How to select the right open source solution? Get inspired by OW2 MRL!

The OW2 Market Readiness Levels "MRL "methodology is presented in the April 19 webinar organized by OSPO Alliance. 

Date: Friday April 19, from 10:30 to 12:00 CEST. 

Speaker: Antoine Mottier, OW2 CTO. 

Abstract:
Market Readiness Level is an OW2 solution that aims at benchmarking open source projects to ease the adoption of mature solutions and identification of new offering.
During this webinar Antoine will give you a tour of MRL. This should allow you to quickly start using it when you need to evaluate an open source software. The conference will also highlight the benefits of the method whether you are involved in the development of a given project or simply as an open source user. We will cover the internal logic of MRL to demystify the MRL score. And finally, we will have a look at the technical architecture of the solution and what we are aiming at for future versions (spoiler: contributions are welcome)!

Useful links:
- Find more about the OSPO Alliance
- Find more about the OW2 MRL methodology

For the first time we have organized a local conference on open source software, in the area of Grenoble. 

AlpOSS "Alpes Open Source Software" took place on Thrusday March 21, 2024, at the premises of the town of Echirolles. 

This event is the result of a collective initiative of three local digital players with varied profiles: Belledonne Communication (publisher of the Linphone open source solution), the town of Échirolles and OW2 for the community side. 

Its aim is to create links between suppliers of innovative open source technologies and users, to discuss collaboration models and business models, and to structure and revitalize the local ecosystem.

For more information please visit the website:
https://alposs.fr/

FOSDEM

 
Date : February 3 - 4, 2023
Venue: ULB Solbosch Campus, Brussels  

If you have planned to be at FOSDEM'24, do not miss the opportunities to meet with the OW2 Community members, while the Management Office team will join NLNet Foundation booth, Building K level 2 together showcasing the new cascade funding project NGI0Commons Fund. 

In the conferences

OW2 will also be represented in Brussels by is members talking at the conference. Click on the links below to see the replays. 

- On Saturday Feb 4 at 14:00: openDesk - The Open Source collaborative suite
Speakers: Clément Aubin, Wieland Lindenthal

- On Saturday Feb 4 at 16:40: Cristal: a new Wiki UI to rule them all
Speakers: Ludovic Dubost, Manuel Leduc.

- on Saturday Feb 4 : FusionIAM a full open source identity access management solution
Speaker: Clément Oudot, Worteks

- on Sunday Feb 5 at 14h25: The good governance handbook enabling good oss usage through OSPOs
Speaker: Boris Baldassari, Eclipse

Visit our Community Booth # H24!

Come visit us during OSXP, we'll be pleased to welcome you and introduce the various projects and technologies presented on our booth. 

Project	Main capabilities
	The OSS Good Governance initiative is a joint effort led by OW2 and many partners from the OSPO Alliance to grow awareness and expertise on how to properly use and contribute to open source software.
	CiteLibre  is part of the Lutece software suite provided by the City of Paris to help loval administrations implement a broad range of digital services, right out of the box.
	XWiki is a professional wiki that has powerful extensibility features such as scripting in pages, plugins and a highly modular architecture.
	Waarp is an Open Source Managed File Transfer Solution aimed at improving the reliability, security, monitoring and integrability of file transfers in a scalable IT system.
	NGI Search is a program from the European Commission  aiming to bring forth the next innovative software for searching, discovering and exploiting data on the internet.

Discover OW2 presence in the conferences

Keynote speech by OW2 CEO Pierre-Yves Gibello

Schedule: December 7, 09:50, room Passy.
Title: Fuel your project with NGI commons: European funding for FOSS and open models with social impact, open to all
Abstract : NGI (Next Generation Internet), part of the European Commission’s Horizon program, offers a cascading funding scheme based on calls for projects, open to all. NGI Commons is NGI’s vehicle for the next 3 years: its aim, to finance the future of a European Internet and digital commons based on open source, integrates a societal vision founded on the protection of private data, inclusivity, public liberties, sobriety and network neutrality.
More information: https://www.opensource-experience.com/event/#sticky-14462

• Download the English slides.

