Thank you very much everyone for joining us in the meantime.
Please take a seat.
We'll move with the next presentation.
I'll let them introduce themselves please.
Hi.
My name is Nick Gates.
I'm from Open Forum Europe.
I'm here today representing a project that we participate in called
NGI Commons.
We'll talk a little bit about what that means.
I'm going to turn it over to Jan to introduce himself.
Hello everybody.
My name is Jan Kriva and I'm working for the Open Future Foundation and I'm also
part of the NGI Commons project.
Happy to be here.
So by a show of hands, how many people are familiar with the next generation
Internet?
Great.
So about half of folks.
So the next generation Internet is a flagship horizon Europe project that
gets funding into the open source ecosystem for next generation projects.
There's an over a thousand innovations that have been funded so far.
There's some uncertainty around the future of NGI, but I'm sure we'll come to that in the
fiscal discussion.
Really what the NGI is tried to do over the last years is to create kind of more
policy kind of coherence also around kind of open source as a form of digital
common.
And since 2022, that has led to what we're calling NGI Commons and the goal of NGI Commons
as a coordination and support action down there is really to ensure strategic
alignment and integration of the NGI efforts within the broader kind of European digital
Commons context.
So it's really building policy coherence but also creating a policy basis for more
investment in digital commons over time.
So yeah, apologies for rushing through that, but that's really the core of what we're trying
to do.
It's a three year coordination and support action and we're hoping to kind of support the
digital commons ecosystem and we'll talk more about that term in just a second.
So let me also quickly ask you who is familiar with the concept of digital commons.
Okay, that's also a good start, but maybe just taking coming back a little bit,
whereas this interest in digital commons coming from.
So where is this concept coming from?
So first of all, the idea behind digital commons is that it's a digital resource.
So we are mostly talking about open source software, but we're talking about open data, open source
hardware, open designs.
So but there must be some kind of resource.
The second ingredients, let's say, is that there's a governance system and this
comes very much from the work of the economist in Austria, who said that basically
there are goods that are commons not just because of their economic features,
but because people decided to manage them as commons.
And so she said that basically all around the world, you can find people who are able
to self organize, to produce and maintain goods in a sustainable manner,
even without the support of states or firms.
And the last ingredient that's very important to understand the concept of digital commons.
For instance, a contribution of your high bank loan, a common space peer production
is the idea that those are goods that are produced outside of strictly speaking
the coordination forms within firms of subordination of markets which are price signals.
So it's people who as peers can coordinate and work together to build and
maintain the resource.
However, and I think this builds on something someone said earlier,
there is a misconception that those would be only very marginal projects outside of the
realms of what corporations do or states are doing.
And this is entirely wrong because you can see that many of these projects
are actually part of the backbone of the digital infrastructure we are relying on.
I think here is not the place where I need to explain that further but what we are trying
to show to policymakers is that this mode of coordination that includes private firms
that includes many different actors is actually responsible for maintaining
many of the key infrastructures we are depending on.
So we are compiling the different research results that exist out there that show the actual value
economic value and also social value of these goods that are managed this way.
And so basically you could even talk about this infrastructure as something that has become
very complex.
So as a kind of accidental megastructure of these forms of collaboration.
And next slide.
So the origins of this project and this interest in comments comes a lot also from a working
group that was that published the report in 2021.
And as really looking at comments as a way to produce infrastructure and to support digital
sovereignty something that is not well understood enough by policymakers who usually think
in terms of classical state interventions or market intervention and who do not see the power
and the possibility to mobilize this mode of coordination and production to provide public goods
in a much more efficient manner and as like key components of the some of the critical resources
that depend on.
So I want to talk about some real world use cases very quickly.
We won't have run all of these because we have limited time.
But this is all part of broader effort around digital sovereignty.
So we titled it Pillars of digital sovereignty.
So this is really kind of a larger policy focus and we see that in the year stack initiative for example.
And important note, you know, I regard digital comments as a policy tool individual projects are digital
comments but there's also the linking of comments to policy objectives and policy implementation.
And so these larger use cases are also a commons in and other themselves.
And yeah, as I mentioned digital commons are part of a number of different emerging initiatives in Europe such as the euro stack initiative.
The digital commons edict and the commission's proposed plan for an open internet sack.
Maybe we'll get to that.
Here's a great example. Open desk.
This was talked about and it's going to be talked about in the government collaboration
bedroom.
But this is really kind of a bundling of different projects together.
Oh, and backwards.
We have Matrix and Element, which is a great example of a digital commons.
It's a massive dawn in peer tube. Also great examples of communications platforms.
And finally, blender. I'm a big movie person.
We recently saw that blender was the foundation for a Oscar nominated best animated feature called flow.
So really, this is a great example of the creative economy in Europe leveraging digital commons as well.
And then young's going to talk a little bit more about some of the policy implications and some of the policy review work that he did over the last year.
Yeah, so one first step in the context of this and enjoy commons project.
As we are trying to make like policy recommendations and define a strategic agenda of how like European commission,
but European member states can support mobilized digital commons.
One first step was to actually look at what have past policies been doing in supporting digital commons.
So we just produced a report that you can find on our website.
We've been looking at the policies in Europe to support digital commons for the past 20 years.
So the objective was to kind of try to provide this overview.
It's not fully exhaustive, but it's an overview of not only open source software policies, but also open data, open source hardware, all the different sub elements of digital commons.
And so what we have been looking at these different types of resources that I've just mentioned, we see that especially in the early 2000s and up until the 2010 years.
Many policies were mostly focusing on supporting the availability of open resource.
So the focus was very much an open access.
You can see that even though I guess many here think that it has not gone far enough,
that Europe, more than other countries have supported the adoption of open source in public sector.
The open access to scientific publications funded by the public sector, etc.
So they've been pioneering athletes here in Europe and the shift that we then see more in like the 2010 years,
where after the Snowden revelations, but also the growing dominance of a few private platforms,
the stronger interest in digital sovereignty, and they're looking at some of the critical elements of infrastructure is looking how they are governed.
So not only focusing on open access, but also, for instance, in the field of culture, not just supporting open access to data of cultural institutions in Europe,
but also doing initiatives like Europe, China that is actually creating the norms standards and infrastructure for sharing that data between public institutions.
And so we've looked at different policies that have supported digital sovereignty here, mobilizing digital comments.
So some are very much focused on allowing states to actually participate in rural making, for instance, when they're promoting interoperability and different open standards.
Some policies that are starting to slowly mobilize digital comments in the context of industrial policies.
So as a tool to catch up technologically, you see that a lot in Asia actually, for instance, in China, where investments in open ship designs are open AI seem to pay off a little bit.
And then finally, policies that are really supporting the distributed ownership of resources, not only for states, but also organizations and individuals, communities who use this tool to be able to have a self-determined,
and more agency in the way they use technology. So that's the review we've just published.
And we're officially out of time and we'll have time for questions in the fishbowl. So I'm just going to really kind of quickly go through this.
We have something called the Digital Commons Task Force, which is a group of experts that provide input to our project.
If you'd like to get involved, please come find Yon or me and we'll help you get connected.
I also encourage you to scan this code. If you can and join our Digital Commons Community Platform over on Matrix, this is a great way to stay in touch with everything that we're doing and to debate Digital Commons.
We had a great debate over the weekend around the value of Digital Commons, so we're really kind of not precious about this kind of stuff. We really want to engage with the community.
Finally, we have a newsletter if you go to commons.ngi.eu, you can sign up.
And yeah, these are all our social media channels. I'll just go back to the QR code, so you guys can have time to scan it.
But that's all for me and Yon, and we look forward to talking to you more.