Okay. So, I'm working on a project called the Open Source Observatory, which is managed
by the European Commission, and it is... that should not be blue. Oh well. So, I'm working
on OZOR. The general goals of OZOR are to help the free software community, in particular
in public administrations, for them to use free software. So, we have a bunch of projects
going at the same time. We have a website, the Open Source Observatory, OZOR, where we
publish free software and open source news. We have a knowledge centre where we're gathering
information on case studies of countries that are using free software. We have intelligence
reports on who in each country is involved in different parts of free software, and we
have summaries of all the policies that they have in place. We organise community events,
so this year we will organise three workshops and three webinars, and from each of these
workshops and webinars we will be producing a report, and then the latest project we've
taken on is that we're going to compile these reports together into a handbook at the end
of the year, and this is going to be the best practices on how to use free software in public
administration. So, we'll be looking at different policies that people have in place, do they
work. The folks will be on finding experts that have already gotten free software into
use on desktops and servers and services in public administration. We're going to look
at all the projects, the problems that they've encountered, and we're going to try and find
the solutions that they've found for all these different problems. But, as part of the OZOR
work, we also try and get information out to the free software community to help people
interact with how the European Commission is working on all these regulations that are
going to affect the free software community. So, this is part of the, there is a procedure
for gathering input and doing calls for evidence, but the Commission also works through people
like myself to find the free software community where you are, and then bring the information,
collect feedback, and try and get people to contribute into the process of making these
new regulations. So, in particular, today I'm going to talk about Interactive Europe Act.
Now, because we had a change in the schedule, I've got a bit of extra time, so what I want
to do is I want to make this more of an interactive session. Not the first half, the first half
is going to be me reading slides, but the second half is where I would like to get input
from everyone here. And so, what we're doing is, I'm going to present the Interoperable
Europe Act, and we're going to, I'd like to discuss then how something like an Interoperable
Europe Act can help the free software open source community, and then in what way can
the community and the Commission and the various bodies that are created by this Act, how can
they all collaborate to work together? So, in general, interoperability. The idea is
to help governments and computer systems to interoperate and share data. This often happens
at a national level already. It's already difficult at that stage, but the Interoperable
Europe Act is going to work on this at the European level. And so, the type of problems
it's trying to solve are, for example, very simple problems like reserving a parking space
for your car once you travel into the next country across the border, and you have to
type in the registration plate of your car. If the registration plate isn't in the standard
format, then that system may not allow you to reserve a parking space. A little bit more
complicated is something like hospital beds. So, the idea is that if a Belgian hospital
phones a French hospital and asks, do you have a bed free? And France says, yes, we have
one bed. Then a Dutch hospital phones the same French hospital, and they say, do you
have a bed free? Well, what is the answer? Is it one or a zero, or is it somewhere between
the two? And so, the whole idea is that the idea of data sharing and trying to get all
these hospital systems to work together is generally more complicated than expected.
You have to have either a reservation system or a priority system, which is understandable
to all the other 27 member states. So, these things get pretty complicated. The member
states generally manage to get this to work on their own systems because there's a government
at the top that can tell the hospitals, you know, please have a system that works with
all these other systems or, you know, make sure that you can interoperate. The European
Union can't do that because the European Union doesn't have authority over the hospitals
of Belgium and the hospitals of France and the hospitals of the Netherlands. So, the
European Union can't tell the hospitals what to do. So, the Interoperable Europe Act is
about setting a standard that will apply to the member states for how they will interact
with their hospitals and systems for reserving car parking spaces and other things to make
all these systems work across borders as well as they are working within the borders already.
So, that's an interoperability. And then there's also the idea of data sharing. And so, this
is the third example of when a city wants to introduce some kind of traffic management
system. They may find that other cities across Europe have already done something similar
and they might find a good example. But will that data be available to them or will the
system that has been created by that other member state, will that be available to this
city so they can use the same framework and so they can learn from the same information
that the successful city learned from. So, the current situation is that we have the
European Interoperability Framework. This is the main piece of legislation. This has
been updated a few times. The most recent version was updated in 2017. The main difference
between this and what is being proposed for the moment is that the 2017 text is done-minding.
