 Yeah, super. So yeah, as Anna said, Claire couldn't be here. So we decided out of kind of convenience instead of trying to play around with having me talking into a prerecorded something that we just prerecorded our conversation. And then I'll come up on stage again and answer any potential questions you might have. But so yeah, please let's play the video and I'll go through the bizarre experience of listening to my own like conversation. And then yeah, just feel free to save any questions for later. Hello and welcome to our discussion on the political potential of Ospos here at Ospo Con London. I am really sorry not to be with you in person today. I think Aster will be with you in person today. So I'm going to get Aster to give a wave now on screen for the recorded piece, but also a wave in person somewhere around us because we're hoping that he will be also there in person. But we are delighted to be here today to talk about this really important topic. My name is Claire Dillon. I work with Inner Source Commons. I also am involved in the Ospo plus plus network, which is a global network of Ospos who have come together to collaborate in the public sector space from universities, from cities, from governments and from civic institutions. And I'm here with Aster. Aster, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Aster Nomellin Karlberg, policy director with Open Forum Europe, where I think I'm working at the intersection of open technologies and public policy. Thank you, Aster. And we're here today to talk about this idea of the political potential of Ospos. So Aster, perhaps if you can move to the next slide, what we might just reflect upon is the fact that we have seen a huge growth in the momentum of the creation of Ospos outside the private sector and outside the idea of a corporate Ospo. And we're seeing them in universities, in cities and in countries, they're springing up at a regional level, or sometimes even in global organizations or NGOs. So we have some examples here. Aster, again, if you can thank you, show those. But we're seeing them across the world in universities like Johns Hopkins University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, UCLA Santa Cruz in the US, also places like Trinity College Dublin here in my hometown. But all across the world, we're seeing many more universities create Ospos as a central point for their open source activities. But also, we're seeing a growth in cities and countries. Paris has recently announced that they're creating an Ospos and we're seeing them pop up all across Germany and in other countries as well. At a regional level, the European Commission has recently created their Ospo as well. We're seeing them in the Cascadia region in the United States. But across the world, we're starting to see more and more Ospos looking at these challenges at a regional level. And of course, in global organizations or NGOs like the United Nations, they are also exploring the idea of how they can use Ospo to progress their goals. So Aster, maybe we'll have a little think about the recent report that came out from the European Commission to give an indication about why this is such an important theme at this point in time. Sure. Thanks, Claire. So early September, the European Commission published its, I would say, landmark study on the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation. We call it just the open source study for short. It has to do with the economic impact. And it was meant to be used as kind of the background document that foundational study for understanding where open source is in the market in Europe today. And from our point of view, working with public policy and open source and open technologies in general, there's, of course, a lot to be said around this study. But one of the kind of overarching points is that it has perhaps not changed the arguments we're using promoting open technologies, but it has added more to our toolbox. And in short, there's this transition of moving away from an old style of argumentation towards a new style of argumentation and understanding of where open source is. So in many ways, the old way of thinking about it has been kind of like open technologies for the sake of open technologies. The way we should approach things in, especially in the public sector, for its kind of moral benefits, there's this should argument. And then, of course, there's been a big focus in the public policy space around open source and procurement law. And one of the big takeaways from our study is that writing a good law, it's not enough. The main success factor for any kind of open source initiative coming from the government has, you know, is the degree of kind of cultural shift in the organization. It's about education, buy in within the hierarchy. So in our view, the most important things and actually moving forward in the conversation around open source in public policy has to do with the institutionalization and maintaining knowledge, skills, and then momentum over time to actually reach scale and impact. And this study is one of many reasons, but for us at OFE, the main reason why we feel comfortable to talk about the potential of open source in meeting strategic goals. But with that, let's get to the a little bit of an overview of the actual economic findings. So in short, the big kind of factor that we've been focusing on and what crystallized from the study was the importance of code contributions and increases in code contributions for economic growth and the positive externalities of this. Something I think most of you in the audience know is that open source code and components are integrated in the vast majority of software. A lot of reasons for this. I mean, it's everywhere today. We might know this, but it's also very good to have this empirically backed in kind of an ecosystem of documents, something that is needed to be repeated in policy discussions. In terms of economic presence in the markets, open source software makes up between 0.5 and 0.7 of the EU's GDP. Now, for a continent like Europe, this is a lot of money. To put this in perspective, it means that open source software contributes to the European GDP in a similar way or actually more than both air and water transport combined. So it's really a massive part of today's infrastructure. In terms of a more dynamic number, if we saw an increase in globally available open source code by 10%, we would see an increase in the EU's GDP of between 0.4 and 0.6%. This is, as you can imagine, a big dynamic change in the economy. And in terms of kind of an investment point of view, open source software, and this is from numbers in the private sector, it has a