Carlo Piana

Carlo Piana is an Italian Free Software advocate and qualified IT lawyer based in Milano. A long standing advocate for open technologies and digital freedoms, he has been general counsel of the Free Software Foundation Europe and is in the OS and IP advisory to the United Nations' Technology Innovation Laboratories and an editor of the Journal of Open Law, Technology, Society (JOLTS, formerly IFOSS aw Rev.). He advises on open source compliance, especially in the field of embedded devices, open data, data protection.

EOLE 2020 / 2021

Webinar 4 "Open source and open science within public administrations"

Carlo was a speaker at this webinar on february 17 at 11:30 am. The Response to Covid-19 threat has been patchy in many countries and in Italy was no exception. Yet, the failure of the technology response has been abysmal, with a negative peak of an entire region on hard lockdown because of failure to properly transmit hospitalization data. But failure comes from a long way before. One of the most important data points -- how the disease spreads -- was meant to be gathered through a dedicated app. Rather than the much advertised "open source" app, it was a frontend to proprietary tracking services of the main platforms, with little to no information as to the protocols and what's more important, no open source in the backend, no open standard, no real open source in the frontend. What should an open source data collecting app look like anyway? How could an open science approach have helped with acceptance and adoption? Why no open independent implementations with reproducible builds?

You can view the slides of his presentation here