So, hello, everyone. Welcome to this interview that I have to admit I'm very excited about. My name is Lina Ceballos. I'm part of the Free Software Foundation Europe, a charity that over the last 20 years has been empowering user control technology. And for the last four years, we have worked on our public money public code initiative that demands that free software should be the standard for publicly financed software. So, today we have this story around this, the story around the lack of public card in the public sector and also some open solutions that was also developed by the public. So, I have with me today a Christian Landberg and a Alexander Crawford. And they will tell us a little bit better about the OpenSchool Platform, pardon my Swedish, or OpenSchool Platform. This is an open platform that was developed by some parents. And I was aimed to fix some issues that was found in the proprietary school that was developed by the city of Stockholm. And that it cost 1 billion Swedish crown, which is 100 million euros, if wrong. And that it was supposed to make the life of 500,000 children, teachers and parents easier. That brought a lot of trouble and even more to the parents who decided to fix it and develop an open alternative that actually works. So, the plot of this story involves a lot of bureaucratic issues, security problems, a very serious vendor locking the police and so more, but to tell us the story better. So, welcome Christian and Alexander. It is a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Great. So, I think to kick this off, let's start with our short introduction around so you can tell us a little bit about who you are and what kind of role did you play in this open school platform.  I can probably start. So, my background is I'm an entrepreneur and a programmer since I was eight and I've been studying a lot of companies and helping a lot of clients with digitalization and also involved a lot in the tech sector and running a lot of hackathons and started a lot of companies. So, and I also have three kids. So, last year or we should probably start nine years ago when we started hearing about this new big project that was announced from the city. But I'll talk more about that after Alexander introduced himself. Thank you. Yeah, thanks Christian and hi again, Lena. Nice to be here. Yeah, so my name is Alexander Crawford and I've lived in Sweden for 30 years. I'm not a developer. I'm not a programmer. I did a little bit of HTML maybe 25 years ago, but that's the extent of my IT or my developer knowledge. But I'm really interested in policy, in the debate about policy and about how to shape government policy and local government policy around a range of issues and especially around tech and digital. So, for me, the open school platform was an opportunity to help the real pioneers, the guys who built it and the guys and women who built it. And but also see how this project could be used to actually change the conversation, the broader conversation. And that's maybe we can get back to that a little bit later. But I think it's good to begin with this story itself. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. And I think it's very interesting to have this mix of background, you know, more technical, but more like policy oriented background as well. Because I'm also personally not a developer or anything. I'm also more interested in the policy area. And I think this is this is a property that we all have to have. So thank you so much for that introduction. And as you, Alexander said, I think in order to understand the scale of the story, we should have a little bit of background about the whole thing. So Christian, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about how the school platform that was provided by the city was and what it was meant to be used for. And in general, what kind of issues you found along the way as a user, but later on as a developer. Yeah, so I think it was two thousand two thousand thirteen. They started with the announcement that now they're going to do something really, really great. They invested or they had a budget for 60 million euros for a huge digital platform for helping everyone in the schools in Stockholm. And the whole tech sector and all the programmers I know were reacting the same way. This is not going to be ending well. This is a monolithic approach. They're going to try to solve too much at the same time. But they started anyway with this and they procured a couple of vendors for doing this. And but during the time when they started developing this news came out from from from the project that it was delayed and it's going to be costing more. And I think it was two thousand eighteen. They launched this and I have three kids. So I was on front seat to to to see this failure of a launch because everything stopped working. It was really slow. You can find anything. It was really bad UX and but as we all know, when you have to have a little bit of patience, when you when you are seeing a new system launched in that scale. So, you know, one year passed by and then a lot of security issues were published that some parent just tried to change some query parameters. And we realized that this is this is not even secure. So they paid paid a lot of money and they have made a lousy job at doing it user friendly, but also loves the job at doing it securely. So something were obviously not right in this and one more year passed by. So now we are at the autumn of two thousand twenty. And I got so frustrated because my my school or my children's school, they the the teachers were forced to use this platform, even though it didn't work at all. The every information about the kids were sent through this platform. So every morning I had to log into this and it was really and it is still really slow and it's always crashes. And you have to log out every time you change between kids and you can't really find anything in this. So I got so frustrated. So I started communicating openly about my frustration and I realized that it's a lot of lot of parents that feel exactly the same way, which would be expected. But I also realized that the teachers in the school were also really, really frustrated with this this platform. So then I decided to start looking into this in a little bit more detail. So I created the first version of the app or I think it was precisely one year ago today, actually, and posted a picture and a small video of of this on social media and also published the source code and encouraged everyone else to join this and try to help building something that actually works. And then this sparked a lot of lot of hope, I think, in the community that it's this is actually something we can solve because everyone has the same problem like you have to get this information. You're so frustrated. This takes a lot of energy in your mornings and in your afternoons and to use this platform because it's so, so hard to use. But also, you know how much money it was. This was already a discussion when you know how much money it has has costed when you see how bad it is. Then this is this is very like an eerie feeling that you want to scratch or get rid of somehow. And obviously also do something about. So there was a lot of a lot of enthusiasm with that we could find a way to solve this ourselves. So there were a couple of friends of mine, old colleagues that a new friends that jumped on board and started developing this app and we developed an API and we did a lot of a lot of work during during