The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MIKE LINKSVAYER: Open source, of course, is code that anybody can use and improve and it's a global team sport. So what do these two things have to do with each other? You can go to the next slide.
So we have ‑‑ that's the symbol for open source or a symbol for open source, if you're not familiar. Kind of an open key hole and a castle to symbolize sovereignty. So, what do they have to do with each other? One thing is open source is digital in a way. There are many millions of lines of code written over decades by open source developers. Between you and me, you know, in the video capture on your device running Internet fine us and that all has to be maintained for everything to work. And that's true in every nation and across nations. I want to say that each digital sovereignty and open source are about autonomy and capability and Paula touched on that. Autonomy you don't want to be locked in, but something they think is not focused on enough is what Paula touched on around stills, which is really capability to be able to use software ability to use open source, you need capability within an organization and at the national level.
So both digital sovereignty and open source have risks and hurdles and I think they can actually be mutually reinforcing. And risk of at least naively pursued digital sovereignty includes kind of following behind becoming a technological back border and kind of getting in a self‑defeating mode where you don't want to exchange technological ideas with the rest of the world. You want all production to be local and that doesn't scale and you're not going to keep up. I think from a global perspective, another risk of digital sovereignty is kind of basically cutting off the connections and scientific and community interchange that happens in the global technological community in a very accelerated fashion under open source. That is risks of treating technology as adversarial thing rather than something we can all benefit from and not a geo political level encourages things like technological surprise.
So open source also has a risk and probably the biggest risk is under investment. It can be thought of as a commons and ‑‑ and it's running the Internet in our society effectively. So it does have the risk under investment and sort of both the corporate organizational journey and I think the national journey around open source and digital sovereignty can help fix that problem.
So I want to illustrate some of this with the next slide and talk about the journey that companies in particular have been on over the last 20 years and try to make an analogy with the journey that nations are on really just as long, but I think ‑‑ I think, um, happening slower simply because they're far larger to have more stakeholders than an individual nation does. This is really a stylized description. There are many ways to talk about kind of the open source journey that companies and other organizations are on. You can search the web for open source maturity model to see very many different thoughts on this. These are common things in the stages that often happen in the same time and continue from one stage to the income. So most companies start out with either ignoring or fearing open source. Then they start seeing it as, you know, we need to consume open source to develop products gauze we can't keep up with the rest of the world unless we do that. And that's open source that's resourced. And that's fantastic, but it only gets so much of the value out of open source to be able to build off of that free resource. And then you start releasing some open source projects maybe without ‑‑ without a lot of strategy behind it and maybe, you know, it's kind of locked whether or not you make a big impact there. Then the consumption starts to catch up with you. Open source is often viewed as free as in a puppy which means the bugs and security issues in open source that you are building products around have to be fixed and you're now responsible for them and you're responsible for figuring out how to ‑‑ how to integrate the fixes that the community other stakeholders in a particular open source project over the thousands of open source projects you're relying on, how to get those back into your product. And at that point, you're contributing ‑‑ it is actually they're operationally, but strategically every product company has learned over time as they consume open source and get the benefits from that you go then want to work with the community to be able to get those security ‑‑ those security fixes and other innovations that the rest of the community upstream there is a term to mean that kind of where the center of development for a particular project is happening when a contributor is upstream.
Then finally, you know, there is innovation happening all along the way, but a really sophisticated organization will see open source as part of their kind of innovation fly wheel and be investing in it very strategically and when you're there, you can create breakthrough things like potential flow that I'm excited to the hear about later. And even in a company that isn't as software company, it is part of the kind of digital transformation journey. I want to argue that these all have analogies at the state level. The stuff happens within individual government agencies and things like that, but I think we can scale those to a nation state level. And think about what policies apply. So at the nations state level, open source of them getting is not feared and completely ignored. The next step is often how can we consume open source to reduce lock in and save money and that can come through procurement.
>> Mike? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let's maybe speed up it a bit.
>> MIKE LINKSVAYER: Yes. Great. Great. Okay. And then the next stage is launching experiments. I think where it really gets interesting at the national level is where it is imperative to foster open source community and that can be done through policy. And then finally, the equivalent, I think, of innovation and transformation is investing strategically in open source with one of the main goals being achieving sovereignty. Let's go on to the next slide.
So through that kind of investment from companies and ‑‑ and the nation's state, we can fix some of the problems. I got the open source comments around potential under investment because we're all working together as a global team sport both companies and governments to secure the digital ecosystem. Through that security, we can each kind of have the autonomy and grow the capabilities that we desire. I think that's really imperative for the world to do that and I want to symbolize that. We can have our castles. By the way, that's a castle in Poland since I can't be there close to the Czech border.
