EOLE 2020 – 2021 Webinar #7 : Conclusion of the 13th edition

The goal of this last webinar is to share our insights about what was discussed and to work together on what we can do after.

This webinar was divided into the seven following parts :

• 1. Free software acquisition by public administration – Laura Garbati
• 2. Public sector collaborations around FOSS projects – Malcolm Bain
• 3. Open source governance within public administrations – Marco Ciurcina
• 4. Open science and open source – Célya Gruson-Daniel
• 5. Tools for public administrations – Benjamin Jean
• 6. Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) – Malcolm Bain
• 7. Gathering questions/roundtable

1. Free software acquisition by public administration – Laura Garbati

Laura Garbati works at CSI Piemonte, a consortium for the management of information systems of public entities in Piemonte, where she deals with intellectual property, especially applied to software licensing, management, research and development of international projects. Last year she gave a lecture about the legal aspects of free software management in Turino.

Presentation

Nowadays we have made a lot of steps regarding the procurement of free software. We have guidelines and tools which already exist. There is a road traced as explained by Leonardo, who presented what we have already in Italy. It is just an example of what exists in different forms in other European states, the guidance for procurement and release of software by public administration in free software concerning the presentation dissemination of practical rule able to make the law a reality. This requires an analysis prior to proceed with any acquisition of software and makes taking into consideration free software mandatory and especially to justify the reasons why if a free software is not adopted.

After that, we hear of the practical experience of Italo Vignoli, a member of the The Document Foundation. He presented a little different experience in practical confrontation with public administration especially small public administration in their reality. Sometimes and often public administration still approach free software from the wrong perspective. They think it’s free and nothing else, which is wrong. So what emerged is that we need also to clear evaluation criteria to evaluate free software as more than the total cost of ownership. It needs to have also more tailor-made criteria to determine the total cost of ownership referred to free software.

Finally Benjamin Jean explains that we don’t need only law and former rules to adopt and to endorse free software in public administration through procurement but also with methodologies. It has been underlined that the correct approach need to start from the beginning : the so-called open by default. All the ecosystem implicated in acquiring free software by monitor it during the procedure and manage it after that.

Insights

What came out is that we have tool and procedural. We need maybe a little bit of practice disliking of operation application that makes Britain procedure into Brexit. I also believe that the winner card that free software was that it really works as well as being ethical. It’s suitable for the public administration i still believe it. Now I wonder if an addition to the support is needed not only endorsement but examples. In Italy it also need some enforcement : competence exists but it shall be disseminated. Because public administration especially small are still a bit of fear to change. Maybe the biggest enemy of free software in the procuring public administration now is just the fear of change. But the good news is that we have everything we need to face such change.

2. Public sector collaborations around FOSS projects – Malcolm Bain

Malcolm Bain is an IT law expert at Across legal and also a researcher. He will talk about both the Barcelona Open Source technical framework which he helped to develop. He also contributes to Open Source within the organization and addresses the adaptation of Open Chain specifications for public administration needs.

Presentation

In the second webinar we looked more in practice in how public sector could collaborate around Open Source projects. We had Barbara Gagliardi, a professor of law from Italy and Andrew Katz a lawyer from the UK helping several public administrations work together around a single project. We had also Marc Pérez-Batlle from the city of Barcelona who described some projects where the Barcelona city council was seeding to create the project and then built community around that. All of the participants indicated that there’s a lack of experience and know-how about how to do this in an agile easy manner. From a legal point of view, Barbara Gagliardi explained how it was perfectly legally possible. There’s nothing in the legal framework that stops public administrations pulling resources and working together. And it’s being done in practice. What’s happening is that there are many administrations who don’t know that this can be done and don’t know how to do it. So the legal infrastructure is there. The question is how to make this more accessible and viable for public administrations on a European level. Because it’s seems to be working locally. This is what Mark Perez from Barcelona was saying. We seem to gather cities and administrations together on a local or regional basis mainly. But there are so many similarities between regions like Catalunya and Lombardia in Italy or Munich for example, that this could be improved enormously.

Insights

The insights from this session were that it’s important to start small with the voluntary people who do not understand and work on this. We don’t have the obligation to create big project in the European style. We have to go small and be agile by pulling more and more voluntaries as the project grows and agree on some general rules of procedure which don’t have to be formalized in public contracts or anything.

