Yeah, absolutely.
And I also do believe that with this we can open up the discussion a bit so that we turn
this panel into a fishbowl.
So that's basically the idea and I want to do this together with Karen.
Maybe you first introduce yourself and then we explain a bit what we are trying to achieve.
Hi, I'm Karen and I have been sort of coming to not fuss them, but digital events.
I was saying to Walter I could have worn a t-shirt like his, but a different model, different
size from the CCC.
I got engaged in sort of trying to figure out how tech influences society and then I
got into politics.
And now I'm in the European Parliament for the Liberal Group and was working together
with Jules on ensuring that open source was included into the PLD in some of the last
sort of shadow meetings and trilogues by taking text from the CRA.
And it's quite apt that I'm in a fishbowl because politicians have so much going on
that they're a little bit like goldfish, so you need to remind them and keep telling them
what they need to know.
And with this, so a fishbowl discussion means that normally we have these panel discussions
and then you are happy to ask questions and then panelists address them somehow and basically
we talk about ourselves.
But there's this empty seat here and yeah, and we feel to use it and to take part in
the panel discussion with the panelists and so put your points on the table, but also
discuss with the other panelists, so feel free to join.
First of all, but we also have to say that as this is foster, we would not take the first
ones dropping by, but we will also look a bit for diversity.
And so we highly encourage you if you are not quite male men to also take part in this
discussion here and I think it's in particular important for FOSM to do so.
So please take this empty chair and take part in the discussion.
Yeah, so, okay, anyone else?
Then feel free.
Yeah, sure.
So the only most important thing is, yeah, respect yourself and please with the microphone.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
It's, yeah, so let's see how it works exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Can you say something?
Yeah, so and I said it's important to have the microphone for or like.
I understand that.
Yes, and speak loudly regardless.
Good.
And don't worry.
I'm not going to stay here for very long.
I'm going to step out as soon as I can.
Anyways, I'm Jonas and I work for Nokia and responsible for open source things there.
And the kind of like I'm been really excited about the topics of kind of like what has
been going over the what is now called the policy week, starting with the commission
thing on Thursday, then the open forum Europe thing.
And now this the discussions here.
One thing that I noticed that in the in these discussions is that and some of these discussions
I've heard before.
So I have a little bit of a kind of like an dark past.
So I am a recovering standards person and I have a history and internet governance things
and they there's a lot of parallels into the kind of like where we are now as an open source
community where we were in a kind of like Internet community community when it started
in like early 2000s discussions.
So but the good thing sadly that's kind of like that comes with good and bad things and
then the good things is that people now finally understand that open source is actually something
very important for the society.
Bad things is that people get very interested in those things and then good things like
political interests come in involved as well and all of a sudden we need to get organized
differently.
So but I think that the good thing is that we've done this in the Internet community
already before and I think we can look at some of the processes and some of the kind
of like things what we did at that time.
And similarly like an open source community, the Internet community was very diverse community.
So we had big companies like me for working for Nokia.
We had small people that were advocates and then the kind of like we had the civil society
and then governments and so on.
And the thing is also that we need to organize ourselves in a little bit of similar fashion.
So and I think that there is a little bit grass roots already happening that that because
for instance for us in there were a lot of people said that the open source community
is not as organized as the industry or something like that.
To be honest in this topic the industry wasn't very well organized.
I started to read about the CRA from actually the NL Labs blog post which was very good
that woke up a little bit, hey what is this and what should we look at that.
And then the kind of like the overall discussion started to go a little bit.
And I agree that even for the kind of like industry we had a lot of luck because we had
a lot of people driving towards the same direction from the open source community as what we
need also as part of the open source community.
The other thing is that what we want to start to work together is kind of like looking at
that we are all part of the community.
We have different views, we have different approaches and stuff like that and we have
to focus on those things that what we are in common and then look at it using the different
strengths and the facts that different people are parts of the community even though they
are not always sharing the same ideas are also present in the different rooms that might
be even difficult to get into by other parts of the community.
