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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>> MALA KUMAR: Welcome to this workshop with the Internet
Governance Forum, #269, titled Inclusive Governance: Models of Open
Source Participation.
My name is Mala Kumar, and I'm the director of Tech for Social
Good on the GitHub social impact team. The tech company called
GitHub, which is a Microsoft-owned company where more than 73
million people, software developers, globally choose to collaborate
on and host their code. GitHub is the platform of choice for the
majority of the world's open source tools, applications, and
projects including in the public sector and in the social sector.
In fact, much of my team's focus is on open source capacity
building in the social sector, which includes all organizations
working on the sustainable development goals. You can read more
about our work at socialimpact.GitHub.com.
So today I have the privilege of moderating this session. And
I'll be joined by three -- unfortunately, Sayeed Choudhury is
unable to join us today -- but three esteemed panelists covering a
broad range of work in open source governance. So the panelists
are Samson Goddy, co-founder of Open Source Community Africa; Kriti
Mittal, entrepreneur in residence and (?) Network India; and Dusan
Milovanovic, the lead health intelligence architect of the World
Health Organization.
So welcome, panelists. Thank you so much for being here. I'd
also like to thank the section's rapporteur, my GitHub policy
colleague, Peter Cihon. Hi, Peter.
So this session will last about one hour. And in a minute
I'll highlight a couple of the global challenges we see in open
source governance before turning it over to our panelists, who will
each have about five minutes to speak about their work.
We'll then have 25 minutes for questions and answers before
closing out the panel; and audience members during the Q&A can use
the raised hand feature on Zoom, and I'll recognize you to add
questions. And I believe Peter is in the room to field any
questions. So with that let's turn to a couple of points in open
source governance, and I'm going to attempt to share my screen.
All right. So a lot of challenges and opportunities we see in
open source governance overlapped with broader Internet governance.
And this might be in part explained that a lot of the tech is
fueled by open source software. A lot of ways we can think about
these two terms, but for purposes of today's session we're going to
refer to open source software as tools or applications whose code
is publicly available on Internet. And under an open source
initiative, OSI, license that permits the user to use, study,
change or distribute the source code.
And then for Internet governance we use the UN secretary
general's working group definition, and the term refers to the
development and applications by governments, the private sector,
and civil society in their respective roles of shared principles,
norms, rules, and decision making procedures, and programmes that
shape the evaluation and use of the Internet. So a bit of a
mouthful, but so we're all on the same page.
It is important to note there are differences in how open
source software is produced and used in the social sector, in the
public sector and the corporate sector writ large which now in
modern era is the biggest contributor to open source software. One
of those issues really is around funding in the social sector tends
to be around new software projects rather than strengthening
existing tools and solutions, which makes open source software and
its governance challenging.
The social sector also tends to focus on open source software
with user interfaces as a stand alone application, meaning that
there's some kind of interface that allows a person to manipulate
the code or to perform a function without touching the code.
Whereas open source software in corporate tech tends to be
something like infrastructure tech that doesn't necessarily have
that capability.
Open source software is also perceived differently in
countries. We're currently running a project now focussing on low
and middle income countries, including India, Kenya, Egypt, and
Mexico, and we've seen because of the way that tech ecosystems have
evolved over the decades theres a different association of open
source software.
In U.S. and Europe there seems to be a democratic association,
whereas, for example, in India the majority of the people we spoke
to, software developers, really appreciate software development
with corporations, because that's how they were oriented into that
field.
Finally, it's important to note that many open source tools
and applications are meant to be deployed -- that are meant to be
deployed in low or middle income countries are built in high income
countries, and so inclusive design and participation, especially in
the areas of remote work where it's hard to get to field-based
operations are major obstacles.
So our panel today has a really fascinating geographic
approach to their work. And so if Samson is on the line, I'd love
to turn it over to him to talk about his work with Open Source
Africa.
Samson, are you there?
>> SAMSON GODDY: Yes, I am. Can you hear me?
>> MALA KUMAR: I can. All right. Please go ahead.
>> SAMSON GODDY: Hi, everyone. My name is Samson Goddy. I'm
the co-founder for the Open Source Community Africa, it's an
initiative I and my friends (?) Four years to define and lead
conversations around the way open source is perceived, while also
trying to define what open source means in the continent of Africa.
We basically focus around our (?) giving people the
opportunity to understand open source to depths from software
community, to (?), to governance. So one of the things is quite
interesting within the organisation is the fact that we -- it's
sort of like centered around different aspects which is the (Audio
Distortion) (off mic).
>> MALA KUMAR: I believe Samson might have dropped off.
Yeah. That's a good suggestion. So everybody who's on the Zoom
call, if you don't mind switching off your video to save bandwidth,
that's awesome. In low bandwidth areas.