Andrew Katz from the UK contrasted the approach done in several city councils where they just had a lightweight memorandum of regarding how the project works. In contrast to it for example, in Barcelona some cities required a formal agreement. There needs to be some ground rules.

It’s also again a question of people : building a team, keeping those teams working together and using Open Source dynamics among public officials to get things going are important. Another example is to have regular events or sessions where technical teams are talking together or where user teams are defining the roadmap. And again the barrier we’re finding is that public officials are not really used to this freestyle way of working together. There’s nothing in the law stopping it, it’s just they’ve never done it in the past. One of the insights here is how to make visible the flexibility that the public officials do have in collaborate together and pooling resources around Open Source projects.

3. Open source governance within public administrations – Marco Ciurcina

This webinar was presented by Marco Ciurcina. Marco is an Italian lawyer, working in the field of commercial and contractual law, Information Technology law, Copyright, Patent, Trademark, and Privacy law, particularly, with special focus on free software licenses, open content and open data. He teaches “Law and ethics of communication” at the Politecnico di Torino and is a Free software and digital fundamental rights activist.

Presentation

The third webinar was about Open Source governance within public administrations. We had two fantastic and very relevant examples that explained how free and Open Source projects are governed in concrete within public administration. We had the example of Decidim that was presented by Arnau Monterde who is the director of the project. Decidim is of course maybe the most relevant free software project born with public administrations and which has grown up to a scale that maybe today is not reached by other projects managed by public administrations. So for sure they have a lesson to give.

Then we had the case story from CSI Piemonte which is an in-house camp company of basically biggest part of public administrations within Piedmont (the region, the city, the Città Metropolitana and many other public entities). And this gives them a very particular position to push in the direction of fostering adoption and distribution of free software. Actually we learned that CSI Piemonte is one of the most productive producers in Italy in terms of projects made available according to a free software license. The stack of CSI Piemonte is a very high percent based on free software. We also learned how CSI Piemonte is managing governance of free software project and how it is improving. Because as Laura explained, things are being evolving now.

Then we had the second part of the presentation that was extremely interesting to learn about from Vivien Devenyi and Clare O’Donohoe from the European Commission Open Source Observatory (OSOR). They gave us a different perspective with the situation of what’s happening all over Europe. This is the result of a study made with the contribution of the European Commission. We learned that things are happening now and this is the basic outcome of our webinar. There’s a change in the speed and in the results that are being achieved at all level in all countries. This is the right moment to look at what’s happening in public administrations concerning free software and Open Source. Because there are many things to do but things are happening now so concrete needs are emerging and there’s a demand for the good output to give to public administrations to help them to grow in culture adoption and distribution of free software and Open Source.

4. Open science and open source – Célya Gruson-Daniel

Célya Gruson-Daniel is a doctor of social sciences and a consultant at Inno³. She supports private and public institutes in their research and open innovation approach by promoting the implementation of open science and data science practices. She co-founded the HackYourResearch collective in order to create a space for sharing and discuss on the evolution of research and open science practices. She pays particular attention to the development and maintenance of digital infrastructures as well as the challenges of their governance and sustainability for the use and co-use of digital communities.

Presentation

The fourth webinar was about Open Source and open science within public administration. For this webinar we had two researcher Alexandra Giannopoulou who is a postdoctoral research at the Internet and Society Center in France and Alexis Drogoul who is a researcher at Institute for Research and Development (IRD). We had also Carlo Piana an Italian lawyer and Myriam Ayass who is a lawyer at the CERN.

Insights

During this session we discuss about the interaction between Open Source and Open Science. First of all for the dynamics of Open Source and Open Science we highlighted that there is an importance of sharing not only source codes but also the models the data etc… We also highlighted that Open Source is really important for collaborative project. In fact it’s a default choice for collaborative projects because it makes collaborative work much easier. >p>Then another topic was about the interaction between science, society and also democracy issues. Indeed, Open Source is a key factor in building trust in technologies. For example with Open Source it’s also possible to address securities issues and all the risk related to platformization, to data and to the economy of data. Open Source is about the code source but also the algorithm or the script for example. And it’s really important because in Open Science one important topic is the reproducibility of results. The combination of Open Source and Open Science is also an inspiration for other sectors and for example for the government in the lineage of open data to enhance accountability and transparencies.

From this session we raised several needs. The first one is that Open Source is not only a simple dissemination of source code but we need the support of cooperative dynamics and it requires human and financial resources. And also for the participants we raise the issue of the complexity from a legal point of view. It’s often a question of articulating and verifying the different software components. For that, we need a standardization of licenses.