cost-benefit ratio of 1 to 10. And if you take into account hardware and capital costs around 1 to 4. And I really want to point out here, as we at Open Forum Europe together with Fraunhofer ISI were the authors of the study, these are very, very conservative calculations. We took very much kind of a defensive approach to really make sure we had data that we could defend in any kind of circumstances. And as I said before, all this taken together, it just kind of creates a new set of arguments and justifies talking about open source at a way higher strategic level for public policy. And I think that in any open source policy discussions going forward, it will be difficult to consider any kind of question without discussing these positive externalities in terms of economic growth. So there are a lot of things that one can say about open source public policy at a strategic level. But for today's talk, we'll focus on what we call the institutionalization question. We can simplify building auspose and the role it has in the rollout of ambitious open source policy. Claire, this is my cue to you. Thank you. And, you know, Astor, it's wonderful to actually get the very specifics of the economic impact because the economic growth argument is something that has been made in the past, but perhaps we haven't had been able to size that impact. But I mean, that's substantial, but the figures you have just quoted in terms of the potential impact for the European Union. And of course, that could be extrapolated for any other country or region across the world. So economic growth turns out to be one of the, you know, emerging policy areas that an auspose could have an impact in. Just the pure idea of innovation as well, even if that's not specifically related to economic growth, we're seeing a lot of organizations in the public sector as well as the private sector who have an actual policy around increasing the amount of innovation that's happening. And that too can be a very specific policy that an auspose can impact. Even the concept of public money for public code is, again, a potential strategy or policy that an auspose can obviously impact. You mentioned, I think, before this idea of being able to address the idea of lock-in or being able to have a sense of control or autonomy. So this whole idea of digital autonomy becomes a very important strategy that, again, auspose can help to impact. SME growth is a very particular scenario within the idea of economic growth. But it often is a very particular goal within the context of regions or countries. And it has of course been proven that the idea of open source and the open source ecosystems that come around the idea of technology transfer can have a very specific positive benefit on SME growth in terms of that innovation ecosystem. But of course, even beyond the idea of economic impact, the idea of social policies that governments or cities might want to roll out, they too can have an impact from open source in a particular auspose in the idea of actually creating competitive markets. And most importantly, my idea would be the idea of transparency and trust. So as a general goal for public sector organisations, the importance of actually increasing transparency and trust in public services has really come to the fore in particular in recent times through the pandemic and in for other reasons as well, of course. But that is an area in which open source and auspose in particular can have that huge impact. And if you can go on to the next slide there, Astor, thank you very much. Those policy goals can then often directly translate into public sector auspose goals. And what we have here is a wide range of potential goals for a public sector auspose. And you'll see many of them have correlations and are similar to the goals that a private sector auspose may have, like being a centre of excellence for perhaps governance and compliance and legal issues. The idea of just being an area that we would promote the sharing and reuse of code, community building around open source projects, cultural change and change behaviours, we mentioned these before in the context of these are very well known goals in the context of corporate auspose. But there may be additional areas in the area of public sector auspose where these goals may extend. Now it's probably worth noting Astor, and you know this as well as I do, that for the most part every single public sector organisation we talk to have a different set of goals. It's not like there's one size fits all in the public sector auspose space, but they often can be chosen from this list of goals. The idea of technology transfer and innovation in the context of that is an important one. Digital skills beyond the idea of training up your employees but actually as a broader digital skills agenda within a country or region can often be linked to auspose goals, as we mentioned before, specific goals around social and economic development, digital autonomy, diversity and inclusion and pathways into tech that may be that may be giving additional ways for people to actually get into technology and that's an important potential goal. And cross border initiatives where we may have to actually introduce shared languages or be able to address minorities in the case of a region. And then this idea again of transparency and the link to open data because we're seeing more and more auspose sometimes actually straddle the idea of open source software and open data in order to make that open data more usable and reusable I guess in that respect. So there's some of the areas that we're starting to see public sector auspose where they may have goals. And now maybe I'll hand it back over to you Aster to talk more about the very specific auspose recommendations that were contained in the European Commission report. Yes, absolutely. So the point of view and the reason why these these auspose recommendations were put in place is in order to kind of introduce policies to make open source scale for wheeling Europe in order to benefit citizens, there's a broad concept, but to really be able to address strategic challenges and big policy goals. We see the need for an institutional infrastructure and this has to do with providing competence and direction and becoming kind of that glue that makes public policies made in let's say a government or or in a ministry have effects on the ground. It's not enough to just like throw money out into the open source ecosystem because it's not that simple of a question let's say if you want to make public investments where do you invest? We need all these infrastructures and this interface between the policy makers and the open source ecosystem and the