And I think that through this we most probably can get into very fruitful conversations and
very fruitful cooperation among the overall open source community.
I hope this helps.
Anyone who wants to react on this?
I think one of the key points when you reach out to institutions is get organized first,
get on time especially because then negotiations can go fast so you have to be there on time
so that we can take on board your inputs on time because then otherwise it is very difficult.
And the last thing is especially if you get organized that we can have one single contact
point for instance which for us is very useful.
And also for your inputs on the institution side again because you also have the campaigning
side but for us what is useful is your expertise.
So we need your expertise and in that case we need your inputs on very specific points
sometimes on the low side, sometimes on the technical side and that is why you need to
get organized so you have diverse teams so that they can provide inputs on low and technical
side which is very important for us.
Well I think as Kieran was saying earlier it is really important to get engaged early
because that is when you will have the most influence.
And then also I think what Walt was saying earlier was that I mean it has kind of been
forgotten what happened in the early 2000s.
You had the software patents, you also had ACTA and you have had the copyright directive
and I mean there is forces that can be mobilized that can actually reach the MEPs and now is
actually the time to influence people and get it because they are running to be elected
so now is when they will be listening.
The problem is since 2005 is that the big companies and society has gotten more engaged
in regulation of technology but not always in the good way.
It is sort of like let's use technology as a magical source to fix our problems.
You have initiatives in the US, you have initiatives in the EU that are not very positive for regulating
technology.
You have safer kids online in the US, in the Congress, you have chat control in the EU
which is probably going to go to the next mandate.
And be aware that people that you think would be obvious to be supporting inclusion and
adapting to open source might not always be so.
We had a lot of pushback from the social democratic group in the parliament against including
provisions for open source in the product liability directive because they were worried
about protecting consumers.
So you need to really be able to explain the digital side to politicians that don't always
get it and want to sort of regulate tech in a bad way.
We don't really need to step into the middle like this is already a circle.
Even better in terms of forum, we don't all look to the same people.
That's pretty true.
Yeah, we'll talk about the next one.
So everybody says get engaged early and there were really good processes for that within
the EU with Green Book, Blue Book, the whole shebang.
And here we skipped a lot of the processes it seemed.
Why did we do that?
Is it not working?
Okay, hi, I'm Jordan, I'm Karen's assistant and I think you've raised perhaps what is
the single most important point.
But I think the reason that we skipped a lot of that is because a lot of people aren't aware that you have this possibility.
It's also exhausting to have to keep an eye on all of the legislative proposals that are coming out of the commission.
I don't know how many they come, but it's a good 30 or 40 proposals every year.
We should, it's important that we keep an eye on this.
It's exhausting for you, what do you think it's like?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
No, no, no, I 100% agree.
I 100% agree.
I'm super sorry.
The thing is we need to keep the microphone for the live stream running.
So please, even repeat when you do these settings or do you want to?
Just quickly.
I'll take some of the tone out.
What I said was in response to the notion that it's busy if you're in parliament to keep track of everything,
we're actually as a community are being told we have to be proactive and track everything and we're just not set up to do it.
And it's...
Speak closer to the microphone.
Interesting.
Okay, so what I was trying to say is if it's exhausting for the people who actually work in parliament to keep track of everything,
imagine how exhausting it is for the people that are just in the open source community dodging bullets as they come down from the sky.
Very briefly, but also very importantly, parliament does not have to write the insinuated legislation.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
It's the commission that has been overwhelming everyone else.
They have a massive tsunami of really crap proposals in the past mandate.
So was that the reason that the normal process was skipped?
Because if we have to be engaged early, for us this process is ideal.
Because you then have one of these books, you can send it to people like,
look what's there and then respond.
And because we skipped that formal process, how can we engage early if we don't see what's happening?
That's probably the problem.
Well, there is an obligation of transparency.
There are processes like impact assessment.
But I know it's something completely foreign from a lot of people.
And here I see a gap personally.
Again, I'm not on the legislation part.