So, this works on the goodwill and cooperation between member states, but no member states
are not required to do anything by this system. So, then there are also other informal ways
that cooperation has been helped. There is the Digital Europe programme and the join-up
platform. So, the join-up platform is a website where, for example, the open source observatory
is situated. And this is a place where a lot of different projects from the European Commission
are available online and they can share solutions and code repositories and general information
or articles. And this is another way that interoperability has been helped. But again,
it is a voluntary idea because it is making information available in the hope that people
will use it if they would like to use it. And then the third way that interoperability
has been worked on already is through this informal network of CIOs from the member
states and the expert group on interoperability of European public services. So, this is
the human side getting individuals to talk to each other and trying to get interoperability
to happen that way. So, this is useful, but it could be a lot more useful in terms of
making the cooperation between all these cities and member states more efficient. It could
be good to lay down a set of minimum interoperability specifications, ways of sharing data, not
just formats, but the technical specifications for how data will be shared and communicated.
And then the third option in the part is the idea of a binding requirement to have interoperability
by default as an approach when designing new systems and also to promote designing systems
that are interoperable. So, the European Commission has been gathering information and this is
the standard procedure when making a new regulation. They do a call for evidence, a call for input.
They work on impact assessments. They talk to their own research centres, which is the
JRC, the Joint Research Centre, and part of that is the CPS, the Centre for European
Policy Studies. They've gone through these systems. They put together, they did online
consultations and they've got 134 for the impact assessment, 112 replies for the European
Interoperability Framework. They also perform then interviews with specialists or stakeholders
in all these domains. And then presentations like this are the little annex on this because
from all this, they've talked to a load of experts, but has anyone in the room been involved
in any of these procedures? One, okay, that's two, fantastic. So, for everyone else in the
room, this is a way that the European Commission, this presentation is a way that the European
Commission is trying to get information to the public and to the free software community
in particular so that people can participate when and be aware of what can be participated
in. So, the interoperability impact is not the only piece of legislation that is currently
enforced or being worked on. We already have the single digital gateway where Member States
have an automated cross-border exchange of documents. There is the Open Data Directive,
which is for the European Interoperability Framework for designing technical solutions
for the reuse of documents. The European Strategy for Data, which is about interoperability
of data. The Data Governance Act, which is cross-sector data supporting the interoperability
of interoperable Europe framework principles and the core vocabularies of these. The Digitalization
of Justice, which is a general trend, which is to make the IT tools used by the justice
systems interoperable with each other. And then there are two pieces of legislation that
are currently still going through the legislative process. So, these are things that you can
still get involved in. And one is the Data Act, which is on interoperability of data
through among different sectors within Europe. And then we also have the regulation on digital
identity. And this is where Member States have to have digital identity wallets. And
this is to create a standard so that this can interoperate between the different Member
States. So, the European Interoperability Act will be beside or in some cases on top
of these existing pieces of legislation. So, the general goals are to create a consistent
approach to Europe interoperability and to policy making across the Member States to
establish an interoperability governance structure. So, this I'll discuss a little bit later how
exactly that will work and how people here can be involved in that. But this is the second
thing. Besides the technical issues of how technically interoperability should happen,
there's also the governance of all these different structures that will be created and how that
governance should interact with users and experts. Then the last part is the idea of
creating an ecosystem, a general environment for the EU's public sector so that people
can contribute to interoperable solutions and people are aware of what interoperable
solutions exist already and so that this innovation can happen in a collaborative way so that
there is more reuse of code. Because we've seen quite a lot of countries now have gotten
to the stage of accepting free software as a good idea and they publish a lot of source
code for the things they're doing. But we don't yet see a lot of instances where a city
from one Member State will copy a solution from another Member State and start even contributing
back to that solution. So this is the next step in terms of collaboration and making
a good use of free software is the idea of an ecosystem and getting the collaborative
innovation to happen. So inside the Interoperable Europe Act there are these six chapters. I'm
going to focus on three of them. The general idea is that it is a mandatory interoperable
ability that comes with assessments and support and solutions that already exist and encouraging
people to create new solutions. But these pieces of text are from the actual Interoperable
Europe Act. So at the moment what we have is the European Commission has published their
