 The role of open source program offices are all supposed to play an important role in the study policy recommendations that we presented earlier. So I'm very excited to introduce here on stage Jacob Green and Clare Dillon of Moss Labs who are the session leader duo. And they will present and lead the session on auspose everywhere and they're in the middle of creating these in government and universities. So very interested in hearing what they have to say. Thanks guys. Take it away. Thanks so much Esther and thanks for having us here today. So as all our panelists start joining, I'll just say that hello everyone. It was when we heard Satiko earlier in the report talking about how we can build institutional capacity around open source, it was great to hear the recommendation about how we can build open source program offices or auspose to help that journey. So our panel here today is a group of folks who have a lot of experience in terms of open source program offices or auspose. So we're here to talk about not just the construct itself as an open source program office but also how auspose can unlock impact for open source. So on our panel here today, we've got Deb Bryant from Red Hat who's the director in the open source program office there. We have Heiss Helanus from the European Commission Open Source Program Office. We have Boris von Hoitner from the Foundation for Public Code. We have Saeed Shoudry from Johns Hopkins University who has set up the Institute for Applied Open Source there and also the Open Source Program Office and Peter Gantt from co-founder of Appel, the European Business Association. So I suppose let's get started. Deb, you've actually had an awful lot of experience in terms of actually running an open source program office at Red Hat. Maybe you can just help level set us in terms of from the corporate world what your views about what an open source program office is and what value it can bring to an organization. Alright, so I'm going to actually start with just sort of a generic expression of what we think open source program offices are. So we're sharing a common definition. I did look this morning. It's not in Wikipedia. However, the Libre Office project and open office do come in heavily when you go look. So an open source program, we call them OSPOS now for short, is commonly established when an organization wishes to formalize or advance their objectives with open source. They may be completely new, but it also includes participating in projects as well as being consumers or adopters. They're typically responsible for policy and practice in in private industry. That means internal policies and compliance, operational policies and also practice practical guides and educating the way it's set up or where it sits in the organization really depends on what the goals are for the organization. So it varies, but they have a very crucial role in helping the company organizations they are supporting to understand the culture of open source in order to help it fully realize its benefits. And that goes to a lot of points have been made where the course of the day, which this is a lot more than code. There's more to open source than code. It's about people and culture. My direct experience, much of it comes from heading the open source program at Red Hat in private industry 10 years ago. There were probably three OSPOS and 10 years later we could and that included did not include Red Hat versus more recent innovation. But today there are dozens in private industry of open source program offices. We think the popularity is attributed to the increase of use of open source infrastructure to support IT and also the interweaving of open source into companies' business strategies or even their products. So it becomes even more important for the company to understand what they're doing. For my team, much of the work we do is supporting the communities that Red Hat works with and relies upon. There's a tremendous amount of non-code work that goes into helping support healthy communities through communication or convening and also education. We also have a role in helping people that are new to Red Hat as they join the company to understand Red Hat's culture and also understand our philosophy of the way we develop software, which is upstream first. That's the way our work is done. And it's a new concept to many people. So when they come in, we make sure they understand what Red Hat's culture is and how we work with community. We also extend that expertise to working with our customers. We encourage corporate contributions. We encourage our customers to join with us in projects. So they're not just our customers, but they're also our partners in open source. So that's an important part of our role as well. So generally speaking, I'll say OSPO serves as culture curators, as educators, and as providers of resources for best practices as well as having a hand in policy. So I just want to say very briefly that I've been really fortunate. My career has banned the public sector. I was responsible for IT policy for the enterprise for a state. I was in academia and I helped build an open source lab that became a global resource for community and of course in private industry over the years. And I will say that I'm very excited about the suggestion that a network of OSPOs be created. I think this is a great idea. We certainly, as an example, the United States has a lot of them and there's a social network and a private network around the foundations. But the idea of being able to cross domains, private, academic or research to me is very exciting. And I think it would be tremendously enabling for a lot of the initiatives we're talking about doing today. Thanks. Thanks so much, Deb. And I love the fact that you've referenced this idea of the triple helix and bringing together private institutions and academia and government. And in fact, we've got great representation from all three angles here on the panel here today. So going next to Saeed, Saeed, you were responsible for setting up one of the first open source program offices in academia in the US in Johns Hopkins University. So Deb has kind of shared how and I love the idea of cultural curation, but she shared about how the OSPOs work in that kind of corporate capacity. Can you maybe talk