A main theme from this year FOSDEM was without a doubt the role of public procurement in enabling Europe’s digital sovereignty and improving sustainability and security of its digital infrastructure. Several panels and talks were more or less dedicated to the topic, stressing its importance for promoting demand and supply under sovereign conditions. Below are some key take aways and reflections.
Att offentlig sektor lider av leverantörssinlåsningar är ingen löpsedelsnyhet. Dock börjar det bli dags att vi tar tag i detta grundläggande problem när vissa av våra beroenden helt plötsligt har börjat utvecklas till brickor i ett geopolitiskt spel.
Society’s institutions and our everyday lives have, for a long time (and increasingly) been transforming from physical to digital, where services, interactions, and communication now transcend the two worlds, which are becoming ever more integrated. Interestingly (and unfortunately), public policy and leadership have not kept pace, which, in the long term, poses a threat to security and, by ext...
Countries across Europe are ramping up their efforts to adapt to the changing geopolitical climate, preparing for uncertainties that the near future might bring. Dependencies on non-European cloud providers are substantial and require proactive action both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down includes policy and legislation setting the stage by, for example, enabling demand and guiding buyers in ma...
How is open collaboration in open large language model (LLM) projects actually organized—and why does it matter? These are questions me, Cailean Osborne, Jennifer Ding and Ben Burthenshaw map and address in a new paper just released on Arxiv.
Sverige och Europa är utmanade i en värld som geopolitiskt har förändrats markant på senare tid. Detta är särskilt tydligt om vi ser till vår digitala infrastruktur. Igår hade jag möjlighet att få kommentera utvecklingen utifrån den uppmärksamhet ämnet har fått i Danmark med särskilt fokus på molnfrågan.
Europe is at a crossroads where it has to choose whether to default to the red path of convenience towards increased dependencies or take the optional route towards strategic autonomy. In reality, this is not a decision that can be avoided. Recently, I had the opportunity to present a keynote at the OSPOs for EUROPE event (hosted by Dirk Schröder, Minister und Chef der Staatskanzlei des Landes ...
The world is turning in a strange way these days. Tariffs and sanctions are increasingly used to pressure and push agendas onto others. Digital sovereignty has, accordingly, singled up to a more general discourse and top of people’s minds. Sense of urgency is now moving beyond data sovereignty (and whether the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework gives any comfort or not) to the broader questi...
While the practice and process for Open Source Software (OSS) development is quite explored in industry and general community contexts, less is known about how development is done on OSS in the public sector context, specifically those developed and governed by Public Sector Organizations (PSOs). To shed light on this, we looked at six mature examples of public sector OSS projects, identified b...
Getting an overview of Open Source Software (OSS) intake (including upstream dependencies) is a challenge as consumption is ever-growing. Each OSS component comes with a risk in terms of its ability to stay maintained long-term, with high quality and without interruption. Analyzing and monitoring the health of OSS intake can enable proactive management of potential risks, but it is also a mount...
We (Me, Georg Link, and Kevin Lumbard) explore how the health and sustainability of Open Source Software projects depends on the human activity invested by project maintainers and contributors. The activity invested is labeled Maintenance Labor and can, accordingly, originate from either the maintainers (Maintainer Labor) or the contributors (Contributor Labor). The latter includes the full spe...
As part of WASP-funded research project, we are investigating how game companies experiment with and evaluate new ideas, features, and changes throughout the development process. The goal is to be able to reject or accept any assumption about an idea as early as possible based on the experiment, for example, based on the technical and commercial viability among (potential) users. Earlier feedba...
Summary and main take-aways from a report commissioned by the European Commision and DIGIT mapping, where we mapped out how Public Sector Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are structured and organized. An OSPO may be compared to a center of competency and excellence driving organizational readyness related to OSS within or across a set of organizations. In the study, we looked at 12 cases acr...
Summary and main take-aways from report commissioned by the Danish Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen), where we examined how software reuse through Open Source Software (OSS) can be supported and realized through public policy and related support actions. In the report, we surveyed policies and practices related to software reuse, focusing on OSS, in 16 digitally mature co...
Öppna data är ett centralt verktyg för att motverka korruption inom offentlig upphandling. Ett viktigt ämne som diskuterades under gårdagens rundabordssamtal på Finansdepartementet inför framtagandet av en ny handlingsplan mot korruption och otillåten påverkan. Deltog gjorde ca 20-talet organisationer var samlade från myndighet, region, kommun, forskarsamhälle (inkl. RISE), civilsamhälle och sy...
Open Source Software (OSS) is catching on across industry verticals, so also in Automotive. Me and Astor Nummelin Carlberg recently published a vision paper outlining the current state and future potential for OSS in Automotive through in-depth interviews with leaders from the industry, including both international manufacturers and suppliers. The study was commissioned by the Eclipse Software ...
Here’s a brain dump with thoughts and reflections from two intense days of EU Open Source and policy discussions together with my great collegue Sachiko Muto in Brussels organized by the European Commision and OpenForum Europe respectively.
Kul och extremt bra exempel på myndighetssamverkan presenterades idag på NOSAD av gänget bakom ASOM (Arbetsgruppen för Samordning av Mjukvara) som består av flertalet myndigheter, inkl. Havs och vatten, Försäkringskassan och DIGG. Arbetsgruppen utgör ett komplement till befintliga aktörer som NOSAD och eSam genom att praktiskt utveckla pusselbitar där det finns ett gemensamt behov kring, och et...
We (Sachiko Muto, Gregorio Robles, Deborah Bryant, and me) have just had our special issue in IEEE Software on Open Source Software in the Public Sector released. Here is a brief summary of the four papers included in the issue.
Continuing on the topic of Municipal adoption and collaboration on Open Source Software (OSS). Listened to the story of the city of Echirolles in France yesterday at the OSOR webinar on Policy and Strategy Aspects of OSS in Public Administrations. An inspiring story. Here’s a summary and reflections.
Kommuner delar många typer av uppgifter och har en enormt stor potential att tjäna på (åter)användning, delning och samverkan kring öppen programvara (öppen källkod eller eng. Open Source Software). Samtidigt är utmaningarna många. Några exempel inkluderar: bristande intern förmåga, kapacitet och kultur, osäkerheter kring hur öppen programvara kan beaktas och utvärderas, luckor och missuppfattn...
Some takeaways after two intense days in Brussels, including the #EUOpenSource Policy Summit 2023 hosted by OpenForum Europe.