Christmas holidays last year. And then in February, we started communicating with media about this and the media started to get an interest in this. And we also realized this is this is a huge thing. People are really interested in both this this problem and understanding how much money and what the money has been spent on. But also that there is a possibility to do something about it. So this was this was already an interesting story before we even launched the app. But then we we launched the app and it directly became a success. It was first on on App Store on Google Play Store directly and it got very good reviews, even though that when the app the first version, I think was just like three functions. It was really, really basic, but those three functions really worked really well and fast and didn't have any bugs. So so everyone started downloading this. And and then, of course, the city was was both, I think, a little bit upset about if we can solve this during our Christmas holiday and they couldn't solve this for for nine years. And then it's a little bit embarrassing for them to do that. But also they they wanted to to look at the legal perspective to see that this app was was also legal. And they they made some claims directly in media, which I think was not very smart because they already presumed that this app was illegal, even though they hadn't done any any proper research at that point. So that was a little bit of a mistake, I think, which probably forced them into continuing on that to have that position throughout this process. But yeah, so that that was pretty much the whole story up until we started developing the app. And at that point when we launched, a lot of interest came also from from other developers and also PR companies and illustrators and Alexander from a policy perspective legal interest. So at that point, we already had a discord with the I think it was 20 people or something like that in the in the early weeks of when we have when we have launched. So yeah, this sparked the whole movement, you could say. And and you know, we could talk a lot about the different learnings and all the different different events that happened after that. But Alexander, what's from from your point of view? What's what was your reaction at this point? Yeah, well, I was I was an observer and Kristin, you and I have known each other for a long time and you you vented your frustrations repeatedly and ongoingly with me. But from my perspective, already then in February, March, April, when this began to be talked about outside of narrow developer circles and outside of narrow kind of school politics or school policy in the city of Stockholm, it felt that or I reacted feeling, wow, I've been involved in so many, you know, policy dialogues and policy seminars and conferences where there is a lot of talk about new digit the new digital infrastructure and new digital landscape and how to build the infrastructure for, you know, for the 2020s and beyond. And behind all of that talk or in contrast to all of that talk, this venture, this initiative was wasn't talk, it was actually a new tool. And the way in which a new tool really, really impacted the conversation. And of course, it didn't just happen. I mean, part of this kind of the Opener School Platform and Collective, as you said, Christian, there are some really, really good, you know, PR people and even and, you know, legal people and all of those who really joined this project, mainly because many of them are parents and have been frustrated just like you had been for so many years and felt the least I can do is, you know, donate a few hours to the initiative.  So I was lucky enough to have them go through school before the school platform. But I can very, very much identify with the frustrations. But the way in which this has already back in, you know, March, April started changing the conversation. And since then, of course, and especially, I think, culminating in the last month or last few weeks, it's been just amazing to see how a little, little snowball has just escalated. And, you know, is without using two big words is, you know, it's changing the conversation around public civil civic tech and and, you know, public digital, the digitalization of public sector. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's very, it's very interesting to see how a lot of people think that proprietor software, because then you pay, it should work and it should be secure and then it should, yeah, satisfy all the needs of every user. But in this case, we can really see that that was not the case. And it is also quite interesting to see how I would say that it was an open platform, you know, everybody could join and then it became this, what you're saying, like this whole movement. So I'm a little bit curious now, Christian, because since you were the one developing, what drove you to release this under a free software license? Like, did you foresee this coming? Did you think this was going to bring people together and it will help you? Or, yeah, just I'm very curious to know this. Yeah, so yeah, that's a really good question. But you have to also remember that my company that I work for and that I founded ITN, we are only working with open software ourselves as an open source. And most of our clients in public sector, but also pretty much every customer we have in the private sector as well, understands that open software actually makes sense because you have so many more potential eyes that will look at your code. And if you could divide the cost of maintaining a lot of the code between other actors, especially the parts that you aren't the part of your core business, but the rest of it, like everything else, if you can, first of all, try to find something, some open source software that solves 90% of your problem, then it's much easier than you have to try to find, you know, develop something of your own. But when you are developing something of your own, why do you have to maintain that yourself if that's not part of your core business? So even our private customers are interested in using and utilization of open source as much as possible. And also from a political standpoint, we have been trying to start this conversation about how to explain to the public sector that this is not about cost, cost efficiency, but it's about openness and participation and democracy in a sense. Like, a lot of the people that are work in my company, we have kind of some sort of philosophical idea on what type of society we are trying to build with our clients, and that's... So to me, that was kind of the easiest way to do it. And also I realized I'm not gonna be able to do all this myself. I need to involve a lot of other people. So if I try to close this down as much as possible, then in the end, that's just gonna be me trying to maintain something that it's not gonna be big. But rather, I try to use the lessons learned from a TED talk called How to Start a Movement. So that was very key for me to those lessons. And that the TED talk, I can recommend it to everyone. But it talks a lot about how the leader is not the most important part, but rather the first followers are the key to the movement because the rest will not follow the leader. The rest will follow the first movers, the first followers. So I try to embrace as much as possible everyone that jumped on board directly. And there was a lot of media interests and everything. So we try to do this as much as possible to be many people, not just me talking