Okay, are you good?
Okay, my name is Yonli Noka, I'm a senior researcher at the National Research Institutes
in Sweden and London University.
I'm going to give some insights and examples of how development and collaboration can be happening
in public sector, open source products.
It's a study I did together with forensic colleagues from Spain and London, or Sweden as well,
called the University and other places, Yonli Noka from Cisco Yonli Noka, that's going to
go with you.
We looked at the called seven different public sector, open source catalogs, and then
we find a quite narrow sample of what we identified as quite mature cases.
So we did a lot of interviews, we did a lot of mining, etc., to really find some insights
and examples to provide others in how you can go about and with doing open source collaboration
development in the public context and how that may differ towards the more general
it may be informal practice that you can find in more products in the world.
So the cases we looked at was one example was the energy plus project, it's a simulation
program for energy consumption in the houses from the US, we looked at those two forms
from our reference, and we looked at Oskary map application platform, powering the geoportal
in Finland, we looked at geotrek platform for managing and enable exploration of national
parks in France, we looked at the Mars simplifier, could call it an ESR platform by the
GNOME in France, and we also looked at the IOAP, so it's an entry app in Italy for accessing
these little public services.
So looking at the development practices, what we saw was that quite a line with open source
in a lot of context is that the development was very centered to a very few set of people,
a core team typically between two to 15 in the most cases, for doing most amounts of development
as we can see in a lot of other contexts as well, generally an open development happening
on GitHub and in these cases, and they used very formal, very structured ALDL, ALDL processes,
very detailed quality assurance processes, and this aligns quite well, because all the
development, there wasn't really a lot of development happening, like the cross organization,
most of it was happening within the main public entity or defender doing that development,
so there wasn't a lot of community development in these cases that we looked at, stuff
was generally reported high-quality, high-level user build in some of which could refer
to that.
We looked at the different types of sponsorships, and one kind of sort of how who develops
or who funds the development and who drives the development basically, and one major part
was where it's really centered to a certain few or one or a very resourceful organizations
to be at a public service company or a ministry or something, it's typically a very business
critical, this application for them, so it's really warrants a major investment for them
in these applications, and then the more decentralized model where you have a lot of different
media, public entities collaborating, co-funding development, driving the development
more in a community way I would call it, together with service providers, in the cases
we looked at, in terms of development resources, again it was typically performed within
one organization, one way or the other, either by the public institution in the self or
through a vendor, one case was the Pagropa, where in the other cases was the resources
was procured in one way or the other, typically consultants, in some cases, really highlighting
this general notion of outsourcing and trusting yourself on the external capabilities,
especially on a municipal level, so Pagropa is quite interesting because they are the
output of an experiment really where Italy or their government wants to build their own
capabilities, build their own development teams and grow vendor independence long term, so
that was a unique in this case, but a very interesting approach, and again all across suppliers
was really highlighted as key for the sustainability of these projects, there needs to be suppliers
out there that can support the development, because again in most cases, as I said, Pagropa,
you were a client on either doing consultants or having vendors to develop the software,
so for the projects to stay sustainable you need to have suppliers with a sustainable business
out there that can support you in this.
So the planning and decision making was typically done top down by the public entity spending
the development, either through some kind of technical steering committee, with those involved,
or through direct communication between the municipality or public entity and the vendor,
so and this could be run in parallel, so they could be like overall coordination happening
while still municipality is going directly to the vendor to fast-track some things, and in some
cases also than for the internal teams, and this is something to maybe consider is that by how
you include vendors or the service suppliers in your collaborations, excluding them fully and just
doing with the public entities in collaboration, that may lose insights from the vendor
service supplier which could help you actually in the development, and also by fully relying
on the vendor or the service supplier in coordinating, that can lead to soft lockings, so you
kind of lose track of the project, so it's really finding this balance in how you include
the service suppliers and vendors in your projects, and this becomes then a matter of how you
how you do public procurement, for example, if you're doing it below the fresh whole delimits and
you can do direct procurement, or if you're frame frame agreements as well, so that needs to be
considering in context as well. And there was also an interesting note in the interviews that
was a large preference for local service suppliers and vendors to have some kind of closer collaboration
and relationship with them. And then in terms of communication, all the all the projects have some
kind of formal communication, but a lot of the communications was happily closed between
inside the organization, like in within the vendor or the public institution doing the
development, but also directly between the public entities and vendors. So this is also like a risk
it risks creating these clicks or isolated communication, really losing a lot of the benefits with
the openness and transparency of open source, really creating a big barrier for others to come in
and start collaborating and see what's done and so on, so this is also something to think about
how communication is done. Community engagement, the community say we're very user oriented,
but we can still talk about some kinds of contributions in terms of funding, sustaining the
development, of course, providing subject matter expertise to their requirements in generic process,
but also in terms of the general shaping and knowledge sharing and identifying a bugs and so on.
So not not not much about like the more technical code contributions here, so more about the higher
level in sustaining the projects. The user basis, so the is often quite limited, is typically
public sector entities, but there's somewhat higher user communities, so not these developer
communities as we find in the world basically or mostly, but the number of end users are much
much greater. So depending on how we draw, the borders of the user community, it will be much
much greater because these projects that we look at are really core in different kinds of digital
public infrastructure or public services, so they are still of great importance.
In terms of sustainability, we have touched upon it, but in the central model, there's a lot of
reliance on this core entity like the land survey in Finland, for example, if they were to pivot
or if any other case, then a lot of other ministries or agencies relying on this project would
have to reconsider, and if you're in the heavily invested, it can be costly, so it's important
that's open source projects in general to think about the robustness and the bus factor or
whatever we call it, how development they concentrate and what you're doing to address this.
And on the other way around in a more decentralized sponsorship model where you have a lot of
different public entities collaborating, co-funding, co-pooling money. You often need to grow up
until a certain level, a number of municipalities, for example, for it to help sustain the development
and so on. Otherwise you need some a certain few larger ones with more capability to fund
the development, but that's typically not sustainable in the long term because again, it comes
to reliance on someone, be it like the capital city in the country. They want to move on,
so there needs to be a sustainable funding model for public sector collaborations.
Well, I talked in the funding dev room this morning and we talked more about these community
rooms, but it's also an issue here. Some further recommendations,
really you need to consider growing an open collaboration involving enabling more public entities
to come in and help co-fund the development, grow capabilities, consider these suppliers,
business models that they are profitable, enabling that you don't end up in a lock in having
transparent continuous check-ins on code and so on to and also consider involving the
divenders and the suppliers. Okay, that was a...