 So thank you, dear all, good morning. Thank you for having me here at this year's EU Open Source Policy Summit and many congratulations to entire Open Forum Europe team for successfully growing because this event was in the very beginning fairly small gathering. And right now it's one of the biggest Open Source Policy Summits in Europe. I've been personally always convinced of the importance of openness principles. That's maybe one of the reasons why I 14 years ago was actually co-founder of a Czech pirate party because we always believe that the openness and cooperation is a main vector in order to succeed to put things working. And there are ways to build better services for our citizen with the goal to improve their user experience, consensually increase citizen trust and satisfaction with the government. And again, common approach that are collaborative, that it's open, that it's trustworthy is one of the important things and it shows to us it's getting more and more important in these days. Over the past year, as challenging as it was, we've been reminded of the importance of unity and cooperation within Europe. And of course, not only this whole, but the people who are looking at us online shows us how that unity and cooperation is understood by us. And those are not only the principles of evolution, but they are crucial for our security and to ensure it. And we also need them fully to reap the benefits of the open source software as a tool for modernization, sovereignty and economic development. Today I would like to share with you three things. I will start by giving you an idea of what is a state of play of an open source in the Czech Republic and share some highlights of our work over the past year since I'm also representing here Czech Republic, its government and I believe in part of my pirate heart also the open source community. The second thing I'd like to depict is talk about the key challenges and priorities in the open source that are ahead of us on the national level. And lastly, I'm going to share with you my perspective on what works well and where we need to improve further on the European level. So let's start with the first thing. And I'm aware that the Czech Republic might not seem like the usual suspect when we talk about the open source software and the initiative. And indeed, open source policy did not always have a strong political support within the Czech Republic and its government. However, did not stop the local community, including academia, private sector and civil society organization to keep pushing, developing talents and creating a strong hub for open source in the Czech Republic. And it's my personal goal to actually uplift that also to the state and the government level. I have to mention the city of Brno, which is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, as a prime example of such cooperation on the municipality level and the community and also Red Hat, another organization. And Brno is a center of many open source, open software source initiatives, including the strong presence of Red Hat I've already mentioned and its cooperation within the local university ecosystem. And I'm glad that since we joined the government, which is already 13 months ago, we have an opportunity to strengthen the support for this work also on the highest political level. We now have a chance to create consensus on broader and sustained support in the future, regardless of potential changes in a political leadership. And the sustainable change is important not only in the area of open source policy, but more broadly to the priority of digitalization of a public services. And that is why over the past year, my team and I have been working and day and night, as I say, but just walking, improving the way that digitalization is managed in the Czech public sector. And again, I'm getting back to Brno. There was a big conference of the community. And even within you, I'm seeing a lot of people who are presently from that community of the open cities and others. Maybe I'll talk about it later. Maybe one thing, since January 2023, we established a digital and information agency in the Czech Republic with the goal of bringing more coordination and stronger expertise and sustainable and long-lasting changes, which, of course, an open source principle is bringing up to the solution of the public and private sector together would be one of the vectors the agency would push through, because it's not a question of a specific ministry. It's a nationwide importance and usage that we are talking about. Additionally, over the past year, and I was already mentioning that during the presidency of the Council of EU, there were several important milestones also taking place. We hosted that open source conference in Brno together with our partners who also publish Brno open source declaration. This declaration laid path of the creation of the Czech National Open Source Program Office under the leadership of Open Cities NGO, which is a long-term supported organization that are gathering the biggest cities to implement and use the open source and the field, publish open data and allow the community to actually build things above them, getting directly involved in the lifetime of the city and its citizens. We also strengthened cooperation between the Ministry of Interior and the Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency, focused on the security aspects of the open source software. And let me take this opportunity to thanks to colleagues from the Czech Republic, as I said and some of them, but I can't see through the fog that is here, are sitting somewhere here in the audience. Thank you guys for pushing this policy in the Czech Republic forward and I hope more and more cities and institutions will join you since you are taking a lead in the implementation of the entire buckle of the principles and putting it to the ground. Maybe the second thing, what we have to work on right now is to make sure that we have the right to do the right thing. We have a lot of work in front of us, including further work on legislation, procurement policies that would encourage rather than prevent to use an open source software. It's not only the length of the procurement services, but also we need to think open, you know, not to vendor lock it through the proposals to the business requirements, of course. And maybe sometimes in the future, when the community will be open, the projects will be up and running. The public procurement that in many cases really slowed down the digital transformation would be very specific parts of the services, maybe some minor, not of importance, maybe not even of the size, but basically the common solution would be able to anyone who is going to need it in that part, which would open the industry options to focus on more challenging future projects, like the development of AI, cloud computing, advanced quantum, et cetera, rather than developing already legacy solutions to the things that government did for tens of years and still doesn't have a proper solution that is modular, that can be carried on by whoever understood the open source software principles. So this is an important part, public