all the time. And also trying to try to be as inclusive as possible in regards to who can contribute. So, and also celebrate every contribution we got. So a lot of those like learnings on how to do something open that we have been doing a lot of time. And this time we could do it with the kind of media intention as well, which was really interesting. So we got an example now to really perfect these different things that we think is important when you start, when you try to start something like this. Because we have seen so many clients trying to do this the wrong way and also other projects that they open an API, and they publish a press release that they have an API, but then they really don't aren't interested in the first users or kind of trying to start something bigger. And also other types of open source projects that start working in the closed for two months. And then when they're finished and they feel now it's ready to publish. And they see the publication of open source as something big. And they are just expecting to for everyone to just jump on board and help them free and doing the work that they. So the key difference here was to do it open from default like the first line of code is you can still still go back to seeing the first attempts that I did one year ago. That all of those things were open from the beginning which means that it's much easier for someone to be part of it to contribute with something very early on which I think is one of the key things when you're joining a movement that you feel that you are you can be a part of the in crowd if you're early. So a lot of psychology and a lot of ideas that we have learned from the last 10 years or so. We now got the opportunity to actually test them in reality when we had full control over it because most of the time we usually have a client and someone else that have a say in what we can do or not do, but in this case we already had one thing that we could actually control ourselves. So we tried to do it and it turned out pretty well. So yeah, that was kind of the, there was a lot of ideas and thoughts about how to do this right and just in beginning. And these two co-founders Eric, which was first and then Johan Bink, both of them had this same idea. So we have talked about this for a long time. So this was actually kind of a combination of some long discussion that were already started a long time before we started doing this. Yeah, and also that I think that frustration that drove you to take one step ahead. I think a lot of people could really identify with that because I mean, there's a lot of like parents like you too that were going through the same thing. So just the fact that it was open for them to also collaborate and to join, it is wonderful. And you also mentioned something that it's very interesting and is that the openness that a free software license offers can actually help a lot, not only to develop the app and to improve it, but also to identify this kind of box on this kind of security issues that there might be. And to me, it's so interesting to see how actually the city of Stockholm called Illigo, this platform, when you were actually trying to help to fix a security issue that you found. And if I'm not mistaken, that for which the city of Stockholm had to pay a GDPR fine. So perhaps Alexander, what do you think like, can you maybe tell us a little bit about how did the developers and also the supporters of the open school platform handle this situation when they realized that this was not only a technical matter, it was also involving some legal and policy aspects? Yeah, thanks, that's a really good question. And the interesting thing was that without going into, without knowing exactly what Christian and Eric's and you one and the other very early developers, what was in their mind, but I think right from the start, the main instinct was to help parents. And being very clear that this project, this initiative is to help the parents. It's not to help the teachers, because this isn't a teacher platform and it's not really to help the pupils on their platform, but this is a group of parents getting together to help other parents in a spirit of positivity, if you like. What happened then quite early with the resistance that came, the strong resistance culminating, of course, in a police investigation and complex legal issues. That, of course, increased the, let's say, animosity almost, you could say, of the open school platform against, and this is where it gets interesting, because it's not really, you have to, well, think a little bit about and know a little bit about how big public sector digital projects are decided and financed and managed and carried out usually how it's been done in the past. And in Sweden, as in many countries, you have a few politicians sitting as politicians, deciding the main strategies and the main policies, and then you have a group of civil servants who've usually been there a long time, and the politicians come and go, the civil servants remain, and then you have vendors, you have, well, you have the suppliers, you have the companies who are providing the solutions. And the key in this case was that they almost inadvertently managed to get the open school platform collective to be against all three of these stakeholders, of all three of these groups. So the politicians, and you, Christian and others, began, of course, having conversations with the politicians. But then it became quite obvious that the politicians only had so much agency about these issues and it fell a lot to the civil servants and the legal department and the CIO, CDOs of both the city of Stockholm as a whole and the school, the school system in Sweden, schools are managed at the municipal level. In other countries, it's national. So, but still, Stockholm is a big municipality and there are many, many, many, hundreds of thousands of kids, school kids and parents. So it's a big corporation if you like. And then, of course, the vendors and then you get into the whole issue of public procurement and how do you manage procurement of these kinds of projects. And all of this came up to the surface in such an interesting way. And that really helped to kind of get a lot of people, including myself, I did not know the details, the intricacies of public procurement of big digital platforms. Six months ago and I kind of assumed that, well, yeah, that probably works quite well. It's, you know, the public servants will just like they use public procurement for all other municipal services, I guess they will use it wisely in this case and you discover, no, they don't. And you would think that, well, public procurement in Europe means that there is a functioning market and that players of various sizes from the big corporations to the small startups, like the company that you run, Christian, are all able to compete on a level playing field for being part of these things. And you discover, no, no, no, that's not all the case. And, you know, they're a handful of very, very, very, very large vendors who have dominated, have cornered this market and keep it, you know, forever and ever. And throughout this whole year, the whole question of, so, you know, what are the actual relationships between the vendor and the public servants and the, you know, and, you know, without going into all the details of all the different inquiries, you know, there's really no, we couldn't find any emails between the vendors and the city of Stockholm for this, you know, 100 million euro project. So