about what brought Johns Hopkins on the path to setting up an OSPO and why it's there and what impact it's having? Yeah, thank you. And thank you to the organizers of the event as well. And thank you to Deb for that really wonderful and perfect explanation of OSPOs and picking up on the team of culture curator, if you will, the short answer to why we created an OSPOs that the university has problems that it wishes to solve and we need new partnerships and new ways of working together to make that happen. So within a university context, I think it's fair to say we do many things, but there are three primary outputs or products, articles, data and software. What the OSPOs does in that context is start to treat open source software as a primary research object. And in any university context, what this does is activate various parts of the institution that are at the core from an academic and an administrative perspective. So by saying we are now curating research outputs of the university in the form of open source software, we can work with the provosts and the vice presidents and so on. If you ask them, do you care about open source software? You may get very different answers. If you ask them, do you care about research outputs? They will all say yes, over one level. So casting it in that way is a very important part of elevating the importance of open source software in a university setting. And if looking at the mission of a university, one could argue there are three main pillars, research, translation and education. So as I mentioned, the research output is a key part of any university. Johns Hopkins happens to receive the largest amount of funding in the United States. It's about $3 billion a year of external funding. If you look across the entire university sector, it's hard to get an exact answer in the US, but I have heard from several people that somebody ordered $150 billion a year. So we are talking about a fairly significant amount of even financial capacity, but capacity beyond that. The translation aspect is really how do you take research and move it beyond the walls of the university, you know, the boundaries of the university. And we heard or I saw earlier in the chat about tech transfer and that is typically the way universities have thought about translation. And in no way am I implying that that doesn't remain important. We clearly need to think about tech transfer offices as a key part of working with OSPOs. But what the OSPOs allow us to do is also think about different forms of translation, new forms of translation. And many of our researchers are very eager to explore those beyond commercialization, beyond patents, beyond IP agreements, but rather impact in a more social and tangible way. In Hopkins, some priorities include municipal services, open access publishing, personalized medicine, public health and COVID. I was fortunate to be part of the team that worked on the GHU global COVID map. We're having conversations about can we create an open source version of that map, for example. Another way of thinking about education is a form of translation. So I am a Hopkins alumnus. One of the things you hear at Hopkins is the best education is when research is translated into the learning environment. So we are doing that through the Institute of Applied Open Source, which builds on top of the OSPOs, a partnership between the OSPOs and the Department of Computer Science. And we're getting wonderful help from colleagues at Microsoft. So for the inaugural talk, Sarah and Abatni gave a wonderful talk about open source as they were, not only a noun. And Steven Wally has just finished teaching a mini-course in between semesters and will be a lecturer as well for something we're calling semesters of code. So we see this as a potential progression from hackathons to the summer of code to semesters of code and deeper, longer, more immersive experiences for our students. And just reinforcing resonating what we've heard earlier, the course of course includes software engineering. You learn how to be a more effective software developer engineer. But it absolutely includes a lot of these software skills, community skills, a more holistic perspective that we've heard. And I'd like to believe what it will do is raise the profile and awareness of our students, prepare them better for the workforce, and give them a better sense of what the options are. So one of the, for me, goals or metrics of success would be do students come out and understand that working for a big tech company is only one pathway. If you care about various things, open source has permeated society in so many different ways. You can continue your work in open source, but not necessarily have to be in a big tech company. And maybe you can even start your own company. In the United States, small businesses still account for the majority of job creation. That is waning since 2008-2009 in our current economic crisis. But perhaps this kind of educational experience will let students recognize they can go out and launch their own companies and do so with this much more holistic perspective. So I'll end by saying that, yes, we did launch the first Osmo University of the US, but we hope it's a model for other universities. We hope it's a way to continue working with government and companies, not only in the US, but with Europe and hopefully throughout the world. Thanks, Said. And I know that you had been instrumental in doing a fantastic collaboration with the city of Paris as well in terms of implementing some of their municipal services into Baltimore. And it's a great example that and in fact, semesters of code of the opportunities for that kind of worldwide collaboration that you can enable through something like an Osmo. So thank you for that. And speaking about then, if we take the third bit of the helix then, Heiss, if I can come to you, the European Commission's open source program office was recently instantiated. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your goals for that open source program office, both now and in the future, and the reasons behind it. Yes. Thank you. Thank you first for having me here, Claire, and Deborah and Said for mowing a bit of grass away in front of my feet. So I don't have to explain everything about the Osmo's anymore. That was really cool. For the Commission, and I just put in the link, in the chat, the link to the open source strategy, our big starting point is actually the Commission's digital strategy from 2018. And it sets a bunch of goals, like making sure the Commission becomes digital by default, and that this whole process becomes once only. Security and privacy are two main objectives there. Openness and interoperability are the other ones. And for anybody that does these things, you immediately realize that open source is a key ingredient to achieve any of these goals. So the open source strategy, which came out in October last year, is really a practical instrument to achieve the goals of the digital strategy. And the Osmo in its turn, which is created with this new communication, is really there to make sure that this open source strategy gets into place so that it's being put into practice. Or in other words, we're here to increase the impact of that strategy to give it form and structure. And okay, so that's all theory. In practice, what we're really doing is we're getting rid of the legal barriers of RxRFU, and they're quite high in the Commission, to share our software source code as open, under an open source license. And we're helping the organization change, or rather we're helping the people in the organization on the road to open source. And so internally, our role will be, we'll be doing an enormous amount of liaising between DGs, between project groups, between development teams. That should be working together. That should be working internally together. And as we are able to remove the barriers to the outside world, we'll be working with public services in the EU and beyond. So externally, well, we're really working on growing a network of auspos, well, auspos or any other name. It doesn't really matter of people doing similar things in similar organizations. And it's not just in the EU, it will be beyond. Because of course, you need to learn from each other. You want to work on best practices. You know, it's the cheapest thing is to learn from mistakes other people have made. And you want to support each other to find your path. To lower expectations of it, because auspos, let's make no mistake, we don't know everything about open source yet. But we'll be reaching out far and wide to other people so that we can start sharing things and get better at it. I think I'll leave it at this. Thanks a million, Heiss. And Jacob, coming to you, Moss Labs has been involved in for a long time now in terms of working with organizations who are trying to build auspos in public organizations. And I love the way Heiss mentioned that, you know, oftentimes there are a lot of people who are doing the work of what we've described here as being auspo work. So oftentimes they may not be called auspos, but there's people out there doing it. But maybe you can talk a little bit about your experiences and how auspos can be used to, I suppose, make policies have impact in the world and maybe some of your viewpoints on that. Sure. Thanks, Claire. We'll start by looking at Johns Hopkins because it's one I'm very familiar with. We're not doing open source for the sake of open source. It's really to achieve the policy objectives of the organization. And the auspo is really designed in such a way to facilitate that in an organizational way. Johns Hopkins is an incredibly complex, interconnected ecosystem of thousands and thousands of researchers, very independent, working differently. And the auspo is, I think Deb likes to say, helps to create a community of practice or a culture of collaboration to permeate that organization. But I don't want to forget the policy objectives of what the goals are of the organization and then also what the role is of something like a university within the larger public policy context in terms of what the auspo can do in terms of creating a almost a universal interface between Johns Hopkins University able to interface in a much better way or a more easier way to the multitude of facets that is red hatch or the multitude of facets that is the European Commission or the multitude of facets that is other large organizations. There are already pressures and reasons why collaborations should occur. The auspo I think gives us a unique opportunity and we're very excited to see how this progresses to allow these organizations to network together and really unlock that capacity, which sometimes I think is hard to get at from an organizational point of view. Great, thanks Jacob. And I think this idea of it being as important not just to have an auspo, but this idea of the network of auspos being so much more powerful to help make the real impact happen and to share learnings as Hyde was saying. And I think that's incredibly important. So Boris, coming to you, in the context of thinking about that idea of how networks of auspos can work together for impact, can you maybe comment on how that could help from a kind of a city perspective or from municipal perspective? How do you see that being able to help in the context of your work? Yeah, well, I think Commissioner Breton said in his talk, he said, well, open source is fundamentally different from everything that's being done. And I think in our practice with the Foundation for Public Code and we're kind of like an open source foundation that tries to be like public administration native, so trying to solve that problem from that angle. I think we've really found that this fundamentally different means that it's also not something that can be just done. You can't just create a policy and say like, okay, now things need to be open source and then things will be open source. They're just not how it works. Because you can make policy, like for the Netherlands, our first motion in parliament to do that the Dutch government should do open source was adopted in 2002 when it was not the last one. That is not enough. And what we're really finding is that for open source to work and to be successful, it needs the involvement of the developers and designers because they need to think about like working with others. They need to have the ability to work with others. So it requires work from management. Procurement officers need to understand how to procure in an open source world. What that means for