>> Thank you, Mike. Very interesting. I have some questions and the castle is much appreciated. So now let's go to our second speaker Jeremy. Jeremy, please.
>> JEREMY LIANG: Good. This is Jeremy from the China COPO. China promote open source union. COPO, created in the year of 2004, which is social voluntarily from the IT vendors, customers, universities, communities and the research organizations. COPO, we have more than 40 global open source incentives and expertise representing talent and leadership.
Now let's take a quick look on the China open source history. Normally, we have the open source history, China, four stages. Stage 1 from 1991. The milestone from AT&T introduced and opened (?) we start from global collaboration. Then second phase start in 1999. So this phase as John mentioned, it is to consume. So people are developing. Phase 3 starting from 2009. So that's starting to release and contribution. Now we are in the phase 4 collaboration. Last year the developers so based on GitHub this year, latest report, China had the developers in GitHub 7.6 million. 10% global share representing 16% year to year growth. Where the developers in China, China software network so (?) that's hosting platform 6 million. So clearly developers are a driving force for the open source collaboration and development. China also has very large market to adopt open source technologies and services. Companies now across industries are embracing open source.
So we have very hard three areas. Operating system, database and AI, on top of three areas. We also seen shape design, blockchain, IoT. Cloud needing computing are also growing. So on those success, we also have big challenges. We have technical risk. We have legal. Open source sovereign lessons risk. We have pension risk. If you take a look under who project left circle, there are so many things inside. (?) broken will have an active (?) for the whole project.
One more challenge is digital sovereignty. From COPO point of view, we have found that open source has become a global collaboration and innovation model. Let me show you one example. In Poland which is open source autonomous driving platform, the latest version is 6.0, which release 600 (?) gathering 45K developers from various other countries with more than 200 panels. You see this is really building and numbers drives ecosystem as a pension. Similarly, open source operating systems such as open hardware, open OS are doing same thing to promote the ecosystem. So we can conclude that open source can improve the trust among digital sovereignty partners and build skills and companies to support the digital economy.
>> Okay. Thank you, Jeremy, very interesting. We took a look at China in our study on the impact of open source for the commission. And it is very interesting because the approach is quite different than the European approach. It is a bit more industry heavy, I would say. We can talk about it a bit more later. And now, let's go to the next speaker which is Abhishek Singh.
>> ABHISHEK SINGH: Thank you. Thank you. You said it right. It is interesting to see how the story of us and the innovation it is driving cuts across the regions and countries.
India's story of digital governance and that option of original technologies and the way we offer services to our citizens. The story of the governments are also synonymous with the story across. We have free and open source software and what we experience and the kind of benefit that comes from using force is much more than what it comes from using any kind of proprietaries. We have become like few things about what is the usual panelists, but all the experts are not going to the usual benefits that one gets the forcing. But what we have seen is that it drives a general innovation. Whenever we expose a code and we allow developers to push and pull commits and then we try to improve the way we are solving a problem in the protect space, we get a lot of ideas from innovators across and that leads to ultimately building a productive solution which is much more better, much more robust, much more comprehensive than what was maybe originally also taught. So this culture of collaboration, this culture of openness and innovation is what makes the services better and more adaptive to the citizens. When you look at the statistics, we find that the state of first reports mentioned that more than 85% introduces in India use force. And then we have a huge presence with free developers in the community like the team from GitHub is there and they would agree that most of the GitHub, the number of software developers in the origin who are contributing to the code generation platforms like GitHub is immense. They're not only contributing to the public good, but also picking up things from there and insuring best practices are also incorporating our projects. We implemented some of the very large digital transformation projects and almost all of them run on free and open sources software like take the names of the examples of the unique identification project of India, which is 1.3 billion people registered on it. If you look at the eDivision, digital education, it is built on December open source platform which it insures that during the pandemic when there was lockdowns and schools were shut, the education did not stop and most students across the country were able to access lessons through that digital platform. It is a document wallet which exchanges data and among various government citizens and allows citizens to share information. That can also build on enforced platform with the COVID vaccination platform. The COVID platform, which is the vaccination platform which we have done more than 1.2 billion vaccinations so far. That also follows an open source platform. And then entire vaccination certificates that is given again that is built on open source platform and we have offered this platform in the spirit of free and open source for anyone to adopt and do that. And the idea that once we open up the code, we do get inputs that further helps us improve that. That is the police fee on it on the policy front. There is policy on free and open source software. We have encouraging more and more adoption of force by running innovation challenges in various sectors and we work with startups and entrepreneurs to develop more robust solutions. One thing when challenged is the kind of myths and the kind of miscommunication that happens sometimes. When we did a survey with regard to what would be the adoption first, what we found is that many governments