proposal. This then gets handed to the European Parliament which are the directly elected
members of the Parliament there. So these are often the easiest to interact with for
people who are not too involved in the legislative process. It is also handed to the European
Council which is the ministers or the governments of the Member States. So this is a second
group that will be looking at the text from the Commission and they will think about whether
to accept it as is or whether they should propose amendments. So this means the legislative
proposal for creating the Interoperable Europe Act is still ongoing. It's still something
that it's actually in the fairly early stages even and it's still something where people
can get involved and that's what I'm hoping to facilitate here. So this is one piece of
text from the current proposal for an Interoperable Europe Act. This is the share and reuse requirement
and it is one of the parts that definitely directly will affect the free and open source
software community. So what is probably interesting in this is the idea that they've created
a piece of text to encourage the sharing of solutions and so this is what we are quite
used to in the free software community but their definition or the way they describe
this is that if the solutions and which solutions will generally mean software, solutions shall
be made available to any such entity that requests it and shall include documented source
code. So that's their current definition of what it should look like to have Member States
working together on solutions such as software. So this is what the Parliament will now look
at and the Council and for we can interact with the Parliament and the Council to decide
can this be improved, should this be adopted as is or if other people want to change it,
we can give our opinion on whether it should be kept or whether it should be, whether other
changes should be included. So this is one part that I'd like to get some input on at
the end of this session so if you have any comments on how that, whether this definition
is ideal or not that would be interesting. The second part is in chapter two which is
quite a long chapter but I've only included a small amount here. Maybe the most interesting
points are that there will be the creation of the Interoperable Europe portal which
is a place where it will be possible to share solutions and data and to create some kind
of interaction between people who are interested in this topic and to increase transparency
of how work is being done on this. One interesting part of article eight is that there is somewhat
a definition of what free software such open source is. So it says here, I'll highlight
some bits, an open source license means a license whereby the re-use of software is
permitted for all specified uses in a unilateral declaration by the right holder and where
the source codes of the software are made available for users. So this is the first
time I've seen free software or open source license being defined in a European regulation.
Once again this is something that we will have to think about and accept input on and
decide whether this is the way it should be defined or are there improvements that could
be made. The second most interesting part in article three is that the EUPL, the European
Union public license, is suggested as the default license for public administration's
publishing source code solutions. The EUPL for, I'll just present briefly, is a valid
free software license. It's approved by free software foundation and open source initiative
as well. It is a somewhat copy left license. So the EUPL itself includes a copy left clause
so if you're using the EUPL and you publish software and somebody else modifies it, they
also have to publish their source code so it's quite a traditional copy left in that
sense but it has a compatibility clause and the compatibility clause says if you're merging
EUPL source code with another project under a license that's listed in the annex you can
change the EUPL license to the license of that project. So this means, for example, the
GPL v3 is one of the licenses in the annex so if you have a GPL v3 project and an EUPL
project you can merge the two and distribute the whole thing under GPL v3. This is one
way, a very positive, a very useful clause that they've inserted to work on license compatibility
which between copy left licenses is always difficult. On the other hand there are also
licenses in the annex of the EUPL which are not copy left licenses or not strong copy
left licenses and so it's possible that the EUPL software would be merged with a software
project which is under a non-strong copy left license and then the whole would be distributed
without being under strong copy left. So in one sense it's copy left license but also
the there's no guarantee that downstream uses of that code will remain copy left. So that
is the most the most unique part of the EUPL I believe and a second aspect that is quite
interesting of the EUPL is that it has been translated into all the official languages
of the European Union which is quite useful because some member states or cities have
requirements in their law saying that they can only sign contracts that are under their
own official languages. So if there's any difficulty with getting software put under
for example GPL v3 because the GPL v3 is in English there's always the option of getting
the software published under EUPL and it can be kept under EUPL or can be later converted
into GPL v3. So that is the EUPL it's getting more and more used at the moment. So here's
just a map with a few examples of member states that are currently using the EUPL but once
the Interoperable Europe Act comes into force if the current wording is kept the EUPL will
presumably be used by a lot more member states and local governments and so it is a license
that we're going to be seeing more and more use of. So those the chapter one and chapter
two are the technical aspects of the EUPL then chapter four contains the governance structure.