data protection, security, policymakers need to think about like what does open source mean for the way that we can introduce, build, and develop policies. And they should use the opportunity to reuse policies of others that come with mature software solutions already. And so I think what this really calls for is like, as Chai says, it really makes sense to make sure that if you're creating these kind of policies, you attach people with mission, which I guess would then be an open source program office, in order to create that coherent response. Because as a public organization, you're trying to make sure that you have more control or sovereignty or independence. You're trying to make sure that you have lower risks. And you're trying to make sure that you can be more effective in what you're doing. And that's why you're doing open source. And that needs everyone working together in order to enable that. And now cities are an interesting, like you mentioned cities and municipalities. And I think they are a very interesting sort of nexus point because they are not too small that they just don't have any idea. And they're also not too large to be ecosystems on their own. They are already very naturally always working together with industry, with local businesses, with universities. A lot of universities have very strong ties to cities. And often also like citizens directly. So there's really an opportunity there for this to be developed and to develop well and quickly. And we're definitely finding that a lot of the innovation that we find needs to happen in order to make open source a shared thing happens in cities. Because they are kind of like the cultures where these things grow. And then I think one of the main things that I'd also like to point out in that sort of relationship of those four, yeah, the triple helix or quadruple helix are the helix with as many strands as you want. Like one of the things why open source is so great is because it can really improve the relationship between all the different parties. Everyone has their own responsibilities that are very clearly defined. And everyone's able to help everyone out continuously. And I'm quite excited that we also have Peter Gunton here. Because I think like one of the biggest opportunities here for open source in general, but also for why you should have an open source program office is to improve that relationship with your team vendors and with the market in general. So I hope that gives some context from our side. It does. Thanks so much, Boris. I'm a great lead-in to Peter than in terms of actually thinking about, because representing the business community in this group of folks, how about thinking about how an open source program office can help that interaction with the public sector for businesses? But I'm going to add in because it was explicitly called out in the chat earlier. So when we think about that interaction, maybe like can you maybe talk about how it can help the businesses, but also how it can help citizens as well as businesses and how that whole kind of ecosystem is self-supporting in that respect. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you. I think one of the insights, the study we talked about today gave us is that the vast majority of companies creating open source are small businesses in Europe. So I think like more than 50% of the code is created by companies with less than 50 employees or something like this. I myself founded such a company which is now a little bit larger, but not much larger. Like we are like 80 people. I founded it nearly 20 years ago and it is the typical European way of doing things. So we did not go for venture capital. We created the company by the money our customers gave us and we grew slowly and we needed time to become profitable and so on. And now we specialize, we're doing identity management and application integration software working a lot with the public sector, especially in Germany and especially in the field of education and digitization of schools. And we heard a lot of... On the one side, why open source is the premier tool to gain digital sovereignty. It's not the only one, I think, but it's very, very important because it allows for vendor independence. It allows to look at the code and it allows to create an ecosystem of different businesses where you can choose from. And that is, I think, very important for this state. And on the other side, this creates economy. Doing this is also very important to create jobs and to create a broad ecosystem of small, medium-sized and also a few large companies without one being the one ruling them all. But having a real broader ecosystem where the government agencies and administrations can choose from and where they are able to switch vendors if they feel it is necessary, which is not the case today in many areas. We had this study in Germany about dependence on a very small number of vendors and a similar situation other well. So this could be a great flywheel with the administration benefiting and the economy and the small business benefiting and to your question. This, of course, is also very good for society overall because if people can look at code the administration is working with, if people can understand how things work, this generates trust into administrations. If they can use it, if they even can submit change requests or pull requests, well, even better. And, of course, they can work on it, they can start their own businesses if they like, they can go into business and already have knowledge about some tool or some program which then can be worked on and so on. So I think everybody is benefiting. And now, of course, why did this not work out the way we would love that it should have worked out for years. And I think one of the problem is that the open source industry is made from so many small companies. And as I can say from my own experience it is very hard to build all these different relationships you need to work with public administrations. There are so many people involved in decisions and there are so many different levels and so many officers and so many people who have a say. And I think the big opportunity we have with and then we are not just the vendor, we have to explain what open source is. And there are many, many people in administrations