Samson, if you can still hear us, please continue.
Okay. I think Samson has dropped off. So why don't we go to
Kriti, actually and tell us about your work in India, and then
we'll bring Samson back in.
>> KRITI MITTAL: Thanks, Mala. Am I audible?
I'm Kriti Mittal. I work at (?) Network India where I lead
the initiative on open digital ecosystems.
As a philanthropic investing from -- we invest in both for
profits and nonprofits and also support government efforts and
research in sectors like education, financial inclusion, emerging
technology and digital society.
Sorry, Peter, I just saw your message, I thought we were to
turn our videos off.
Anyway, hi. Hi again, everyone.
So just to give a bit of a -- I think Samson is back.
Do you want me to continue?
>> MALA KUMAR: Yeah, go ahead. When Samson is up, we can go.
Thanks.
>> KRITI MITTAL: Sure. So the Open Digital Ecosystems, or
ODE initiative focuses on population, scale, digital
infrastructure. So for example, things like digital identity,
digital payments. Data infrastructure, as the sort of horizontals
and any large scale government-to-citizen digital platforms.
Across sectors like healthcare, education, you know, open
governance, agriculture, et cetera, as the sort of verticals.
And so our work sort of spans, you know, both these axes. And
the context in which we began this work is really bad, in India
digital infrastructure has seen a paradigm shift in the last few
years. From what used to be end to end tech systems existing in
silos to what we are seeing now, which is a much more sort of open
tech paradigm where there's an emerging understanding that digital
infrastructure should be open source and should have open API,
et cetera.
And this whole story really began with UPI in India, the
digital I.D. and payment trails. But has now become the sort of
go-to model to build gov tech across sectors. Now we have these
government-led digital infrastructure missions such as the national
digital health mission as well as interesting protocol-led
approaches coming up as well such as the open net for digital
commerce.
And while this new approach is much more collaborative and
therefore has the ability to reach a large scale quickly, it also
poses some big risks, especially since the regulatory landscape
here in India still evolving. We are yet to sort of put in place
laws around the flow of personal data as well as nonpersonal data.
And protections around both.
And so the perspective that we are really trying to bring
through our D work is a greater emphasis on what we refer to as the
nontech layers official infrastructure, essentially the governance
and community building layers.
And just to -- maybe not go into the framework much in my
opening remarks and maybe come back to it in the discussion but
just to give a couple examples to make this a bit more tangible, so
one of the efforts that we are supporting here is to create an open
data platform for all public data. That can act as a kind of base
layer for all kinds of open source innovation that can happen on
top of it. This is called NDAP, the National Data Analytics
platform, being developed by an ETIO, India's planning body and
government think tank.
What end up will do is offer all government data map to a
common schema, geographical and temporal identifiers and then sort
of offer all of these data sets up in a user friendly platform so
that you can easily sort of do analysis across population scale
data sets which are currently setting in departmental silos.
Another one that we've supported is an open governance
platform developed by a nonprofit called Echo Foundation. This is
now being used by hundreds of municipalities or city governments
across the country to provide a range of sort of digital services
to residents from grievance address, to property tax collection, to
building plan approval, et cetera. And it's completely open
source.
And these and many other such platforms, the technology part
is not really rocket science. What we've seen is that a lot of
effort is needed in getting the design and implementation right for
the governance and community layers. For instance, should there
mandatorily be a public body that acts as the institutional home of
the digital platform that serves so many people?
If not, who should be held accountable and how?
Do we need new laws and regulations to prevent exclusion of
people who are on the other side of the digital divide now that
these platforms are mediating essential services as well. And how
do we protect citizens data while at the same time encouraging open
source innovation.
These are some of the critical questions that we're hoping to
sort of support more work on. In addressing these kind of issues,
a huge role is played by open source communities. In sort of
building inclusive open digital ecosystems. Not only do they help
build and maintain this critical infrastructure, they've been
creating the localized and context-specific solutions and use cases
on top of the core digital infra structure. And secondly, OSS
communities play a big role in ensuring transparency and
accountability.
To give a quick example, the platforms of the Indian
government iced for contact tracing during the pandemic and vaccine
coordination were both made open source after some pressure from
civil society groups and now open source volunteer developers have
been contributing to sort of catching and fixing bugs in these
platforms as well as highlighting and exposing issues of data
privacy. So much so that the government stakeholders themselves
are now acknowledging and recognizing the value of open source and
making -- open sourcing these platforms led to many improvements.
Let me stop here and love to hear from the other speakers. And
perhaps in the discussion I can talk a bit more about the sort of
current challenges and opportunities for open source in India.
>> MALA KUMAR: Great. Thanks, Kriti. I believe Samson is
back on.
Samson, if you would like to continue and I will go off camera
to help with the bandwidth situation.