More talks

Reuse and open source: a guarantee of digital sustainability?

Schedule: December 6, 15:00.
Speakers: Pierre-Yves Gibello, OW2 CEO and Cyril Desmit, IGE
Abstract : Recently, the French interministerial department for digital technology (DINUM) opened the way to factoring in free software in the durability index of the hardware supporting it, by publishing a positive answer to the following question: “Do you think it is possible to install a free operating system that increases the sustainability of computers and smartphones?”
This answer is supported by a synthesized report by OW2, to which Electrocycle has contributed alongside several players. It shows that free software contributes to sustainability well beyond operating systems. The main factor is found in a free software / hardware repurposing mix. Hardware represents 75% of the impact of electric equipment. Free software helps delay its obsolescence. Other areas appear essential like APIs and open protocols that give a new lease of life to several connected objects besides computers and smartphones.

Reconciling business needs and free software

Speaker: Maxime Besson, Worteks
Schedule: December 6 at 12:40.
Abstract: Some free software is funded by service contracts sold to large corporations which legitimately expect a certain number of features in return. How to implement these sometimes hyper specific needs within free software without encroaching on the needs of other users, compromising security or making maintenance more cumbersome? I talk about my experience as a free software developer and as a consultant paid by customers to solve their problems with this same software.

Telephony in the workplace: how to support the transition to software-only solutions.

Speaker: Jehan Monnier, the cofounder of Belledonne Communications
Schedule: December 6 at 16:20.
Abstract: The company telephony is constantly evolving, with IT and telecoms departments coming closer together within organisations over the last decade. Hardware IP telephones and physical servers are gradually being supplemented, or even replaced, by workstations on PCs and virtualised servers, or even by solutions offered in SaaS mode by service providers. Increased teleworking requires solutions that allow users to be mobile, and raises new issues of network and communications security. Finally, the rise of smartphones in the 2010s has rapidly led to the emergence of proprietary communications applications for the mass market, posing new challenges for developers of telecoms solutions. We will be presenting the complete open source client/server software solution for deploying and modernising your Voice over IP infrastructure.

The Importance of Collaborative Applications for European Digital Sovereignty

Speaker: Ludovic Dubost, XWiki
Schedule: December 6 at 15:20.
Abstract: Progress and challenges of alternatives facing the BigTechs.
In the latest years, the subject of European Digital Sovereignty is gaining ground. Clearly the dominant position of the BigTechs is making both European companies, Countries but also individual increasingly dependent on the product and services of the BigTechs. In order to regain our sovereignty we need to look at the full stack, from hardware, to cloud and to the software running on those hardware and clouds. In this talk I would like to present the importance of Collaborative applications as the entry point of all collaboration and the need to regain ground and move to Open Source solutions. I will show the progress made in the last years by different providers of Open Source solutions (NextCloud, Matrix, BigBlueButton, Jitsi, XWiki, CryptPad and many others), and also talk about initiatives to build alternative solutions in Europe, such as the Sovereign Workplace Project in Germany or the initiatives in France. 

The challenges and role of sovereign messaging in the Digital Workplace

Speaker: Pierre Baudracco,
Schedule: December 6 at 15:20.
Abstract: 2023: Digital Workplaces no longer ring the death knell of email! They have finally understood the importance and ubiquity of the leading communication channel. Collaborative messaging challenges are huge:
– The challenge of extending the scope of collaboration and integrating further into the Digital Workplace
– The challenge of sovereignty for the most widely used and exposed application
– The challenge of scalability and resilience for the most widely used and critical application
– And above all, the challenge of usage and respect for user habits, without which users will reject the solution.
Native Outlook support, revamped UX at the heart of development, instant upgrades and PRA, extensibility and collaborative interfaces.
This talk will discuss how BlueMind, the French open source messaging solution, has become the first alternative to Exchange and 365 by responding in practical ways to these challenges.

