Okay, hi everyone. Thanks for coming to this death room if you haven't been here for a while already.
We will have a very experimental round table, so we have a table where we don't have seats.
So this will be interesting. It could be very dynamic or annoying, we'll see.
I'm Leia Bajamana, because system coordinator at Zennis, the center for digital sovereignty.
And with me here today, when I'm going to start any Fisher, who is tech lead at Zennis,
we have Michael Meeks, CEO of Colette Colabra productivity.
We have Frank Kalichek, CEO next cloud, Armondine LaPap, CEO of Element, we have Ludovic DuBost, CEO XWiki.
And then we have Timmerkans, B1 systems, we are in IT consultant at B1 systems.
So hello to you. Thanks for squeezing into this room.
I think this will be an interesting conversation or same.
Just a bit about the context of this imaginary round table.
When we issued a CFP for this death room, we received a lot of proposals for many people.
And a lot of them were vendors explaining to us how to collaborate with governments.
And then we also got some from Reney explaining how governments can collaborate with vendors.
And we thought we could bring them all together in this round table discussion and get to hear both sides.
One of the proposals we received was called 10 cooks, one kitchen.
How we made different software companies work together, and that one was by Reney.
So I'd like to start with Reney describing how we work in this kitchen at Zendes with different software companies.
What do you learn from that?
Thank you, Leo.
Yeah, we are now like a half a year into the project with you all.
We already had some really, really interesting learnings.
How to cooperate with the open source ecosystem.
And I could give long talks about how the project is organized, about technical stuff.
But if I would condense the experience of the last two past half a year into like two or three minutes that I have now, I'd say it's the most important thing is the human factor.
Actually, we are all tech people, but we are also all humans.
And making this project successful is only possible when we collaborate efficiently and openly.
And therefore I'd say that the three key things I'd like to highlight is trust, transparency and contribution.
And trust in being that like an example.
Attenders we have like Alex mentioned that we are like a higher request of customer communication because there's a lot of interest in the things that we do.
And sometimes it's overwhelming that we miss out on people like this email that isn't getting answered today, but maybe you have to wait for a few days.
But you have to trust us that we take the right steps, we get the message, we take the right steps to the right actions to make this project successful.
We learn a lot about transparency and in the way we work together.
And I really like that you demand more transparency in the project and we are working on that really hard every day.
And just to give an example of what we did like when we went to weeks ago at the centers headquarters.
We agreed on a request for comments format which is open to everyone to make proposals in the project.
Being an technical proposal or an organizational proposal or whatever everyone can join in this discussion.
Make a different proposal or make suggestions and then we condense and re-unit and then go move forward.
And I think it's a great example of how we can strengthen the collaboration with you and put more transparency into the project.
And the third and last thing is a contribution.
There's so much passion in all of these in all of these companies and the people that work in these companies to make this project successful in every aspect of product development.
So not only technical on a technical side where I am mostly in rounds with your developers but let it be in sales and marketing and all of that and communication that really well you and we will make more use of this year to scale up and bring this.
Product into German government on a scale that is necessary.
And contribution wise we need to be more we need to be open also for new contributors and we are open to new contributors to the project and to the product.
Because I think it's important that we get new ideas and new directions into the project and that also that vitalizes a revitalizes the project regularly.
Thanks for that. I think when we prepared for this talk we talked about how trust is also not just the one way street right I mean vendors also need to trust us.
Sorry so when we prepared for this talk we talked about how trust is also not just a one way street but that I mean you also have to trust governments to work with you.
And also have trust in your business models and I think thank you had some ideas about that how governments should support your business models instead of just asking for things that you don't even offer usually.
Yeah maybe just quickly to stress how unique this is what we are doing here together.
I mean we have basically eight different companies with eight different products and they all have their own positioning pricing development model roadmap.
I mean marketing strategy all kinds of things and then with the government organization comes and takes like eight different things and creates another product out of that.
And to synchronize all of those things actually quite a quite a challenge it's we all think the integration is changing on the technology side it is changing on the average side but I think it's this is a lot easier than integrating like the whole thinking and release them schedule and marketing and go to market and sales process and all those things.
And yeah this is quite a quite a challenge but I think we achieved as mentioned already a lot of things and are we happy to move forward.
Interesting little performance.
So I think what makes working with governments also difficult sometimes when we talked about that is this whole procurement and and tenoring process that you have to really understand before you can even do that properly.
Could you maybe fill us in on what what is it and why is it difficult.