used to think every force is free. And they would think if somebody is offering a product which nobody is charging anything in terms of monetary value. Nobody is responsible. How can I trust to use a system which is totally free and open? So we do a lot of advocacy in order to explain that free means free to share, free to exchange, free to contribute, free to adopt. It doesn't necessarily mean free of cost and less secure. In fact, there have been studies that show how four systems can be more security, if not as much as the proprietary systems. Is that becomes a bigger challenge, of course, but with partners and stakeholders, we keep on working those challenges. The whole issue with regard to digital sovereignty, again, false notions about what you use force. It doesn't mean you lose your data and information to anyone. Data and information will be protected by your standards and by insuring how do you do your encryptions, how do you provide sass controls. Having that and putting the code open will in no way compromise the kind of systems we've building as far as data is concerned. So I do feel that this fear about force compromise digital sovereignty is misplaced. It leads to more ‑‑ if I can use the phrase creating sovereignty. Once if you are contributing the system, you are contributing to public good. If the nation is contributing to that, that nation is heard in any other country or region that is adopting that software. In a way that spans the sovereignty rather than limits the sovereignty in some way if I can say that. The platforms like this like (inaudible) and IG which brings together force stakeholders and force practitioners from across the country and world is going to be very useful for exchange of ideas or exchange of information very often the societal problems we're trying to solve within agriculture is common across. So what has been done in development and in India and the same thing might be applicable to what we can do in Kenya. I will compliment IGF and the organizers of this panel today for bringing all of us together on this panel and look forward for engaging discussion. I look forward to listening from the other panelists.
>> Thank you. I am glad you mentioned the public good aspect. This is also a big result that we had and this was a very attractive for policymakers. I guess you were an example of it. The initiative of the UN is called the public goods alliance. Just open source tools being used around the world for governmental services can be used as such.
But now, let's go to Nataliya who is here. So please. Yeah.
>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Great. Thank you. It is great to be here with all of you. I am really glad that they all touched on the economic implications of open source and that's exactly what I'll be focusing on here. So I'm going to be talking about a study I've been working on with my co‑authors at Harvard business school basically trying to understand the relationship between open source software and entrepreneurship around the world. Here you see a graph that is showing basically this relationship between the founding of information technology ventures on the Y access and commits to GitHub which is at this point pretty much the biggest platform used for open source contributions on the X access. You can see here any basic economics class will tell you it's a positive relationship. Notably it's a positive relationship not only for high income countries which are often the focus of many software or information technology related studies, but also for middle and low‑income countries. This positive relationship might be because open source has the reverse relationship or it might be just the case that open source is correlated with high human capital in different country which I think Mike touched on technical capabilities and high human capital ends up leading to IT ventures. So my co‑authors and I tried to look at does open source simulate entrepreneurship around the world? And does entrepreneurship stim yule open source and what are the channels that underlie this relationship? So next slide, please.
So to be able to parse apart, what are the directions of this relationship? We use a metric framework that combines your basic ordinary squares and don't go too much into this as well as two 2SLS. You try to account for other factors that might be playing a role in this. Policies that governments around the world across time have stipulated to support open source, for example, preferring open source and procurement systems which helps us to better identify this relationship. And we find that open source software does positively predict the formation of new ventures and the reverse relationship holds more weakly. IT venture stimulates more open source contributions. To be concrete, a 1% increase commits on GitHub leads to about 5 to 15 new IT ventures per year, per country on average. And in the reverse directions, a 1% increase in GitHub commit ‑‑ I apologize. In IT ventures leads to or is associated with over 50,000 commits on GitHub. You can think of lines of code. This relationship if beating directions is particularly strong for ventures that are mission oriented and global oriented, which we measure through a machine learning technique using the descriptions of ventures around the world as well as among high quality ventures.
So what does this all mean? If policymakers, we notably find the that open source software could be an important lever to stimulate entrepreneurship ecosystems around the world. And notably, policies that might promoter support open source don't necessarily need to happen reoccurring in order to have the benefits in the sense that if one promotes open source or helps stimulate open source activity, that leads to or may lead to the founding of IT ventures which then the more likely leads to more open source software. And for Private Sector, what we suggested with our study is that investors might use open source software as a way to detect high quality entrepreneurial activity around the wonder particularly in geographies that might be under invested under venture capital and other investor communities. I'm sure Peter might be able to send the link over. We have our working paper out and I'm very excited to hear from your questions.
>> Thank you. That is something very interesting. How do you make money with open source. Yeah, of course, your study goes much farther than this. And now last but not least, let's hear Laurence Moroney and the work that is happening on this globally.
>> LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks so much on all the speakers. So I'm Lawrence and I work at Google Alphabet. My mission is to make AI easy to as many people as possible. But why? Why would we do this? The biggest opportunity comes from Artificial Intelligence. I put some stats about the research showing that by the year 2030, they expect a $15.7 trillion contribution to the global economy. At 26% boost for local economies and a 45% of these total economic gains will come from enhancements to existing products. So the opportunity is obvious. But what we want to do is insure if there's fair and equitable enhancements and one of the things that really triggered this was a study by 10 cents in China that showed that we're only at that type 10,000 AIGs in the world. The key to understanding this is not how they measured that. The idea was to count the number of people who had their names written on a paper. Some kind of academic paper and the large conclusion is that AI was and still is a very academic discipline such the skills was really roam the hands of a few. Next slide, please.
Given that, we have been talking a lot about open source. What we want to talk about is open source was the beginning. Given that we had extensive flow for people to learn and would go AI models, machine learning models from computer to metro language processing and what not. But we saw there was an opportunity to be able to reach software developers with AI instead. At the time, we took a conservative estimate there were 30 million software developers in the world. If we can e quip 10% of the world's software develops are, we then increase the number of AI practitioners 10X and people all over the world can see the effects of this. This is really the strategy. So continue to invest in open source framework so that everyone can have access. We wanted to have the goal of this to be a programmer‑friendly interface. The first version was kind of SKUd more towards researchers. The second version is programmer friendly to make it more pythonic if you're a programmer. Make it much easier for you to build stuff. In addition to that, one of the things if you're not familiar upon is good hardware. Things like GPUs, powerful machines to be able to train. We realize they're not available to everybody. And Bitcoin and driving up the price of GPUs, we realize that was a barrier for many people and many economies. We row lease something called co‑lab which is a browser based environment. We provide for free. So anybody can open up a browser, go to co‑lab and start training an AI model using hardware.
We really wanted to make educational material was available to everybody. We started with YouTube.com so that anybody could get training for free online. But then go deeper with this is work massively open online courses. And make sure we had a free tier with them. So we partnered with the biggest (inaudible) in the world to audacity to Netty's in China and we created a baseline syllabus that these other use. But we created this baseline syllabus that anybody can be able to put out courses.
This also led to a universal program and we have been working with universities and countless countries. When we spoke with them and tried to encourage them, the hardest thing they had to face was have time to be able to design a syllabus, understand that it's the correct syllabus. So the universities could teach them and the results that we had. Universities from the richest countries to the poorest, the opportunities there are to teach to students everywhere.
Then from this, we move to a certificate program other the next big problem that we heard from employers in smaller economies is they didn't know how to find AI skills amongst the engineers. They didn't know the right questions to be able to test people. So we launched the certificate program where we designed exams that people can take and we provided stippens and grands to people in low‑income countries to take these victims. When somebody passed this pressure, I was able to take reports. The first person in Turkey to get the certificate program was a woman and we have been able to help them find employment and engineering as well.
And then finally just to go into we're been working with partner countries and governments call out one in Indonesia, where the idea is that governments want to launch cohorts of people who can learn AI to see the startup ecosystems and do this freely based on open source and education platforms being able to do that. In Indonesia, we worked with the government on a program called Banket which trained eye co‑host of 3,000 people to be engineering and AI in noble development and such as Cloud.
Finally make sure that AI tools and practices are available. We are is the up for on you AI ‑‑ we need tools to understand maybe biases inherit in your data that you can start. With all of these, our goal was we wanted to lower the barrier of entry. Anybody can build skills to create AI powered application seat and solutions and all families can benefit. That's our contribution to helping sovereignty. Really the goal is anybody can take part in the shift in the industry of the economy I talked about earlier.
Here is the minister of education ended up doing a talk with students. We have done other things. I can tell a thousand different stories, but some of the things done by students and unemployment people to help needs and particularly the environmental stuff. With that, I want to say thank you so much.
>> Thank you, Lawrence. It is super interesting and the first person that finished the court was a woman. This is a big challenge in open source. We believe in this whole thing very often makes it a less ‑‑ it is great to have programs that are promoting equitable seas. So yeah. Thank you for the remarks to all the speakers. This was really interesting. I don't know if we have any questions in the chat, but Peter is taking a look at it. Let's start with a bit of a policy discussion.