that means, well, how do they communicate? So it was just a very, very rapid kind of learning journey into procurement of large digital solutions, which then in turn kind of awakens the broader question which is, okay, now that we're supposed to be building an infrastructure for, you know, a digital society or a digitalized society, what are the principles behind that infrastructure? Who should be doing what? Is it the case that the city of Stockholm should do everything? Of course not. We didn't do everything when it's about physical infrastructure, like, you know, water and sewages and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. They do something and then there's a clear line and say beyond this, it's up to, you know, others to do it and we provide the interoperability and we provide the interfaces or, you know, to put it in these terms, we provide the APIs and then it's up to others to develop the solutions that they feel are the most interesting. So, but that, I guess in a way that the resistance of the city of Stockholm at both political level and civil servant level kind of energized, kept energizing the open school platform movement. There were times when it felt heavy, wouldn't you say, Christian?  Hey, come on, how far should we go? But at the same time, it did energize and it meant that more and more people joined, people who don't have kids in Stockholm, people who don't even live in Stockholm, the developer all across Sweden joined and then of course leading to the, perhaps the coming step in this whole process, other municipalities outside of Stockholm saying, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't make the same mistakes that Stockholm is doing, maybe we should make sure that when we develop our school platform or whatever other digital platform for other public sector services, let's do it in a smart way, let's make sure there are APIs. And in some cases, the solution that was developed for Stockholm will most probably be used in other municipalities in handshakes and welcoming and almost embraces between the political level, the civil servants in the city and the developer community. Yeah, I just want to add one more thing to the idea of openness and the brilliance of that in public sector because as we said, if the city of Stockholm would have had a different mindset from the beginning, they would definitely have seen this as the perfect way to solve their problems. Like, okay, so here's a bunch of parents that have built one thing and we have all the other municipalities in Sweden that also have the similar problems. And this could be kind of the start of something new. And the rest of the municipalities are looking at this in that way. So they are actively now collaborating with us to try to see how can we make sure that this app that we have developed in Stockholm also is compatible with the school platform in Gothenburg. And we are doing a lot of work to kind of divide the code in a way so it's going to be really easy for every municipality to do their own adapter. So the same user interface could be used in many different municipalities, but also not only in Sweden. The app is now translated into, I think it's 15 languages. So it's in Danish and Norwegian and English, of course, and French and Italian and also Arabic and Somali and I think it's Japanese and also Latino. So the app is already published in many different languages. So now we actually have a start of a movement that could be much larger than just for the city of Stockholm but also the municipalities in Sweden.  And that way you could also show by doing the potential of this movement, this idea of openness which is from my perspective, looking at kind of where Europe are in the terms of global economy. We have United States, we have China and they all have really big tech companies that are competing with each other but Europe, we don't have that many tech companies in that level so we can't really compete with them in size but I think if we can spark a movement of openness and collaboration and embrace the European Union and the ideas of why the EU started in the first place if we can make sure to use openness as our competitive advantage and do much better collaboration between each other instead of just waiting for the public sector to start doing and giving us allowance to do this, we can actually make sure that we show them that this is possible without them telling us to do it or asking for permission to do it but rather just do it because as we showed now in Sweden is that this police investigation and all these privacy washing propaganda, if you would say, were ineffective. That just helped us to get more traction and more interest and in the end, once they understood the principles in which we have developed this app where all the information that the app is gathering is not stored elsewhere, it's just stored on your device which means that we are not liable for any action that the app is or any information we can't really see as developers, we can't see any of the information and once you start using those principles which is basically privacy by design what's said in the first sentence of GDPR if you just follow those rules and the design principles of GDPR and you do it in an open way so everyone can look at the code and make sure that you are doing it right. There are so many different potentials of these types of apps, in healthcare, in transport business and to tackle all the problems with climate change, a lot of different things in terms of procurement itself, all the different aspects that are that feels wrong in society right now that it's going too slow, there are these types of opportunities where you can start developing something for yourself to solve one problem for you and then publishing the code and doing exactly what we did and if we start seeing those type of movements we can start seeing a lot of potential for Europe to start being so much more collaborative and effective but also competitive in terms of the global economy. So I think this could be in hope for the we could spark that type of movement for this example. Yes, yes, certainly. And actually that's one of our ideas exactly with this interview is to highlight these examples so other administrations can actually see and avoid falling on the mistakes that unfortunately the city of Stockholm made of not seeing the potential of the openness that this platform had and how it could help to improve the existing platform and also as you mentioned, the option of like interoperate with other cities, the call of collaboration with all the cities, all their countries and it's very interesting what you just shared with us that there is some collaboration started like already taking place and hopefully in the future, other cities of Sweden or other countries can actually reuse this platform and actually save some money, avoid some vendor locking and as you also mentioned, let free software, small and medium enterprises to compete in a market that is being run for by the big corporations. So coming back a little bit to the case of the legal issue, like the data protection issue and so on. I just find this case so fascinating. So I'm being following a little bit and if I read that actually the city of Stockholm made an official statement and it somehow in a way said that they will let you get access to this data within the system, but with a condition that it will be like external providers setting up the license for you and namely the open school platform and the