I'm not on the funding part.
But the gap is that we heard that open source is very important.
It's 80% of modern software.
It's a large part of the IT business, an IT stack.
And a lot of players are benefitted from it.
The question is, so it's important, but there is a gap of representation.
It's not in the mind of a policymaker.
So what you describe is a situation where open source comes after.
But if it would come first, it would mean that decision makers have this understanding
that open source is important, and especially in Europe.
So this gap, in my view, is the main reason why we are late in the process.
And to address this gap, it's a question of making decision makers that you guys are important.
So it's a question of having people from the community representing,
okay, we have European organizations that are doing great job,
but we also need the grassroot people and the process to democratically represent them
at the level of decision makers.
That's my impression.
Okay, I got it.
So I was, thank you for all the answers to this.
And I was listening a little bit to what you were saying,
but also to the point that we're made throughout the week
since we had this event from the Commission, the OFE event as well yesterday,
the summit, what they call.
And it reminds me of something I used to work on before.
That's called SME policies, and this principle that is called the Think Small First Principle.
It was developed by an expert group on SMEs.
Hopefully one day the Commission has an expert group on open source
so that we can actually reflect on those principles.
And I was reading through the paper that was written in 2009.
And just if you look at the table of contents,
it starts with the importance of SMEs in the EU economy.
That's exactly what we've proven throughout the week,
the importance of open source for the economy.
The impact on regulations have on SMEs.
We're in the same situation, impact that regulations have on open source.
And then they explain what is the Think Small First Principle.
First, listening to SMEs, listening to open source community.
The second is what they call the SME test.
Why don't we just go for an open source test?
Every time we enter into a digital legislation, we think,
can we apply this to open source? Does it work with open source or not?
And then after that, it's a bunch of stuff that are way too bureaucratic for me to read them through today.
But maybe if we have an expert group one day, we can actually build us the bureaucratic stuff as well,
specifically for open source.
So I'm thinking, we've been discussing the processes, but maybe also the policies could be adapted.
Could you go ahead with the microphone?
We have a great pleasure.
So I have just a practical proposal.
There used to be an application that was called Follow the Law.
And then you could just put in, like, I'm interested in digital legislation,
and then you would be notified at the beginning of the process that a process was happening,
and you could follow all the way through at what point it was,
who you would need to address if you wanted to be part of it.
So maybe this can be remade again.
Unfortunately, it is no longer.
Someone from the panel wants to say on some of these remarks here.
Yes, exactly.
I was hoping someone would step up from the community and said we have a tool to help for this.
So, kudos to you.
Another point we've mentioned that many times in this conference, in the previous conferences,
software is pervasive everywhere.
There will be software in everything as the world goes digital,
and therefore there will be more regulation.
That's unavoidable because software probably will be a commodity,
just like we're regulating our air and our water and our electricity.
So probably my question also to the open source community today is,
what legislation would you like to have to help open source?
I think that would be a valid question as well.
So I would like to respond to the gentleman in the red shirt,
because he said it would be a good idea to check policy against as a me interest of the EU,
and especially open standards can really help bring forward the position of open source within the EU,
and it would help European SMEs a lot if open standards are at the forefront of EU policy,
because that helps our sovereignty.
It helps European companies exist in a landscape with big tech
and really help small companies to compete.
And if local governments are keeping to open standards, that helps a lot for SMEs.
So maybe take it from the standard side, and that will help engage open source as well.
It's a double question.
Yes, I'm Jason Petjo.
I'm a biomedical engineer and I work in Brussels.
Very active in everything regarding fab labs as well, the digitization of the hardware world.
I'm more of a free software guide on the open source,
because I think this question of public European stuff is really about making the citizen more free,
and what I saw in the digital rights stuff is exactly about that.
And so if we talk about open source in the context of political framework,
I think it's important to put the freedom as more core to it.
And what I made me take is about the data of the project that NGI supported.
You said a lot of them follow European politics.