We heard from representatives from the Private Sector and public sector and it seems everybody is interested in how open source can contribute to serenity. Maybe a question to Mike. So how does it work when governments start to translate this idea of digital serenity into public policies? What are the implications and what have you seen? On the European level, I do have to say that there's a lot of concerns that we are slightly becoming a first res Europe ‑‑ fortress Europe. It depends on the culture and given government works and what goals they have generally. The digital solutions are acting to achieve those goals. So yeah, Mike. Any thoughts on this?
>> MIKE LINKSVAYER: I think the engagement with open source sort of mitigates against the tendency towards fortress Europe or fortress whatever jurisdiction you're talking about. You can even see that in discussions amongst the open source community, some who want to translate, you know, let's only invest in open source startups and projecting that happen to be located in the jurisdiction question and then often there's pushback saying we will benefit the most from open source if we're corn assuming and contributing to the open source. That's part of the global community. We will get back to engaging with the local ecosystem that otherwise not might exist.
It's another kind of shift kind of like corporate engagement with open source, which is grown incredibly over the last 10 years especially and has also generated political chimp but overall, it is much bigger and robust and I know public sector will do on another order and that will be the biggest impact for open source.
>> We are strategizing and institutionalizing the involvement in open source. So then it can be more sustainable and, you know. Also then governments can have a bit more control over it. And then actually it can deliver on these more digital sovereignty goals. But any thoughts on the governments that work closely? I see Jeremy. So yeah. Please go first.
>> JEREMY LIANG: Yeah. Okay. If we look from the common sector first, the users, right, as a user they will care. This I open architecture, open standards. Right? And the open systems. So many things they will care. They are technology. They don't want to log ‑‑ lock in a certain segment. All those they will put together. They cover many things, right? On the other side, government will care.
What's in the future? How to inch for inference the economy. So all those from our COPU engagement of open source, the whole history, we have found that open source has become global collaboration, innovation model. So we need to leverage the model to power our economy, our data economy. If we look open source the nature, open share collaboration. So all those have government to inference. In China, very clearly we have the plan. So this year, we have the five‑year plan. It's very clearly schedule for enterprise customers for enterprise to customers than users. They need ‑‑ Larry is open source. Open course. On the other hand, they also need to learn what's open source lesson requirements. They need to comply with a legal. Those challenges, we have opportunities and we need to work together. This global opportunities, this global those developers, right, to resolve today we have those challenges released if greeting, TJ sold sovereignty. I'll be back. there were no security concerns to build that they trust amongst them.
>> Very interesting especially with the five‑year plan and the entrepreneurial sector is encouraged to open source. This quite leerily shows the difference and, of course, there are plenty of differences in policy making in China or Europe or wherever else. It's very interesting. But also what I noticed is that you mentioned that the government is the open source user. And in my view, it often moves on. The government starts to be not only users or maintainers, they do have open source developers in their units and we have been with the organization. But yeah. It would be very interesting to hear. What is your favorite thing as a user or a contributor.
>> ABHISHEK SINGH: There's a great value for the government to be contributed to the first ecosystem. And this we are seeing from a person of experience having several coast projects which are large impact, high volume and impacting a huge population. And to the extent that what we found in the policy level, there are challenges. We have a policy which says that ‑‑ there are 25 state of the federal governments which you call them which implement a large many citizens in the projects. When we interact with them, they're also ‑‑ (?) with regard to value and the challenge has been the how and who is the bigger issue. How do you go about doing that. How do you do ‑‑ how do you build them? How are you able to deliver service as promised. For that, we so been working and creating toolkits and creating templates for allowing to make it easier. It will take an (inaudible) for creating a ‑‑ we have solutions that have been implemented in any part of the world or India reported into a (inaudible) you can say this is the information available. This is the ‑‑ we call it open source which we put in the level. This is the location on which ‑‑ then we work with the organize and capture programs in order to bring people apart to be able to use it. So with that, adoption is growing up and then what we have found is that products improve. They do. They do have value. They're not by natural collaborative. Still the version 2.0 or 4.0 comes in.
With that, once you're able to do that, it becomes an easier way and I will fully agree with the people that presented short value. The number of solution providers were working with free (inaudible) made available with open SPIs and having access. The entrepreneurials the start upon ‑‑ I would normally find the scope of the project in RFP. The imagination it limited to that. But when we do something on open architecture within exposed APIs and people build solutions, it drives innovation in eye great manner. Seeing the healthy domain and national one we are implementing, the basic building blocks have created all registries and all the ‑‑ we got to hospital bases and the standards for healthy reports laid down. But on top of it, on the existing ecosystem, entrepreneurs. In linking services happens and it is simply not possible in the way of development systems. So yes. Greatly benefits sovereignty in the sense that it also allows you to insure that your solutions go far and wide. Our vaccination platform. There's a lot of countries in the world who have adopted. So we should think of it which improves the delivery of services and we spend on a discussion of commission for this kind of system.