Round table: How to create a sustainable business based on an open source project

Speakers: Pierre-Yves Gibello, OW2, Elisa Nectoux, Belledonne Communications.
Schedule: December 6 at 17:00. 

How and why secure communications today against tomorrow's attacks?

Speaker: Johan Pascal, Freelance software security consultant for Belledonne Communications.
Schedule: December 7 at 13:30.
Abstract: We are going to talk about current developments in the field of quantum computing, which pose a growing threat to the cryptographic algorithms used today, for example in secure voice-over-IP and instant messaging applications. Although such a quantum computer has not yet been officially announced, some governments recommends protecting data against this type of attack by 2030. The encrypted data shared today could be stored and decrypted soon thanks to this breakthrough innovation. This is because encrypted data shared today could be stored and decrypted in the future by such quantum computers. That's why it's important to encrypt them today using algorithms that are robust to this type of attack. The Linphone application, for example, is one of the world's first open source communications software applications to have implemented the winning algorithm in the encryption key category, CRYSTALS-Kyber. One of the key milestones was the development of a modified version of the standard ZRTP encryption protocol.

About Open Source Experience:
Led by Systematic Paris Région, Open Source Experience is the meeting place for the entire free software sector, which brings together more than 6 000 professionals for 2 days! A place for technological exchanges, meetings and business opportunities dedicated to open source and all open digital players.
Visit: https://www.opensource-experience.com/en/

Practical information for OW2 members:
If you are an OW2 member, please consider joining us and sharing the village to showcase your projects and solutions. The Community village will be ideally located along OSXP main aisle and close from our partners. The illustration below gives an idea of the booth set up. 

The package includes:
- global signage and visibility as an exhibitor (entry on OSXP exhibitor directory)
- individual counter + stool
- the blue carpet
- the generic OW2 visual on partition including OW2 member logos
- individual signage for each booth with member logo and tagline
- a screen
- to be shared: brochure holder and meeting space (table and three chairs)

Contact us for more information and cost to participate. 

The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFSCON promotes the use of Free Software in digital infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.

OW2 is partner of SFSCon since many years now. We will be there on a booth run by OW2 corporate member Engineering Group and organizing a conference track. 

OW2 Conference Track

Date: Friday, November 10th, 2023, starting at 2 pm.
Venue: Seminar Room 2
Moderator: Noemi Maglio, Engineering Group

AGENDA

Talk 1: RIOS and the OSPO Alliance

Schedule : 14:00 - 14:15
Title: Updates on the OSPO Alliance and the Good Governance Initiative.
Speaker name: Stefano Pampaloni, Seacom
Abstract: The Good Governance Initiative (GGI) developped by the OSPO Alliance proposes a methodological framework to assess open-source awareness, compliance and governance in any kind of organizations, helping them to structure and improve the use of FOSS towards an OSPO. This presentation will highlight the main progresses and new features achieved since last year's introduction at SFScon, such as the translation of the GGI Good Governance in five languages, the recent Success Stories presented in the OnRamp meeting series, and many more. 

Talk 2: TETYS project

Schedule: 14:15- 14:30
Title:The CORD-19 Topic Visualizer: Exploring the evolution of research topics during the COVID-19 pandemic
Speaker name : Francesco Invernici, Politecnico di Milano
Abstract : The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped research across various fields, producing an unprecedented flood of articles. In response, several open-access corpora were created; among them, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) collected over a million articles in 2.5 years. 

In this presentation, we introduce the CORD-19 Topic Visualizer (CORToViz), a method and tool for exploring CORD-19's scientific abstracts. It uses a stack of modern open source technologies to cluster articles and mine temporal topics. CORToViz has an interactive dashboard for quick topic visualization, time series tracking, and statistical testing.