I'm a bit surprised because for me politics follow the will of the people,
and so follow actually the community.
And so this, I mean, should actually, should.
So my question is, aren't those policies following the will of the community
and therefore shouldn't the funding go towards funding the policies?
Like, we are supposed to give, to take all free time to pay for people,
like to pay and to use all free time to defend our opinions.
Why should we be paid to tell the commission what they have to do
and what the government's, well, that's what governments are for somehow.
It's like democracy when you're one.
The European institution is a global source.
It gets paid to the legislature.
So I will start with a question to the audience.
Oh, you know what? I will ask a question to the audience to start.
Oh yeah, so Thomas Dapierre, what I do does not relate to what I do for open source.
My job is not related to that.
You may, some of you may know me because of my blog post a year and a half ago
called I am not a supplier.
I have a question for you and for the audience in general.
Can you raise your hand if you get paid for something linked to your presence to this room today?
Right.
So what you are all telling me is that the people that do the work are not represented in this room.
And what I'm saying is that what we saw is that most of the people doing working on open source
and we have ample data on that are not paid for it.
They do it on their free time.
They are what we call our best.
The other people that cannot do the work you're asking them to do.
My total time for open source and I maintain multiple packages that are niche but fully,
indeed a lot of context on knowledge is this niche, is two hour per month.
Just reading the law is more than that.
I cannot and people that do this cannot participate and the grass with people you're asking to participate in this cannot do that.
To come here, this is my free hobby time for the next three months or four months I have to take.
So I understand all the discussion that happened here around the fact that we need engagement from these people
and we need this engagement to happen.
How do you want us to do it?
This is a part we need to decide as a community and this is a real thing we should probably talk about more
than things like digital right and source which I already have quite a lot of organization working on this.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think that decision makers answer to these policy remarks.
Well, I mean the difficulty in Brussels is actually figuring out what's going on
because once it's public the bulk of the influence has already been made
because once the commission has their proposal out they've already made up their mind on what they want to put in there.
So that's why I'm saying you need to influence the politicians that are trying to get elected before they get into the parliament
and you need to get to know their offices, you need to get to know the policy advisors in the political group delegations
and also like the policy advisors in the groups.
And a lot of companies are trying to influence both the commission and the politicians
and they have the time to do that.
So I think a lot are thinking about that the source code that is also at the basis of commercial code, proprietary code
is actually open source and that is maintained by developers doing it in their free time
and that is actually a message that was really difficult when we were sitting in the negotiation room to get across
and that's why we had to push really hard to actually get that part into the text.
So being here, taking your free time to talk with us and put these things into the room is really important.
I think Edry has been doing a great job on digital rights.
I mean the commission is now talking about digital rights but I don't know if you remember Marie Tishaka that was in the parliament
for about 10 years until the election in 19.
I mean she read out a speech about digital rights and then told the audience afterwards
this is actually from the Communist Party Congress.
So you can have a lot of fine words that sound good but it's how you apply them and implement them and put them into legislation
that's really important.
I mean one of the things that we like was putting our head up against in the negotiation was that the commission has this blue book of definitions
and stuff like that that nobody amongst the co-legislators actually had heard about
and we're like come on this is your own internal standards.
This is not supposed to override legislation.
That's supposed to like follow and be adapted according to the legislation that we're putting in.
So I mean it's difficult for all of us and that's why we need to work together on this.
Sorry for being long again.
Could you maybe hand over to Iqbe as the representative?
Well no I'm not the other representative.
I would say there's no separation between digital rights and open source.
The digital rights movement was started by the open source people.
We have become somewhat unmoored from our roots in that respect but please do re-engage if you feel is not sufficiently represented.
You're deeply disagreeing with that notion I see from Elaine.
I would also respond to the notion and I'm one of the people that's not being paid for this by the way I should mention.
This is not a matter of being paid for this.
You as a citizen if you want to be represented it's too much work for any citizen to get represented properly.
And there are more channels than just your political party if you're a member and please be a member of any political party.