>> Thank you. This is fascinating. Then we can switch to Nataliya. I think that's a pretty natural next step. You talk about all these benefits and, you know, we need to support it, the government has noticed how well we work this cycle. I am wondering, Nataliya, any further policy recommendations to just use the community that is there. Provide better services, to text globally more people and more developers.
>> I'd start with going in the relationship and the entrepreneurship that I just discussed. If we take it a step back, you presented the fantastic report on impact of open source and the European union, but even beyond that, there's been great academic studies out there that have looked at benefits of open source to firm productivity, to reducing frictions in the labor market where developers can use platforms as a way to signal their skills as well as interest for employers and for startups to single out (?) and kind venture capitalists through the platform. What the benefits in mind there's basically a lot happening through the Private Sector channels already. The need for policy might be there, but the benefits carry through even outside of the public sector. Now in terms of public sector, governments have implemented policies across years that, for example, preference open source to procurement or, you know as we heard today, especially here, sustaining and maintaining projects to which countries and other parts of the world contribute to. There are preferences as mentioned as well as through more bottoms up approaches, facilitating projects which attract and engage developers from the country and from other parts of the world.
>> Thank you. Thank you. In our study, we did take a look at the impact that policies have. So if you have a policy that encourages the public sector officials to procure open source or favor open source, it depends on the political culture there. So there's a great example that Frank took a look at. Italy and France introduced similar laws, but in France, the impact was immense and we have hard numbers that are saying just like the opinion services have become more innovative. We had more innovation. In Italy, it didn't really work. A lot of it was coming from the strong regionalization. It is very difficult to find and say who is responsible for thousands. They are not able to determine if the open source solution is better than the other one. It is not very easy to choose a solution and have it liken with time thing and then move on. I don't know if you want to respond to this.
>> Yeah. Absolutely. I would add that obviously policies and this is broader than this panel. Policies are only as effective as they're implemented. If they're not a strong proponent enforcing them, they will not have much anytime. Another good example of supporting open source from the bottoms up and not the procurement and the direct policy. It is coming from Singapore. There are applications on top of open source stacks. So that's a way that basically again from a very bottoms up, I guess is the best way to say it, bottoms up approach you can encourage both local and innovating on top of what the government is already providing.
>> I believe we have a question from the audience. Go to the microphone there and ask the question. I believe it's for that that. If you can just ‑‑
>> SPEAKER: It is for everybody. I appreciate you brought all these bright panelists. AI project, they're somehow engaged with governments whether founded by governments or they use data coming from the governments. As you mentioned, clearly and some other panelists, the cultures are different across. Some governments recommend and put a continue to have the result in all business platforms, but in reality, they don't like it or they limit you on which platform. They give you a specific platform. Measuring it, there are local platforms. So if they consider that as the new oil in the world, we see all the history of oil ownership in this at most. Right? What about this idea that replacing global platform to share everything? Well, think of regional or even national open source platforms like a multi‑verse. Then we can expect a metaverse in the future. Somehow in the future, there would be a new platform to make a connection between all these regional or local platforms for open source innovation or algorithms or even big datas. I think it can be a solution, a short‑term solution to make us to keep us together. Yeah. Thank you.
>> That's a very interesting thought and interesting question. It goes a bit to the thing that I mentioned before. These concerns of fortresses. The mole idea of digital sovereignty is very difficult and in my opinion, it is counterproductive. It just doesn't work. But LAURENCE, you coordinate so much on AI corporation. I would love to hear what you think about it.
>> LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah. Sure. I would say in the point of fortresses, one thing that tends to be forgotten is brain drains and skills. For example, I grew up in Western Europe and two of Western Europe's weaker economies. That was Ireland and wales. I am a classic example of the brain drain. I had to move to the U.S. And costless other people like me had to move. As a result, if you have a drain of skills leaving your country, it is hard to have any fort res or digital sovereignty.
Now with the upcoming AI solution, one of the things that I believe is very, very important, very, very different now they believe government should take advantage of is the fact that it answers the question from the gentleman. There are global‑scale platforms for building AI services and AI solutions such as tent of flow. We have competitors and it is also open source, but the key is they are open source and that means they're globally available. But the framework is available for anybody to use and GitHub provided beautiful platform that allows you to do an analysis. We did one on people who started extensive flow. We have people in almost every country in the world. We do have people in every time zone and we have people from all the way in norther nor way to the section island and Antarctica. The openness means it is useful for somebody to use it anywhere. The global type of platform for people to be able to use this kind of thing can only be empowered by open source. Hopefully that is something that will pre-investment a future brain (?) also in Europe, it happens from the east to the west. But do you have any further thoughts on the policies that you would see as beneficial on the national or regional level that could foster this global corporation? Just insure we can share the resources and we can work together.
