She and we will be talking about solving the used problems with open source.
I'm Claire Perchen, I'm EU advocacy leader at Mozilla Foundation.
I'd also like to acknowledge Paula Gervingruyevska from Linux Foundation, who's co-organized
this panel.
I think she's maybe a womaning the door outside right now, but she's been encouraging
to solve its problems with open source for many years now, and is the mastermind behind this session.
So we will be talking, first I'll introduce the panelists, how about that?
So we have Dr. Christopher Brewster, who is Senior Data Scientist at TNO in the Netherlands
and Professor in the application of Emerging Technologies at Masterpiece University.
He coordinates the Horizon EU Project Open Agree, which is building open source software and services
in components for the agricultural sector as it digitizes.
We also have Tobias Augsbunger, who is a climate tech innovator and open data and open source advocate
with a PhD in atmospheric sciences.
He is head of data at Open Energy Transition, which is standardizing electrical grid data.
And he also contributes to OpenSustain.tech and climateread.com, which connect and promote open projects
that combat climate change and biodiversity loss.
And finally, we have Boris Dolly, who is Ospo director and lead for responsible digital strategy
at the French Grid Operator RTE.
His cross-domin expertise combines software engineering, open source leadership,
procurement strategy, and additional sovereignty vision.
And he killed created RTE software engineering department, where some 100 developers are so
I believe, are working on open source grid critical tools along with the Linux Foundation energy.
So with this excellent panel, we will be discussing how different experiences that all relate to open source.
So across Europe, open source is increasingly used to address systemic challenges in a variety of sectors.
We've just seen democracy, for instance, in the last session.
And here we're going to be talking about agriculture and farming and the energy sector.
However, the full potential of open source in these sectors depends on the adaptedness of projects, policies, and markets.
So the idea here is to bring together these different concrete experiences from each of the panelists
and to see how open source can enable innovation, transparency and autonomy, and different spaces.
And we'll see how various policy choices from funding, procurement, data governance, standards, licensing.
How these can ensure that open source software provides the basis for sustainable and resilient ecosystems
that Europe needs to address different environmental, social and economic challenges.
So with that, I'm first going to turn to Tobias.
Can you set the frame for us here?
Because you've had various experiences, including open energy transition, and more widely.
So can you tell us what is it about open source, open science, open data that make these methods particularly suited to climate and energy challenges?
Yeah, thank you so much.
So if we talk about climate and sustainability or environmental general, we're talking about something that can be measured.
You know, everyone can see it.
You can really see what is true of faults, right?
You can see if there is a thunderstorm coming, for example.
You can measure the wind speed and all this data is actually available.
And we can make quite good assumptions about the future using open source software.
We can model the future in a certain way, or how different directions, how different policies can change the future.
And this is done with open source, quite a lot in the energy space.
So to plan where to invest is high to part of future.
Is it battery storage, or is it solar power, or should we just wait until fusion is ready?
So on all this planning, on all this, what we consider sustainable, or not, we can do calculations.
And with open source, we can just open them up.
We can open up the energy assumption, any data that we use.
And this makes actually open source and open science the key indicator for sustainable sustainability in general.
Because you can really prove with data with software.
If some future investment actually is could be considered sustainable or not.
For example, we give you climate change.
There are a lot of people saying there is no climate change.
But if you can prove that there is no climate change, you can create an open source model using open data and just prove there is no climate change.
And climate change is not, let's say, for a really a problem for a society, you can model that.
But there are no open source and open data models out there that this prove climate change.
And that's why climate change is there.
Because you cannot disprove it with open science and open source as an example.
And the same goes with investment in energy, because energy is the most important leverage or let's say way to tackle climate change.
Because most of the CO2 comes from energy from the energy sector.
Great. Next, I'm going to turn to Christopher.
You've actually sat in exactly the order that I was hoping to have this.
Christopher, now we want to talk really specifically about the agricultural sector.
Agriculture is an extremely important area of EU policy, of course.
But not one that we often talk about in relation to open source.
So can you tell us a little bit about the motivation for the open-agre project?
And also from your perspective how the project is going.
I think it's year two or year three already now.
We're in the final year of the project we end in December of this year.
So open-agre is a European Union-funded project running for three years, we're in the last year.
And it has two core activities.
One is the development of a collection of open source software services, which we already have available.