We will show the results extracted with CORToViz, which allowed us to visualize and tell in a synthetic way what happened to react against COVID-19, comparing it with the key moments of the pandemic. The high adaptability of our approach suits any textual document corpus, and it lends itself easily to exploring new challenging fields of research, such as climate change. 

CORToViz represents the first prototype of a series, which we aim to develop within the NGI Search Program, under the TETYS project (Topics Evolution That You See), aiming to build the next-generation Web topics explorer.
See it on SFScon website: https://www.sfscon.it/talks/the-cord-19-topic-visualizer

Talk 3: HeReFaNMi project

Schedule: 14:30 - 14:45
Title : Can AI counteract Health-related Fake News? HeReFaNMi: an open-source project to counteract health-related misinformation
Speaker name: Alessandro Bruno, PhD in Computer Science, Faculty of Communication, IULM
Abstract: HeReFaNMi (Health-Related Fake News Mitigation) is an NGI-Search-funded project to give back trustworthiness to the Internet community by tackling fake news spread. Other than the well-known cyber threats, several factors have been undermining the Internet search experience lately. One of the pandemic's lessons learned concerns the health-related fake news spread over websites and social media networks. Some nefarious effects came as a non-negligible hesitancy towards national healthcare systems' guidelines. Since then, several AI-powered solutions have been developed to counteract fake news circulation using supervised and unsupervised learning. The task is challenging due to the need for continuous updating upon introducing new scientific findings. The so-called data drift and catastrophic forgetting also affect the effectiveness of AI-powered classification methods. LLMs (Large Language Models) have recently made their way through the AI landscape by delivering unprecedented performances over text analytics, mining, question and answering systems, and text generation. However, LLMs suffer from Hallucination, meaning they can elaborate contents that are unreliable as a source of truth even when fine-tuned on scientifically sound datasets.
See it on SFScon website:https://www.sfscon.it/talks/can-ai-counteract-health-related-fake-news/

More information about SFScon: https://www.sfscon.it/

Mindtrek Conference
October 3, 2023
Tempere, Finland
Website: https://www.mindtrek.org/

OW2 member "City of Paris" will participate at the Mindtrek 2023 conference and give a keynote talk.  

About Mindtrek: Mindtrek is an international technology conference organized annually in the city of Tampere, Finland that offers a horizontal view into the field of future technology. It’s all about networking and exchanging ideas with people who come from different backgrounds and who have different areas of expertise. Mindtrek consists of several different sessions. Themes of the conference vary each year and can cover topics such as open source, open data, smart city, immersive tech, eHealth, IoT, AI and more.

OW2 is happy to be partner of the 2023 Open Source Week, organized by RIOS, Rete Italiana Open Source. 

Dates: October 3-5, 2023
Venue: Eataly Roma - Piazzale 12 Ottobre 1492, 00154 Roma
Website: https://opensourceweek.it/

The OSPO Alliance and GGI (Good Governance Initiative) will be presented Day one by our partners from RIOS. 

Find more information about RIOS: www.reteitalianaopensource.net

OW2's position on the CRA is clear: we are not trying to get all of open source out of scope, but CRA should only apply to direct commercial beneficiaries of OSS deployment. "Full stop", should we add?

For details, please refer to OSI's September 4, 2023 post by Simon Phipps ("Diverse Open Source uses highlight need for precision in Cyber Resilience Act") which  perfectly reflects our vision. We have no other requirements, and fully support its conclusion:

"The Cyber Resilience Act should exclude all activities prior to commercial deployment of software and clearly ensure that responsibility for CE marks does not rest with any actor who is not a direct commercial beneficiary of deployment."

About the Cyber Resilience Act:
The proposal for a regulation on cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements, known as the Cyber Resilience Act, bolsters cybersecurity rules to ensure more secure hardware and software products. Even though the CRA provides an exemption for open source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity, there are many remaining challenges in defining the scope of the exemption, which are currently beeing discussed.
Find more about the CRA initial introduction from the EU: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-resilience-act

We are collecting below a number of useful links from the press, media and technical blogs to provide some background information on the topic. 