>> LAURENCE MORONEY: From the policy here in the U.S., one of the things we can is that all data from the government because it is funded by tax payers has to be open and all solutions built to using that also have to be open. I think that's massively beneficial to everybody. I would recommend that other countries follow that lead. I'm not an expert in policy, but I will cite one project that was in the UK. In the UK, they have a national health service. And the national health services provide free or local health cost. In the UK, I am trying to remember, but you in 2020, I believe it was 2 million in the UK age 100 or greater. 98% of health care costs were in the last two years of their lives. They wanted to provide great health care for people, but also keep the cost down for tax payers. They needed to apply AI which would require open access to the data, to be able to build solutions for, this but open access to personal data like health care data may not always be available and that's a problem they are resting with. I would say one of the things I would encourage is for governments to weigh out that balance of understanding public benefit from access to data while also exploring ways that data can be kept private but still build solutions. So there are technologies for keeping it private, for ‑‑ but there's a lot of fear if it is going to be used in something personal like health care data.
>> I found it interesting you didn't go into the whole ethics discussion on AI. I feel that this is the largest part of it usually. In Europe, we have this tradition of open data and sharing. They're easy access to data that might be used for companies and AI companies. But we do focus on the ethics side. Do we have a question in the audience?
>> Hi. I am from Finland and I also work in the open source sector because the company I work for Ivan does open base services. Basically I wanted to bring up a policy I know from Sweden is the public sector procurement has done their open source purchasing framework agreement which as far as I know has made it a lot easier for municipalities to purchase open source software and open source services. They don't need to reinvent the wheel and remake all those agreements. But there is one agreement and all the different actors can just use it.
>> This is very interesting. We are quite in contact with the Swedish. Having the guidelines is very crucial. We see guidelines that have to be updated and changed. We don't talk only about skills and education. But we also talk about public officials. But yeah. Any thoughts on policies that can further bring these goals for governments from any of our speakers? Mike or Jeremy? Something you would like to add in policies?
>> MIKE LINKSVAYER: We talked a fair bit. I know that study the European Commission study covered open hardware. But that's another critical ingredient of digital sovereignty that has substantial overlap in terms of community and methodology, else, but also differences. Those kind of three open things, open and ‑‑ it is an important policy and governments need to be thinking of when formulating policies to make open contribute to digital sovereignty. Another thing that we haven't discussed at all, we have mainly been talking about policies that can foster open source. That is great. That is the main focus. Early policy implication for digital sovereignty is governments need to be increasingly aware to think about fostering open source collaboration in other policies and not undermining open source collaboration. We saw this in the ‑‑ we're able to achieve a win there, but it touches areas from things like a property that was an example to even things like Internet availability so that developers can, you know, participate in the ‑‑ in the global type part of open source.
>> Thank you. That's very interesting. This is a concept we have been working on quite a bit is the concept of open source programs that is very helpful in making sure that we are not open fostering, but collaborating and using the capacity in the private sector. I don't know if there are any questions from the audience on the side. If there are, raise your hand and let us know. We will continue the discussion. I think we don't really have questions on the chat at the moment.
So I would like to go back to Nataliya. There's this interesting idea we talk about serenity, but we see the private sector is doing a lot of the work. What do you think is the right approach to make sure it is sort of a balancing act. It works both for the benefit of the governments of the citizens and for the benefit of the companies.
>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: I think Mike brought up a crucial point about certainly governments continuing to create the right environment to foster both open source technical capabilities. Certainly we're seeing governments around the world who are either facilitating some education or kind of more targeted AI blockchain of ‑‑ there are various panels in the forum that talked about how much of the world actually doesn't have access to basic Internet. Of course, if you don't have Internet, much less outside of skills, you can't really contribute to GitHub. Government can play a very important role in facilitating and enabling the environment. But at the end of the day in terms of economic benefits of things like jobs or productivity, that is really where firms in many countries are really in the drivers wheel. We're ‑‑ we think back to the 1990s. It was a very different time. Mike brought this up about companies orientation towards open source, especially sophomore companies. Now, pretty much every company uses open source. Platforms like hit gun such ‑‑ and the new more agile models of development.
>> Thank you. Yeah. We did discuss it quite a bit today. Yeah. All of the sessions here I really like the point about the access. The meaningful access and I think that this is a very important part of the whole open source discussion.