starting point and very much here the focus is on the European Commission and from that angle we will look at this but this would be relevant for any national government as well. So our first step is that we recommend actively using the European Commission auspose as the Commission's external collaboration interface to other also enabled institutions within industry, research institutions, universities and across borders. This of course to give them credit this is already in the works and the Commission but we really wanted to reinforce this work that this is the center and the interface with which the Commission connects to all these diverse stakeholders in the open source ecosystem. Then very typical classic policy recommendation but it's an important step to take is for the European Commission to identify and map the existing European auspose in industry public sector and academia with the aim to exchange you know information share best practices and all this is meant to feed into the process of identifying let's say gaps in some spaces identifying strategies around recommendation three which is the kind of first investment recommendation that we put forward and that is essentially for the Commission to encourage the building of 10 government auspose through its funding programs. Consider this kind of as a pilot program. As we all know in industry there is already a steady increase in the number of auspose this can and should be encouraged as well this is part of the conversation but for the public sector we ask them to leverage funding programs such as Horizon Europe and Digital Europe to speed up this process and to already from the outset and here will bring us to the last point adding on certain requirements so kind of not standardizing as such but adding certain key features that would be part of building these government auspose and one of those requirements in our view should be giving not just the Commission's auspose and networking component but also these 10 that they're building and the idea here we'll get into this a little bit later it's about leapfrogging the maturity of auspose that we've seen in the private sector in order to really facilitate the building of an auspose network we think that it's at the network level we will be able to create this infrastructure to really realize that the big ambitious goals and this yeah brings us to the final points which we'll discuss also just kind of in a broader perspective as well Claire and I but we recommend the European Commission to create a program meant to network these these auspose so it's includes the European Commission's own auspose the auspose identified in the kind of landscaping exercise of industry public sector and academia as well as the auspose form would support from the EU funding programs within this like specific subgroup for different sectors can be considered but I do think that it's in order as we all know from collaboration there needs to be a backbone well funded well informed well connected that can bring this all together in a more kind of cohesive infrastructure for open source in the public sector and how it links to the wider ecosystem and then perhaps let's take this to to the next level and start discussing how we see this kind of work on a more global visionary level and the potential the political potential that auspose actually have Claire yeah thanks Astor and I think you know the points you made about the the ability for the public sector auspose to learn from the private sector auspose is a great one I mean if you even think about the gathering here today of the to-do group and and all the auspose representatives that are here in the audience today we have so much in the public sector we have so much to learn from the great work that has already gone on in the public sector in the private sector should I say and so there has there's a great wealth of knowledge there much of which can actually be applied directly in the context of public sectors but some of which may need to be tweaked and we've learned that in our discussions that it's not necessarily just a lift and shift into some of these new public sector contexts but that discussion and that starting point is it's really really valuable to have that so I think when we think about having this network one of the main goals needs to be a learning goal and not just in terms of learning from the private sector but also in terms of having all these new government auspose and public sector auspose learn from each other because it's such a fast evolving space and people are only beginning to realize the potential and the opportunities around this so sharing practices and challenges is really part of a goal for this auspone network and I think one point here to add this strengthening the links between diverse organizations I think this is one of the most interesting things from a public policy point of view I mean open source at heart why it's exploded is that many organizations be it companies or foundations realize that a lot of the the challenges that were asked to solve today one company one city one country doesn't have the resources themselves to solve them the challenges are greater than that then in order for us to collaborate we need to lower the kind of transaction costs between very diverse sets of institutions in this space the open source license is a incredibly interesting kind of institution or norm through which we can enable this collaboration without mo use without massive contracts the kind of norms and the infrastructure to collaborate is already in place and well tested and successful and I think it connects to all these other challenges especially from a european context of getting countries to collaborate cities to collaborate we have this very interesting open source license as a norm to collaborate on that we can we have only begun to start thinking what kind of challenges we could tackle using this this approach it's a great point because every time that's mentioned I think about the example and that's a shadow uses he's he runs the open source program office in johns hopkins university and he talks about that collaboration that happened with the city of paris and their new test platform and how that he took new tests and he was implementing it for a local neighborhood center in baltimore and the same francis neighborhood center and he talks about the fact that you know if he had actually had the task of actually setting up an mo u between a local neighborhood center johns hopkins university and a city in europe um i mean they'd still be talking about it today in terms of actually wrangling through how that would work legally in terms of shared code and