• Position of the CNLL, French Cluster of free digital and open source software companies, September 6
• Article from APELL : Europe’s Open Source Industry’s Statement on the Cyber Resilience Act, September 5 
• "Diverse Open Source uses highlight need for precision in Cyber Resilience Act, Blog post from OSI, September 4
• "No Cyber resilience without open source sustainability", Blog post from Github, July 12
• "European Parliaments version if the CRA threatens cybersecurity and open source development", Blog from Mozilla Foundation, July 13 
• "EU Cyber Resilience Act moves to next stage impending tragedy for open source", Article DevClass, July 21

[French version]
La communauté open source OW2 recherche une collaboration avec un/une travailleur indépendant(e) du secteur marketing et/ou évènementiel pour l'organisation de sa conférence annuelle (en Juin 2024) : OW2con'24.

OW2 est une communauté informatique indépendante dédiée à la promotion de logiciels open source pour les systèmes d'information et à l’animation de leur écosystème. Chaque année, OW2 rassemble à l'occasion de sa conférence annuelle environ 200 participants (30% d'étrangers), incluant des experts, responsables de service informatique, architectes, développeurs et chefs de projets open source.

Période et durée de la mission: la prestation s'étalera sur une période allant de février à juin, sur une base d'une demi-journée par semaine au démarrage, évoluant jusqu'à une journée par semaine avant l'évènement. Nous prévoyons une enveloppe d'environ 6 à 10 journées au total. La présence sur place à Paris courant juin est à prévoir (les dates seront précisées ultérieurement, prévoir 3 jours de déplacement, les frais seront pris en charge).

Descriptif:

• Suivi et mise à jour du retro-planning existant, en soutien et en collaboration avec la Responsable Evènement OW2.

• Gestion des prestataires (consultations, choix, suivi des commandes, facturation, accueil et suivi pendant l'évènement).

• Participation à la définition et l'implémentation du plan de communication, et contribution à l'animation communautaire en amont de l'évènement, aide au recrutement de participants.

• Participation aux autres tâches selon les besoins et disponibilités.

Le/la prestataire devra faire preuve de d'initiatives et capacités d'adaptations, d'un niveau correct d'anglais (anglais écrit minimum requis). Une expérience de base dans l'évènementiel, ainsi qu'une connaissance du secteur informatique et de l'open source seraient appréciées.

Merci de contacter: catherine.nuel@ow2.org

_

[English version]
The OW2 open source community is looking for a collaboration with a freelancer specializing in marketing and/or events management for the organization of its annual conference (in June 2024): OW2con'24.

OW2 is an independent IT community dedicated to the promotion of open source software for information systems and the animation of their ecosystem. Each year, OW2 brings together around 200 participants (30% from abroad) at its annual conference, including experts, IT managers, architects, developers and open source project managers.

Period and duration of the mission: the mission will be spread over a period from February to June, on the basis of half a day per week at the start, evolving to one day per week before the event. We anticipate an envelope of approximately 6 to 10 days in total. Presence on site in Paris during June is to be expected (the dates will be specified later, allow 3 days of travel, the costs will be covered).

Description of tasks:

• Follow-up and update of the existing retro-planning, in support and in collaboration with the OW2 Event Manager.
• Management of suppliers (consultations, choice, follow-up of orders, invoicing, reception and follow-up during the event).
• Participation in the definition and implementation of the communication plan, and contribution to community animation before the event, help in recruiting new participants.
• Participation in other tasks according to needs and availability.

The freelancer must show initiative and adaptability, a good level of English (minimum written English required). Basic experience in events, as well as knowledge of the IT sector and open source would be appreciated.

Thanks for contacting: catherine.nuel@ow2.org