>> At one point, going back to the digital skills side, one challenge of open source platforms this has been covered in a few studies in the past. Increasingly, people who do contribute to open source were seasoned developers. As a result, they went to provide very intense documentation to do their work and for others to contribute itself. It can be in the hospitals of government as well as private sector to help ease in newcomers to the platforms.
>> Of course I'm going back to policies, but as soon as you have a policy, people feel working in open source is sort of like hire on the agenda. And hopefully, you know, the governance rules with the whole discussion is a very separate one and motivations and under developers that are contributing. I like to go to the point. It's becoming to be an equal participant in the open source landscape. But yeah. I was ‑‑ we talked about open data. We talked about open source. I was wondering if you have thoughts that open source ‑‑ for me, I work on this a lot and for me, this is special and in the European policy, we have policies that are standalone policies. It's a part of the whole digital landscape and supply chain of any individual product. Do you see this open course ideas went government to other sectors or other digital policies and sort of like bring together the different.
>> ABHISHEK SINGH: Exactly. Open source is realized by almost everyone I mentioned. It's not that people don't understand. The only problem is how do you defend yourself against questions that will it compromise your security or show support? That's what we need to crack. As a principle, a collaboration, nature of collaboration and the we is ‑‑ it is reflected in the open source development philosophy. The only challenge we need to address is make it easy to procure. Make it easier to adopt and share. And create systems which would insured continued support will be there. It doesn't mean you take something from somewhere out in the sky and nobody is responsible. What happens when suppose there’s that much of open source. I implement this project, if we go, it will go to mechanism for supporting projects. when it comes to data and data security and data sovereignty, if I may use the word, then we need to see the tool that open source development is at a friend piece and data security and data contribution. Protecting the data and they're the principle that most before I opened the data policy. Anyone who have attributes and at the growth rate who wants to use it can bend it for solutions. A lot ‑‑ one can build models for, AI models for protecting and understanding what happened at what time, how much medicine are medicines will be required and oxygen. This entire happens there. So data should we group separately? Wink we do that and when I was able the institutional framework is very easy. We were age to concern the questions we have. A open source and one can think of is can we create a global partnership for enabling open source adoption. Building dove tech solutions based on open source. So if there is any work that needs to be done, in agriculture and health care, can the same IT solutions, and sane software be large with the country. We want to move ahead and debating whether it will be too many risks or something.
>> ANGELA: I didn't read into the planes. So then it is easier to make it go we're approaching the end of our session and I would like to ask each of our panelists to ask one question that you would like to share with the participants or you took away this session. This is the whole idea it's great to make us think and wonder and trying to find a sluice. We may not find the solutions, but we can think about it. So I'm going to art is with Mike who started with his remarks. Well, I think ‑‑ the thing that is more heartening is everybody in this session, at league alluded to the win‑win nature or of open source or as others ‑‑ I think really that's something to keep in mind when we've thinking about digital serious and sovereignty. Literally everybody in the world and governments are winners from this. They all get more sovereignty, more autonomy, more capability by engaging with open source to a digital version. Again, it involves fortresses and over compensation. That's real a training I want everybody to think about when they're thinking about digital source and sovereignty. Jeremy?
>> JEREMY LIANG: Okay.
>> Please keep it under 1 minute.
>> JEREMY LIANG: Right. If we see the open source, that's the ‑‑ the global collaboration. Right? From a software developers, from communities. Very good global concerns and you have a trust we can solve everything. We thought who ‑‑ it can resolve our issues and concerns. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Very interesting thought. Yeah.
>> ABHISHEK: Yeah. Open source is here to stay and lead to innovation and economic going to ‑‑
>> Thank you. Straight to the point. Nataliya?
>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Yeah. Absolutely. I would say that open source is more than just an intellectual property regime. It really is a mindset in a community. I would say motivation for the city I discussed came from speaking to the developers here in Loland. You just feel that energy in that community right away. Building up this community requires an enables environment where there's a role for Private Sector like to facilitate access and to support the rights of human capital development. So really open source is great. Reached a lot of victim upon create the environment and facilitate it.
>> SPEAKER: Again other last but not least. Importance. Okay. He might be thinking that we almost finished because we almost did. Thank you so much for all these insights. I found it very interesting and I know that it's not that easy to discuss the whole ADF digital not many perceived the openness as a way to go. So, I know, this is the panelist we guttered and look forward to. Not everybody does want what. We don't have to think of the ideas and the frameworks that come from the policy as just as they're being divined at the very beginning. With you they can be taken somewhere else by the developers, by the citizens, by the users who have more independent and want to use services that are a bit better. So I hope you enjoy the session. I'm sure there's plenty of nice discussions afterwards. You're with IGF and can also contact us.