At the end of this session we came to three different actions possible. The first one is the legal compliance and a facilitation work to help to raise the issue of all these legal compliance. The second point it’s to make the research funders and policy makers understanding the needs to support these practices and the needs of human resources. And the third and last point was that open source should be a topic raised in the discussion about science and society issues because it can help to highlight all the issues and needs of trust in technologies, empowerment, transparencies, and reproducibility.

5. Tools for public administrations – Benjamin Jean

Benjamin Jean. Known for all his work on Open Source and Open Data, Benjamin is currently CEO of Inno³, an open innovation consulting firm focused on IP’s value and collaborative and open project management. Indeed, besides his full-time job at inno3, he teaches Intellectual Property law at several universities, he is Master conferences at Science Po, works as a consultant at Gilles Vercken Law firm, and regularly intervenes as an expert at several related events and conferences.

Presentation

The fifth webinar was about legal tools for public administrations in order to sustain the use of Open Source within each public administration. The speakers were Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz who is a lawyer an ICT practitioner and legal expert in the framework of JOINUP from the European Commission. Marco Ciurcina who is a doctor researcher at the Nexa Center for Internet and Society as polytechnic university of Turin. Malcolm Bain who is an it law expert at Across Legal in Spain.

We highlighted many insights from this webinar. The first point is that managing Open Source within each organization is something which can be very complex. It’s more and more complex to just identify Open Source components we’re using and the executing obligation from all of them and there’s a lot of other things to do. But there are more and more tools which can be used in order to help people to do it right. What we wanted was to rely on complexity in order to make it as simple as possible.

We can think about what might be the tools we need and how we can work on those tools for every people who are managing Open Source within its pubic administration, organizations, or instance. We wanted to manage complexity from both technical, legal and human point of view.

Insights

The first insight is that thinking about Open Source at a global level is something which is more and more important. And if we want to gain a global approach of the benefits from using Open Source or disseminating public administration software’s under open licenses we need to rely on some evaluation methods. These methods of using and disseminating Open Source can be some shared methods. It is very important to think with similar criteria in order to exchange the same vision of what might be the value of using reusing and contributing to Open Source. When we think in a supply chain approach there is a need to establishing a trusted environment to share code.

Malcolm discussed about how some standards like Open Chain might be used and added adapted to a specific needs of public administration’s organization in order to help them to have a similar approach. But also in order to use and share Open Source. When we think in an organization point of view, the way people are managing Open Source components within their own solutions and the way they are contributing to to external Open Source projects or internal business projects are relying on specific methods. We can also share to other public administrations or other people from private entities in order to do things better.

The last level we discussed was that when we are looking at a software level, we need to understand what are the Open Source licenses used on the specific Open Source dependencies etc… So we need some tools to do it and Patrice presented us JOINUP. It’s a specific software they developed in order to help public entities to make the good choice when they have to choose between several Open Source licenses. Because they need to think about compatibility and to have specific legal questions. They can rely on JOINUP in order to help them to do right things. But they can also share knowledge database in order to try to share such legal advice.

Regarding lessons we learned from this webinar I’d say there are several tools. Every big actors are trying to develop some tools to automate that. It is sometimes technical tools, sometimes legal tools and sometimes it’s a mix of it. But we are not very good at reusing them between public administrations. Sometimes because there are some differences but it’s often because there is a cost in order to be sure that people knows about what we’ve done and there is a cost to know what other people have done. This particular cost in order to share things might be something we can work on. The other point is that there is a need to adapt existing tools to be more fitted to a pubic administration needs (like open chain standard expressed by Malcolm).

6. Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) – Malcolm Bain

Malcolm Bain is an IT law expert at Across legal and also a researcher. He will talk about both the Barcelona Open Source technical framework which he helped to develop. He also contributes to Open Source within the organization and addresses the adaptation of Open Chain specifications for public administration needs.

Presentation

The last webinar was regarding Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). They are a little bit of a fashion but also a better approach than the programs we had in the 2000s-2010 which were like kind of Open Source project roadmaps or mega plans developed by national, regional or even city councils. What we’re seeing here is a more bottom-up approach of centralizing knowledge processes skills in what they call a program office to be able to become a competence center and to support Open Source projects and using Open Source in public administrations.