who do not understand open source. So still there's the question, why should I pay if it can download it? How do you make money? Why is it secure if everybody can look at it? And all these questions where we think they have been answered 20 years ago, but they are still there, they are still there. And therefore I think these open source program officers or however you call them in Germany there's a plan to create a center for digital sovereignty which is basically an Ospo as my understanding. They can build the nexus between the smaller businesses and the administration. They can explain to the administration not only how the broader open source community with the universities and the enterprises and the users, but also the open source industry works. You need both parts. You need the broader community and you need the industry. And they can explain and help to create policies how to effectively work with this industry. And this would make it easier for the administration to consume open source software because sometimes a small administration just wants to consume it. They are small. They are just two IT guys. No big plans to create an open source project. Just I just want to consume it because it's better. And they can also be one point to speak to for companies like ours. And as we have heard there are thousands of them in Europe for organizations like the open source business alliance where I'm the chairman of and also Appel, our new European umbrella association. And therefore I think they might have really play a crucial role in bringing this flywheel to rotate and to take off. Thank you. Well, I love the idea of getting that flywheel to rotate between helix and flywheels. We'll be spinning around with this. Thank you for that, Peter. And it really kind of covered off some of the major kind of potential for an open source program office and how it can remove blockers. Heist was talking about that too. And I want to come back then to this idea of the network effect because I saw it kind of going up on the chat there as you were speaking. And I loved personally, I loved, I think it was Mirko's comments earlier when he was talking about the fact that what we really need to do is we've gotten good at sharing in terms of potentially, there are lots of organizations who are sharing code and sharing open source software, but we need to get better at this idea of working together and collaborating, which is a different thing. It's this idea that together we can be better instead of I'm so good, I gave you all my source code. So thinking about that and thinking about the opportunity for how that network effect through an institutional construct like an open source program office can be achieved. Maybe I'll just open it up now to the panel to say, who'd like to comment about what we can do to help that network effect? Because there was a talk about the kind of creation of a network, but what would that network actually do to make that impact bigger and better, to get that flywheel really going in terms of collaboration? Anyone like to comment? Boris? Yeah, no, I think it's a community of practice. And I think, well, probably not one, but many communities of practice. Public administrations are becoming digital institutions. If we would need one CTO that understood both public administrations and technology per public administration in Europe, we would be short very seriously. So the need for collaboration is enormous. And I think what we need to do is we need to create the norm in public institutions to have these kind of conversations with your peers in different organizations all around and everywhere. Because we need to like in the same way that you wouldn't trust a doctor that would never talk to other doctors. I think like we need to have that kind of attitude in public administrations as well. And I have seen, for instance, in municipalities and lower governments that we work with that, for instance, they tell their developers that the developers are not allowed to create pull requests on other repos or even like treat pull requests that come into their repos. Like they need to understand that that is a core part of what it means to develop digital government. And that it is the part, like that's a core part of everyone's work. This is a problem which is way too large to fix with sort of traditional hierarchical communication where you have to communicate through your bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses in order to get something done. We need to be able to have those lateral communications, those communication practice, those networks of people who are trying to solve similar problems as you in other organizations, share assets with them, share best practices with them, build on that, and only then can we really move forward here. Thank you, Boris. Now, I see Astor is here, but Jacob was just raising his finger there. So maybe we'll get one more very brief comment. We're all being very cheeky, Astor. I'm sorry. Go on, Jacob. Get your comment before Astor. Yes, I just wanted to close up. Thank you, Astor. Open Source has a culture of collaboration. And so we look to create new institutionality in the triple helix, in the helix, institutionalizing open source and institution and that culture of collaboration. The benefits, I think that's what that is the, I hate to use the word tool, but that is the construct. I think that is very the building block that goes to what the commissioner called for in the opening remarks, as well as what Chris called for. You know, that's that institutionalization of collaboration is going to serve us very well. Thank you, Jacob. And I just like to finish up, Astor, but by thanking all our panelists for your contribution today, and I do think this is a really valuable conversation. And I'm sure all of you will be participating in whatever comes next. And Astor, you know, I hope we can all work together to perhaps move forward on that idea of the network and to get that flywheel turning. So thank you so much to everyone for participating. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. And yeah, Oofie is not leaving the concept of the Osfo anytime soon. But yeah, thank you very much, everyone, from what I see as the cutting edge of open source policy across all these sectors.