And the other is to analyze how Wendy's services are used.
What the energy performance is, particularly with the target audience being small, medium technology providers,
having smallholder farmers across Europe.
So very often a lot of agriculture is in remote locations.
It needs to be cannot guarantee a dependence on broadband services or connection to the internet.
So all our services are designed to function both with a broadband connection or without independently.
The challenge for the agriculture sector is enormous.
The challenge Boris about energy, I think agriculture is the big problem for climate.
Agriculture is responsible for agriculture and food is responsible for more than one third of greenhouse gas emissions.
78% of water extracted is due to agriculture.
And in Europe, like in most parts of the world, most farmers are small scale.
There's obviously a power curve here with a small number of very large scale farmers.
But 70% of farmers in Europe are under 20 hectares, 50% are under five hectares in size.
So this is our target audience.
Small farmers who have very small profit margins to the extent that it's needed to use digitization in this area.
That's what the project is targeting.
There's a strong push from the European Union to introduce more digital technologies.
There's great passion from a lot of technology providers.
I think this considerable resistance from the agricultural sector.
Thank you.
Let's look at start for this topic.
We'll come back to it.
Boris, now diving again into the energy sector.
The energy transition is in full swing.
The grid is digitizing and virtualizing.
But is there something specific about decentralized community driven nature of renewable energy?
That links us back to open source.
Can you share with us your personal journey, your collective journey,
with open source in the energy domain?
Thank you.
I think she was read.
We're going to tell her that.
Hello.
I want to.
Hey.
Nice.
Thank you so much.
Yes.
The energy transition and the climate change and the agriculture are,
I think, something we need to take care of for people in planet prosperity.
So we're on a huge topic.
And what we've done in order to face the challenge,
when I say we, as I say RTE, the French transmission, great.
We saw that the waterfall system with nuclear production,
and how we say it.
Sorry, I don't have the word in English.
But the behavior of the citizen and the industries was perfectly known
from the end of the World War II to the 21st century.
But in the 21st century, something changed.
The behavior of everyone in this, what we call the power system,
will completely change.
We are a grid operator where you are a solar panel, a product,
whatever your role, gas, electricity, water.
We are all facing this energy transition.
So what is a point?
We will never be able to make this power system so agile
because now it's a software-defined power system.
It's not more a human one because we need to automate
and react very quickly because we can have blackout.
And it has been demonstrated recently in Europe.
So we can have blackout if we are not so agile at the production
is changing everywhere on the conceptions of engineering.
So what we've done, we've done something that the open source
is very good to do.
We copy paste and we do the same as other.
And not reinventing the wheel.
We saw what happened in the telecommunications center.
Sorry, in the telecommunications sector.
And we saw that they've built an ecosystem for open source.
In order to address together,
the same challenge that they all have.
And spending money one after one in the same needs is wasting money
and not being able to face the transition that is in front of us.
So we've created this Linux relation energy project.
In order to have three main topic, we will build together.
First, of course, the algorithm.
We need forecast for the weather.
And it's interesting because it's interesting for climate change.
It's interesting for agriculture.
So you will see what is this common thing is more than energy.
But in energy, we need, of course, algorithm.
We need also that as.
And with AI, it can mix to the two.
And we need open standards.
And the standard organization are not so quick for building digital standards.
They are improving and it's a good thing.
And open source is really helping them for that.
So we created this ecosystem to give you an insight.
In 2019, at the yearally, the first yearally symposium, we were nine.
And next year, we will be 700.
So we copy-based telecommunication.
We copy-based the vehicle and we did that in the energy.
Great.
So to sum up a little bit that first round, I'll try with this microphone to speak loudly.
We're seeing not just different sectors, energy, agriculture, climate.
But we're also seeing different attributes of open source that make open source,
particularly the lend itself well to addressing these challenges, right?
Copy-paste, ecosystem effect, decentralization, ground truth,
verifiability.
So for this next round of questions, I want to draw on your experiences and think about what
you policy should be doing now.
We are in the policy bedroom in case anyone was not aware.
So we've already seen the benefits of European legislation initiatives.
I think you've experienced those benefits firsthand.
So now, let's think about the difference between policy, perhaps, in theory,
and then how it works in the field, in industries and in communities.
And think about how can future policies overcome the next obstacles that you're facing,
and continue to safeguard the role of open source in these sectors?
