Okay, now it's a five-plus-one. Welcome everyone to this
deaf room. Open source. You policy something. You know the
table better than I do. My name is Sebastian
Wrightle. I am the director of EU Government Affairs for
Appell and together with my colleagues, I am
organizing this deaf room. Very happy that you all came.
We're going to start with the presentation open source as a
cultural movement by Stefano. You can look up probably the
rest of the schedule, but I just want to give you a couple of
words of not wisdom probably, but of what motivated
this block in this deaf room. So a lot of people ask
the question of how do we increase or improve
Europe's competitiveness in the world? And I just thought that
at first maybe it would be important to mention for the more
technical minded. So I used to work in policy in the European
Parliament for 10 years until the last summer. I'm a
computer scientist. I used to go to these conferences to look
at technical talks. And I think it's important for the
more technically minded to understand that when we talk about
competitiveness, it's not only about creating jobs and all
of that. That is behind it, but it is about connecting with
the narratives that we talk about in politics and that we
need to motivate interest for open source in policy
making and in that field. So yeah, in order for us to be
understood and for the idea to be understood why open
source is so important. We need to connect to these narratives
that the politicians speak and this session is about that.
We do understand that technology is built on the basis of open
source, but that's something that we have to keep telling
that the politicians and policymakers over and over again,
because that is something that you don't understand if you're not
very technical. Remember the XKCD picture with the
blocks that make up a project or that make up our
infrastructure and with sometimes the individual
matches that hold up entire parts or the entire structure.
So getting that idea into the minds of politicians is
what we hear about. Not a lot of people know that
technology is built that way and that in particular open
source is the reason that all of our infrastructure keeps
running. So that's what we're trying to explain.
And one narrative that currently is around and that you've
probably heard of is that of the euro stack. It's also been
talked about in some of the previous talks.
So yeah, let's connect to the narratives in policy
making and in politics through the narratives that they
understand. Even though we want to achieve something for open
source here, we want to achieve something for society and
seeing as I work for a business association, we want to
achieve something for European businesses as well.
Because that's after all the opportunity that we have not
only implement the cool technology that we want to
implement but also to create wealth and then
income for people not only from this community but to
also try to include more people to that overall
wealth. So yeah, I think those were my introductory words.
I will be around here all day long, probably. Let me know
if you have any questions. And with that, I will hand over to
Stefano. Thank you.
Thank you.