I'm Amanda Brock. I'm CEO at OPEN UK. And we are the industry organization for the Business of Open Technology in the UK.And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Open UK before I start to talk to you about the importance of collaboration in a time of Brexit and geopolitical shift. And as I mentioned, I'm CEO of Open UK. We are about the business of open technology and promote UK leadership in open technology. And if you haven't heard that term, open technology, I think it's important that you understand what it means and that you start to think about it because it's something you're going to come across in all business areas. And for us at Open UK, it means open source software, open hardware and open data. And we work within those realms on three pillars. The pillars are around community, the business community around open technology, legal and policy and learning. And we pull together and build a cohesive community across the UK. We are Europe's biggest open technology community and the, the one that it generates most revenue in Europe. Now we do that uh bringing together through a number of celebratory and other events and activities.

We host an awards or 2020 awards at almost 100 nominations in their first year and we are currently taking nominations across eight categories. We also had a very british activity in New Year's honors list on New Year's Eve and we do other events and promotions of our community and we use that cohesive community to have one voice and that single voice allows us to influence legal and policy. We have a very strong legal committee who respond to legislation as it comes through in Europe in the UK. We also uh have done things internationally beyond Europe, like submitting an amicus brief in the Google the Oracle litigation and you'll see that very quickly within a few months of the organization refocusing on open technology, we were recognized by the European Commission as the actor in the UK, the place to come to, to talk about open technology.

And of course, the third pillar is pretty obvious learning. So we not only teach adults about open technology through our future leaders and our founders forum, but also we are looking at skill set of the future and helping Children and young people to develop skills and open technology to fill that role as community. We know that despite being the biggest community of open source software engineers in Europe, there is a shortage and that there's room for more. We also have a shortage of soft skills around open source. And we're about to launch our second summer camp in July that we use the mini Moo Love kit and the mini Moo Love kit runs on a BBC microbit and allows Children to learn digital skills. So we do a very fun animated camp. It's 10 animated lessons and easings and the kids can go in and take the course and learn about open source open technology as well as digital skills. And actually, in our first year, we were the runner up in the Gnome Community challenge. Now, on the policy side, we actually do a number of activities and we have started producing a report in three phases.

Phase one has been published in March and it demonstrates that this open source software community alone brings in something like 43.1 billion in GDP per annum in the UK. Now that's using slightly out of date figures, I suspect it's going to be 2 to 3 times that and the way we're trying to work out what those real figures should be is getting more up to date data. We currently have a survey underway. And if you are in the, the UK in any form of business or in the public sector, we would love to hear from you. And our survey at open uk.uk/state of Open will be open until midnight UK, 1159 UK. Actually on Thursday the 10th of June, it would be great to hear from you. And that's what the survey looks like. It is intentionally very simple. Also, on the policy side, we're working on international collaboration around data centers and we're creating a blueprint for the data center of the future. And in doing that, we are bringing together a number of partners from across the globe, from California, from Amsterdam across the UK.

And we're looking at running a data center on open hardware, open source software and opening up the data to help to improve uh the carbon neutrality or carbon carbon negativity of the data center. Now to do that, we are also looking at using green tech and putting the outputs back into the grid. And that's really exciting. And as a project, we part of COP 26 we're going to be hosting a COP 26 day on the 11th of November and that will be about sustainability and open technology. So you can see that we're doing a lot around open. But we also collaborate globally and the very nature of open source software, open hardware and open data ie open technology is that we've pulled together across the globe really for many, many years to create technology that builds the infrastructure we all take for granted today, whether that's the internet or the cloud now as an individual, as well as being CEO OPEN UK, I have a number of other roles.

One is that I'm a European representative of the open invention network, a very Creative IP organization protecting open source. Another until very recently is that I was the chair of an advisory group for the United Nations for their Innovation Labs. I'm the author of a book or the editor of come at the end of this year, free and open source software law policy and practice, publish books with university press, but which will have open access and be free. Thanks to the Beach Foundation and of course, I spent a lot of my life doing this talking at conferences. And uh how did I get into a space like this? Well, 13 years ago in February, 2008, I joined Europe's biggest open source company Canonical and I was very early stage, I was employee 165. And I was really surprised by not just the technical interest that open source gave me but the community and this was a very global community where I had the opportunity to get to work with and get to know people across the globe. And what I discovered is that I was regularly collaborating with people from every corner of the planet in creating technology that was accessible and therefore sustainable through its open nature. And I'm going to talk to you a bit about Brexit and geopolitical shift today.

This is my last trip before the pandemic for a conference. And I used to speak at events all over the world, probably a couple of times a month actually. And this is back in uh January. It's actually one minute into February the 1st 2020 I'm in Brussels and I'm outside the European Commission at a minute past midnight on the first of February and the UK had, of course, Brexit it from Europe at midnight and I'm there because we had Europe's biggest open source software developer conference for STEM.

And I'm on my left with Kavita Kapoor, who is the Open UK uh Learning uh Chief Learning Officer. On my right is Jonathan Riddle who's based in Scotland and who is our um awards uh committee chief. And then to his right is Cheryl Holme from the C MC F the Cloud Native Foundation. Lot of if not, most of the public cloud runs on cloud native and open source. Now you'll see the four of us are there outside the commission and we have varying views about Brexit and it didn't really matter what your view was. This was a very clear and defined moment in time when a geopolitical shift happened. And what we saw was Germany didn't take quite the same approach, you know, a, a referendum and an exit from a long standing treaty is a very clear geopolitical shift. Germany, however, had a court case to decide the same thing. And in that court case, Germany decided that the German law overrode European law and that Germany has sovereignty. Now that word sovereignty is one that we've heard a lot around geopolitical shift and allow around political shift full stop. And what we're seeing is talk of both digital sovereignty and data sovereignty and what those mean is often very difficult to pin down and badly defined. And that is part of a digital decade.