Christopher, you mentioned, actually, I think when we spoke earlier a bit about problems
related to lock-in, related to entry, especially for everything about small,
older farmers, right? We're in remote locations.
How is so far the open-agre and the agricultural data space?
How are they helping to address these issues in your perspective?
And what kind of updates might you need from policy in the future?
It's complicated.
There are many laws, of course, to this, but if one of the issues is that we're having a situation
which, as I mentioned before, there is a top-down push for greater digital adoption,
as a general resistance from the agricultural sector.
Larger because it doesn't make financial sense.
So that's one simple aspect is actually looking at what's really happening on the farm,
and really looking at the profits.
You can't really persuade people to invest in new tools if they can't afford to buy them.
Beyond that, there are lots of other laws to do with standardisation.
There have been efforts in the European Union to standardise.
In talking particularly there about interoperability.
Currently, you have big agricultural machinery providers, each of which have their own websites,
with their own access, the farmer can access their data on their,
I'm speaking to some French farmers a few weeks ago.
They were saying, well, we have to subscribe to John Deere,
we have to strike threats as a panel and we have to support.
And it's all different.
So that kind of thing is an obvious area where there should be a strong push.
Obviously, a very strong pushback from the manufacturers and from the big companies against this,
because that is a fundamental principle of locking.
You get your target audience, some of the technology,
and then it's easier for them just to carry on being part of that ecosystem.
So there is a really an area where the European Union at a policy level can really make a difference.
Ensure that there is a guarantee to be able to walk away from any particular technology stack and go to another one.
Beyond that, there are issues around funding.
I talked about need to subsidise agriculture as a whole,
but there's a need to understand more carefully the funding that is poured into the sectors.
Lots of money around, but it's very bitter.
It's very a bit here a bit there and that's the thing.
So if the European Union has a serious policy in this area,
that needs more coherence into the way that is organised.
I'll stop now.
Okay, I'm the topic of funding.
Actually, a Boris, I might turn to you next.
You have experience with procurement and funding and different market models.
So does anything that Christopher say resonate with you,
what have been your experiences and what would be your policy recommendations related to procurement and funding?
Yeah, thank you for this very important question.
And here I took a note because a little bit exhausted by this open source week.
So yes, public procurement is something that we spend 2,000 billion euro a year
at the European Union level each year.
200 billion are dedicated to digital.
And we have a first key that we need to know.
The first one is when you are a public procurement, like me, a public buyer, like me,
you will either buy or make.
But if you buy the care here, we are not in the real estate.
If you buy out of the shelf a digital asset, it's not your digital asset.
So you will pay fees and you will rent not buy.
And the first key is to now stop buying private digital assets,
but beginning to buy public assets, digital public goods,
public source for all the world, but there is a bet.
When you do that, you face the immunity totem of your CEO, your CTO, your CFO, and your CEO.
What is this immunity totem? Remember July, 2024, Crowd Strike,
Blue Screen of this, everywhere on the world.
No one was fired for that.
This is the immunity totem I'm speaking about.
When you go to open source through the public procurement, you put your CEO at risk.
So he needs SLA.
And this word has not been said, it's service level agreement.
There is four level classical in SLA, one, two, three, four.
One, two is the running daily life and three expertise and four excellence.
So what we need is to produce European champions to offer this SLA
for the entire industry's administrations that are public procurement,
but also private procurement.
But for that, how we do that? It's easy.
We have already European open source catalog.
It's available online in the Interpowerable Framework of European Commission.
And what we should do is improve this for why.
Doing a matrix with IT for IT staff.
Here's the generic IT of his replacing this.
We have all we need.
And then drawing verticals, electric reads, electric generation, gas,
train, agriculture, every vertical.
And there is small horizontal layers between them.
For example, you have a linear infrastructure, train rail road.
You have an electrical, you need to modelize the vegetation.
So we have open sources to that.
It's not in the European portal now.
So we need to make this map of what exists in open source.
I'm not speaking only about product.
I'm mostly speaking about the offer.
But the offer will never happen if we don't have the same northern star.
And not the northern star.
The northern star is open source.
The open source week has demonstrated that's done.
For Europe, we have the northern stars.
For sovereignty purpose, it will be open source.
But we need a compass.
We are not in this space world.
Walking here, what is the compass?
The compass is this matrix.