city. So could you like maybe you both tell me a little bit about this decision and what do you think? Do you think it will undermine the openness of the platform or it will improve it or what are your thoughts about this recent decision? Yeah, I think one big part of the story has not been solved yet and that's money and business model. I think so far we haven't reimbursed anyone helping us with developing this platform, but really from the start, we felt that to do this correctly and do it in a way that people can expect that it actually continues to work even when media attention has been falling off. We wanted to make sure that we have some sort of business model so we have some sort of money coming in so we can reimburse everyone that wants to help out. But still we also wanted to make sure that it was cheap enough so everyone could use it and pay for the app. So right now it costs one euro to download. But that's of course something that would be better if somehow we could finance this because it's a public effort, this is something that would need to be free at some point. But then you kind of get to the point where you don't really know and you can't really expect that this should work even in two years from now. And it's a lot of initiatives that I've been seeing that are starting really well but then start the interest from the founder and the original contributors are falling off. So after a while it just becomes stale. But what we wanted to show was something that could continue growing and continue to be better and better and have some sort of sustainable business model attached to it. So the city of Stockholm, they had a really good idea I think was to license this. So the parents didn't have to pay them by themselves but the city would pay instead of the parents. So that was the main idea. But what they didn't do was to pick up a calculator and understand that this actually costs a lot of money if they want to do this. So when we finally just realized what they were asking for and we sent them the offer, they just said this is too expensive. So they didn't kind of do the math before promising out loud that this is something they're gonna do. So what they did and the effect of that was that instead of helping us, they actually just made things worse because if you know that the app is gonna be free in two months, then you're not gonna download it and buy it now. So you just force the users out from our platform and waiting for them to approve it and pay for it. So that was another thing that they did wrong. They should have investigated this and have some sort of discussion about prices and then after we have came to a conclusion, then they could have gone out to the media and said, this is what's gonna happen. So that was another mistake that they did. But in the end, there's still no kind of really good way of handling these type of open or financing these type of open projects without either getting paid from the users themselves or getting some sort of like state innovation funds, Vinnova and things like that. Or like they suggested, get the actual city that it's the one that probably should pay for these type of services and find a way for them to start paying for this. So that's still an open question. And I'm hoping that some of the other municipalities will have easier to try to solve this in a kind of more flexible way than the city of Stockholm was doing. Yes, Alexander, would you like to add something here? Yeah, I think what's important and what became clear was the need for basic knowledge and information about how these kinds of things work. It felt like, I mean, what happened when the city of Stockholm decided to try to look for another model, procurement model, basically, for the school platform. It became clear quite quickly that that was a political decision that wasn't really anchored in the organization itself. So the political leadership was quick to say, of course we want to contribute to the creation of an ecosystem of developers who can, et cetera, et cetera. And we welcome the open school platform and we've together with our legal team and procurement team, we think we've found a solution to do that, except just like Christian said, there was, as far as we know, there was no budget allocated and no budget allocated, or the money that was maybe allocated was nowhere near the huge public procurement of the large vendors. And that meant yet again that something that has the potential of having a real or has had a real positive impact in the daily lives of families is kind of relegated to being almost like a little humanitarian project or a nonprofit that works somewhere out at the edges doing something good, but far away from the big machinery of local government. And it's that philosophy that you need to attack and somehow change because without changing that there won't be any funding available for anyone, but the large vendors and the ones who can make it through the huge procurement procedures. And hopefully the open school platform will be a little bit of an eye-opener for others, maybe not the ones who have been spending the last 12 months trying to basically kill the open school platform initiative, but for others in other municipalities and for others in Stockholm. And in 10 months or nine months it's local elections in Stockholm and hopefully the election campaign at the local level when you're talking about so what do we want for the schools in Stockholm? It's not only a question of curriculum and class sizes and et cetera, et cetera, but it's also things that, well, it would also be good. And hopefully some party will come out and say, well, part of our campaign is also to make sure that the digital tools for parents are as good as possible and are developed in a modern kind of forward-leading way that will ensure that we can keep them updated, keep them cutting edge without falling into five or seven year contracts with huge vendors. Yeah, and I just want to add into that debate also not only financing these things, but also making sure that the APIs they have in the city are open because this shouldn't have to be a political issue because the city have already decided in 2017 that before the last election that the APIs should be open and they have a strategy to collaborate between the city and entrepreneurs to try to gather as much as possible from all the programmers that are already working here. And you have to remember in Stockholm you have the most common job in Stockholm is to be programmer. That's above everything else because of our huge tech sector. Because so we have, I think it was 67 or 6 billion euros in VC capital just during this year coming, like money coming into Sweden to help all the startups to grow, which means and all the startups are in the tech sector. So that just means that we have a lot of programmers, a lot of tech competence here. So we already have the competence now we just have to bridge that over to help also the public sector in the digitalization space. Yes, exactly. Like kind of to promote this synergy of promoting local economy and also like saving a cost in the public sector with the public procurement and also avoiding vendor lock-ins and just making a more collaborative ecosystem in terms of digital infrastructure. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. This story is very interesting. And just to draw to a close and I can already got a little bit of the feeling of what your perspective is, but just to wrap this up, you working for and own a free software solution. What do you think is the biggest challenge that administrations have nowadays to modernize their digital infrastructure with public code? And in general, what would be your advice for those who want to work on free software solutions in the future? I can take the first question and you can take the second, Christian, maybe. Sounds good. Yeah, I'd say that the answer to the first question is just competence, just learning, just understanding how it works, that it is the case for a citizen and I think even more so for a publicly elected official to know something about the digital world, how it works, what are the key principles, how does, how should one think about these kinds of things? So, and how do you change, how do you level up the level of competence in among our publicly elected officials? It's like we've done in so many other areas in the past years and decades and centuries, you just, it takes time, but there's a need of an alliance of the people in the sector and then you need the journalists to start asking questions about that and inside the parties themselves, the few people who know something about that need to be able to go upstairs to the party leadership and say, hey guys, we really need to think through the digital part of our party program or of our election platform. And we need to talk to people like Christian and have contact with organizations such as yours to learn more about this. So that's my easy cop out answer, more competence. I think it's very good actually. Yeah, but I think we need to understand that this has been two shifts, one shift that came like in the 80s and 90s where we got computers and software and tried to move from paper to kind of documents inside of a computer and starting sending emails and the office packages and printers and all of that. That's the kind of the IT revolution. But then in 95, when the web came along, that sparked its own revolution and that's what the next phase is about. So when people and especially as politicians are talking about the utilization, I think that in their minds, they already think that they have control of this because that's what they have been doing for the last 20 years. They have been doing computerization. Like they have installed computers everywhere and they have web browsers and they have office packages and SharePoints and a lot of tools within the IT sphere. But what the tech sector is about and the changes, the disruptive changes to society, those things are oblivious to them. I don't think that they see them in the same way as the rest of society is doing. So I think this is a gap between the private sector and the tech sector and also the IT sectors because there's a lot of vendors that are now thriving in the golden era or the remainder of the IT sector because there's a lot of contracts, there's a lot of collaborations, you have a lot of relationships and they are stuck in that era. And what the politicians needs to do is to understand how can we move the society and the public sector from the IT era over to the internet era and try to understand what's the playing rules in that era. And because that's where Facebook is, that's where Spotify is, that's where Baidu is and Tencent and all the other players that are not stuck in SharePoint or vendors in that size, they are trying to force network effects over to society and try to bridge those finding those small hurdles in how to make their products better and better at a continuous rate. And that's not what you get when you have this type of politics in the public sector. And so going back to Alexander's point, that means in effect that you have to switch place for a lot of people, you have to bring in more people from the tech sector into this conversation, but also into these organizations that you control that you are in charge of. You have to make sure that they think in kind of the internet era's mindset of continuous development, continuous improvement, continuous delivery, those type of questions should be strategical discussions in all the different agencies that you have in society. And if you don't have those, then you are stuck in kind of the old era and you are eventually gonna be just more and more costly and less and less effective. And in the end, you're gonna be thrown out by these type of initiatives that we can represent. We are a disruptive force to force the discussion, but also the government agencies and the municipalities to start thinking in new ways. And the good thing is that parents are actually helped every morning by that solution as well. Yeah, that is true. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And now we as FSFE, we are also trying to educate people around the free software because we still believe that there is a lot of myths and misunderstandings around these new solutions that could actually bring a lot of good things in terms of digital infrastructure and use in general, like for digital buys. Every time we're going a little bit more digital. Okay, yeah, thank you so much for you two for being here today. I really think this is a perfect case that portrays in a very good way, how some issues such as security risks, vendor lockings, lack of technical support can actually be avoided and also fixed with free software solutions. Yeah, so thank you once again for being here. It was a very nice chat and it was a pleasure to have you both here. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks, take care, take care, bye.


Welcome to the Crimson Engine, my name is Rebedium. Today we are looking at this camera, the Canon EOS R, which is not out yet. I'm shooting this in the pretty awesome test bay at Canon in Burbank. They have lights, they have focus charts, they have a whole bunch of cool monitors and things to look at. So I was able to get my hands on this camera and just wanted to like play around with it a little bit, put it through its paces, just get a sense of what the usability is for cinema, because that's what I'm most interested in. How does this function as a B or a C camera for the C200, C300 users out there? If you have a 5D Mark III or Mark IV, is this the camera you've been waiting to upgrade with? If you don't have a second camera and you're thinking about maybe getting a second C200 for alternate angles, will you be able to get away with the EOS R, which is maybe a quarter or a third of the price? Because this is a mirrorless camera, the dynamics are different. Going back, you have this area here, which is the customizable ring that you're able to set to control. This right now it's controlling the aperture, but you can also set it to control shutter speed or any number of things that the camera lets you customize. There's a big flip screen on the back, which is a huge step up from the 5D Mark II and Mark III that I have, because you can turn this around and if you're operating a second camera or using this as a camera on a tripod, you can bend the screen around and have to be able to check what the camera is shooting. I guess the main thing about this camera is that it's just the next evolution of Canon's stills camera philosophy. You know, it's smaller, it's lighter, it's faster, it has a more sophisticated processor in it. It fits one SD card instead of the SD and CF card that my 5D Mark III does, which meant that this camera was never going to be able to record in 4K RAW, just because the data transfer rate that SD can achieve just isn't the same as C-Fast 2.0 cards and they didn't want to put a C-Fast 2.0 card in