Blog
Notes, thoughts and summaries of talks, papers and reports. Some in English, some in Swedish, depending on the context :)
16 minute read
Denmark faces a growing need to strengthen digital sovereignty as dependencies on dominant technology vendors limit choice, transparency, and long‑term control over critical digital infrastructure. Open Source Software (OSS) emerges as a practical lever to address these challenges, enabling greater autonomy, interoperability, and shared innovation across the public sector. However, Danish publi...
2 minute read
New paper out where Sachiko Muto and I argue that if we want to enable the many opportunities Open Source Software (OSS) offers for digital government, we need to start measuring how governments actually use and support OSS, and enable knowledge-sharing and benchmarking by baking those measures into global digital maturity indexes.
2 minute read
Today, we’re announcing the launch of the Open Source Enablement Compass (OSEC) project, a collaboration between the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, along with our first and founding partners, GitHub and the Ethereum Foundation.
1 minute read
Wrote a piece on the EU Sovereign Tech package for The Conversation UK, looking at its opportunities and challenges ahead.
1 minute read
We talk a lot about tech sovereignty both in- and outside of Europe, but the discussion remains heavily focused on software. In this TechPolicy.press op-ed, co-authored between Javier Serrano (European Open Source Academy (EOSA)), Nicholas Gates(OpenForum Europe) and I, we argue that this is only part of the picture. True sovereignty is a full-stack challenge, where open source hardware is key.
2 minute read
Our study - Public sector open source program offices - Archetypes for how to grow (common) institutional capabilities - is now officially published, and right in time for OSPOs for Good and the UN Open Source Week.
1 minute read
Hatten av för Digg – Myndigheten för digital förvaltning med Josef Andersson och andra involverade för arbetet med deras policy för öppen programvara, samt tillhörande dokumentation. Även om den är intern för DIGG ger den en bra grund för andra myndigheter, kommuner och regioner att ta efter. Tillhörande riktlinjer lyfter bidragsprocesser, hälsoaspekter, säkerhet och underhåll som ofta glöms bo...
12 minute read
EU:s suveränitetspaket markerar en strategisk förflyttning mot ökad kontroll över moln, AI och data. Med satsningar på öppen källkod och minskade beroenden av tredjeland vill unionen bygga en mer konkurrenskraftig, säker och resilient digital infrastruktur i Europa. Här följer en analys jag ursprungligen skrev på RI.se.
5 minute read
Policyn belyser tydligt hur det geopolitiska och i grunden förändrade säkerhetsläget medför risker som var offentlig aktör nu måste öppna upp ögonen inför, ta hänsyn till och analysera. Analysen lämnas för var och en att göra och att balansera mot den bredare kravbilden (bl.a. funktion, säkerhet, rådighet, suveränitet, robusthet och kostnadseffektivitet) utifrån lokala behov och förutsättningar...
4 minute read
Europa har under lång tid byggt sin digitala infrastruktur på teknik från ett fåtal utomeuropeiska leverantörer. I ett allt mer osäkert geopolitiskt läge har detta blivit en strategisk sårbarhet. Nu växer nya former av europeiskt samarbete fram kring öppna digitala lösningar och här finns viktiga möjligheter tillika lärdomar för Sverige. Och de potentiella vinsterna för Sverige ska inte undersk...
1 minute read
Förra veckan träffades Svenska OSPO‑nätverket för en workshop med fokus på OpenChain Project, open source‑compliance och OSPO‑arbete i praktiken – med särskilda perspektiv från starkt reglerade miljöer som fordonsindustrin.
less than 1 minute read
Roliga nyheter från Kommissionen som nyligen annonserade utfallet av sin upphandling av digitalt suveräna molnleverantörer, totalt värt €180 million. Post Telecom tillsammans med CleverCloud and OVHcloud, StackIT, Scaleway, samt Proximus, tillsammans med S3NS (ett joint venture mellan Thales och Google Cloud (?!)), Clarence och Mistral.
1 minute read
Intressant utveckling i Frankrike som redan är långt gånget i sitt arbete kring digital suveränitet. Det nämns hur DINUM kommer att samordna en interministeriell handlingsplan för att minska de utomeuropeiska beroendena. Vidare ska enskilda ministerier (inklusive dess myndigheter och bolag) i sin tur ta fram egna handlingsplaner senast i höst. Dessa planer ska omfatta områden som operativsystem...
1 minute read
Building an open source business is not an easy endeavour. You need to separate between projects and products, users and customers, community and partners. The focus shifts from barricading IP to service excellence and technological leadership. You will face an uphill battle with conservative procurement officers, who are commonly mentally (or de facto) locked in. The market size, by consequenc...
11 minute read
Digital suveränitet har gått från nischbegrepp till fråga om säkerhet, beredskap och konkurrenskraft för både offentlig sektor och företag. Här följer en längre analys jag ursprungligen skrev på RI.se där vi lyfter initiativ i Sverige och Europa – och varför mer samordnat, långsiktigt arbete nu är nödvändigt.
less than 1 minute read
There is increasing interest from Canada into what Europe is doing for growing its digital sovereignty and resiliency. Commented recently in two different media highlighting the many opportunities that reside across software and hardware layers, and how open source can serve as a lever for collaboration wherever there are mutual interests, e.g., in creating alternatives and breaking dependencie...
1 minute read
För några år sedan utforskade Christian Landgren, Ted Stalte och jag möjligheterna för att upphandla utveckling inkrementellt i en open source-modell med hjälp av Dynamiska Inköpssystem (DIS). Intresset var stort men mognad och mottaglighet att gå till verkstad begränsad. Det jag framför allt stött på sedan dess i digitalt sammanhang är dynamisk upphandling av utvecklingsresurser för att stärka...
2 minute read
The Swedish OSPO network recently had its 8th workshop, this time hosted by Husqvarna Group, where we explored how EU policy is impacting and needs consideration in our use and collaboration of open source software. Many insights from a phenomenal line-up of speakers and participants.
1 minute read
Europe is falling behind the U.S. and China in building and maintaining strategic digital infrastructure, largely due to underinvestment and fragmented support for open technologies. In a recent TechPolicy.press op‑ed, co-authored with Amandine Le Pape, Nicholas Gates Peter Neuhäusler, and Dr. Denilton Darold, we leverage fresh data from Fraunhofer ISI and the OSAwards.eu project, and highlight...
5 minute read
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.
1 minute read
Wrote a piece for the Conversation on why Europe needs to pivot away from its de facto strategy of placing almost all of its dependencies on far too few clouds, and more importantly, clouds that can become bricks in a geopolitical transatlantic game of chess. And yes, this issue is not limited to the cloud, but spans space and subsea infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains, and social media...
4 minute read
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.
5 minute read
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...
4 minute read
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...
3 minute read
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.
3 minute read
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.
22 minute read
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 ...
17 minute read
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...
12 minute read
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...
7 minute read
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...
11 minute read
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...
1 minute read
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...
14 minute read
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...
9 minute read
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...
3 minute read
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...
6 minute read
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 ...
4 minute read
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.
2 minute read
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...
2 minute read
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.
2 minute read
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.
1 minute read
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...
3 minute read
Some takeaways after two intense days in Brussels, including the #EUOpenSource Policy Summit 2023 hosted by OpenForum Europe.