Where you put the maturity level of the product of the community.
And in the community, there is two things.
Production grade ready.
For example, we have open source in production for very critical missions.
So we need to make a pin everywhere in Europe.
And this ecosystem, software defined vehicle, elephant energy.
And in agriculture, you have ecosystems where we know the product and the grade level.
But there is the other level, which is ready not for production only.
But also commercial grade level ready.
So we have an ecosystem.
And I will take an example and guess what?
It's not a promotion because it's open source.
It's matrix.org.
Ask in your procurement because you are allowed by the low.
No need for the policy to change any comma in the low.
You are allowed to say I want metrics.org solution.
But you are not allowed to say elements because it's a private company on top,
which is a part of the entire ecosystem where you have what the European has been built for as healthy concurrency.
So we need these champions to be identified in this matrix with the product.
And then the compass will be for every public procurement to have this incentive to stop thinking about the short term optimization.
Would you eat junk food every day because it's cheap?
Or will you eat organic food because you consider your entire life?
It's the same for the digital assets that we pay for through public and private procurement.
So remember 200 billion per year for digital for public procurement.
The private sees a amount of money that we can make.
If we broke the vicious circle of spending money to digital assets everywhere on earth,
but not digital public goods.
Let's start.
This is prosperity for people in planet.
Thank you.
And buying not venting got really big nods from the other.
I don't know if you want to respond to some of that before.
I also have a question for Tobias.
It's different for the energy sector because you have said,
if you use about guaranteeing a certain level of delivery of energy continuously.
But there's a flip story here, which is that we're trying to create a dependency in agriculture.
We're trying to impose upon agriculture.
You should depend upon these digital services, which then will have to be guaranteed by the energy sector in terms of data centers and
God knows what.
So we are artificially creating a dependency there, which is challenging and problematic.
And do we really want that?
It's an open issue.
So the question is slightly different in the agriculture sector.
That on the farm level.
But a lot of the analytical side and all that's a thing.
Yes, definitely.
There's a lot of echoes now.
And Tobias, I actually wanted to ask you a slightly different question,
although you're welcome to respond to anything.
So I think you'll have perspective on policy making, but from a different angle,
which is actually how open source, open science can improve public spending and decision making.
But do you talk a little bit about this?
Yes.
For example, let's say open-range and decision company and working for their doing energy system planning.
So we just really create software to do what's the investment you have to do for the next 10 years in different technologies in your grid,
in the power plants.
And this is used by policymakers.
Some policymakers really love open source now.
And to use open data, open source to add this to their reports, to their documents, why this needs to be done.
But it feels like that there's a problem in policy making general that those people who speak with openness or with open science don't really get the spotlight.
And what we really need to do is do exactly this.
And for example, in Germany, we try not to invest as new governments and they all want to invest now into gas power plants,
but really it makes no sense from a security environmental or any perspective.
But they still do it and then they give you a paper and they say here's why.
It's not enough.
I would just say go home.
Leave the room.
I want to see your data.
It's about a future.
Show me your data.
Show you model what your assumptions.
Why do you think this is why why you don't speak about better storage at all in your reports.
Right?
It doesn't make sense at all.
And that's needs to be changed.
So those people who really speak, you're not transparent.
Transparent is a little bit difficult because you could transparent this.
Everything can be transparent.
You know, actually glass glass that is part of the light passing through glass.
That's transparency.
What you want is traceability.
That's something different.
It's a little bit stronger and also an illegal framework much stronger.
You just need an indicator.
How traceable is what this politician is saying there?
What is he saying?
Do you have a model that you can show me?
Do you have any data?
And if not then you get just less trust.
And this should be implemented into policies from my point of view.
That's it.
So there should be trust.
So the trust that is created by openness should be somehow implemented into policy
Making or at least how it is communicated to the public.
And this would significantly change a lot of things in our society.
If suddenly we would allow open science to have the spotlight in policy making.
Because then we would get rid of all those very bad political, influential people that try to
Just lie because it's more or less just lying that you try to avoid with that.
And that decision making is manipulated by some other bad actors.
And it can be done.
So most people don't understand that you can model a lot.
You can calculate a lot.
And there's a huge ecosystem.
We have 200, or 200, or 200 open source projects for energy system modeling.
They do exactly this.
There is already massive ecosystem.
You just have to use it.
And you need to away.
