So now I'm talking into the mic and the sounds needs seems to work.
Great.
Cool.
My name is Yuan Li Noker.
I'm from I'm a senior research at Rice.
The National Research Institute of Sweden.
And here we have the gates.
Senior Policy Advisor at OpenForm Europe.
And we're going to present a study we did together with
Youngness and Simon as part of a report that you want to.
Yeah.
So this report was funded by the Open Service Observatory.
This is a project run by D.G.
Digit in the European Commission.
And as part of that, they try and gather news and intelligence from across Europe
around how open source software is being used by public administrations.
Particularly at the national level, but also at the local and regional level,
which is what we'll talk about today.
So our main message is we're going to talk about digital sovereignty,
but we're going to talk about it from the ground up.
So basically how local governments can start thinking about this topic and how open source
can be used and developed and collaborate on in different forms and ways.
First off, when we say digital sovereignty, we prefer open strategic autonomy,
because it communicates the need for control agency over your digital future,
in many ways, but it highlights the notion of open that you should still aim to collaborate,
to share and reuse, promote and drop ability as far as possible.
To make that happen.
Open strategic autonomy of digital sovereignty requires control,
which requires investments and contributions,
especially in the case of open source,
and this requires capabilities.
The issue we have in public sector,
and this is both our general observations throughout our years in this space,
but also throughout the study where we did 25ish interviews
is that public sector suffers from a conference syndrome.
It's risk-aversiveness.
It's conservative procurement culture.
It's a preference towards the status quo.
Someone told it nicely yesterday that civil servants,
they are tasked with keeping the state functioning.
They're not tasked with taking risks,
which I think highlights it.
And it's not a healer, me or he problem.
It's a wee problem.
This is Derek Schroeder.
He had a chance to re-advisation in,
so he put it quite nicely in a hearing in the Danish Parliament,
earlier last spring,
that this change requires courage,
and that sovereign requires systematic changes,
not just technical replacements.
So open strategic autonomy requires
that we grow capabilities.
That's our key message of the day.
And this capability needs to be both on the transnational,
on a European level, on the national level, and on the local level.
And it's a local level that we will focus on now.
And in the study we did focused on five case studies,
on five different open source projects
that's being collaborated on, shared and reused,
governed, driven from various local governments on different levels.
And I handed it to Nick to dive into the different case studies.
So really what we thought to do with the case study was to do a systematic review,
which we found absent in the literature of open source adoption
and reused at the local government level.
The reason we did this study is because there is a question
around what it means to collaborate on open source
in a public sector context,
and while there's an emerging literature at the national level,
that literature wasn't well represented at the local level,
and we sought to situate it in the context of sovereignty,
and some of these decisions that people make around
the capability and control they need to run public administrations
in a city context as opposed to a national context.
So we surveyed a wide range of literature,
including over, I think, 60 papers,
and ultimately we featured 15 papers in our final paper.
Across those 15 papers we identified different types of OSS collaboration,
so projects that emerge organically within the public sector,
projects that emerge in the community
and get wasted into foundations, projects that emerge as collaborations
between ministries or agencies within a city or across borders,
all of these different archetypes.
And we used that to surface along lists of 25 case studies
that we thought were broadly representative of different ways
in which public sector collaboration around open source offer happens,
and then we selected five to feature in the case in the report.
And we think that they're broadly representative of different types of open source collaboration dynamics,
and I think they represent different archetypes,
also by which people can build sovereignty from the ground up.
So the first one is console democracy of this toilet,
but citizen participation software, particularly for participatory budgeting,
to give themselves some more control over how they run their democratic processes.
So what we really learned about this case study was there's many different ways
that this type of collaboration can happen and it can be decentralized.
There's many different ways to think about the role of a foundation,
and how it can actually provide support to the public sector
or leverage support from the public sector to evolve over time.
So I'll move on to the next one.
This one is called OS2BoggerPC and MedBoggerPC.
I'm actually going to let Johan talk about this one
because it's very close to home for him.
Okay, yeah.
So this one is interesting.
So this emerged from in Denmark,
as a need to create a public citizen library PC distribution OS.
It grew out of a number of municipalities engaged
and very closely to one specific vendor.
And so it has continued and grown sustainably,
but there's a lot of interesting nuances here
in that there's different perceptions in this case study.