this camera because the media is more expensive and it's going to scare away a lot of the lower end photographic consumers that this camera is going to be the target audience of. It has a big, bright, beautiful touchscreen on the back. It functions a lot like the M50, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, but it's much more responsive, it's brighter, it's clearer. It gives you access to all the things that you would need. When I put the camera into video mode, I'm able to use my dial to adjust the aperture and then I'm able to tap on what I want to focus on. This camera also has dual pixel auto focus. It will track this subject's face. It'll give you a track variety of faces and allow you to tap or switch between which face you want to focus. It'll track an object as you move towards it or move beside it or move away from it. Being the next evolution of stills cameras with video component, it is just that much faster, that much quicker, that much more responsive. The focus for stills works by tracking where your eye is looking. You can turn that on so there's no more taking photos, resetting, resetting, resetting. You just look at the person's face or it tracks the face and it'll keep it tight. You can also turn on eye tracking if you're at really low apertures. This is an 85 1.2. Your depth of field is going to be incredibly thin. This camera will actually track the subject's eyes, lock onto it so that your photograph is going to be sharp, even at razor thin depths of field. I'm shooting a video. I'm able to change aperture while it's shooting. I'm able to change ISO while it's shooting. I'm able to monitor the audio, which you can put through the audio port. I'm able to turn the audio up and down by tapping the screen rather than adjusting something inside the camera settings. That brings us to the video capabilities. This camera shoots 4K, but it does so by cropping in on the sensor. This is due to, as Ken says, the processing and data requirements from the 4K. It has a 1.7 crop. You can use the entire sensor to film video if you film in 1080p. You can then go down to 720p and shoot slow motion. Who is this camera for? Should you wait to get it?  The EOS R is really worth checking out. $2,100. It's cheaper than the 5D Mark IV, and it has most of the same features. It has C-Log, which comes free with this camera. You have to pay to get it upgraded on the 5D Mark IV. It has 4K video cropped like the 5D Mark IV. It's able to record 10-bit 4.22 video out to something like the Blackmagic Video Assist, which I have. Yet this camera can get an adapter to have the same EF lenses you have on the C-2 or C-300, but the main lenses you're going to probably use on this are the R lenses that were designed for this. You're going to need lenses that won't be interchangeable necessarily with your C-200, C-300. The main reason that I would like to get a hold of this camera is for using second angles during interviews or generally shooting second angles in film. You almost always want a wider angle for your second camera, not always, but usually. To move to a full frame that's going to give you much more field of view is a huge trade-up than trying to get another C-200 and move it back or just go wider. This is going to give way more bang for your buck. The big question mark over this is the crop factor, but I really don't see that being a huge problem at least for my workflow.  Most projects are still delivered in 1080p. No one that I work with is demanding 4K or may ever demand 4K. It's a lot more data and a lot more work for negligible upgrade and resolution. Your crop factor 4K on the EOS R is still going to be wider than a non-crop lens, same lens on the C-200 because the sensor of this is so much bigger. It has this cool trick where when you open the front of the camera the little gate comes down over the sensor, sort of like the shutter. So you can't get dust or dirt in there. It's going to be really helpful for outdoor and adventure photographers that work in snow or have to change a lens when there's a lot of dust around. I mean this is such an obvious thing. I don't know why someone didn't come up with this years ago. It's also going to be one of the best, most fully featured stills cameras that Canon has ever released. So for less than the 5D Mark IV you're getting much more in a package and you know as much as I love the click and the shutter release of my 5D Mark III this I understand that mirrorless is the future you're able to bring a lot more camera in a lot smaller footprint for a lot less price. You know if you like shooting with Canon's color science, if you have Canon lenses like I do then this really is the future. Thank you to Canon Burbank for letting me check out the camera. The only restriction that they stipulated was that I wasn't allowed to put an SD card in the camera and actually get footage but as soon as they allow that I'll come back here shoot some test shots and some scenarios with this camera and get some test footage for you guys to check out. That is my look at the Canon EOS R. Thanks very much for watching guys. Leave your questions in the comments and I will see you next time.


Magnus Sights. Magnus has gained international fame because of his reaction to the Star Wars trailer. And I've been featured on a show called Russell Howard's Good News, Series 9, Episode 7, to be exact. Now, you want to watch me react. To me, watching the clip of me reacting, but to see how he incorporated it into the show.  You get what I'm saying? I got to watch it, alright? We'll have 15 seconds of fame I got over there. Shit, it might continue. I might take a trip to London, you know what I'm saying? Alright, look, let's watch this, okay? And I will put the link in the description to the full show, so you can go check them out. I sense disturbance in the force. The trailer for the new Star Wars film has just been released. Cue downright madness. Cue an absolute geek meltdown. Thousands of fans filmed their response to the trailer and they were amazing. We did. So lost their mind over this spacecraft. Oh my god, the Mario Falcon! It's the Mario Falcon! This guy, is it me? Watching it whilst getting a blood drop. Yeah, I've seen him before. He's always like he's busting nuts. A reaction for Godzilla. And he was like, I was like, wow, he looks like he's busting all kinds of nuts, man. Like he just went deep inside. So now that I've gained international fame along with these two other brothers, my brother in Star Wars-dom. Star Wars-dom. See, I'm definitely taking a trip to the UK now. I can see it right now.  I'm going to be walking down motherfucking street. I'm just going to be walking down the street. You know what I'm saying? You're like, uh-huh, what's happening? They're going to come up to me. Oh my god, is it you? Is it you? Would you join us for tea in Crumpet's place? I'm like, look girl, listen. A beautiful London woman. I'd love to do this, all right? But there's a line on my lawn. Getting the back of it goes all those London girls. Oh wait for me. Just go whoo. You're number 69. Yeah, shut. I am though. I am taking, I think I want to take a trip to the UK. Because I hear the UK is pretty cool. And I do have some fans over there. I will see y'all soon. So if y'all stop me, if you see me, stop me, okay? Magnus, is it you? Yes, it's me. Wanker. Or whatever you say over there. And we can take a picture. We can take a video together saying one million subscribers. Woo. Post your comments below. Let me know what you think.


