Hello everyone. How was everyone doing today? Good. Alright. Little energy is always helpful.
This is an interactive talk. Please feel free to stop me at any time and ask questions.
There's no dumb questions and I'm happy to answer any questions at all. With that said,
I'm Jacob Green. I'm from Ospo Plus Plus. Does everyone know what an Ospo is? Okay.
Nope. Just for those that don't, it's an open source program office or an open source program
organization. It ends up being the epicenter of open source for an organization. Whether that
organization is a company, an industry, a government from a city to a nation state government,
as we've heard earlier. Germany now has an Ospo. Yay. We have university Ospos now and hopefully
we're going to get some NGO Ospos coming up soon. I'm here to ask you to come to a party.
Kind of like FOSTA, but we're throwing a party at the United Nations. On June 9th and 10th,
we have a huge room available for 800 people and we want to bring together the entirety of the
open source community, including governments, universities, NGOs, and industry. But not just
from Europe, not just from North America, we want to bring people together from all over the globe.
We held this event last year in June, June 20th, I think. We had about 80 people. This time we're
going for 800 people. This is the report that we came out of that event. Ospos for good, building
cooperative digital infrastructure. We're going to be hoping for this report to come out next year,
but that all depends on your participation. A little bit of history about how this came to be.
We held this event, I'm from Baltimore, the city of Baltimore. You have seen the wire? We have
some challenges. This is why we're in the public code dev room here. We want to cooperate with
you as a city of Baltimore, as a representative, not of the official city of Baltimore, but just as
a resident looking to cooperate with you. We need infrastructure to do it. We want to run your code
and I want anything that's developed in Baltimore to help in your cities. The swap going back and
forth between you all. We've been working with the United Nations, the European Commission.
There's a European Commission Ospo Network now of governments. We have about 13 of them. We have
about 12 university Ospos now in the US. We're starting to branch out these Ospos everywhere.
Now we're going to need to start cooperating. On November 21st of this year, at the European
Commission Open Source Awards, the UN Secretary General's envoy on technology, Mr. Amadeep
Gill, said some remarkable words. He equated the Ospo as soft infrastructure, just as important as
hard infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, etc. The Ospo itself is an organizational construct,
like the Office of the CTO. He equated it to helping us to solve challenges, those challenges
being helping to localize and advance the SDGs, helping to get cross-border solutions in Europe
and interoperability, which is very important for digital sovereignty, to helping achieve AI
governance and working with AI. You in this room could think of a bunch of other policy issues
that might be used by an organizational construct that's about cooperation. He took it a step
further and he called for the cooperation between these Ospos. He said, and I'm going to hopefully
screw this up. We need to start connecting Baltimore, Buenos Aires, Bangalore to Barcelona.
Four B cities, so we're looking for more B cities. We have Berlin coming up hopefully next.
Boston hopefully is coming up soon after that. If you're in Berlin, happened to be on March 5th
for FOS backstage. We have a Berlin Breakfast Club that's been going on. The Berlin City Ospo
will be there talking and answering your questions. The event we're going to do now
was announced yesterday at the Open Forum Europe Policy Summit. Both the UN Secretary of General
Technology Envoy, again called and opened up, made the announcement for this event. The UN OICT,
which is like the office of the CIO, also enforced and asked people to come. I would like your help
in making this possible. What does that mean by help? Well, we would love your help in making sure
that it's a global event. So one, I'm looking for attendance. We would love for everyone here
to come, whether you're a developer, a community manager, you're a policy wonk, you're in government,
or you're looking to use open source to achieve policy missions. Various NGOs that you would think
about as not having to do with open source are actually heavily involved in using open source
to achieve their policy outcomes. We're looking for attendees. Second, we're looking for those
attendees to come as groups, as a delegation, you might say, because one of the things we were
to happen after you leave the event is for you to work on building cooperative infrastructure
in your own city, your own government, your own NGO, your own university. Third, we're looking for,
as I said, the attendees to be coming from all over the world. So that means industry from all
over the world, universities from all over the world, cities from all over the world, world
governments from all over the world, and NGOs from all over the world. I can't pull that off
myself. My organizing team can't pull that off themselves. We need your help in that. So attend,
help drive her participation, and then come have a good time. The United Nations is an amazing
place if you have not visited. It was awe-inspiring last year when we went, and I would like for the
open-source community for us to come together there if possible. We're making this a yearly event.
I'm opening the floor now to questions.
Questions? Okay.
So, also, how do we get our governments involved? Because we need to have governments
engaged with us, the members of the United Nations. Any thoughts on how beyond the city of Baltimore
you're going to, like any hope of giving the White House to show up? Yes. We're going to show up?
I don't know yet. Can I repeat the question? How do we get our, how the question was,
how do we get our governments to show up? One, we have examples now. When I first started
evangelizing hospitals around, we didn't have examples. Now we have 12 European governments
formed in a network together. That network was just approved in European budget legislation
called FOSEPs 2. So now you have a point of contact to point your government to, to say,
you're not alone. Second, we can connect them to the United Nations itself who is looking to
bring this together. The ITU, the International Telecommunications Group, just announced a
program for governmental OSPOs that they're, they're running. So it's no longer a theoretical
thing. We now have programs starting up for OSPOs for good and just OSPOs and government in general.
So please reach out to myself, jakeupatospoplusplus.org, Yan Oralena. Thank you.