For this webinar we had Gijs Hilenius from the Commission who has a huge influence on OSOR and other Open Source areas. We also had Philippe from the City of Paris. He’s a developer and a senior project manager working with Open Source and working on Paris’s own competence center. Then we had John Whelan from Trinity college of Dublin. It is a public university producing lots of Open Source as the results of research and how they set up their Open Source project center about three four years ago. Finally there was Leonardo Favario from Italy who I think are the most advanced in this area. They’ve already set out a roadmap for their OSPOs.

So it was interesting because we had different stages like Paris which is a little bit behind by still just thinking about OSPO and how to do this whereas Italy is well ahead of us.

Insights

Gijs was saying that the setting of an OSPO was going to be that the seeds for much more Open Source work at the Commission and the European institutions. It would bring together knowledge competencies, knowledge skills, tools… : everything we’ve talked about in this series of seminars. But he focused that this really need a culture change because just talking about Open Source among Open Source fanatics is what we say in English : preaching to the converted. Whereas you need to preach to the masses and to the people who don’t really understand how and what. And that, in bureaucratic and public administration terms, is difficult. So Gijs saw this as the major change in terms of changing mental and culture.

Philippe confirmed this saying that they need this at Paris. He was also talking about Lutece which is their flagship Open Source project. And he said that it is difficult to see outside that project if more seeds are being sown and more projects are being built. It’s very piecemeal and maybe this concept of Open Source Office would bring this together not just at a strategic level but also as skills competence, peoples, events.

John Whelan and the Trinity college at Dublin are much more mature in their approach. They are working on public/private partnerships because they work in tech transfer. So they were looking at Open Source as a result of public projects and public research and how this needs to be transferred to industry and how their office was supporting researchers tech transfer, staff lawyers, business, analysts… All in order to build an Open Source business models to build public/private partnerships and and do this in a very practical way from the project up. This is from a specific research or technical solution that Open Source was wanted. What skills were needed for building a business case ? For building a partnership ? For building a community ?

They’ve developed the guidelines and they’re still developing guidelines and best practices on this concept of network of Italian regional offices or competence centres or people to be able to support this at a national level. The interesting thing that he also said is that the best practices and competences and skills come out of de facto projects. They’ve been able to distil the last years of their work at national and local level. Private industry practices has been done that and then done this earlier faster as usual. What is interesting at an administrative level, is the synergies that can be built at the different levels (national, regional, at a city level, municipal level…). Look my experience in Catalonia, there’s no way that the 5 000 different municipalities of Catalonia can have each their own OSPO. But the regional entity which looks after information or infrastructures could easily set up, and they are setting up, a competence centre to support the pooling of resources, skills and knowledge for the five thousand municipalities. So it’s happening and it’s good to see that people are thinking about what is needed and I think this opens the question which is the debate : what can we do from EOLE to support this and what role can we play ?

7. Gathering questions/roundtable

From what we learned this year about specific challenges for public administrations do you have any other questions or what is your impression about it ?

Marco Ciurcina

Malcolm was speaking and explaining that it’s an issue of legal, technical and organizational issues and I asked to myself then what can we do ? What do we have to do within EOLE ? How can we help for this process that of course is interesting for the community from different angles ? I remembered that we had in 2010 an EOLE event that was about freeing public sector software. We are on this issue since a long time and we were looking at things that were going to happen so we can be proud of this somehow.

Now we have some organizations that drop the interests of all the communities that deal with free software and they are made of people, individuals developers and companies that today are the main actor in the panorama and in the scenario. Indeed they already learned to deal with the free software so they perfectly know how to move to the goals that are profits. The interest of public administration is different. It is not only making money or saving money. So there is a need for interactions and new institutions are emerging. Institutions that put together these new players of the panorama of free software and Open Source. I believe that later some institutions will represent this interest that is different from the interest of companies.

So what can we do now ? Foster interaction among people that we deal with these issues in different countries and differences within public administrations. I think this is a need that has to be filled. There’s a gap because we know that there are many public administrations and people working within public administrations in different countries. But they’re not big interaction among them. They’re all working for themselves. There is no interaction among people working within public administrations with free software. This is a need that has to be filled. There’s a demand for an offer of means to allow people that work within public administrations to interact.