Sure I think that's a passion of mine so the passion in in summary is this so pay for what you use.
So it's days three okay and and I think what runny said was fantastic about getting people really good people and I just like to plug the open source business alliances led by some wonderful people in Germany and they have a new tendering guideline because for any real scale of government work it has to be tended.
And the key is to get the great people that we have in the room and and so what how can you you do that when you buy proprietary software you assume the vendor can support their software.
I mean that's just kind of implied if it's if it's Microsoft office you hopefully they have the people that wrote it and they can actually fix it.
But when it's open source it's very easy to inject all sorts of fly by night people that have no skills, no competence, no whatever and are very cheap surprisingly cheap.
And if you're tendering is then focused on price you have a massive problem because you get exactly the wrong people to work with to build that that ecosystem that trust and to reinvest in it.
Anyway, so the OSBA has a beautiful paper that explains I only brought this has done some great things and certification here to provide a value.
Marker and and there's a whole little other techniques I just that's coming out and I think five or five days and if you're involved in government procurement of any kind you need to read that.
Because it will really help you get the right people as Ronnie says get the right skills so your projects exceeds becomes a success works upstream and does all those good things that's and this is I think getting really right and we're just excited to see here.
So yeah just spreading that best practice throughout our industry can really change the economics of open source I just really encourage you to pay for what you use so it stays free. Thank you.
One of the blogs.
I was wondering if maybe you could tell us in I could fill us in on more of the practicalities of working together because I mean you have a lot of experience working with governments at element and you also you provide the tools for collaboration right and there must be some very practical aspects of how to do that or how not to do that how to use your tools to collaborate.
So on the practical aspect of collaborating.
Yes, there is the day today he's a common to link to be able to work together.
I think the other angle is really making sure that the collaboration is progressing everyone's product and.
Basically coming back to what Michael was saying it's.
When you're trying to build an open source product and even even more when this is an end user facing product.
It makes no it's an operator for government to use the open source version as we said earlier it's around the sovereignty and transparency and be able to share digital digital comments basically.
But if you are as open source business we are here actually competing with property products which would be things like teams or Google workspace or these sort of things.
We need to be able if you want these products to be used internally by the administrations.
You need these to be at the same level of fast evolution new features coming in make sure it's glossy etc and you can only do this if you have a team which is big enough to support all of that.
And this is why the turnering process is important to make sure that it takes into account the fact that the open source companies need some regular revenue.
Coming in to be able to sustain this so on one hand it is great when people go in and fund future development but the question is the maintenance.
And as Michael say if you want the product to stay free and good quality and secure then wants the features there who is paying for the maintenance.
And this is worse and this is doing something great making sure the contribute features of stream but also making sure that the product companies who have the product vision can work together.
Can continue fund the team to continue evolve the product into the right direction.
Thank you. I was told to speak up so I will really really try to be loud now.
Or just, is this better?
This is more embarrassing now but thank you.
Okay, I had it over to Tim because I was wondering what we experienced at Zenness must seem very familiar to you because you had the one systems.
I have a very distinct role in the open-desk ecosystem because the general service provider as we call you in German.
Maybe you could tell us a bit about your experience on how you make the different vendors work together.
Yeah, first of all thanks for having me I'm a bit of a guest here because I'm actually from a neighboring project at B1 systems I represent a Linux client management team.
Well, we do just that at B1 systems with Linux client management for customers of all sizes we provide management of the Linux distribution installation on the actual computers that the users are working with.
And so if you do that then an entire Linux distribution that consists of tens of thousands of packages with thousands of software projects behind it.
I only find myself only thinking in supply chains.
Very very interesting input now from the past talks about I heard some very important sentences one important sentence we heard multiple times now is an open source supply chain must be sustainable.
So if I see now here all that has been discussed with highly recommended and highly regulatory recommended systems that introduce a lot of bureaucratic effort and additional effort all these batches and all these special considerations.
That is all if I think in a supply chain very much of it is happening at the supplier side it's getting shifted into the supplier side it generates a lot of work there and this work is cost and that cost has to be like funded and so it's also very good to talk about many different methods of funding and there are many different tools for example the subscription model which I also would not rule out.
There's a very interesting way of funding and well it has to be carefully considered and all the supply chain attacks and all supply chain issues that were in the past years in the press we have witnessed them we have to deal with those and many more much more tedious ones that don't get so much press.
And it's work all the time it's simply a lot of work and the work costs money so that's I think yes yes that that is I think the bottom line of this sustainable open source tool chain I can I can make many demands on the supplier side like for example accountability and reliability availability interoperability documentation.