So this part is how interaction is going to be done with experts and with member states
and so the Interoperable Europe Act proposes making an Interoperable Europe Board and then
an Interoperable Europe Community. So these two will work together the Board having a more
executive function the community having more of an input role. They will both interact
with national authorities and national authorities will be required to create national assessment
bodies and there will be interoperability coordinators. The details of how all this
will work might look a little complicated might be a bit complicated as well but is
also not completely defined at the moment. So there have been statements at conferences
to say that the free software community will be included in the Interoperable Europe Community
and the fact that this has been explicitly mentioned by high ranking people in the commission
means that it should be quite a real role which means as a community we now have to
think about how do we want to be involved in an Interoperable Europe Community. If we
are to have representatives how do we choose these. If we are to work with the Interoperable
Europe Board how do what exactly would we be requesting or what would we be suggesting.
And so this is where I will soon come to the interactive part because this will be up to
us to think about how can an Interoperable Europe Interoperable Europe framework help
the free and open source software community. How can it help the software itself in terms
of data formats. What can we do to make sure the data formats and the systems that use
them are systems that can be used by existing free software solutions or if we are developing
new solutions what do we need to make sure that these things are all can all be made
use of by the free software and open source community. So that is the general idea of
the Interoperable Europe Act. It will have all these positive outcomes legal certainty
of course more innovation more agility for public administrations and connected digital
public services. But the reason I am giving this talk here today is because I would like
to have your suggestions. Possibly I was about to suggest possibly from the people who have
already been involved in these various procedures but do you have a microphone for questions
or how do we do. So you could repeat any questions you get so that they are audible on the live
stream because you have the only mic on your shirt. Yeah and people aren't going to come
over here and start. Okay first question. Yes. Yes sir the definition of the definition
of the definition of open standards or the definition of the open knowledge condition.
I am not sure because a lot of the questions. So the question was has there been work while
drafting the text of the Interoperable Europe has there been work to coordinate with the
definition of open standards and the open knowledge centres work on defining open standards.
That correct yes. So when the European Commission is writing their initial proposal for legislation
it is a lot of it is behind the actual drafting it happens internally in the Commission. So
they will have consulted with certain experts and when they did the call for input it would
have been possible for open knowledge centre or any of these organisations to participate
during that stage. A lot of the time these things get missed by people who should be
interested in these topics and that is partly just because there are so many different pieces
of regulation going through the systems that we can't be aware of everything that is happening.
So it is possible that they have not been involved during the elaboration of the text
up until now but this stage of the legislative process where the text then gets handed over
to the Parliament and to the Council and is visible to the general public this is where
there is now a chance for everyone involved to comment on the text and that's what I'm
here today to make sure the people who weren't aware of it until now are aware and can start
participating. We had one other person. It is a regulation. I didn't have the word on
the slide but the text is publicly available. As far as I remember it is a regulation and
so it would be directly enforceable rather than a directive has to be implemented by
the member state so there is one step of implementation there but it will be a regulation
so it will be binding to all the member states. Yes, sorry I forgot to repeat the question.
So the question is what the general feeling is on whether the text will be changed now
or what the member states and the Parliament think about and what their capacity is or
the capability is for dealing with topics such as this. So we have not yet gotten much
feedback from the member states. There are a lot of pieces of legislation going through
the system at the moment partly because there will be a new set of policy makers elected
next year and so there is somewhat of a rush to get some piece of legislation through.
Technical topics like this are always a little bit difficult for policy makers to work on
and there is always the worry that will our issue get the attention it deserves but what
I have generally found is there are always a few people in the Parliament who do understand
this topic they understand whatever topic is given to them. There are also in the Council
each member state has their own set of experts and they will have somebody who is an expert
on it could be standard setting or it could be digital solutions but they will have people
who do understand these topics so it is not so much that the MEPs don't work directly
on this themselves but each MEP in the Parliament they will have a team of assistants and each
group in the Parliament will also have an external team of policy experts and so if
you are looking at the MEPs and you are wondering will this person really understand the text
you have to take into account that it is not the MEP on their own who works on the text
it is their office who will work on the text and so within each MEP's office there will
be well each MEP that is going to work on this directly there should be somebody who
is who understands this and that is part of the job of anyone who wants to get involved
in it is to identify the people in the Parliament in the Council who are the experts and who
do understand this and then try and work with them to improve the text and then within their
groups and within the Parliament they will generally be seen as an expert and then they
would have a larger influence on how the text should be changed.