Well maybe not a Nazi party but there are a democratic society that does not function solely through elections.
There has to be permanent engagement through other channels than just the election.
And that's what civil society is for.
Of course it should be.
And lastly democracy is not about the quality of decision making.
It's about the non-violence of the decision making and the non-violence of the transfer of power.
So do not be overly disappointed when the outcome is poor.
At least we're not shooting each others in the trenches of Ferdinand again.
And that's a win.
If I may one comment it's on the question of the representation and the fact that we are professional of the profession.
And we are not representing grassroots to some extent.
I think the question you ask is the question of representation of democracy.
It is not.
Okay well I thought it was.
But the question of money you ask.
Fine.
Time.
Yeah well time is money.
Yeah because people who have units choose to pay the time without money.
This is not about money.
It's about time.
What?
I need to keep maintaining the stuff you all used to live.
Exactly.
If I take away from that time to explain to the audience.
I cannot keep the thing that you need to live and to keep alive.
Working.
Exactly.
So well the argument is time is money.
So you need a way to have the right people representing you and that will have the time and will have the money because they will have to be paid for that.
And so they have to represent you and you have to find a way that you find the people that.
So you have European organization.
You have OEF.
I will not mention all of them because there are a lot of them.
Well they are not representing.
They are coordinating and helping whatever.
But what you describe I think is a democratic representation of the grass root people.
And you have to find solutions.
There are examples.
Look at IETF.
IETF is grass root.
IETF is people contributing with their own time.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Not really.
They are big tech.
Okay.
But it's wait, wait.
It's one person one vote if you like.
It's not one.
Well you want to talk about maybe ITU?
No.
Okay.
You can think about organization that organized this representation and maybe take example.
Maybe it's the wrong example.
But my only argument is you have to find ways to get a representation.
That's it.
It's not just open source that has to make time because the people in open source they
contribute with what they can do best and it's mostly writing code.
And there's a thing that people in policy roles have this attitude towards technology
quite often that they say we don't have to understand it.
And there's an educational gap there.
And it's not that the people who write codes have to make time to explain all that.
The people who make policy have to understand technology because it's at the core of our
democracy.
So there are people willing to explain it but don't take them away from writing the
code because that's really important for society.
So it's also an effort from the people in roles that are important for policy making
to learn about technology and try to understand how important it is.
Thank you.
Good morning everyone.
My name is Monique and I'm involved in the NGI community since a few years.
I think this debate is amazing.
I think we cannot pretend that we all speak and understand the same language because we
have different skills and we do different works.
This is a multi-stakeholder community and we have to respect each other and we have to
learn to work with each other.
I think the work that we have been trying to do in the NGI community has been really
to talk different languages to different people and it's very difficult.
At the end of the day my job is to run the NGI outreach office and I can tell you it has
been very difficult to reach out to some of the open source communities but it has also
been very hard to speak to politicians, policymakers.
So the fact is that we speak different languages and we work according to different rules and
to different, we have a different pace.
But I think also that the progress and I've been here the whole week attending all the
events, you know, workshops at the commission, open source forum today, yesterday, here at
FOSTEM.
I think it's amazing what's happening.
We have open source, very high up in the discussions that a few years ago we could have dreamed
of being even mentioned.
So I think there is a cultural change and we all have a different role to play.
So let's not, so I think to go back to the guy from Nokia, I think we really have to
work on the processes and on the ways we can work better together.
I think this should be the core topic of this discussion.
Hello, I am Karim.
I am not paid here to be here.
I have my own company in, I have a background in public administration.
I'm a contributor to RiotOS, my microcontroller operating system.
So thanks, happy to help out on this.
What I was wondering, I heard policy makers speak with a lot of people and groups before
they make the first draft.
Who are those groups, who are those, what kind of institutes are that because that's a procedure
that's already there with whom they talk.
And maybe from that side out, can we then look on what as an open source community can we make
or go into to speak with them.
Okay, I'm already getting feedback from the repertoire of this session and so who will also have the
the honor to summarize what you are saying in the last minute.
