I trust them. However, now we want to hear about, is this the first slide? Oh, sorry.
Like this. OK. Jean-Luc, and Kemen, who starts?
Good morning, everyone. I'm Jean-Luc Doréle. I work for the next generation unit, an generation
internet unit. It's not a new unit. So together with colleagues, and I have one of them here,
we are supporting the so-called thanks generation internet initiative, NGI. So I don't know how
familiar you are with NGI, but I will introduce that in a few words. And then Clementine will
give you some insights on what we are currently doing in analyzing the impact of this initiative.
So we have heard about the legislation this morning, the CRA, PLD. We'll probably hear about
the DMA a bit later, the DMA-DSA. So the European Commission is the executive body of the European
Union, and we have the right of initiative, and we give initiative and suggestion to the
co-legislators. And we have two main, to simplify, two main stream of action. One is legislation,
one is money, funding. So I'm representing the funding part, and the colleagues who are
representing the legislation part. And in the funding part, you will have many, many things
like agriculture, policy, regional development, infrastructure, and you have something called
research, and more precisely, the Horizon Europe program. So this is where the money for research
is channel, the main instrument. By the way, it's a law, so it's also a legislation, so
co-legislator matters, even in this part. And as part of Horizon Europe, there is a lot of
actions. You can imagine, it's the research spectrum. It's a little bit less than 100
billions euro over seven years, that's the budget. And if you scroll down, at one point,
you will find something called next generation internet, that's us. It's been operational for
five years now. We are completing the fifth year. We mobilized between 20, 25 million euros per
year. That's the envelope. And what we do is we fund open source. So I don't know how familiar you
are, but there are a lot of people funded by us in this FOSDEM event, these two days. There was
a session yesterday, there was a stand from NLNet. And the way we work as commission is that we don't
give the money directly to the funded party, but we give money to intermediaries. Why? Because in
the context of open source, we believe that we don't have the instrument to fund open source
communities, because at the commission, we have instruments for big consortium, 2, 3, 4, 5 million,
and a lot of participants, et cetera. So what we do, we give money to intermediaries,
and we have projects, and some of them are here. And they, in turn, take this money and do calls,
open calls. You can find them in ngi.eu, and there is somewhere a section on those calls that are
open more or less continuously. We just awarded a 27 million euro funding for the next three years,
so it's a quite significant project called NGI0 Commence Fund. And this notion of commence is that
we are funding community-based and community-governed development of open source. So there are some
nuances in open source that will not dig into that details, but check the eligibility if you're
interested, and you will find that it's relatively, it's very open. Well, five years means that we
need to step back a little bit, understand what we have been doing. It's 1,000 funded projects.
Again, you can find the catalog in ngi.eu, 1,000 projects, and we need to understand what's the
dynamic of this portfolio, because comes the next steps of funding, and it is a core legislation,
it is a policy, so we have to have the impact understanding so that we can come to the decision
maker and tell them that's the five years we have done this and this, and this impact this and this.
So we have contracted the Gartner and the Clementine that was involved also in the early
discussion more than five years ago that settled the rules and the principle for this initiative.
And I'll leave you the floor for detailing precisely the benchmarking of these five years of NGI and its impact.
Thank you, Jean-Luc. Good morning, everyone. I am Clementine Vellier. I used to be a researcher
here at ULB. I studied a master in IT at ULB, and I have been coming to FOSDEM for the past 20 years.
Five years ago when the European Commission launched the bid for creating the next generation
internet initiative and shaping it, at Gartner we are humbly in love of technology, and so of course our
understanding was that it had to be digital commons as well, the next generation internet, and that we
would have to reach out to the existing community. So what did I do? I called an LNET, I called Mikhail,
and that was my lucky moment. We won the bid. And so that year at FOSDEM when we finished the study,
we had one of the keynotes of FOSDEM presenting the NGI study with the policy officers at the time.
So that's also for me, I think, the first where the European Commission came to FOSDEM, and I'm
glad that they're here every year since. The reason why we thought it was also interesting to present
the NGI in this track, as Jolnik was explaining, is that the NGI initiative with its thousand projects
has an impact also on EU policy, because it actually helps implement them. So we've been trying to
collect data points fast to present them at FOSDEM today, and these data points come out from the
initial analysis of a survey of these NGI thousand open source projects.
So we looked at how they implement EU law, how do they carry and foster European digital rights,
how do they provide alternatives, how do they link to standardization, what standards do they
implement, and the topic of sustainability is also analyzed through other different dimensions.