>> SAMSON GODDY: Sorry. Thank you. I'm still traveling.
Yeah, like I said, I lead a project called -- organisation called
the Open Social Organisation Media Africa. Originally started in
late 2017. And the reason why we started creating the open source
committee Africa was for the opportunity to get to connect the rest
of Africa into open source.
Like I mentioned earlier, before I went off, diversity is
something that is super huge and has been an open source maintainer
myself, contributing to a lot of projects that are based in U.S. or
western centric projects. There's a lot of misconception about
like how open source or how open source contributors from Africa
like in terms of data. For example, some projects only support
things like Afrikaans, which is one language inside Africa and
definitely not people in West Africa. Because I'm -- I definitely
don't speak Afrikaans.
Having those challenges, I had an opportunity to get to some
of my friends that are building communities and into the open
source community space. So we created Open Source Community Africa
with the ability to work into defining what open source is in the
continent Africa. But also to view and -- kind of a two-way street
in terms of what we do.
Within the organisation itself, we have -- we created a
flagship event which is called open source festival. Kind of a fun
three-day event where we get people locally but also abroad and
host them in the space and they talk about everything open source
from Web chain, blockchain, Web development, technical writing,
talking about a lot of things that develop human capital. But also
one of the interesting one that I'm on a panel, is the fact that we
created a local city tracker programme. And just like the way it
sits -- the way it's been said, means that we basically bring open
source down to the local communities.
We started in my City, so I live in the city in Nigeria called
pro happen pour, which is a base city, we started in there and the
reception was great. And then we move over to the largest city in
Africa, which is Lagos, and eventually we move to a different
panel. And one of the benefits is to have the opportunity to not
just bring the definition of open source, the western one, but come
and...(off mic) and so service means in the community.
So we sort of create a framework that enable for a power of
the local communities to take open source and to sort of like open
source definition and make it local to them. So that means that
people can now take things and make it very local. And then solve
local challenges.
The City Chapter Programme uses the support things like that.
And as of right now we support roughly around 60 to 70 cities
across Africa. I think in terms of how we define it, there's a lot
of representation from West Africa, obviously. We also have
eastern Africa. We do have a couple in Southern Africa and I think
some few ones in central Africa where we're trying to see how we
can support people in the north and -- because again there's the
language barrier in terms of like Arabic. So this is something
that we've been trying to solve. But again the Open Source
Community Africa is designed specifically to work on advocacy but
also to localize what open source is to the continent of Africa.
Because of course Africa is not a country, it's a continent with
over 50 countries. And I know that -- the dem graphy of my
country, Nigeria happens to speak over 500 languages. Like China,
like generalized things that it would be crazy to -- we're working
really hard to define what open source is in Africa using the Open
Source Community Africa. I think that's kind of a general overview
of what I run here in the continent.
>> MALA KUMAR: Thanks so much, Samson. I have spent a couple
weeks in PH. And I think the surface -- I was shocked to hear you
had such success with open source in that city. So congratulations
in all of that.
Next we hear from Dusan and your work at the World Health
Organization and it's focus on gap.
>> DUSAN MILOVANOVIC: Thank you. Can you hear me?
Things. Yeah. Hello everyone. And thank you greatly, Samson
for a really interesting overview.
I think -- I hope I'll be close to what you're doing. Because
it's really exciting to hear the ideas in India. And there's some
overlap with what we are thinking on the global level as well. And
also what I'm going to tell you little bit more about our new plans
that we find exciting as well. Closely correspond and meet
initiatives like Samson has offered.
So as Mala said, I'm health intelligence architect at WHO.
And that's might be a new term. Tell you what we do first. And
then we can leave details for discussion.
So I mean, you know, the WHO -- WHO is an organisation -- and
United Nations that basically is responsible to coordinate efforts
related to the population health on the global level. But there is
one part to WHO that is more operational. It became -- it started
back in 2015 after the first Ebola outbreak in Western Africa. And
within the mandate to strengthen and coordinate global health
security, the World Health Organization conducts global
surveillance -- maybe you didn't know that -- for public threats
and -- including detection, verification, and roughly assessment to
risks, to provide timely and actionable intelligence to decision
makers, in all stages of health emergency management, from
prediction, to prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
You know, people know about traditional surveillance. Or
having intuition about it. It's really about collecting data about
patients and lab results and the different relevant biomedical and
behavioral, socio, demographic information to -- and diagnosis of
specific diseases, and then compare trends over time, and basically
comparing the trends, trying to understand what is going on based
on the information on this incident in a particular place. So it's
a traditional way.
Now, when you combine this information with an objective to
basically detect that something is going on before it becomes
official information, and when you then -- in order to understand
it unofficially, you need to have access and basically compare and
put this into the context. So basically gathering more information
about geography, social factors, and travel and trade; animal
health, environment health.