So on the one hand, there's a perception from OS2,
which is a municipal association in Denmark
with about 85 plus, I believe, out of 98 municipalities.
So that's where the OS2BoggerPC project is hosted,
they maintain it through this main vendor.
And then, with time and with various activity,
coming from the steward side,
the municipal side seems from our observations
to be some kind of vacuum there,
which generated that the vendor started moving more rapidly.
So that really illustrated some sort of a split
or where the municipalities believed that they were
being more and more locked into this vendor,
while the vendor was more of the perception
well, everything's there.
And that led into the bringing out to another vendor,
to the code review,
and there was kind of a split in governance,
and I don't know the state of play today,
but this really shows how it's very important for municipalities
to stay active and not drop, drop the mic,
or lose focus.
They maintain maintenance happens on a day-to-day basis.
And if a vendor is driving the maintenance,
they need to be empowered to do that,
and the municipalities need to be on that train.
While still the municipalities need to ensure
that there is certain quality assurances
in place to ensure that there is no risk of getting locked
in even though it.
Development within a specific municipality.
So what we really observed was that the MIT license,
in this case, really wasn't for collaboration with other city's regions,
but it was to attract and retain developers and talent,
an operator ICT, which is a joint stock company owned by the city of Prague,
was actually able to provide better salaries than a lot of public sector institutions.
They could also work on behalf of clients,
so they weren't just working for the public sector,
they could also do other types of work.
And that enabled a more kind of agile style of public sector IT development,
and open source was kind of a strategy to attract and maintain talent,
but also to help make sure that this platform was usable by other kind of
industries or other agencies and departments within the city.
So one of the lessons here, I think, was open source and can help
with development recruitment and code quality,
and helps build trust with city stakeholders and eases kind of collaboration
even within a given city.
And you kind of see some overlapping inner source and open source dynamics here.
But yeah, that cross-departmental collaboration was a very fundamental lesson for us,
in a very unique example compared to some of the other case studies.
We do see some example of there being some demand for,
can maybe outside of Prague, for example, in the Bohemia region,
they have some integrated transport that they're working on,
but it hasn't quite materialized just yet.
So it's still mostly within that city.
Another example is parlimator.
So parlimator is kind of another civic action initiative,
I guess you would call it.
So parlimator is for parliamentary activities,
so it helps you monitor the activities of a parlimant basically.
So in this case, it was developed within Slovenia.
And what we see here is kind of where the local becomes national,
the national becomes local, and kind of where those lines blur
when it comes to open source software.
What was interesting here was that it was kind of developed predominantly
within a national context, but you see it federated across a number of different
municipalities throughout Slovenia.
So we actually spoke to a number of small villages that were using
this tool in different ways.
And then we also saw how it was later exported to places like Croatia
and Bosnian Herzegovina.
What's also interesting here is how it was developed and maintained.
So parlimator is maintained by a civil society organization.
And that civil society organization promotes digital rights, digital democracy,
but they also develop tools, specifically tools for direct democracy, civic action,
parliamentary monitoring, things like this.
And parlimator is one of their most prominent.
So parlimator in Norway.
So for here, we really see the importance of cross-border open source communities,
but also kind of existing in organic capabilities within public sector institutions.
And how the two can meet.
I'm hoping that one day did you translate gets moved into a foundation.
I think there's a really interesting codebase there that they could evolve
and collaborate on across borders, but it's really allowed them to reduce costs
for their transport planning and completely open source.
Kind of the way by which people are able to navigate in that region.
So yeah, I'll send it back to Johan,
but those are the case studies that we found through the report.
Thanks.
And building on this is coming back to the capabilities.
Municipalities, local governments can build capabilities in different ways,
as the case study shows.
One way is going external, going together.
And this is especially for small medium.
It's about to see this is probably the way to go.
To pull your resources, to come together on the National Local Government Association,
such as always doing Denmark, such as,
some preconceived and examples in many other countries as well.
I do like in France.
But there can also be for international foundations.
If the product escalates or for trusted external surprise.
Or you can be go the internal route.
If you have the muscles, if you have the budget and resources,
and the political commitment, because that's really key.
If you want to go internal and build up substantial internal development and maintenance organization.
