Hi,
Tickets for this are going swiftly and the event is this Thursday so if you haven't registered yet then I'd recommend doing it ASAPs.
Hopefully see some of you on Thursday.
On the evening of Thursday, 20th February, the BCS Open Source Group are hosting an event on "Open Source in Government" in London.
Registration is now open at https://ossg200220.eventbrite.co.uk/
We've got a good line-up of celebrity speakers:
Open Source Excuses – busting the myths
Terence Eden
Why don’t government departments and NHS organisations want to adopt open source? This talk looks at common reasons given. It will give you real life examples of barriers to coding in the open, and practical tips for adopting open source.
Terence Eden is the Head of Open Technology for NHSX. He is a technology & policy expert. He teaches government courses on AI and ethics. He was formerly the UK Government’s representative to the W3C. He speaks around the world on open standards, open source software, and open data.
Current political challenges and opportunities for Open Source in Europe
Astor Nummelin Carlberg
The campaign to save Open Source development from the EU’s Copyright Directive was indicative of the current status of Open Source advocacy in the EU—while ultimately successful, it was more reactive than proactive. The most important lesson from this campaign was that Open Source was not targeted by policy makers, simply forgotten and misunderstood. This suggests that while Open Source has gone mainstream, Open Source advocacy has not kept up.
As there are both more opportunities and regulatory risks for Open Source in the European Union, more, if not all, Open Source community stakeholders need to increase their capacity to deal with policy making. At the least, we need to make sure that Open Source never again becomes an unintended regulatory casualty. There are several very tangible steps that can be taken to do this. Since Open Source is becoming ubiquitous at the same time as there is an eagerness to regulate tech in the EU, the time is now to mature Open Source advocacy and increase its effectiveness.
Astor Nummelin Carlberg is OpenForum Europe’s Policy Director, responsible for policy development and advocacy. Before joining the team he was an Accredited Parliamentary Assistant in the European Parliament, and has studied in the United States and Germany. He has extensive experience of European policy making processes, communications and catalysing networks and communities for advocacy impact.
Making the case for open with Governments
Irina Bolychevsky
Irina Bolychevsky is the founder and director of Redecentralize.org. She’s a digital strategist and expert on data, open data, data platforms, standards, privacy and decentralised technology. She led the ckan open source data platform to international adoption, served on Open Knowledge Foundation’s senior management team and now as a board member and developed the personal data infrastructure programme within the UK’s Government Digital Service. She developed the Smart Dubai’s and UAE federal policy, regulatory, commercial and technical frameworks for data exchange and ran one of the first UK data trust pilots and researched digital identity for the Open Data Institute.
The event page is here: https://ossg.bcs.org/blog/event/open-source-in-government/
...and you can register for a (free) ticket here: https://ossg200220.eventbrite.co.uk/
Hopefully I'll see a few of you there!
Whilst this is not an OSHUG event, it is organised by the BCS OSSG with whom we (OSHUG) often organise joint open source events. I thought it might be of interest to some of you.
Best wishes, @ndy