I think it is something that is shared when I hear the questions and I think it is really
a big political game to get on the table and get the right people on the table but for
example on the member of the extendence foundation it is all about the infallible chat I just
made the budget what it would cost our foundation to probably react to the digital market sex
And to participate also in a community input would be really a big stress for our organization.
So I think we could have lots to contribute there.
Lots of useful input because I think that digital marketing could have been much better if they would have conserved the place.
But they're out of resources to do it and still it's a big game who's there and who should be there.
The comment is that it is very important who is at the table and who will be involved in these negotiations and in giving input and it's always a difficult decision to make on how many resources we can put in a community organization or even a company can put into participating in this particular legislative procedure when there are also so many other that are also very important to work on.
And yeah, it's a devalued comment and that's like we're trying to make it through this presentation through coming to FOSTA.
I'm trying to be part of making it easier to participate in this. At least people will be aware of it.
And then yeah, it's always, you know, whatever can be put into it, it will hopefully be beneficial.
But people will, everyone does their best.
I'm wondering how do you think that this will benefit the general open source community?
These acts, they say that agencies must publish as open source but it doesn't say they will use it.
What they often see is that they just hire a bunch of consultants from ATOS or whatever, Gemini, but they don't hire actual open source developers. They just hire a bunch of people using a consulting framework.
Then they just download the free software for free and they say, oh look how much open source we need, but that doesn't benefit us as a community. I do think this will improve that.
Because I don't see any things that like what the previous commenter said about funding of the community and supporting the community really.
It just says you must make open source but it doesn't say support the real makers.
So the question is how will this really benefit free software open source developers if we already have a lot of government agencies who already download free and open source software and they use it but this doesn't actually lead to contributions to the software or it doesn't help other people who are writing projects.
And so I would say the way this could benefit free software developers is by making public how interoperability will happen, it will make it easier for a project to develop the software necessary to interact with these services in that way.
Because at the moment if we have 27 different ways of reserving a hospital bed somewhere and if all these, if the specifications are not public, well then it's very difficult for a free software developer to come along and say well I'm going to write a hospital bed reservation system.
But if the specifications and the data formats and the procedures for performing these tasks were transparent and public and then that's already one step that would be useful.
And then if France develops a system and they publish the source code for theirs and Belgium develops a system and they publish the source code for theirs then this also gives us reference implementations for how to interact within these frameworks.
And so I think I would have thought that was the problem you asked but would you like to do a follow up comment?
Yeah, I don't think that that's because I think then it's just the consultancy firms that develop these open source services and I mean as an open source developer you probably don't invest up front a lot of money and time to do something.
I don't know how you see that. I couldn't then still be developed by big companies.
Okay, is this the same comment?
Yeah, actually the add-on to this. The thing that I see happening is of course I'm from the States so I have a whole different environment I have to deal with.
But they sat there and go oh here's billions of dollars for open source. Okay, great. What's the procurement path into that money being distributed?
Because all that's going to happen is you're going to have these huge consultancy firms come in.
If we're lucky they dump 8,000 lines of code on us which doesn't go through our process, doesn't go through any of those things properly, they don't behave correctly.
There's all of these different problems that happen and there's nothing to actually address that piece of the fact that there's not a good procurement process.
I know in the States it's horrible. There's no way an individual developer could ever go through the process to ever see any of that money.
You know, it's impossible. I don't know what the processes are like here in the different countries either.
But I know that that procurement pathway ends up being the thing that's really devastating to actually helping the open source structures that exist.
Because most of them actually are non-profits too. I mean how many of them are set up as actual non-profit structures and do we have a clean way to get that government money?
No, you have to go through. You have to be a business. You have to be a business of a certain size.