Laura Garbati

I totally agree with you and I like to add : being inside the public administration and the mechanical organization. We need for sure some critical mass, a sort of community of competence before the community of code. I mentioned the small entities and small public administration and maybe it’s specifically to Italian cases because we have a lot of small public administration. But my impression is that we have to make such a critical mass to force in some way the rule to become real in a disseminated way and not only for some privileged cases which have the force to change their typical procedural habits. We have also at the European community level a formal declaration but too much shy in the application. As I look at the last open data strategy and all the perspective of the new digital agenda I see a lot of openness and the cloud coming up. And I fear that such elements risk to miss the connection point of the Open Source which is a fundamental key to collect all these elements and protecting the real openness of the environment. Because of course we have this principle open first but then we have to force it in the everyday public administration life. It’s a crucial point now that we cannot miss to connect with movements like open data, artificial intelligence and cloud, to create an ecosystem in which free software is stronger. And without critical mass and interaction we are too small to move in such way. Because public administration needs a solid umbrella of example and practical application of such new ethical principle.

Célya Gruson-Daniel

To continue in this part I think that we have the Open Source tools and it’s more question of appropriation by different stakeholders of this practices but also the mindset related to openness in general. Not only Open Source but also open data or Open Science for research. And it’s really a mindset because often if we don’t help people to understand and to help them experiencing why we need such tools why for like really societal issues (trust, transparency, accountability, privacy…). Maybe with the help also of new approach like design or co-design approach we can help different stakeholders to experience why we need openness Open Source. I’m not a lawyer and I know that it’s a quite difficult challenge for people who are not familiar with all this legal framework. That’s why in France for example we are organizing different workshop on Open Science and legal issues. And a huge huge work it’s to facilitate the discussion with people who have a different background and to help them to understand that they can understand legal information. But it also permit lawyers to understand their point of view, their approach or their case studies. That’s why for me it’s a lot of work about helping experiencing openness as a needs and also by co-design, innovation and so on.

Benjamin Jean

I think there’s maybe a paradox today because what I see is that Open Source is becoming more and more central in public policies. Of course inside France there are today lots of pubic approaches which are using Open Source codes for their needs transfers and needs. It’s a really good point because we have new stakeholders who are thinking about Open Source and doing very concrete projects to answer to their particular needs. But the paradox is that it’s maybe more complex to help them to discuss about their common needs about Open Source approaches because they are not thinking about opponents by itself it’s just a need for them. It should remain simple but it’s not as simple as they need. Maybe one of the challenges we need to address is how to help those particular stakeholders. They are public entities who want to use Open Source solutions, who want to produce and to contribute to Open Source on free software but not as a goal by itself. We need to give them maybe tools in order to facilitate what they want to do. Because if they just achieve to do it it’s the best for all of us. They are doing open tools not because they want to do Open Source but because it’s an answer to the need and it’s not too complex to do it. Maybe from a public entities, they are doing it because the need and the answer of the free software is very clear but they are not as aware of how Open Source works as previous public entities for publishing and producing Open Source components.

Malcolm Bain

We’ve seen two decades of public administration working with Open Source : the 2000s and the 2010s. They were marked by two different approaches. In the 2000’s they were big plans from the European commission, national governments or regional governments with big statements about Open Source but with not much efficiency. During the 2010, there has been lots of individual projects where Open Source is seen as a as a tool and also as an objective but with a lack of collaborative partnerships among public administrations. We saw lots of different public entities embarking on their own journey into Open Source with very few network effects. So i think maybe the 2020s is a moment to bring a little bit of a networking collaborative approach to the individual projects. The stakeholders have different objectives and they see Open Source as a tool and not as an end. If they recognize the mutual challenges they have and the mutual goals among in a wider context, maybe the 2020s will moves towards collaborative public projects rather than individual public projects.

Some are already there but if you look at the case studies on OSOR for example, so many of project are just individual public administrations launching their own. Some of them obviously talk about wider collaborations. It’s the moment to bring the concept of collaboration by networking and bringing people together. Because people are seeing the benefits of the individual projects and it’d be good for them to see the benefits of collaborative projects. Like it was said in the conference Open Source is a verb and not a not a noun. Because Open Sources is an action. Like Célya said, you have to live it and experience it as an action and it’s not an action in itself, it’s an action to achieve your own goals. It’d be interesting to see how we can align, bring together or maybe has a role to bring together people who might have similar goals. Because they’re all public administrations and they’re all doing the same thing as everybody does. Their goals are going to be very similar and what we can try and do is to provide some tools or some space where they can walk the walk together rather than walking them individually.