This is, I mean, in Sweden, this would maybe qualify to two or three or four municipalities,
I would say.
And then there's these quasi-internal capabilities.
I mean, I think best explained by public, public ICT.
Operator ICT, and in the context of the city of Prague,
where there is a publicly owned service company working on behalf of the local government.
But we can also talk about, is it immune in Belgium, I believe?
It's a service provider owned by, I believe, 140 or something,
Belonian, you know, spouses.
Then there's also the need to look at the community, leverage the resources and engage in the community.
They use them as a force multiplier to come together.
Either through the international foundations or on the national level,
where we differentiate between two types of municipal stewards associations or foundations.
One being somebody who can Sweden, exemplified who looks outside, see what kind of open source solutions are out there.
Next slide, for example, packaging that enabling sharing and reuse for its members.
Then they're upfront.
Or is it due to transparency reasons you want it to be open?
I mean, depending on the gold they're different routes.
Self-assess, what kind of barriers and challenges is.
I mean, we talked about risk versus nism and blah, blah, blah.
These are very general, but you need to look in your own organization.
There's a lot of common themes, but you need to look into your own organization and do the mapping.
And then plan accordingly and acquire the capabilities.
And when you initiate a project, and now we're very open source 101, consider interoperability and reuse from day one.
If it's, if you think about this two years later on, it won't fly in most cases.
Think about, do you want this to expand to become a multi-prost boarder project?
Then you need to think about localization from the start.
In many cases, there won't be funding or priority out from this from one single municipality.
So dedicate funds together to address these requirements early on as well.
And also strive to do an angel development model.
Try to see how you can work with different public procurement frameworks to come up in a more dynamic way to produce and address needs,
and what and features as they arise.
And think about sustainability from day one.
Think if this is an existing upstream community, think about how you can go in the sponsor,
how you, for example, Munich is a sponsor of council or how you do procurement of the service providers of the maintainers of the project.
Directly rotten, then going to a big fancy consultancy, which probably doesn't contribute upstream.
And then also think about the sustainability of the stewards.
Oh, I'm sorry, of the suppliers, that there is a business model for them, that functions that you, that you procure both maintenance and hosting operations, not just one or the other.
Think about stewardship governance from day one.
Think about if there is an existing stewardship association foundation wherever that you can go to,
thinking that your own local government will host this indefinitely.
While others come joining you will probably not be a sustainable model.
I can give you many examples.
Early on consider, again, how you can ensure that the maintenance and development states maintained,
and involve the service suppliers in the maintenance and governance in an appropriate level.
I mean, the local governments, the public entities, still need a safe room for the procurement discussions,
but there can be a level below that where the suppliers are in loop and can influence,
because they have customer awareness from coming from most of the municipalities as well.
So you need to consider them into the governance model.
Yeah, take away digital sovereign needs to be grown, bottom up just as top down, and these were some insights.
Yeah, ultimately what I hope we accomplish with our report is just to give kind of a new and novel kind of framework or way of thinking about decisions a little bit more intentionally as you seek to gain that sovereignty and gain more.
And how you provision your digital infrastructure that maybe this can offer a useful way to think about that either to examine a project director actively,
and start a new project or collaboration in a local government context.
So we are certainly hoping to refine this over time, and if you have any feedback, please get in touch.
But thank you very much.
Okay. Any questions?
The top console and they helped basically kind of maintain and provide console as a service.
There's OS 2 in Denmark.
These seem to be particularly successful models in terms of bringing municipalities on board and allowing them to make their own decisions,
not all municipalities adopt and implement the same solutions, but they are free to do so.
And there's lower cost to them transaction cost by participating in the association.
There's other models emerging, I think you can talk to a few of them.
No, but I think your questions spot on because I mean there are many examples where I have one prominent example is Sweden where.
But coordination is key really.
There need to be some kind of coordination function between the municipalities.
So there's one collective prioritization requirements engineering, road mapping process.
Everyone should be able to do their own procurements just as you do your own development feature quest in the resource project.
But the different tenders need to be coordinated.
And if there's no collective voice, no collective backlog.
And everyone is talking to the to the vendor directly.
Then the vendor will be in power and this will soon relate to risk becoming a single vendor project.
And I have live examples for you of that as well.
Okay.
Thanks.