know just have a solution that we just plug in and it goes and you know the customer can pay with with mobile money and yeah I think I think that's it I mean definitely and and I mean on this on the irrigation side you know I mean we're also getting lots of requests on that sort of equipment as well so hopefully more development and standardization in that sector would also help us productive use I think you have some experience there and also of course the same question like your your your killer application the thing that you really wish was open source already or that you hope is going to be open source so yeah so maybe I did miss the exact was there a real actual question of the productive use or just general heating on a father they see much more demand for productive use coming and and I think you have been really specializing on that in the in the past years and especially the irrigation I think you have a lot of solar pumps work say under your belt yes and and productive use I think is is more it tends to be I think more complex than more most people think in terms of execution but I think it's also very promising in terms of sustainability because it really is about making the end user more productive which means they make more money which means they're more likely to pay back and we've really seen that we did pivot we did homes systems for a short time and then completely pivoted to productive use now so we do see you know better repayment rates and so on so I would say it's it is an important sector to grow and I think it will in turn cause the home sector to grow it's kind of what happens if you have a good job you can buy nice stuff at home exactly and create more sustainability in the sector as well and which has been a problem in the last mile definitely and we call it last hundred miles because sometimes you have to go far out to install these things but it's there there are different problems if you solve I think there are technology knowledge problems service you know things business stuff that breaks people don't go and buy something small again there they need it to be fixed they need everything so they need sort of an end-to-end solution we do have water pumps that there's the design you know who does the proper design and sizing for because you don't want to buy something that looks nice for your business you want something that works well sometimes it's not true but ideally that's what it should be so then there's a lot more on removing the the knowledge barrier from the design piece of it what's the right so in some sense you're partnering really with your customer to make sure their productivity goes up it's a very different approach but I think with a lot of potentials that's why we're getting the solar switching to what I'm most excited about I think actually two things one I would actually double on what Catherine said in terms of like there's direct but there are other options like there's carbon credits there's things like that so if there is a standard we are measuring what we're doing or what we're achieving it would be easy for say a new fund or a new agency to say okay this is these guys are doing it in this standard way which seems to be adopted by everyone so it's trustworthy so that that trust element I think is really important to to bring to that brings the table and if it's being done right with the right security aspects in line it's really important the other part I'm really excited about is is how do different distributors interact I think the there's questions and then some exciting pieces so one one reason we made our we're contributing the wireless piece is because we think that'll enable a way to find lost products so the sort theft and you know sort of dishes use is kind of the problem here and if everyone's product kind of could talk at least on a basic level to any other product wirelessly then or at least the bigger products could then you could have you know suppose we're setting I don't know solar fishing lights and someone's making I think in Kenya there's a company making solar motor boats like so okay so the solar motor boat is riding by and someone is stolen someone's fishing light and keeping it on the beach then a hundred meters away the solar boat catches those lights and says hey this is where they are you know kind of thing and the boat is and the distributors of the two are totally different but since their systems can talk and since there's a broker like an axis who is sort of third-party agnostic it can really create some you know we can leverage each other's work is what what I was trying to get at that's kind of important to this nascent baby sector where no one really knows the right answer. Continuing to me and it is on the fact that while open source per se works under the assumption that you have independent actors that will either contribute to a certain innovation say a technology or something and then other actors that might adopt it and and then you know make it theirs and customize it and whatnot. We see there is more and more of a need for also a neutral third party to act as a coordinator and that's clearly we hope that an axis can fulfill the role and I think the first thought around that actually came through the direct directs initiative where there is a need for a an issuing body someone that actually says yes I recognize your measurement of of the kilowatt hour for instance that you have generated and and I do now issue a certificate that you can you know trade on a market and get money out for and I I think a similar thing now comes in the case of of you know theft and wireless communication and and theft detection we see that there is probably a role for a neutral body that just handles that sort of data in a confidential manner and allows people to know okay might a a certain set of data is actually sitting there and and I trust that third party I trusted that third party is not going to share the data with anybody but having everybody on the same say server with which devices are are detected by the Bluetooth gateway means that we can actually start saying hey that device you just detected was stolen and but we need we need a coordinating agent for for that particular work to happen and so that's that's I think a next step we are on our side trying to build towards that it comes without saying it's a it's an interesting journey because we have people that don't even know about open source in the sector and then others that are instead ahead enough to start feeling that need of hey but we need a a central repository of data where we just don't act as independent agents but actually we are coordinating somehow let me also say that meanwhile if there are questions please feel free to send them on in the chat and and we will try to answer them in next in the next few minutes meanwhile you can also see that there is a link to our open energy access podcast this is this a place where you can actually hear and listen to conversations with with people that have released open source materials and what their experience was so that's typically a bit more you know in-depth conversations with