Benjamin Jean

I think one of the points is also how can we design our action or our tools in order to help people to collaborate were sometimes because of political reasons they won’t. In France sometimes very similar projects and free software Open Source projects were emerging in the same time in different parts because people are not willing to work together for political reason. I don’t know if we can do it from our legal perspective and actions. But maybe some of the tools or actions we can work on, might be focused on how to design it in order to add them into in the right time just to collaborate and to just to fix this kind of non-collaborative projects. Because they’re thinking it from their own perspective and they are not sharing tools.

Marco Ciurcina

I don’t think we will have a strong and solid collaboration among public administrations in one or five years. Maybe this is something we will see as an established way of working of public administrations let’s say in 10 years maybe 20. That it’s not outreach today. We have some extraordinary examples like Decidim that succeeded in joining collaboration in a specific single project that’s the tool developed and used by more than hundred of different public administrations. Decidim is a good example we should study to understand why this succeeded and others did not.

It’s not at our reach to have the goal to achieve collaboration. But what we can do is do something more concrete and very simple like it happened with lawyers involved with free software from all over the world that have a unique many list where everybody can participate. It could be interesting to have something like that for people working in OSPOs because there are people working within public administrations at different levels. They are dealing with the goal they have as OSPO member and they have to deal with the technical, legal and organizational issues that have to do with the fostering adoption and distribution of Open Source software by the public administrations. They have common interests maybe just in exchanging information but starting from that could be good. Then the next step could be in a few years to think about something more like making a space for exchanging information and networking virtually at least. I’m sure public administrations will collaborate because it’s obvious they have to in their interest. If you work with free software but you don’t collaborate, you’re not doing the right thing.

Malcolm Bain

I think building up from small successes is going to be better than an override with an end goal. I wouldn’t try to implement big programs or plans but I definitely start with small things like a mailing list. The success from Open Source when it started it’s it’s it’s just people getting together around a common concern. I think one of the differences is the question of risk and fear. A lot of Open Source started by people who took risks and didn’t worry about publishing code which was not particularly good but did solve a problem. And then it just built up better and better and more people joined in. I think public administrations don’t have that mentality. I don’t even know if actually they have legal restrictions from doing this type of thing in a very collaborative and open manner. But I’m seeing a generation change. The younger people come in and are more open to just throwing out some code, some ideas or looking for some collaborations whereas the elder generation are much more structured in their way to work. They have to work on a project basis with a internal file to justify the actions etc… There’s a mental change there which we can also help to support. We can just through a mailing list and a few simple events where we can pull together people and work bottom up and agile by keeping it simple and build from there.

Laura Garbati

The CSI Piemonte is already an OSPO and we are trying to offer the competencies also outside. And I’m the first to say that public administration usually fear the change but we can also witness that they try to change. We are managing some reuse agreement and trying to make a community around a unique Open Source project. We have also already offered our components and assistance to other public entities which were trying to find a support. So maybe from small things we can grow to something bigger and connected. Something is moving and we believe in the courage of single public administrator who decided to change. Because there’s no limits from the public recruitment views. All the road leads to different perspective so the changes offer a higher level of risk but it’s worth. I think that we will see that the changes is happening now.

Benjamin Jean

Maybe the point is that there are already several resources but which are very just not together in one central wiki or a new website. They are not easy to to find. So it could be great to have something to share easily more contents. But the more important is to work on the community just to help people to discuss and to share problems or answers regarding their use of Open Source. In France we’re training to help people to share their stories for instance regarding what might works when they want to publish a free software or common goods. But what might be really interesting is to share outside of France with other public entities. And what might be useful for us is to give some feedback from our use of other tools. It’s for example the memorandum which was presented by Andrew during the first webinar. It’s quite interesting and I didn’t use it. Maybe it might be useful to try to just present it to some French big entities in order to see if they can adopt it. If yes, it’s a good way to establish some standard and to build common tools from all those ecosystems. Thinking more on the ecosystem or the community than on the legal challenges by themselves.

Malcolm Bain

Most projects are driven by technical and organizational issues not by the law. The law is just a facilitator which has been seen to be a barrier. What we really need to work on is removing that fear through success stories for example. Maybe it’s a different approach for understanding the legal dimension than from technically and organizationally pooling resources and building collaboration. It’s funny because a lot of the community and a lot of the talking around in communities is around licensing and around the law. I suppose it’s because I’m not seeing the huge amount of collaboration that people talk about different software algorithms or different open data sets. So I think we need to concentrate on where we have skills to supply and to share. As I said before keep it small keep it simple and then build from there.