And he told me we have a lot of questions but no answers at the moment.
And maybe we should like focus for the next minutes on this and to kick this off I would first of the Simon.
Thank you.
I'm Simon Phipsen just because I'm organizing the room.
It doesn't mean I don't have opinions.
So I work for the open source initiative.
The answer to your question is in the impact assessment of the CRA.
The impact assessment of the CRA explains that the European Commission went out of its way to approach SMEs for input on the CRA
but did not make any attempt at all to consult with the open source community or anybody who is a genuine community member.
And the reason for that is because their societal model is a societal model that has manufacturers or producers,
it has labor force and it has consumers and it has no recognition that for the last 30 years there has been a
there has been commons based peer production and it has no recognition of the fact that there are people engaged in that.
And so the number one thing that needs doing is actually a very difficult thing that needs serious political engagement
which is the Commission as a whole needs to recognize that society is no longer the society of the 1950s
and that people are connected to one another and that as a result of being connected to one another
they are actually doing things that are being harmed by their regulation that believes that unions and MEPs represent the people.
Unions and MEPs do not represent I believe anybody in this room and as a consequence the Commission completely failed.
Maybe there is one Karen, I don't know.
But as a result the Commission has discovered to its surprise that coming to Fozdem, Benjamin last year was quite surprised to discover
he had a thousand new friends who wanted to share their opinions about his legislation in the corridor.
This year he was a lot more positive about it although he did ask me if he was going to be egged by the audience.
So the most positive thing that I've got to contribute is a very difficult thing which is the Commission as a whole
has got to recognize that society is no longer the industrial society of the 1950s.
It is now the digital connected society of the 21st century.
There we are. So we are still looking for answers, right?
Well for the Parliament side I can say that the question was to who did we reach out to for the PLD for instance
we mostly talked to Free Software Foundation, Open Forum Europe and Debian for us and Marcel Scolias team.
So I would think that in our team for instance if you send an email to us we are very sensitive in the Pirates about the Epoenso's community obviously
so if you send an email to us obviously we will answer.
But again that's also the main purpose of the discussion today, you have to be targeted.
If you're not working at all on the topic we might not answer because it's not our topic, we're not working on the file on this specific file.
So I think that's the main thing but on our side definitely we will answer to Open Source community almost every time.
Thank you very much.
I am Pablo Correa from PostmarketOS, a small but very fast growing community to put real Linux into phones.
And there was one thing that caught my attention from your NGI presentation.
You said that out of the millions and millions of euros you gave out you managed to get 80 people
to organize a community or a foundation to establish a legal entity.
And that seems like that's a huge success but that's also way too small for the amount of money.
I am like my feeling.
I am part of this overworked people working their free time trying to grow a community
to create some sort of entities so that we can at some point make this a viable product because we see people, we see consumers wanting this.
We want this, people want this and we are lacking the tools to actually grow into something where we can organize ourselves.
We are lacking, we are all developers and we are lacking people with the background in business.
We are lacking people with the background in law and the funding does not support us on that.
The funding, we don't get or we just say can you please get involved.
It's like well maybe I can get involved in my 25th hour of the day but if we are all working on something else because we can't finance ourselves.
If you can help us like pay advice on free software, there are people from grassroots organizations happy to do that.
We need help and we need funding not only for development, also for development but we need funding for more things.
And if you can provide that, that might actually help us.
Okay, a very quick one and these are also the last words for the panel because then we have to transform for technical reasons with the camera.
Okay, no just very shortly on NGI so we have a new project, NGI Commons and there is a special effort to precisely provide business support
so in terms of what business model could be on top of an open source because you guys are developers so you don't necessarily have the right knowledge in terms of what sort of business model needs to be done.
So this is included in the new project called NGI Commons Fund.
So that's good that we ended the specifics.
Yeah, so with this I'm going to end the panel and the fishbowl discussion.
Thanks for the insight, thanks for all of you taking part in this.