 My name is Veronica Sherva, and I am an analyst of the digital agriculture team connecting from Budapest and I will be a host for today. Our special guest is Dragan Angelovsky, technical advisor at Pao's office for Europe and Central Asia. Who will tell us about the found needs of customizable open source tool uniquely designed to record information on animals and the keepers in Georgia or any other country. Dragan, welcome and thanks for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. So Dragan, I have four questions for you and now I will launch a timer for 14 minutes and we need to get these questions answered before the timer ends. And in the last minutes, we will take a few questions from our audience. So do your participants, please write down your questions and comments in the chat. My colleague, Aidae, will be monitoring it. So the timer starts running now. Dragan, are you ready? Yes, please. Great. So Dragan, can you please tell us about the needs? What is it and what was FAUSE motivation in developing such a comprehensive tool and why was the tool developed as an open source? Okay, well, first to define the needs. It is an animal health and food safety information system developed for the National Food Agency of Georgia by FAO with support from the Swiss Development Corporation and the Austrian Development Agency. Now to define an IT system, it's basically a collection of elements working together on a basis of a set of predefined business rules that usually mirror regulation and official procedures. So in other words, the Knights consists out of a software or a web application, a database that stores data and ensures that the rules are followed. It runs on hardware and it's basically data is input by users and stakeholders who are recording information to demonstrate their performance and compliance with the business rules and the legislative rules. Now, if such an IT system is used properly for some time, full traceability and with accountability will be ensured and when this is done properly for some time, there will be enough data to do analysis of past performance and future projections. For instance, for outcomes of animal health campaigns for improved planning. And when this is done properly for a certain time, inevitably it leads to improvement of institutional practices and performance. Now, the motivation to develop the Knights as such a comprehensive systems with over 30 modules stems from the need to address few challenges in Georgia. First, the complexity of the livestock, animal health, food safety and to some extent the public health sector in Georgia. In particular, in the aftermath of events when the Soviet legacy met the ambitious EU approximation plan of the country. The second challenge is the overall need for redefinition of roles and responsibilities and also to record the compliance and performance in line with the new rules. And the third challenge of course is the need to address the absence of legacy systems apart from paper-based documentation in the country. So a tool like the Knights in principle follows EU regulations. However, approximating Georgia regulations are still developing and mandate gradual implementation. Therefore the Knights was designed with flexibility and global best practices in mind which makes it customizable to various scenarios so that the system can work with different procedures in different periods and different areas. No, in regards to the open source, we have selected open source since this is basically the cheaper version to develop and maintain. And it's not a subject of neither licenses nor authorites which gives us more flexibility for their future for its future improvement, development as and as we will discuss further dissemination. Very interesting, Dragan, thanks. So I understand that certain sophistication of Knights system stems from the need for it to be adaptable for instance to the country context, to legislation, to the complex system of the livestock itself. So now considering that it was created as an open source tool, now Knights of course has a potential to be introduced in other countries of the region and even beyond and thereby avoid duplicating the same work. So the question then is, what is generally needed to appropriately operate the system based on the experience from Georgia? Thanks. Okay, so being also the country experience in perspective for any system to operate properly such as this one. Firstly, what is needed is political will and ownership which are a must as the system is a tool and how you use the tool is just as important as the tool itself. Political will and ownership can directly translate into the remaining needs, meaning discipline to use the system properly and of course consistency in the proper use. Then third need is basically development of capacities on all levels. Georgia is facing challenges in terms of capacities in rural areas, but not only there. And the fourth and final need is basically to have budgets to keep the system running both in terms of IT infrastructure and in terms of data input and data quality assurance. While the first phase of the Knights project was developing the bulk of the tool, the second phase active at the moment are running until 2025 fosters the development of the political will capacities on various levels and consistency of use. Budgets are a bit more difficult to secure and of course, like many countries, Georgia struggles with this. Therefore, we are aiming to open the system to external stakeholders such as farmers and the private sector and to share the data entry responsibilities and costs. For this to work, we are also building awareness that substitutes the Soviet mentality when the government should do all with the understanding that everybody must play their part and take responsibility for it. In this sense, we are positively surprised by the enthusiasm and entrepreneurship of the private sector in Georgia whose willingness to engage with the Knights exceed that of many more developed countries. This also gives us an opportunity now since when dedicated stakeholders are willing to use the system, this leads to improved performance and development of both the livestock sub-sector and the agricultural sector overall. Not to mention that the interest of dedicated users incentivizes the government services to do their part in providing data with adequate quality and timeliness which later is again reused by other stakeholders. Very insightful, Dragan, thank you very much. Let me just quickly remind our participants to draw up any questions or comments in the chat. And in regarding to what you've been saying, I think that these preconditions, the sense of ownership, discipline, capacities, budget, buying from various stakeholders are somewhat common when it comes to nationwide projects in general. And so the third question we would like you to answer is about the systems users. The question is, who owns the system and what impact does it have on the national but also on the farm level? Okay, well, from a legal perspective, government of Georgia owns the currently deployed version of the software and the data in the system. However, the source code of the application being an open source means that it belongs to the world. The source code is available to all and has been recently added in the FAO catalog of digital public goods. If we are referring to the country of Georgia, the competent authority is responsible for the use and maintenance of the system. And this is the national food agency. However, the system also touches upon the work of several other state agencies which are all part of the ministry of environmental protection and agriculture of Georgia. On another hand, the data in the system belongs to the users while the statistical information of the analysis is public. So in a sense, the system at the same time belongs to everybody in Georgia. On stakeholder level, the veterinarians need the system more as a tool since more