Then we start talking about something that we name public
health intelligence. So basically public health intelligence
itself is a core function of public health, one of the core
functions, with objective to generate actionable insights for
decision-making.
So that's a background of what we're doing. And then in that
context, not only because of the lessons learned with COVID-19, but
because of our couple decades experience and more in the public
health domain, we got an opportunity finally to basically start
practically with a new approach. We gave it a name: Collaborative
intelligence. And that name has been heard recently. We're in the
new hub, WHO hub for independent intelligence, has been
inaugurated. And basically that term captures the essence of WHO's
new approach: Collaborative and intelligence.
So basically to improve the assessment and management of
public health risks, collaborative intelligence of health is needed
across four areas. And these four areas is important for then
discussion about, you know, how to practically achieve this
collaboration.
So first we need multidisciplinary approach. Which basically
is a synthesis of many different types of contextual information
about the circumstances in which pandemics, epidemics occur. So
like I said, it's a context that's important.
Then we have multistakeholder decision making, is the second
area that needs to be addressed. That means interaction across
many stakeholders, in political, public, scientific, civil society
organizations. I would say private sector as well. Who have been
required to use pandemic intelligence to manage a response. When
their are public health emergencies, or to prevent them.
In order to have this collaboration, and to make it really
possible, we need to establish a trust architecture, that's our
fourth goal which is basically global trust architecture, I don't
mean only technology, which would support the global platform, but
promotes sharing of data and information and within communities and
countries for public goods. I come from WHO, so when we say
countries, we mean every country, not some countries. It's
countries and -- it's not about countries and geopolitics. It's
about all of us leading in the same plan.
The fourth situation, stakeholder decision making and trust
architecture is basically a technical part. We need to provide a
truly distribute information exchange. And in that context it's
really interesting what Kriti preferred to in India. We're working
on developing from scratch basically. Because we don't have the
global network systems and data sets that facilitate effective
human machine decision-making or using augmenting, you know, human
decision making with machine processing.
We do have a worldwide Web, as we know, and this is
intergovernance forum. But worldwide Web, unfortunately, as some
of you might know, is not used in a way it is used in different
disciplines, not used in health. And I don't mean in public
health. It's across the board, from healthcare, from individual
health, to population health.
So basically you know, we intentionally -- the WHO
intelligence will be kept at least for creating this new.
And underlying the collaboration and collaborative
intelligence is the concept of open innovations and the technology
part which we call open source. So -- or open source software.
And I would say open sharing of data information and knowledge. So
what are we going to do about that?
Well, for the first time in our history we plan to tackle this
problem in an organised way and to provide support for the
communities and projects that would like to use or create open
source software or openly share information and knowledge. So
we'll create a new open source programme office within the context
of WHO have for academic intelligence, that will be truly open
source office and provide support to any projects internally but
also worldwide.
And with that, maybe just a few notes or reminders about where
WHO stand really when it comes to cooperation and what's our point
to use. So basically the working principles behind these projects
and primary initiatives of WHO have our -- maybe the following six.
First, we need to make sure that we have ethical design and Mala
mentioned a few good points just minutes ago. So basically
intelligence systems will have to adopt approach to achieve data
privacy and confidentiality, security, ethical use of information
from clinical data onwards. So this is really promotional
integration of information and custodianship of the data source
rather than taking data from the source and process it to -- will
help and basically support sharing of data insights and
participation. That's one important thing.
But then equity or being WHO and how WHO will work for the
benefit of all populations as a set.
And particularly there is the (?) differences in access to
intelligence systems and the knowledge, insights and then also
participation. Irrespective of social, economic, demographic,
graphical structures. And then we of course will foster
exploration through different approaches.
As I said, this is an entity that should collaborate with
external world. Then multiplicity, of course. I mean, it's not
possible to achieve this big goal with having an initiative or
couple projects, for example sitting in WHO. Really we want to
foster collaboration between people and reuse, as Mala mentioned.
Which is a rare -- rare I think these days.
Independence, we are all independent and not totally
technology-wise but also we're interdependent with nature. We have
this one-health approach, and we don't have -- human, animal,
plant, environment health, and the planet as a whole.
And then this opening remark with reminding again about the
openness as -- as the other principle, basically that WHO have.
Will promote the use -- I would say already promotes -- use and
creation of open source technology solutions as well as the widest
possible access to insights to generate public health intelligence
approaches. And this includes development and promotional
platforms and tools that are available to members of the public.
And it maximize citizens, science, opportunities as well.
And with that, I will stop with opening remarks. Over to you,
Mala.
>> MALA KUMAR: Thanks so much, Dusan. Thank you so much,
Kriti, Samson, and Dusan for those insights. Every time I listen
to you, I lear a lot more.