typically 30 40 minutes conversation with one one person only to flush out their story and and know how that was and sometimes there is a lot of very nice things discovered let me see meanwhile if any questions are coming I see none marked as such so I'm probably no questions quite yet but yeah please just just post them in the chat if you have any and yeah you will also see the recording of this webinar as soon as we have completed it so typically it's up in a couple of days and we will share the link with you guys um so let me let me go back to um to Catherine in fact um what is that you imagine um could not be open sourced so what is that on your side as for say that you like well but that one no that one is not going to happen and why most probably I would be very reluctant open sourcing how our charge controller is functioning detail and because I think we put there um I guess there should be still like some kind of differentiation between different companies and um more or less I see our charge controller we as core part of our knowledge DNA and at least like for the product which are currently our best sellers I would be a little bit reluctant open sourcing it's um as as an organization that really touches a lot of open source ideas and proposals um it's it might sound funny but one of the first things we tell people is just so that we are on the same page are you sure you want to open source this and do you have a strategy around open sourcing this we don't want you to open source it and then uh regret it later so that's definitely something that we understand um very quickly uh same to uh mark and then vibe up and then I'm actually gonna start wrapping up I guess with Gabriel mark um I suppose our customer database um that I mean since we I mean we're not product developers um and you know as I said we lost more distributors we wouldn't want you know any other distributor to target our customer base um but otherwise no I couldn't think of anything else really our differentiator is the fact that we offer um all the way up to four four kilowatt or so pumps pay-as-you-go which no one else does and that that's uh all tied to the to a single pay-as-you-go system so that's something that's kind of a hardware piece that I think it's not um I wouldn't say it's unsolvable but it's it's just something that takes people longer to resolve so that's something that maybe will open source in time and just to close so the last question um your one suggestion your one recommendation your your uh your one advice to anybody thinking okay yeah I could adopt this certain open source uh piece of open source innovation technology business model what's the one thing that you would tell them uh same word as of kathleen mark and vibe up what what is that this one person should know hey just make sure that you what's that thing kathleen um from our experience I would just tell them do it it has been it has been really a great experience a great relief bug um and yeah I guess really it's all about sharing and I think what everybody here can said what you wouldn't open source is really like your usb your core strength but everything which is more or less just like um yeah additional features to your core product but which are necessarily to to make it work that don't invent a real twice and um especially when you are still like a young company and not very big or your small organization don't don't try to reinvent the real twice what's out there so building on what kathleen said I mean we we learned to mistake as an organization as an organization of of trying to do something that was already done and which wasn't successful at all and when there were really good products in the market already and similarly with our shs you know rather than have these component systems you know look look to people like for Sarah to to install you know to to buy their products so do your research very well thanks the technologies again not the end product it's for example this does open source pays you a control and all that but you still have to manage your loans you still have to get to collect money somehow so you have to convince your customers this is good to buy so if you're a distributor like us and I think um introducing at the right time is also important it's not a panacea for every kind of problem that you might be facing with any uncertainty but it's it's more about the right fit into the model and the community and indeed on the community yeah please feel free to join our community also to know more about open source and I'm saying that because meanwhile the results of our polls are being displayed and you can in fact see that there's quite a few people participating today that did not really know about open source before this webinar or have not yet used open source solutions so yes do it start using open source solution hopefully you could see that there is at least three people in the world and you are seeing them now that have used open source solutions in their companies and are pretty happy about us so maybe that's a good it's a good testimony of the situation um thank you so much for everybody and and Gabriel the floor is back to you for the concluding remarks and thanks for the others for this great webinar thank you yes thank you very much Fabio and really thank you also to to the panelists it was indeed again a very interesting conversation a very interesting discussion insightful as I already said last time I'm also learning on open sourcing so um thank you very much for for this I think it should also really encourage as I said the the participants of this webinar or all kind of different stakeholders to engage more to talk about it and to talk with each other what I really liked about what came through in all of your contributions I would say is that it is it's it's really about sharing it's it's about collaborating and together really try to find solutions to accelerate the development of the market really to always also towards the achievement of the energy access objectives so for us at the at the Alliance it's it's definitely very exciting and it's interesting to to follow this conversation the developments and also in the future we will be more than happy you know to to support and and also to to talk and communicate about what was going on how this open sourcing develops because I think potentially there are still other stakeholders that could be involved in the in the conversation so we are really happy and open to see how that will evolve and and and we would like to what actually our mandate is to be a platform and and to facilitate also the knowledge exchange and and collaboration and being a platform to to facilitate and and support also these these discussions so I'm curious and looking forward to to the to the developments what's what's going to come next and wishing you all really a lot of of success with with with your activities and yes it was a pleasure supporting this series and and we are hoping that more will follow thank you thank you very thank you very much to here and to all the participants and yeah wishing you a nice rest of the day thanks thank you bye bye