things like that but the fact that everyone could do it under open source licenses meant that they spent all that time and all that effort actually building value and creating value for all concerned and i think it's a great example but but removing that friction from collaboration between these different scales of organizations and where they may be placed geographically that's a huge huge value point um that that can't be underestimated really um and i think it's also worth mentioning just in the context of these diverse organizations like one thing we've noted as well is that there's often organ like there's groupings and organizations and individuals in many public sector bodies who might be doing a lot of what we've just described as ospo goals i mean they it may already be happening they may just not call themselves an ospo um but there is value in having a recognizable name so that when someone from johns hopkins is talking to someone from the city of paris they know who to connect to they know who to contact when they're looking for collaboration opportunities and and so i think that idea of even if you have very diverse organizations will completely you know geographically diverse maybe diverse on scale or diverse in their end goal they still have this interface point this familiar contact point and if you have an institutional construct like an ospo so i think that's an important one to call out this idea that number one you may already have people doing it but the name having a name that's familiar to people can be a huge benefit in that mapping exercise and that discoverability you talked about earlier which in fact is we have added that as one of the recommendations in the european commission study as well to actually call it an ospo it might sound like a small point but uh in terms of institutional interoperability semantic interoperability is important calling it the same thing um really matters and i think think it's one one of the many examples of how we can lower the transaction cost between these organizations and here i think also an important thing here as we move and start talking about this you know we've started talking about this global network of ospos let's not forget you know there are many different levels where the ospo needs to be relevant we're not just you know in a pipe dream here talking about like oh networking all these things of course at the end of the day the ospo set up in an organization needs to serve that organization's needs it needs to solve the open source challenges and you know meet work to meet the goal set out in the organization's open source strategy that is all good but what we really want to push and encourage here is also not losing track of um that networking component if you look at the private sector a large a sign of maturity around the private sector ospo is them networking formally or informally with other ospos in in the similar industry or on the user side etc that kind of networking part it took a few years i would say a decade or so for it to develop i think this is a great opportunity for the public sector and the academic sector to kind of leapfrog that development and kind of start off having the the um networking collaborative component built in from the start yeah i mean that and that definitely allows for this idea of increased citizen value i mean that's what this is all about the idea being that for no matter where you are in the world and to the point you made earlier um there's no one city or region that can solve today's problems by themselves i mean i mean just even thinking about the amount of open source uh you know projects that people are leveraging today when we think about the very specific needs of cities and regions and countries um there are often common threats um but there are often very specific contextual things that need to change it's a perfect environment for for using open source so getting you know accelerating that citizen value is what we're talking about here and having ospos as a tool to do that um in the context of local policies is is exactly uh the the opportunity that we see here the trust is also very important because you know as we're moving to a stage now where perhaps there's a decline in trust in public organizations we need to find ways to bring that trust back in and indeed the idea that you can point to examples of the code being used in different parts of the world can really increase that trust and increase people's willingness to jump on these projects and to actually invest in them which again is an incredibly important point um but i think as well that the idea of actually having everyone engaged like giving citizens an ability to be able to see what's happening not just in terms of being able to trust what's happening but also being able to actually have an impact on their own lives like that's hugely valuable too right like it's uh the idea of of of that agency and being able to be a part of what's happening in technology in your city or country that's that's great because it means that it's just not someone building something for you it's building things with you um and i think that's that's again another very very important benefit that we can see from this global network because it's people coming together from all around the world to build things together there's a huge community building potential in that and while this sounds like big words you're all here in the audience you're part of the open source ecosystem it works it is happening it is actually done it's one of the great examples probably in history where this kind of collaboration has taken place let's just start expanding on the kind of challenges and issues that we could help solve in this kind of mode of collaboration and innovation i think that's very important i think here it's a point of encouragement as well right claire of get out there and support and help kind of expand your view of how you could spend your time in in uh in terms of contributions to open source or how to teaching how to engage with open source in the ecosystem and and just even when we think about corporate ospa goals um obviously you will have your own goals in the context of the communities you're already involved in but perhaps they can be extended to include some of the corporate social responsibility goals your organization has and giving your employees even maybe beyond the software development employees an opportunity to actually work on some of these global projects that we know are coming out from places like the who united nations um and certainly uh it would be wonderful to start seeing this network of this global network of ospa's include not just the