Before we turn it over to questions from the audience, I do
have a couple of questions myself that I'd love to pose.
So Kriti and Samson mentioned quite a bit about the
nontechnical aspects of open source. We all know open source can
refer to code, which can be many different types. It can also
refer to text, content, or data, which I Dusan, you work with a
lot.
A was wondering, Kriti and Samson, if you could tell us more
about the community building aspects that you focus on because that
is such a critical part of open source that I think, honestly, is
underplayed in education and really with dialogue.
>> KRITI MITTAL: Sure, I can take that. So you know in the
open digital ecosystems we work, we essentially look at all digital
infrastructure as having three layers, the core technology, the
governance, and the community layer. And then we talk about the
community layer really referring to, you know, a few different
groups of people. One is the entrepreneurs and open source
developers, who build not only the core infrastructure, but also
the solutions on top of it. And then there's also the civil
society folks who ensure continuous improvement and hold the
government to account.
So just to give an example, the civil society engagement
around the digital ID Aadhaar in India led to fundamental right of
privacy being enshrined in the constitution and legal guardrails on
where and how Aadhaar may be used.
And you know, coming to the current state of open source
communities and the kind of sort of challenges and opportunities
that they face in India, I think one of the -- so there was a study
recently conducted on the state of force in India by a office
called civic data lab in partnership with us. And I think one of
the things that they found is that in spite of a huge volume of
open source usage from India, we do seem to sort of lag behind in
terms of valuable contributions and innovations in spite of the
large tech talent pool.
And so they spoke to folks in some of the larger OSS
communities and some of the reasons that they uncovered were -- you
know one is that the organisational capacity to really sustain a
group of mostly young volunteer developers over a long period of
time is really lacking. And they need all kinds of support from
government incentives to some of the large tech industry employers
also creating the kind of spaces where it's kind of what can
happen.
I think secondly, you know, first led technical education
hasn't really permeated at the ground level except in a few states
in India like Kerala, which has a rich sort of history of -- and
thirdly there's also not enough commitment and -- you know, to open
source support from, you know, some of the mainstream I.D.
companies, et cetera. Right?
As well as the government which in spite of having a policy on
paper about preference being given to open source technology and
public procurement has not really necessarily been able to
implement this.
I think just want to mention that in spite of many of these
barriers, one of the great examples of how open source communities
have already contributed to digital inclusion in India, is the
collaborative work that has happened on creation of Indic language
tools, fonts, dictionaries and other pieces of this localization
layer. Which is essential for a digital country such as us with so
much cultural divert.
What Samson was saying about the African continent as well. I
don't know if I've answered your question, but...
>> MALA KUMAR: Yeah. Thank you. Samson, if you have a few
remarks, and then I see we have a question from the audience. I
want to make sure we get to that.
>> SAMSON GODDY: Sure. Can you hear me?
Good. Okay.
Yeah. I think the technical aspect of open source is in my
opinion, I think it's already sustainable. I am a contributor
myself and there's -- I've been in a project for roughly around 11,
12 years now, basically half of my life, I guess.
And I think for me the reason why I'm particularly focussed on
community is because that's what the biggest problem is in open
source in general. There's a diversity problem, and still like
there's a pipeline problem. Particularly on the continent, the way
the Open Source Community Africa started was -- for the first time
I attended a conference in Google, a project that I was helping
Google to run. Basically about 99.9 percent of people were
definitely not Africans; right?
And I told myself okay this is something that needs to be
fixed and I had a talk with the team. Like the momentum, everyone
was kind of a -- amiss, back then, it's like, oh, we don't have any
staff. That I could call originally. There's a lot of things that
we need to like work on that we need to definitely get into. All
kinds of programmes were global, but obviously they were like
lacking the defined vision.
So I had to take it upon myself and call some of my colleagues
to you know basically work on the pipeline side. Although right
now, the population of Nigeria is -- using Nigeria as a case study,
roughly 60 percent of the population now under the age of 13. So
what that means is that every single day you see someone coming
into tech. If you go to tech right now, there's someone jumping
into one framework or jumping into a language.
I've been getting a job, but no one is physically -- the
numbers of like collaboration being open source tools, that --
because obviously the setup doesn't happen constant. But some
people don't really see it as a -- as something that they could
participate on or even see it as a way to like join.
And if you look into like I think GitHub actually highlighted
some of the efforts easily -- October, I think there's a made in
Africa list now of a bunch of open source tools right now that are
coming from the continent. Specifically for Nigeria, the --
maintained by one of my friend (?).
Just shows that the community aspect of Africa as part of a
technical, because of course the effort of doing for for quite some
time -- I've been able to drive basically the technical aspect of
it. But one of the most popular -- right now is called chuck UI,
which is basically a framework that a lot of companies are using
abroad.