So it technically could fund a lot of software for its own use it could actually decide to okay I'm going to to make all the software instead of buying it because it has this very large scale.
However when you look more in the details you realize that technology is a lot of work and it's very complex and actually.
You can't really or you might not do as good as the competitors and as was said before where what we're trying to do here is software that needs to have the level of quality and that allows really to replace.
Solutions in which a hundred of million of dollars if not billions have been put in and and plus additionally.
If the government has its own software and the private sector has a completely different software then there's going to be a lot of interoperability issues between the private sector and the public sector.
And it makes a lot of sense that whatever is being built with a governance money needs to be connected to to things that are used and built also in the private sector and the private sector needs people to serve them and so not only it makes a lot of sense for the government to have a professional team of companies.
That is providing the support and development on top of the software it's actually super important but these vendors can also bring that service to the private sector also push that software to the private sector so that the private sector also adopts it and actually most of our company.
Or also born out of customers in the private sector like we we have a lot of us have a very significant amount of our revenue if not the majority of our revenue in the private sector and so we already brought the software that we have today at the level it is because of that that revenue in the private sector.
So it makes a lot of sense to have this collaboration which allows to have these synergies between public and private sector and the vendors are very important there and this should be true also if we build new things.
If we build new things if we build them completely from scratch and we we build absolutely complete new things it could be interesting for the innovation aspect because there is always a need for innovation and new things.
But there is a big risk that there might not be providers for the private sector that can push that software also in the private sector and also do innovation and private sector.
So from my point of view when the government works with open source should always think about looking if they are not already vendors that are working on the same things and not.
Not duplicate things that already exists so that the synergies that are at the maximum between what they need and what also the private sector.
The source below of materials and so I think it is very valuable that such mechanisms that maybe were not required beforehand are now being established I think that's some valuable work I can I can only recommend that.
Thank you and one of the previous talks we had that sometimes it's difficult to bring together the project roadmap and the product roadmap map and I think this is also something that we experienced working with you that there might be different ideas on how the the product should continue.
Well that the open desk project is maybe will take a different trajectory than the products that you had in mind.
Can you maybe speak to that among them because you have experience working with governments who might have different ideas about where element is going.
Yeah it's definitely the hardest thing when you work with when you work with private sector usually they take whatever is on the shelf right and there are to say may come to use.
I love to have these love to have that etc.
But it's true with in public sector when governments won't a specific feature there was already to pay for the development of the set feature.
So there is a lot of back and forth on trying to get these two angles aligned which is always a very interesting exercise on the plus side.
If you're trying to focus on selling to a given market the demands that are coming from outside and not necessarily to misaligned with your own roadmap it can be just a matter of I was planning to do that in six months rather than now.
But it's definitely your challenge when you can get funding from a government to develop a given feature which is moving your roadmap around and I know that in our company at this new guys tell me about you but our product teams need a lot of flexibility and when you hire new product manager they are not expecting to see their roadmap changing under them like this and there are a lot of time and discussion spent on the phone.
I'm trying to make sure that all the eight products are aligned developing the same feature if it's a process different products at the same time.
Yeah, maybe we can add something.
We also have to understand that someone needs to make the right product decisions and it's there's often not like one right answer that different options but the important thing is that we decide on one thing.
This can be a bit of the challenge if they're basically different cooks in the kitchen here so just a quick story like last week I visited a government customer and make it evolve and to even sell it it brings them together.
If you think about it it looks it looks at maybe a different scale a bit like when you're abroad together are not ex companies to make airbus and so this industrial project is actually is what we need because we need we need groups that are well structured very professionally in the work able to deliver.
And we need to bring them together to deliver and this is really one of the things I find really great into in the project of then this is that it does this it does not just do a technical project there is of course technology is super important.
The project needs to be well done well integrated between the different software that the different vendors are doing but it's this group of industrial that can bring bring forward the challenge that we have.
And there is a business model and there is a business model and there is a sage team and there is a marketing team so that's.
Which is software where they can go and buy license if we turn up and try to answer tender and say hey here is open source software please pay a license the procurement person sitting in front of you usually say what it's a principles I can you I can buy feature I can buy support I cannot put license in front of the open source box in my form and that's one thing we were hitting against in some places.
I mean fun story I I also would cheapie also software for seven figure a number because it is possible why not if they pay for it you can charge for it.
The procurement from the other side said we have this rule that like two thirds of the money need to go into the license and one third into maintenance.