Okay, so the question then is...
The question is how do free software developers get access to the funding for developing free software in public administrations
and how do you avoid that all this money gets given to big consultancy firms who dump code without participating in community procedures
and the procurement rules will not be of any use to free software companies who would be able to do proper collaboration with the community.
Procurement is a national level competence so the European Commission is not going to be telling Member States how to work on procurement.
What will happen with interoperability is that the formats and the procedures and the frameworks will become transparent
and there will be reference implementations at least available.
So in that sense where it was very difficult to interoperate with all these public administrations
it should be with open specifications and with source code and implementations. It should be a lot easier at the very least.
Who ends up getting paid to develop the software? That is something that will be dealt with outside of this legislation
and it will have to be worked on in some other texts, probably at the national level.
Two for you.
Quickly.
The willingness in the commission or recognition that maybe we should just dump all this on GitHub
and have a platform within the European Union that is used to host this code.
The follow up on that is are there any AI training clauses in this license?
So the two questions are should the European Commission have their own code hosting website instead of using GitHub and are there any AI clauses?
AI is not in this but there is also an AI Act which is currently going through the legislative process
and so that's something where it's still halfway through the legislative process.
If people want to get involved in that that would be very useful.
GitHub, the European Commission's code sharing site is code.europa.info.
So this is something they put online I think last October and so they have their own code hosting site
and this is one of the ways they hope to encourage people, projects from the European Union to collaborate and work together
and so yes it won't be on GitHub.
This is only for European institutions and not for local governments?
At the moment I believe the projects that are there are only European institutions
but it is also the goal is for it to be broadened out and I expect that it will also be for local governments
but it is only online the last three or four months so that's the start.
Sorry the question there was what goes on the code.europa.info portal.
Do you have one more question?
We have time for two questions.
Two, okay.
I have a question, is there a consideration how much complexity exists within the member states?
We build a group of concepts and it kind of died in the draw because there was no confidence in getting consensus among the 16 member states of Germany
so the standards within each member state of the European Union are also really different and getting consensus there is hard.
The question is is there any consideration for the complexity within a member state in terms of implementing all these different IT systems?
The Interoperable Europe Act will focus on making sure that interoperability is possible.
How complex it is for a country which has 60 regions or in Belgium where you've got seven governments, how difficult it is for these things to work together is still something that the member states have to work on themselves.
Each member state can define their own number of regions and provinces and communes and communities and that is something they all have to deal with.
So those technical solutions won't be solved by Interoperable Europe Act but by making specifications, file formats and procedures transparent it might have the knock-on effect of also making it easier to work on those problems.
To mention the European Commission doesn't want to interrupt into the procurement practices in national states, why not? It could be harmonized in all of you.
So the question is why the European Commission wouldn't get involved in procurement policies in member states?
The answer is mostly that for certain member states certain things are very sensitive and there are some things that some people wish was at a European level and for other people it is completely unacceptable that this would be at the European level.
And so even within public procurement if you're going to have a national policy then you also have to think about regional governments and local governments and communities. So it would be very difficult to get agreement across all these different institutions.
For everyone to say yes the European Commission is the person who should define how the region of south-west Dublin should procure software. So it's just part of the complexity of the European situation.
There was one question over here and I'll give a chance to people who haven't spoken yet.
Thank you. I see that the legislation is a good step forward but on the other hand open source success depends on the right mindset on community building and exchange. Is there any initiative ongoing to spread the mindset for using and reusing
the particular open stuff like that? I mean it's not done by just publishing and there must be a mindset to take that out like we use it.
So the question is is there any philosophy or mindset or strategy within the European Commission to encourage participation in open source development and collaboration with the community.
So the interoperative is one thing, it's about interoperability. There is an open source strategy, there is an open source programme office where they participated in a session yesterday on the main stage in the Jensen.
So there are different activities happening within the European Commission to work on this from different angles. This is one that hopefully will help or if you think it doesn't help enough please get involved in the legislative process. It's the open part.
But there are other initiatives also. It is something that's slowly expanding within the European Commission.
My time is up so I have to thank you for the input. I'm going to hang around if people have more questions I will be available so thank you all very much.