procurement and its adjustment towards open source principles. So this has been an important part for us in Czech Republic, as I said that, to cooperate with the open source community through the digital and information agency. Again, because it's not the question of a ministry of a regional development, I'm also in a health or other ministry of interior, those principles are common. They are umbrella to all what we do in the digitalization of the e-government and other public services. And last but not least, it's crucial for us to upscale, and I think I was already talking to people from Red Hat, year 2023 is year of skills, right? And all of you here, you've got, I believe, decent or excellent digital skills. Some of us are just speakers, right? I didn't write a code for at least 10 years, so I'm probably currently doesn't even know what I'm talking about. No, I still probably can write a code and do the enterprise architecture, but we are developing things when we need to go farther, but we also need people to be able to operate them, to understand them. In order to fight disinformation and misusage of technology against people, we need to build technology that people believe, and you only believe and trust to the thing that you at least understand somehow. So please, anyone who can put a hand together, this upcoming year and maybe next five years, the digital up skills of entire society with the basic skills, filling the gaps, because we do face digital poverty, but we need people to be able to survive in the 21st century. And all this resilience, you know, whatever unity, strength of the society is, that we understand what's going on around, and since more and more things are going around our digital base, our online, our social media, we have to focus on that and contribute. And I believe the open source community, as it helped with the solutions, putting on the ground the software development, you know, architecture proposals, and many things also regarding to the war in Ukraine, the education of the community, academy programs of the Red Hat and the others. It's very important because we need this massive up skill and it couldn't be done by the local NGO who can help on the place without the people do courses for the woman, because we do have a significant depth, because only 20% of the ICT people involved are female and the Czech Republic is only nine. So we are missing specialists in many areas, but also this balance of gender, it's quite a bad thing. And last thing that was mentioned on the telco conference, when we were finalizing our presidency by the commissioner and by my final speech, was that part get it balanced, you know, and focus on that the digital is not whatever gender specific area, and again open source community can help us with that. On the European layer, there has been an amount of legislative work done, it was mentioned here by the initial speech and I would like to use the opportunity also to thanks to colleague from the European Commission and particularly from DigiDigit for the work they've done and for the cooperation that we do have on this specific field. And I believe also that in the future, and we started with that and I was talking to members of the European Parliament, we have to go for the systematic support on the European level of the open source and it's necessary and the benefit of all the stakeholders because EU as is needs to push that forward as well, especially when we talk about the future of let's say some common digital solution interoperability of European institutions. I believe that open source would play an important role. One of my key priorities both on both national level but also European level during the presidency was the revision of ADAS regulations. I believe that as a COVID pass or green certificate was mentioned here, this is going to be one of the biggest challenges to have a European digital identity wallet that would be secure that would have all the features to protecting the citizen data would be cyber secure, friendly, whatever but enough open also could be used for whatever future purposes. And there is a huge potential of its usage, not only within the eGov and a state-to-state communication but to entire internet population which is if I take a look how many households are connected in the Czech Republic it's basically almost everyone except those people who are excluded which is one part we have to work together more of technology and telco companies. So I'm proud the Czech presidency brought us this general approach and also it included the strong endorsement of an open source solution. However our work doesn't end here after those 13 months in the politics and in the government this was my final agreement the work will never end and it will never be better of having more life work balance. So we speed it up on a national level due to the resolving issues of the Ukrainian war as well. The momentum of cooperation is enormous of what we can do together so we can easily push our national or our national companies wishes aside and cooperate. That's why we finalized so many important files. Push them towards towards European Parliament and please all of you use that momentum we won't lose it. The war is not over we've got still a lot of work to do regarding to secure physically but also online the environment within Europe but it was unique and things maybe people are watching to all of my colleagues from different governments because the atmosphere even on the lower level was unbelievably open towards finding the common solution that everybody would agree to that and would be carry on farther towards our citizens in either future legislation within the countries but also to the real implementation. Many important people from European Commission and from whatever areas said you know guys we talked a lot about the things let's move more to the action right let's deploy let's implement you know and it's on both way we need the framework we need the legislation but we also need the hands on the ground or on the keyboard and that's again one of the biggest strength of the community that we include a lot of people who are actually writing the code you know doing the solution doing the enterprise architecture and we just have to join in the common force and speed up maybe one last thing for me as a 90 person which somehow as I said would decide for last 10 years and a politician the community was always the key and all the milestones and visions that politicians or legislation makers or negotiators or lobbyists which is nothing bad on lobbying for specific purpose one it's balance and it's legal it's cannot be done it's cannot be done without the community with the global support and that's again why I would like to thanks to organizers of this summit that bring us together today and I would also like to share my commitment that the Czech Republic will work towards not only participating in for the building and strengthening the open source community please enjoy the rest of the summit and force them with its unforgettable atmosphere this weekend and thank you and maybe excuse me I was a little bit long so the next speaker probably need to speed up