animal health problems that country has, more likely it needs a system like this to address the issues. As animal health spills into food safety through residues and zoonosis, the system is also preconditioned for improvement in the public health sector. In regards to subsistence farmers, the system currently offers only indirect benefits in the form of improved animal health and public health. However, for commercial farmers, this system is a prerequisite for commercialization as it is the basis for improvement of their production practices and of course a precondition for export. For instance, the export to the European Union of live animals and animal products for which Georgia aspires to. Thank you very much. So, NAITS is actually valuable for all value chain actors, right? From what I understand, starting from farmers to veterinarians to private sector and finally to animal health control. Considering its potential, let me ask you the last question, more of a practical one. We have a bit more than three minutes to answer it. So what are the key steps to introduce current NAITS in the country and how much would it cost to actually introduce it but also to maintain it in another country? Okay, well, to speak from practical experiences, then the NAITS at the time being transferred to six countries with FAO TCP project supporting the customization of the software. The cost in principle depends on the customization requirement. For instance, in the Caribbean where there is no animal identification registration systems present and there is a small pool of users and animals to be targeted, the budget of the project is approximately 100,000 US dollars per country of which we expect about 25,000 US dollars per country to be dedicated for the software customization. On another hand, in an EU approximating country like Macedonia which already operates an obsolete system and has basically about 15 years worth of data to be transferred as well as established workflows to be considered, the cost of the transfer of the system is estimated between 150 and 200,000 US dollars. In terms of maintenance, we envisage an estimated cost of between $2 and $3,000 per month per country. This cost is annually about 1% of the development cost or to put it in context, this is still about one fifth of a standard annual maintenance costs for similar systems which ranges between five and 10% of the development cost. Now, we have to realize that building and maintaining systems such as this is a transformative and tough process. And standard systems follow rigid presets of workflows but then almost always the legislations change, the situation and the users change or the reality of the system changes requiring amendments to the system. Furthermore, the technology can change and countries that have systems from a decade ago or more are already feeling the need to evolve them and to allow the use of, for instance, mobile devices, PPS and similar tools. Finally, experience from several countries that we consider during the project also shows that most countries need at least few attempts before they manage to develop a proper system. Therefore, it's not an easy thing for a country in particular if the system has been developed with external support to maintain it and to evolve it. In fact, only the richest countries include developers within their governmental structures and hence continuous modernizations is usually not part of external support provided. In that regard, we believe that having a corporate solution that can be updated and improved with each new country deployment offers to FAO an opportunity. A basic system such as the night but only focusing on few modules for animal electrification registration costs approximately 400,000 US dollars to develop while a comprehensive system even close to the functionality that the night has costs well over a million US dollars and this is in pre-inflation prices. Even if we marginalize the use of the nights or the potential for use and we say, well, let's use the system only for countries that do not have a system as their first system to try. We are still talking about dozens of countries. However, if we consider that the night in terms of technology and functionalities by far exceeds the systems used even by those in most EU member states then and it's available for more or less free then we can start thinking and having a more ambitious goals for ourselves. I see, thank you, Dragan. It's apparent that developing nades as an open source tool in the first place actually drastically reduces the expenses of other countries willing to introduce it. Amazing result. And Dragan, thank you so much for answering these questions thoroughly in such a short time. We've made it just in 14 minutes. Let us now take several questions from the audience. Aida, you have been monitoring the chat. Please tell us what our colleagues are curious about. Thank you, Dragan and Veronica. Here we have the following two questions from the audience. The first would be, what does open source mean in simple words? And the second question is, as in the case of Macedonia, the country has a system for identification traceability in place. What are the key elements of data transfer from the existing system to nades? How is data modified? What are security measures to avoid data leakage and so on? So the floor is yours, Dragan. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for the questions. Now, let me start from the second question. Well, as we have mentioned in the case of Macedonia, there is a system operating since if I'm not mistaken, 2011. So over that period of time, this system has generated quite a bit of information which has been used for various purposes. Now to basically approximate, we need to move that data in order not to lose it. We need to move it into the new system, which means developing of a new framework, a new architecture in the database and basically moving the data to corresponding locations. We can describe it maybe better as imagine that you are developing a complicated Excel format and then you would like to move the data from an old Excel format into the new. However, we cannot move the file but we have to copy paste the data. So it requires a bit of more prudent approach compared to when developing a new system where there is no system previously used because we have to ensure that the data is transferred to the exact locations and that the architecture of the new system is identical to the old system. Of course, we do not have to transfer all of it but only the data that we need for future use. When it comes to data leakages, there is no possibilities for it because this is an internal process which is managed by the IT team. So it does not really pose any risks in terms of transferring of the data but this is a complicated activity and as always, there are some complications possible but I'm confident that our team can manage such activities. Okay, so can we... Ah, okay, so the second question in terms of open source, well, it basically means that the FAO and the developers do not have any licenses against the system and we are bound by the rules to upload the source code to an online platform where anybody can download it and use it without any restrictions. So in a sense, means public domain means that belongs to everybody who would like to use this data regardless if this is for replicating a system or for other purposes. And this also means that FAO can share the system with other countries without any premiums or basically costs for licenses which is in my understanding, one of the very few occasions that such a system is available. Thank you, Dragan. I also see that our colleagues shared some links in the chat where you can read about open source a bit more. Thank you very much, Dragan. It was really great to learn about what it takes to design such a complex system for the government as well as the benefit of open source technology and many other valuable insights.