To the question of open source in the public sector, how is it happening in Europe, but
also elsewhere, there's a lot of resources on the platform.
I really encourage you if you've never been there on this website.
To go check it out, you might learn a few things.
We produce, for example, country reports that are taking a deeper look at what's happening
inside the public administration in every country of Europe, right now we're updating
all of them, actually.
Our latest, for example, our own Greece and Cyprus, we're always trying to get the context
in the member states to basically give us the best info they have to be trying to understand
what's the legislative framework happening there and so on.
But today, I'm not here to talk about all this work, I'm going to talk about one of
the latest project, which is the Ozor Handbook.
And so, as you might have guessed, a Handbook is supposed to be a guide and this one is supposed
to try and help public administrations and the public sector in Europe to try and use open
source.
You might be aware of this, but it's not easy to do open source in the public sector.
There's many rules, many legislations, many complication that comes with it.
There's no simple answers, they're not one answer that can easily solve the problem,
but so we did still and we're still trying to create a guide that can be helpful to many.
We're not the only one that I've done that, there's many other, but we're not claiming
that we're doing the best one, but still, I've felt it could be interesting for people
to learn about the process of how we came up with this, also for other people that would
be interested to do something similar or to use this resource.
And so, to give you a small idea of what the Handbook is trying to cover, because there's
a lot of things to cover when you talk about open source in public sector, here's a
small chapter overview, so basically, yeah, we're going on there, finding and using open
source, developing, could developing and participating in communities, as well as the
question of funding, which is for public sector, really important.
We're very good example here today in this room of what funding can look like, and I'm
very happy to be part of the room with people that have been able to set up such interesting
models of funding for the projects inside the public administration.
We obviously also try to talk about legal framework, while there's different legal framework
in every member states, there's some common basis around public procurement and around GDPR
or other European regulations that you might know of, that still can be relied on at European
level. And also, the question of how do you structure the use of freedom open source software
in public sector administration, how do you make it so that the use of open source is stable
over time, and that is not too much dependent on the political field at the moment or the
political ideas of the moment of a government change, because those usually quite strongly
can affect our public administration's work. And so, you might ask how we try and did this,
but it was quite a long process. We started in 2022 and in 2023, we led a series of events.
First, we had three closed workshops with experts. We have the chance at also of knowing quite a few
people now and having built quite the network of open source experts in public administration.
And so, through these workshops, we tried to gather feedback on what was needed from these people
that are working public administration when they work around open source. We then add three
open webinars to share those and get feedback on what we already gathered for knowledge there.
And based on these six events, we drafted the first version. Obviously, the version is of perfect.
I've worked on it myself and I must say there must be some revisions. That's why last year
in December and November, we started a one-month long consultation. During this consultation,
we opened a front-up ad, led the text open to basically anyone that wanted to add or change anything
there to propose additional content and to propose modification to question basically the way we
worked. And we tried to gather that feedback in the end with the final workshop where we also
just discussed the feedback received so that there wouldn't be just one opinion taken at phase
value and non-essentially double-checked or triple-checked by many other people. We also managed to
gather more important revisions and through that, we've managed to, I think, get a more
representative view of what the community fought of this first draft. I'm seeing a picture
of being taken and waiting. And so, yeah, we had 10 men contributors during this phase. I don't
know if any of them are here today, but we're very thankful that these people basically took the
time to go over the whole document. It's early pages, it's a bit of, it's quite a lot of work, actually.
And we received 140 comments and input as well, tight schedule and we are not an infinite team,
obviously. We also worked very much around the fact that community brought review and what I was
explaining a bit before, right? It is discussion around not only what one person think, but what
the consensus seems to take away from that. And finally, it was the question of purpose. The
sandbox is supposed to be shared and used by public administration in all over Europe, by people
that are not necessarily aware of what open source is, or don't know it very well, that some of them
have never heard of it, and it's to help people that are aware of it in their administration
to convince the rest, to convince maybe the director or to convince the management or the
head of uni, the CIO of the interest and the utility of those. But I think by now you have an
idea of what the handbook is. There's just a few points I think would be interesting for anyone
that has done something like this, or that would like to do something like this to remember.
That's some of the small lesson that we learned from this. First of all, it's the important of
consultation, because when the first draft came out, we didn't know we would do a revision
necessarily from the get-go. That came out after, because obviously, and it makes sense now,
but our first draft, even if it was community-based, because we had six events, and we had
this workshop, so we talked with experts and so on. It was good to put it under the scrutiny of
a wider community of people that maybe missed this event and also to just leave it to the public.
And there's a real question of legitimacy that arose from us, especially because it's a
European Commission platform, so we want to make sure that we take a humble position there and to
leave the community to also say their mind. The second one is simplicity. We talk with experts,
and this experts always have their perspective, which is, yeah, when you explain what an open
socialized sense is, you should say this word, or you should use this standards to explain
how to do an open-source repository, or you should explain what this law is instead of another.
Myself, I need to always step back, even take five step backs, and try to explain things
way more simply, simply. And I think right now what we're really trying to do is to make sure that
this is accessible to anyone that doesn't necessarily have the technical knowledge, but also the
policy knowledge necessary to work around this issue and this questions. And I've had some great
feedback, notably from people that already did handbook in public administrations, that brought this
up again and again to say, yes, you need to make it simple, easy to access, and to give the possibility
for people to access further resources if they need to. And that's where the latest one comes.
It's community. This handbook is not something that's creating knowledge out of nowhere. There's
many guide. There's many resources existing already. Our goal is also to aggregate a lot of
this resources, and I think when talking about public sector use of open source, there's a lot
of knowledge existing, but I know that a lot of public administration people using open source that
I've talked with didn't necessarily know, for example, about OSO at all, even though it's been
existing for 15 years, just like the people working on OSO don't necessarily know about every initiative
and trying to structure and to aggregate this knowledge is quite the challenge, but also quite the
stake. So I'll just finish this by offering and asking. If there's any resource, you would recommend
to someone to try and start using open source. Which one would it be? I'm very happy to receive
any proposals or any suggestions. And so you can either talk to me outside a bit later,
or you can also just address them to our email address. And yeah, thank you for your attention.
I hope this was a bit interesting to any of you. And yeah.
Wow, you're way more prepared than we are.