So what I'm trying to do is give the pipeline a lot of calls,
trying to make sure we have a lot of projects that are out there
probably from the continent. That's kind of why I think the
community aspect as a technical study, we sort of like drive the
numbers, driving the community numbers, basically the technical
aspect of it. So I kind of see them as a -- as the -- you know, a
joint effort.
>> MALA KUMAR: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Samson
and Kriti for those insights. I see we have a question from the
audience. So please go ahead.
>> Hi, my name is Ati Madine, I'm an IT consultant based in
Frankfurt.
My question about -- I always believe in open source, and
there is a lot of bit community which is providing a lot of
different solutions. Focussing on that can help us to develop some
kind of infrastructure. But when we come on the government level,
we are aware about the data reliabilities. And now we are facing a
lot of digital threats.
For that, for -- do you think like there should be some open
source software assessment framework or something like that, that
while selecting some chunk of code, you can actually assess it and
you can even view that if it is usable for you or not.
Is there someone, do you know, who is working on it?
>> MALA KUMAR: Yeah. Thank you for the question. I wish
Sayeed were here, he would be perfect to answer this question.
Sayeed would be perfect to answer this question.
The government servicing offering, I think Dusan, since the
World Health does work with different governments, I'd love to hear
your perspectives.
And Kriti, I know that work comes up a lot in your work. So
I'd love to hear from you.
>> DUSAN MILOVANOVIC: That's an important question. I'm not
sure I can speak on the government, but I can speak in the name of
WHO tan what we do. So basically I told you that we have this plan
to create open source problem office. That should provide
multidisciplinary support. Legal, procurement, capacity building
community, and technical. And so you know, the governance part
consists of technical parts as well. So...so before agreeing and
securing the acceptance of all the stakeholders that WHO need to
talk with, or cyber security, CTO, and the others, basically how it
was done really to...if you want recommendations and -- and
development methodology.
So if you want to use open source software, so basically we're
building the number of recommendations for suggesting steps, you
know, need to take. Yeah. If you want to use some open source
software or if you want to provide open source software.
Before design. I mean before doing programming, you need to
do the design, architecture within context, you need to also
assess, make sure that security and confidentiality rules and
principles are applied. Security and -- software and
communications confidentiality, privacy or data protection
generally, comes with data, data architecture. This is our
approach. It's technical. And I think that the problem is
technical, rather than governance and -- I suppose.
And there is also in my opinion, experience, it's really
difficult to have on-site -- I mean, it can be a very general, yes.
Develop methodologies and which questions need to be asked first.
But to have a technical framework, a tool that can help you to
basically answer these questions is really difficult. I mean,
there's this vulnerability, for example, GitHub which we are using
at Who. It works nicely for us so far. But you know, these are
just tools that will apply in some cases and would not in some
others.
>> MALA KUMAR: Kriti? Anything to add?
>> KRITI MITTAL: Yeah. I think the only thing I'd add is in
my sort of limited nontechnical understanding, when it comes to
government adopting open source, the degree to which you know, the
data security and data privacy are concerns, you know, really
depends on the type of data that you're looking at. So that now in
India, there's a legally defined personal data and nonpersonal
data. And I think the government's understanding has evolved on
this quite a lot in the last couple of years. Even the sort of
legislative discussions that are happening around these different
types of data and what are the kinds of security concerns around
these.
But in my sort of discussions with government stakeholders at
the ministry of I.D. and so on, what has really come to the surface
is that it is not -- that these are not really the primary barriers
for government to adopt open source. What is really a barrier is
the -- you know, how to do procurement. You know, and that's a
whole different problem to solve that.
>> MALA KUMAR: Yes. Absolutely. Thank you for that. Just
to kind of go off the point Dusan made, the tool is called the
Canada bot, adjusting any open source packages, the panel will scan
your code and tell you what you're using. You can do something
called an action, an automation to automatically update your
software every time something is released that's a new critical
security update, for example.
And then I definitely hear what Kriti is saying, there's a lot
of barriers to open source. So a lot of my colleagues will say
that open source is never apparently any less or no more secure
than proprietary software. It's about the structure of the code
and how well it's done.
And then even open source can get around security barriers
because it is open and transparent. So it's in some ways easier to
troubleshoot the issues.
I see we have a question from the audience on Zoom. So Allan,
would you like to go ahead?
>> ALLAN OCHOLA: Yes. Thank you for the opportunity.
My name is Allan, I'm from Kenya. And my name -- I don't know
the questions or comments but just maybe the overall discussion
that's going on. Around open -- (?) For quite some time. In the
educational system for quite some time. And health sciences
specifically. So I'll probably touch on mostly the speaker's -- --
open comment initiative. Whatever will be mentioned in India, I
think in terms of Kenya, I think in Africa, Kenya is one of the
leaders when it that to open comment.