And that's some kind of challenge.
How do we get open source into the into let's say our public services.
Right into our industry.
And there is a gap of services that we still need to fill.
But if we can fill this gap and tell people trust open science.
Because it's very hard to manipulate it.
That's really the point.
We can change a lot.
Yes, I hope.
Great.
We have a few more minutes.
Actually, Boris, you were nodding about traceability.
I don't know if there's something you want to add there.
No.
Great.
We've got five minutes for questions that are not case.
Take your time to think of your questions.
Yeah.
In the back.
We'll repeat.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The manufacturers of large machinery tractors and combined harvesters and the plow shares.
The jump deers of the world.
I want to know your opinion.
If it's already dead from the start, just focusing on software.
And that is about time to actually develop also the open source hardware for these vehicles.
Why?
These big, big ad companies will just read the rewards of the open source data and the open source software and the open source things that we tend to provide.
What's your opinion on it?
I agree entirely.
And I think there's a fundamental problem with digitization.
I was just saying to an earlier conversation, which is that as soon as you digitize any sector, you are tending towards consolidation.
So we have a history all the way going back to.
There's a wonderful book by Tim Wu on this called the Master Switch going back to telegraphy, telegraphy telephony, radio, television, cable television, all the way to internet.
Give it 20 years and it always consolidates to two, three, four companies.
And I am very afraid that the agricultural sector in 20 years time will be four companies.
Four global companies.
If you look at what's happened in other sectors, such as inputs.
So fertilizer production, pesticide production, seed production.
It's all got consolidated to four or five companies at a global level.
So the question there really and I throw this back to the audience is, how can we force open source to act as a barrier as a shield?
To that inevitable consolidation.
That's for me a core question because I can create open source software.
I can encourage startups all over Europe to use that and create customized solutions for their small ecosystem of farmers.
But how do I prevent the big player from coming along and swallowing them up one by one?
So I mean we've worked in previous projects with the company in Italy.
It's a little hotter, very interesting farm management system they were bought by BASF.
Why does BASF buy in a digital agriculture company?
Let's think about that.
And that's just going to be replicated across the board.
And this is not to contradict the fact that there are a lot of pushes that enable open source solutions.
If you look at regulation like the EUDR regulation on deforestation has created a whole collection of tools and startups trying to answer that both within Europe and internationally.
And not some other such scale.
Then they create these ecosystems.
But then give them 10 years, give them 20 years, they disappear.
So I'm pessimistic but I would like to have hope.
Check, check.
Any other question?
Yeah.
Is it working?
Okay.
All right.
So one question to Boris.
You mentioned, we have wonderful open source projects.
There has spread in many parts around the world.
There's a need to sustain open source projects and so on.
But then there's a gap in creating European or local service champions all around the world to actually get open source implemented in like big slow moving institutions.
What's your idea on how we can create those champions?
First, we need there already exists.
There are small.
The question is how they can go at scale.
Then there is another point.
I think that we can maybe try to change the mindset the culture and the incentives of the stakeholders of private company companies like service providers.
We have in Europe very great service providers.
So guys, we'll be mainly capable of doing the level one and level two for your open source project.
There will be keen to do that because there are also keen to do integration of private bricks that they have partnership with.
They're interested in very early money.
They're also keen to make something for you, but you alone, not a digital, but good because you will as a client do this cycle, this vicious cycle.
For 25 years now we are doing that.
You invest, you go in prediction, for maintenance cost, and then you didn't document anything.
And those guys will not document for yourself.
No wonder you meant what you built.
It's too hard to think it's a consensus.
And then what will happen when you will need to have this evolution, you will drop down.
So it will be a loss of cost.
The champions we need.
We need to insightize them to say stop working for me.
Begins to begin a champion for the four layer of, so you can have some of investment, which is never ending digital asset capitalization.
Those guys, we need to incentivize them, change our culture, or there is a third option for answering a question,
is to find a new unicorn on that.
We have very great developer all around Europe.
And what we need is give them the funding.
We spent eight hundred, it has been set by during the open source weight.
We spent a Europe commission.
Funded open source.
About 800 millions euro in the last seven years.
Those should go to those guys.
This is my answer.
And then if we identify who they are, what they have succeeded in,
and we can have this service development to give to our COC IOs, it will go up.
I think we are going to have to close it there, but thank you so much to the speakers.