Thank you very much.
Thank you for attending the call and for the invitation.
It's good, Garloff.
We're presenting as 7N and also several CloudStake here.
And my name is Nicoluk.
I'm representing Gafstake in the initiative.
And first, we will quickly present what is Gafstake,
and what is the sort of CloudStake.
And then we will speak a little bit on how we collaborate,
mainly a broad of Europe and North America,
but in other countries.
And what is Gafstake?
Well, this is a picture from Mexico,
but maybe you are familiar with the situation of being in public
and administration.
You want something from your government.
You want a birth certificate.
You want to get a social benefit.
You want to get your text done.
And either you do an analogue way or more more countries.
Digitalize their services.
But when digitalizing, that's usually a huge challenge for governments.
Because you don't want to, for all the applications,
for all the services you have in all the sectors,
like from social sector to health sector and so on,
to create an own software for each and every service you have.
So the idea of Gafstake is, that's why it's called stack.
So a soft plastic where you have on top,
the visual services are citizen sees.
From the different sectors,
government supplies you or a business services with.
But below, you have certain software components,
because then building blocks which serve generic functionalities
to these top services.
So that means one is in blue here, in mediation middleware,
in green, certain we call them feature building blocks.
If you need a payment functionality,
if you need geo informational,
if you need e-signature.
So and all these blocks are addressed by an API.
So everything on top is basically a unified UX.
But below, you reuse certain building blocks in the APIs.
And foundational blocks are registry,
ID and authentication, for example, issues certain block flows and so.
And the, once on below is the cloud infrastructure,
which we will talk about in a second.
So the idea is, do not build monolithic systems,
build modular decentralized architectures for all the services within
the government.
And Gafstake was founded by the German government,
the Estonian government, the International Telecommunication Union,
and a digital impact alliance.
And we are kind of an open source project,
an open source community.
And we are not developing the software,
but we are writing requirements specifications.
So not software, but specifications.
And why that?
Because for governments,
it's even better you could know the market,
you could know all the solutions,
but what is actually better,
because they have to go into procurement,
it's to know what they want.
And in order to know what you want to do the requirement engineering and so on,
it's good if you start with a blueprint,
if you start somewhere.
So what we did in this community in this working groups,
we brought together experts from different fields
and special road requirements specifications for these different blocks,
where we expect that software, open source,
or proprietary software, is already on the market
and can be chosen by a government through procurement and so on.
So one block here has multiple software solutions
on the market which fits fit.
We treated like a standard,
but we called it usually a blueprint
because it can be adapted by governments.
They should be owned to decide
what they use, how do they standardize internally,
what they're procurement.
So we are basically a neutral broker
between the demand side, governments,
and the software providers, the supply side,
in a market which is very restrictive.
So both sides contribute,
and both sides have a value in these specifications
in this requirement specification and procurement
in developing products for this market.
And coming to cloud, in this group we specified the virtualization,
the container layers, and this is really all text
like requirements specifications documents
in order to find the right solution for you.
And one of these solutions which we cooperate
is a certain cloud stack,
and with that I'll hand over to you.
Thanks Nico.
So it was a really blessed collaboration for us
because the first thing we found out
really online, we have the same goals.
In our title, we have sovereign cloud stack,
sovereignty is one of our main goals.
So one of the things we did early in our project,
we had to kind of diffuse some of the confusion
that was around digital sovereignty.
And maybe you've seen this becoming one of those marketing terms,
unfortunately, so we talked about sovereign washing now.
People talking about sovereign clouds,
and then if you look at what they aspire to achieve,
the only thing they try to achieve is having data sovereignty.
Well, I'm not even sure they do that, they succeed in that,
but that's the only goal they have.
And if you've seen this slide from a send this before,
when they talked about digital sovereignty,
it's a much broader concept.
You've seen choice, technological sovereignty,
and open operations or the spills you need in order
to run and operate those systems on them.
Those are the same things we have in our own definition
of digital sovereignty,
and that's actually now a scientific publication
we've written on that in order to kind of try to have defined terms
and have the same things we talk about.
So we have those four directions,
and it's important that when we talk about digital sovereignty,
we always look at those four different angles.
If I look at our project,
the way we are addressing this,
the sovereignty is a given or something you can actually get
by having the providers that are local,
that you trust, that work within your environment,
and they are able to deliver in a secure way.
And then on top of that, what we do in our project,
we add the choice aspect by having really strong technical,
certifiable standards, so customers,
users can easily switch between clouds,
or use several clouds together in a federated way.
We talk about technical sovereignty.
This is, of course, where we do need
fully openly developed open source stack,
that's where reference implementation comes into play,
and then the knowledge building,
having the information, the skills available,
with the open operations, and the open knowledge initiative.
Hending back to you.
Yeah, quick note on that.
So there is one part which I just described,
which is the global standardization,
but also German government Estonia,
and you are also working with countries together
to implement these architectures,
or to basically do trainings
on the different aspects of gasstack.
And I think I leave it with that.
So these are a few countries we work with,
but I think it's quite interesting to see
how sovereign cloud is working now,
with a couple of these countries together and with us.
And just to maybe share some of the things
that are currently happening.
And you've seen on the last slide,
I mean, we've had a number of African countries being interested,
which is really great,
because I see Africa really catching up with open source
and with digital visualization.
So there's some picture from a training
that happened just, I think,
was actually this week.
Where a custom was talking about cloud
and how you use clouds,
and how we can help these countries
to be successful, having their own control,
having their own digital infrastructure.
And just maybe as a closing remark,
and I actually decided against
inserting very, very depressing pictures here,
but they are linked from the PDF slides
if you really want to look at them again.
I mean, one of the things that's really inspiring me
here being at Boston seeing lots of people working
for our digital freedom,
maybe the fight we are having here is no longer
just about digital freedom.
I mean, we see those big tech companies,
unfortunately, not just working in strange ways
with newly elected people,
but we also see them actively supporting regimes
and parties in Europe that are fighting
against the fascism that we hope to overcome there.
And I mean, let's do our piece,
make sure we have the digital freedom,
and hope that helps the world to not go that wrong direction.
Thank you.
Well, I just wanted to, one last remark is that
I think it's worth to look beyond North America
and the EU.
We were working with so many governments
which all have open source communities.
So there are a lot of users.
There might be not so visible,
but actually the community spreads wide
and I think it's worth to look globally
and not only very EU-centric.
Thanks.
Thank you.