So basically, there are six European digital rights and principles. We have data points here
that basically show how many projects implement how many digital rights, and so basically we have
over 20, 25 percent of the projects in NGI that implement up to three of these digital rights,
and we can cite this number, which I think is really interesting. You have three quarts of them
that actually state that they increase safety, security, and empowerment of individuals.
These EU digital rights are really important. I encourage you to follow the link and keep them
at heart. I think they stick close to the open source community as well. So this was one of the
initial findings. The next one is about how do they fuel the uptake of EU policy. So we have
cited many different EU policies. Those that were actually mentioned by Jean-Luc, so I won't go too
much through them, but I think what's interesting to see is that let's say 90 percent of the projects
see themselves as implementing EU policy. So to be honest, I think the open source community
understands somehow EU policy because they have similar values and they understand what they're
thriving for. We're getting there. Another data point that's really interesting, of course,
is the fact that more than half of the projects state that they're implementing an alternative
to large monopolistic solutions that exist. And so as these alternatives are open source and available,
they will, of course, be a good source for driving digital sovereignty in Europe.
The standards. The standards are also very strong on the European Commission's radar for many reasons.
For one, they fuel innovation, but they also help create, let's say, scale and breadth in the market
and interoperability aspects as well. So obviously the NGI projects are rooted in the standards
community, mostly ITFW3CIOIEE, but we've heard also other standardization organizations linked to
geospatial aspects that were cited. And now, of course, this is key as well because the NGI is
going to, of course, be part of the Web 4.0 that will take place worldwide. And so geolocalization
will be a key part of that. What about sustainability? I mean, we've seen in these last data points
that there's a strong footprint in those EU digital rights, values, policies, standardization,
but what about the outcome? How do these projects follow through?
Well, actually, three quarters of them follow through. It's a significant data point for many
reasons. For one, it shows that there isn't a concrete outcome. So either they follow through
because they are part of a larger effort, an open source community or a business, and so those
contributions funded by public money have been integrated back into the community solutions.
The second point that's interesting is that 8% of them have, as a follow-up, created a company
or foundation. And to build on that point, so we can extrapolate the data and then estimate that
NGI so far in those five years has generated probably a data point around 80
companies or organizations or foundations that have been created.
What about those companies? So we asked what are those business models? And interestingly and
probably not unsurprisingly, the main business model is about SaaS hosting hosted solutions
for almost 50% of them. So let's say this is also an interesting data point because
we understand that this releases or at least takes away the struggles for implementing
other people's open source tools and solutions and the technical hurdles if you're not a techie.
So the reuse is also important. How are these tools reused and how are they made available to end users
as a wider part of consumer base? Another very interesting data point talks about the developers.
So what about the developers? What about the open source community?
Well, the NGI definitely attracted the community and the talent. So in that sense, we were very
happy to see some of these data points because it was the bet to actually reach into the existing
community and inject the funding into the one that's actually making the internet run and trying to
make it, let's say, pursue further its maintenance, its update and its innovation. And so in terms
of community, we have 40% of projects that have a small community. We have 15% of projects that
have a large community. We call that over 50 people. And then we also have six of these projects that
are running in a community larger than a thousand people. So if we extrapolate that data, we can
estimate that 80,000 people are actually contributing to the NGI through code testing or bug reporting.
This is a very important data point for us. But it's also interesting to see how the NGI solutions
are channeled through the open source community through the mainstream distros. This means that
the user base is also expanding. We're looking on how to make sure that these solutions are reused.
And last but not least, I think one of the main lessons also is the notion of agility of funding.
The mechanism that Jandik explained at the beginning of this session is about funding innovation.
And that was also one of the recommendations of our study was how to do this. We have these notions
of course of fail fast, of incremental funding when you fund innovation. And the fact that
three quarters of projects pulled through means that a quarter of them are recognized as failing
fast and that's fine when you fund innovation. I think from my take today, from the discussion
of this morning that were really interesting, as much as we managed here to do an agile funding
scheme for the open source community, as much the European Commission and NL net have done with
the CRA discussions, almost an agile policy making approach. And I think there's lessons to be learned
from that. I think there is value in iterating, in iterations. And I think the open source community
has taught a lot in an unorganized organization that you can't really tap into formally, but
somehow always finds a way to innovate and always finds a way to get their messages through. So for
me, this was a really insightful morning and I'm really happy to have presented these data points
today with you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, let's hope we can continue with the interesting
and conversations. With this, I'm going to hand over to Kiran, who is there.