And the European Commission are very quick and very keen to acknowledge that that digital decade is going to be empowered by open source. And we're looking at the next 10 years, the twenties being, you know, maybe the roaring twenties, the pandemic, twenties, who knows what they will be remembered as most, but they are undoubtedly the digital decade. And in Europe, we, we see two women at the core of that Ursula Von Der Leyen and Marguerite Vestager. And this is a letter from Von Der Leyen to Weer on the line to Weger on her appointment as the VP for Digital for Europe. And it says changes in digital technologies and geopolitics are all effect on the lives of Europeans. We're witnessing major shifts all the way from global power structures to local politics. What we do now will determine what kind of world our Children live in and will define Europe's place in the world. And the reason I quote you, this is you could swap this out for any country in the world and it would be true. Every government, every country is going on this strategic sovereign uh exploration of data and digital and the European strategy and data is very clear.

So it's one that I'm referring to here because it is so clear and they're recognizing that there is an issue in Europe where they see the influence of non eu technology companies threatening Eu citizens control over their personal data and constrains both the growth of eu high technology companies.

The eu uses this term high technology to mean big tech and the ability of national eu rule maker to enforce their laws. Now, these laws were created a decade ago and were created at a time when we could not envision social media and the way in form we have it today. And I I'm focusing on Europe because Europe has some very clear and helpful documentation. The European parliament has these E PR S briefings. This one is from July 2020 right in the heart of the pandemic and it talks about the digitalization acceleration because of the pandemic. And we've seen something like five years of digital transformation in three months. Recognizing that for both business and for governments data and digitalization is the heart of everything they do. And in this eight page briefing, which I'd highly recommend you read because it reflects not just Europe but what all governments are doing, you'll see up on the left there at page eight, I've highlighted the need for open Europe, then goes on to give us 24 action points. The first of which is a Federated data infrastructure and that's bringing data home, bringing data sovereign for Europe. And that's something that can be slightly controversial.

But as we see Gaia X as method for doing so evolve, we're also seeing some of these high tech companies included in the process. And I think that's in some ways a learning from open source around collaboration and co opet, you have to have everybody at the table or it won't work. And this collaboration around infrastructure, the infrastructure of government is a natural collaboration and technology because for the last 10 years, we've been shifting to open collaboration and a state of coition. Now I've mentioned that it applies both to digital and data.

And we see um you know, this didn't come to fruition. But as we were working towards a Brexit negotiation, we saw across Europe, a leaked paper saying that all data services would have to be established in the EU IE not the UK. And we've seen a very clear pushback from the Eu and China and similar from the US actually not just the EU and we see this shift between China and the UK, between China and Europe, between China and the US. And you know, we have the Huawei equipment ban around five G in the UK. But we see this not just from government itself but from its institutions and the European court actually China but pushed back on the US saying that it didn't have adequate data in place. So where for many years there had been a reliance on that um privacy shield that was set aside because of this adequacy ruling by the European Court. And we have to think about what that means and how that's going to work for us because we have governments uh at this point of friction creating division across them. Yet, acknowledging that the infrastructure of today, it's not just the highways and the, the water companies and their power providers. It's the Clyde infrastructure and the platform infrastructure that we've seen move into that center point over the last decade as we've moved to a digitalized world.

And what we see there is that this infrastructure is built not in a divisive way but is built in an open and collaborative way through the use of open technologies. And I'm sharing this image with you from C MC F I mentioned Cheryl Hook right back early on when I was talking about Brexit and what we see here is an infrastructure around cloud computing. There's over 1500 cards here and you'll see a mark for these projects for these packages, for these companies of over 19 trillion and funding in the billions. This is big business, but this big business is currently at the heart of all business models across all businesses and across all government and all public infrastructure. And what we're seeing is a move and a shift to managing that infrastructure. And the way that that is done is through collaboration you cannot build something of this scale without using open technology and you cannot build it without collaboration. And that collaboration is al almost always these days in a point of coition. So if you look at something like GIX, which open UK is a day one member of one of only three from the UK, when you look at it, you will see companies who day to day compete, whether that's Athos and OVH or um Dell and HP or Arm and Intel, you will see companies like that who day to day compete, sitting around a table together collaborating and they collaborate on the base infrastructure.

Because what they've come to recognize is that the world today is built on software. We live in a software defined infrastructure. We need to understand and be able to use code code that is already freely available and which we can share and expand on ie open source. And the way that that's been created is through collaboration and that collaboration is something that is global. It's not possible to have the bifurcation of the internet in Asia. It's not possible to build a data infrastructure on a Federated basis across Europe without using that collaborative open source software. So as we move further and further down this route of transition of geopolitical shift of clear and defined splits like Brexit and less clear and defined splits like the the shift between different continents, whether it's the US and Europe and Asia or the or Europe and the US, what we have to recognize is that whilst we focus locally, we collaborate globally and that's at the heart of the infrastructure we need for today and tomorrow.

So with that, I will pass you over to any questions. I'm not quite sure if you're able to ask those in the chat. Um I'm just gonna try and take my sharing down to be able to see those. It looks like I don't have any questions. So thank you very much for your patience today and for joining me.