But also when comes to the -- I don't know exactly what really
the data deployment really means, into -- because I know in this
(?) In terms of the open sands, but of it.
I don't know exactly when -- when the WHO wants to really give
an open sound, are they talking of bio banks or open bio bank,
exactly? And does it also mean also having development principles
to the collection, processing, and use of study of human data?
I think those are some of the ethical issues that have to
really -- how the WHO is working on that.
And especially I know personally I've been -- it is open sand,
someone asked about open sand framework. I probably can refer them
to check the UNESCO website. They just wanted last month, the
UNESCO recommendation on open sand framework. And I believe in the
Bay government, it was introduced last month. But UNESCO country.
This is some of the common areas around open source that are
technical at the moment.
But nonetheless, good discussion happening at the IGF.
>> DUSAN MILOVANOVIC: Thanks for the remarks. Thank you.
Your point is actually -- it's -- it's a pivotal thing that we're
talking about. Around which we are organizing. So a couple --
I'll tell you that actually, yes, we're talking about creating an
environment for the true open source. And I'll tell you how we see
that.
So as you mentioned the data side of it. The data side of it
is complex as it is. Open bio bank, for example, if you refer to
U.K., open bio bank, or any other, is a reality we have these
initiatives on many places.
And for obvious reasons information there has its own
confidential as the British national -- and data and different
aspects (?).
So how do we -- because I'm an architect, I'm more on the
solution side, I can tell you more about solution side than
governance, politics. But on the solution side what we plan to do
is couple of things. First thing is very (?), and that is really
to create a network, to annotate all this information.
In the principle, really meaning to expose this information
first ever on the worldwide Web. From out of -- to expose the
types of so what exists there. What the values might be
confidential, but the first time to create the possibility to
search for information. If you don't know about this.
And then you know, it's also between data custodian, between
data owners, primarily and national citizens, because actually
data -- some citizens already have initiatives to share data; we
don't need to pay them.
There's -- in the global north o more developed countries,
this might be to monetize information, to basically incentivize
people to share health-relevant information. And then some polls
show that this is the wrong initiative. Some people will pay you
to use the information.
So basically means that there's a lot of work to be done
there. But the technical side we acknowledge the fact and reality
that it will stay forever, that we won't be able to take
information that might be useful and then process it somewhere
outside of where it sits in secure. And like the solution of, you
know, linking on the worldwide web or these different information
systems.
And number two, if it's not possible to take own information
or some kind of values, then we can process information there. To
some kind of (?).
And that brings me to second aspect. Open science -- and
that's less talk recently, we and some others are trying to raise
the topic. Open science also means open analytics. Most
analytical models and most analysis, every single analysis and data
brings bites with it. Most analytical models, especially more
advanced ones, are pretty much opaque and closed. Especially if
they come from the (?)
But also from (?). So we know a better function, we don't
know why some ways or barriers are put by the author of the model
the way they are. Because we don't have mechanisms and if you want
information and communication technology infrastructure to open and
explain these models.
And you know, COVID-19 and government decisions are the best
example of the? In we don't know what's going on two years out.
And then we have models that are based on previous knowledge, but
also these models are not fully cleared well. And I can give you
one example briefly and stop at -- (?)
We had a discussion one month ago maybe brewing in Technical
Institute in brew en, and very smart people from applied in (?) And
basically talking about what we are doing and what they're doing,
exploring -- is very interesting model to predict -- the SARS 2
virus in a closed environment. And basically to classify the
probability between high and low probability as a threshold they
used what they believe the scientific proof (?) Which if you are
closer to the two meters person for longer than five minutes, you
have a chance to -- you have a very high probability to be
infected.
And actually, it was interesting because one of the -- our
colleagues was in the meeting was in the meeting in WHO at the very
beginning of the onset of this outbreak, and that was a decision, a
guesstimate decision made at the meeting. Because we don't have
facts and criteria to know. This is difficult to know. And this
is now viewed as a fact in many models worldwide.
So you know, we don't have -- it's maybe in the minutes of the
meeting, that fact. But you know, we need to expose this
information.
We need to say to the world, okay, this is, you know, a
minute, it's time, in place, special temporary information. Based
on the fact and presumption.
So this made the presumption and where it comes from doesn't
exist. This is a big, big problem of having true open source. And
maybe third part is -- you know, that's another topic completely is
this publish or perish in academia problem in which, you know,
really don't sustain your research on a topic, you simply need to
publish -- what's publishable, what's editor of the magazine think
it's publishable, not really what the topic is. That's our --
yeah, our take on it. The way we address all this...
>> MALA KUMAR: Thank you, Dusan, for those insights.