public sector ospa's but also all the private sector ospa's and how they can actually interface and help this journey for citizen value i think that would be an excellent outcome yeah couldn't agree more from from the hyper local to the global there's uh there's a role for open source stakeholders to play almost everywhere as we're moving into digital public services or the interaction with the public sector and citizens and companies will be more and more digitized so i think there's a lot of work to be done but you know we're in a good place and we have a great model to start looking for tools to solve solve some of the most interesting and challenging issues that that we have facing us completely agreed after and so i suppose with that we'll we'll wrap up this talk i know you're there in person to take questions i'm sorry i can't be there in person as well i hope you've all are having and will continue to have a fantastic conference um but thank you all very very much and uh we look forward to seeing you again soon bye bye now thank you so yeah do let me know if you have any questions that was weird to listen to myself for like 25 minutes um uh yeah any questions or thoughts or statements please one question yeah no it's a very good question um i think there are probably many different ways it could be done so working with open source in um and public policy as i mentioned in the beginning a lot of it is and will touch on procurement law like you probably if you've engaged in the space at all uh there are arguments around public money public code public procurement in terms of software should only go to um they should only procure open source solutions and services this is all good and fine as an idea um there are however quite a lot of examples i think italy might be the best one they have a an almost perfect law that states exactly this and nothing's happening they've had it for several years um and i think this is an interesting thing to reflect over i mean this has to do with enforcement of course are there like penalties with not following it so there's a lot of details everywhere and how you design these things but also just kind of helping the individual um public servant who needs to abide by this law with clear guidelines how to work and here is kind of again the point where we really start looking at the institutionalization building up ospos um because it will be that center of excellent and excellence and knowledge that would help people across um very different diverse organizations actually follow these things develop guidelines on how to procure open source um it is a different mode of thinking it's a different mode of procurement so i think we just have to keep on thinking long and hard but it's not just about writing that great law and that regulation it has to do with you know classic things like you know changing culture internally and a very important thing and we had a conversation with the european commission and you and uh ospo guys on this they they were asked like what would you ask like what would you like to have in order to actually progress with this and they said time give us time we need to learn we need to figure a lot of things out there's so many examples of you know kind of politically driven pushes into open source from cities and regions but then that party might be voted out of government and then stops and that's where institutionalization is important you need to have something to last over time and even for big companies that are often fast faster moving than the public sector it took time for them to figure out open source and how to do it and institutionalization was a big part of it so i think we there is no which i think many wish there was like a quick solution write this law and then we're fine now we have to work from the ground up really get by in etc well things are moving at least denise let's see if i'm now it started thinking about a bunch of different things so let stop me if i'm answering the wrong question here i made this point in the talk about i made perhaps a not super exact differentiation between old and new arguments for open source in the public sector or in public policy the quote-unquote old arguments are still valid there are still good arguments around cost savings let's say that you can share and reuse between sectors and regions and cities using each other software solutions etc all this is still relevant well we're interested in and this is perhaps shaped by the fact that we work mostly with the EU institutions where the kind of systems level goals is what really matters like across Europe we're interested in trying to move new stakeholders and new participants and perhaps politicians of a different color to start being interested in these questions to move it at a bigger scale because the arguments about cost saving and let's say cities or regions that cannot afford the proprietary solutions they might be already by those circumstances forced into having to deal with open source what's interesting is to start looking and discussing why should let's say a country have a targeted open source policy maybe it's because of the economic growth the fact that investing like in procurement law instead of saying you have to buy open source it's rather how do you justify buying a proprietary solution over an open source solution when there are proven economic externalities and positive benefits to the economy by releasing more code more there are like direct links direct causation between more open source in the economy and startups being founded like there's more access and there are more ways of doing business around this right so I think instead of completely shifting that into what arguments we're using let's just be flexible and realize that there are so many more arguments that are there to be used today there's also of course just the the digital autonomy argument which is I like talking about it in the context of open technologies I mean part of it because our think tank deals with that so it's it's nice but instead of talking about digital autonomy and just you know building walls around your country only by our country's technology and throw a bunch of money on perhaps solutions that are not that good focus on open like focus on open maintain control have access lower the cost of switching providers and vendors that also gives a public institution the sense of control that I think the discussions about digital autonomy actually that is what they're actually about at the end of the day so I feel like I kind of went on the side of your question but I hope that was all right yeah okay um we're gonna uh go to the last speaker so I guess we are out of time