So I have a couple questions if there's nothing else from the
audience. The first one is for the different aspects of open
source, but open -- kind of models, or code or text or governance
when it comes to the actual community-building aspects, what do
each of the panelists thinks needs to improve the change.
Dusan, since we're on the subject we'll start with you.
>> DUSAN MILOVANOVIC: I think I said -- actually, thanks.
That's really what -- the last century or so. And with a we said
which actually answers your question, I think. We're having this
realisation of -- right, again, I'll speak from the field domain.
You have something called digital fields. And personally I don't
know what digital means. I'm -- I'm technology. I'm information
technology. Engineer, scientist. I know what digital and analog
means. But why putting digital next to it. You have intelligent
health. Is there intelligent health?
These are all buzzwords for different things.
And then worst of them all, you have healthcare industry. I
mean it's not an industry. It's a private relation between
attending physician and a patient. And everything depends on that
trust. Everything should support that trust. We are far away
especially in developed world from this concept. And I think that
actually hinders, you know, open and including open source
software.
In my experience with I won't call them big tech, I will call
them hyper scalers, I like this, I think that's the most close
to -- closest to what they really do. All this big tech hyper
scalers, basically what we work with them if they want open source.
For example, they will suggest a budget of zero license
because they would like to for fit and have it popularized if it's
useful. Commercialize -- commercialization is okay. If they want
to have the property. You need to pay the -- and this is very,
very dangerous game we're facing. It's ongoing. Especially now
with (?)
So change the culture. I know it sounds like Utopia, but
really can -- pass a couple times. Some were wrong, some were
right. It's less tech, it's more culture.
>> MALA KUMAR: Thank you, same question to Samson and I would
like to add, including questions, so how can people get involved in
your work and what would be a meaningful contribution to you.
So Samson, would you like to yield?
>> SAMSON GODDY: Sure. So for me I think the Muslim --
(Audio Distortion) finish from the governance side of thing, I
think it's -- work with the African union to sort of get more
reach. I think more reach in terms of like -- communities part
of -- but also I think obviously the biggest aspect of -- one of my
biggest challenges actually has been coming from funding. But
obviously think of like clever ways to bring funding into the (?)
So basically the Open Source Community Africa run a one big event
called Open Source Festival, which we use to like get to like --
teach to public companies and we get funding from those
organisation and then we get -- give that fund into the
organisation. And then spread it across the smaller community that
we run locally.
So I think the most important thing here would be to you know
work with communities, organisation, and nonprofit, and governments
that would basically help in terms of getting more funds. But
second I think awareness as reported as the funds, so yeah, that's
a -- will be my add.
>> MALA KUMAR: Thank, so much. Kriti, if you can respond
quickly.
>> KRITI MITTAL: Sure. So Mala, in the Indian context I
think of what should be the way forward or what needs to improve to
support open source communities here, I think the key thing is a
kind of institution that can bring together both capital and
capacity-building.
And so one of the ongoing conversations you know that we've
been having is the idea of setting up some kind of Open Source
Center of Excellence that can act as a kind of institutional back
borne. Promoting the development and adoption of open source
software.
And a range of interventions, you know, can be housed under
this kind of an institution. From you know advocating for open
source-led curriculum and tech schools to facilitating
collaboration amongst the existing open source communities, to
funding and incubating high impact open source projects.
Especially for sort of population scale use cases.
To you know, many other such initiatives. Including some of
the ones that Samson spoke about that he is working on with the
Africa open source community as well.
In terms of collaboration actually I think some of the folks
on this panel are a great example of the kind of collaborators we
would seek. You know, so you'd love to learn from folks who
have -- who sort of set up successful, sustainable models of open
source communities in the developing country context.
And GitHub as well, we've been speaking to UN India as a
potential partner for the Center of Excellence and certainly Dusan
to bring in sort of learnings in terms of visual infrastructure at
a very large scale.
Yeah, you know, pretty much anybody who's working on large
scale open source use cases would be a great potential collaborator
for this kind of work.
>> MALA KUMAR: Wonderful. Allan I know you had a quick
question but unfortunately we're almost out of time so I will do my
best to make sure that question gets answered after this panel.
Thank you all to the audience and of course our panelists for
joining today. I know it's always challenging with hybrid events
and I do appreciate your patience as we got everything settled.
Just a quick closing remark.
So I -- there's obviously a lot of expertise here in this
room. And I think one of the expertise that's kind of our --
undervalued really is cross sectoral, whether it's the private
sector, the social sector or the government, public sector. There
are institutions and organizations that do very well in different
aspects of open source governance. So I do encourage you to reach
out to people at different parts of the industry and really figure
out how to play off of, you know, those strategies.
So thank you all for coming. And have a great conference.
Bye.