So, Graham Orkins, my name, I'm based here in Adelaide, I'm an agronomist by trade, I've been working in the ag industry for about 30 years and I'll start to show my age. I've previously worked for Elders and for the last eight or so years I've been working for Ag World. I'll go after South Australia, Northern New South Wales, Queensland, New Zealand and as of the last couple of days I've been doing a little bit of work up in the Pacific Islands where some industries or farmers in Tonga are taking on the software, along with Fiji, so interesting life travelling around. But, Ag World is an independent global platform for the data driven future of agriculture. A lot of what people talk about in the ag game these days is around data, who owns the data, who's using the data. Now, vision of the process, it's the farmer owns the data, we're independent, sometimes refer to our competitors, we're owned still by the original founders of the business and the venture capitalists that put the money in to get us going, we have no ownership in or no ownership by a chemical company or seed companies which you'll see in a lot of the global positions. So we're independent. We don't sell data, the data that is generated by farmers and their advisers is owned by the farmers and their advisers. And I think listening to the Israeli gentlemen this morning, our aim is to simplify what farmers and their advisers do, not make their life more complicated. Everything we do is about reducing the requirements to create that information, making it simple to use, easy user interface, a day-to-day farmer or a day-to-day activities for a farmer and their advisers is complicated enough without attempting to use software that doesn't help in that process. So we aim to make it less complicated, not more complicated. So we've been going since 2009, so just made it past our 10th birthday, which for ag tech, star-wag tech companies, that's quite an achievement. We're probably not considered a start-up anymore. And as I mentioned, a lot of what we see in the ag tech or our farm management space is systems like ourselves being bought by someone. We've recently reversed that strategy and have actually bought a business in the US called Green Book, which provides label and warning rate information, which we currently use in the US. It's not here in Australia as yet, but by purchasing the business out of the US, we'll give us that capacity to change some of our library function and search functions that we have here in Australia. Our primary markets, the US started in Australia, but then expanded into the US, expanded into New Zealand in about the same time. And we've just launched in Canada back late last year, so getting our first customers in the Canadian market. But everything that we've done was, the foundation was Western Australia and moved across the rest of Australia. Each of the markets we operate, we reskin the product to suit the actual marketplace that we're operating in. 50-plus employees, half of those are programmers, so the co-drivers that drive the system in the background. The people that do the things that I've got no idea what they're doing because I operate at the user interface, which is what interacts with farmers on a day-to-day basis. The user interface is what drives the day-to-day use. 35,000 registered users, approximately half of those are here in Australia. Australia, the agronomist market, is about somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 agronomists, and we've got over 900 agronomists advisors using the system. I should say there's approximately, shade over 2,000 subscribed farmers, another 3,000 using the system on a day-to-day view-only basis, so interacting with AgWild, but not actually subscribed. And then there's about another 10,000 farmers who have access to the system or just receiving information direct from their agronomist advisor. So digitizing farm information, it's a difficult space when people are still using Excel and paper and whiteboards. Growers use lots of different machines, lots of different monitors often get farmers saying to me, they're not tech savvy, don't use computers, and I jump into their header or tractor, and there's more computer screens in those headers and tractors than I'm sitting on the desk. Farmers are using technology every day, sometimes it's more applicable to their day-to-day activities, in that they like putting oil on a tractor, so a computer, a tractor is different to a computer that they hold in their hand, a smartphone, mobile, they only operate on Apple systems, but their farmers react differently to technology that's sitting in a tractor versus technology that they're carrying around with them. Connectivity is poor in many rural areas, as we know, our mobile devices will work both online and offline, so Growers and Agronomists can use the system all day long out in the paddock, and when they return to the office back into the kitchen, often McDonald's on the way through town, they can jump on Wi-Fi and all the information will sync together, so they can lost connectivity, maybe poor, they can still use what we provide on a day-to-day basis or throughout their working day. Lack of standardized data and APIs, and I've touched that on that in a little while, but everyone talks about moving information, integration is a big topic in the... That's the free carton of beer. Everyone talks about integrating. I want to bring my weather station information into AgWorld. I want to bring the machine data into AgWorld. I want to shift products from one spot to another, but the lack of standardized data and the lack of APIs or application program interfaces, the middleware between someone like ourselves and other pieces of software makes that an interesting task. As I say, oils ain't oils. APIs and integrations aren't as easy as we might think, but that's the challenge the industry faces. I actually support for technology, one of our strengths, but in rural communities, not the highest priority. And few farms really have a technology plan or an IT technology plan. They may have plans around what new tractor ahead or they may be buying, but are not particularly looking at what software they'll be using to help them manage their farms. So we're a collaborative platform. So we work across each of these systems in our own system and sharing the information between retailers. People, farmers, buy their day-to-day farm inputs, fertilize a seed, insecticide, herbicide. Growers themselves advisors, so potentially consultants working to advise farmers not what they do, and significantly agronomists in their applicators. We run a power aid permission system which allows each of these people to interact with Agworld and interact with the farmer, depending on how they wish to. Some instances we might have simple production data shifting between an agronomist and his other farmer. Others we might have financial information around the cost of production, shifting between the farmer and the agronomist or the farmer and his retailer. So the retailers can get an understanding of the seasonal input needs. System runs, so we have a planning and budgeting tool, precision ag, core GIS, everything operates on maps, and currently rolling out some features around NWI imagery, bringing importing layers as applied layers, yield maps, nitrogen removal maps, through integration we have with a company called PC2 or precision cropping technologies. And that's an instance where integration is working because two companies willing to talk to each other, allow the transfer of data, we have a standardised piece of information being the GIS referencing of fields. In-season agronomy, day-to-day agronomy, has to say 75% of the agronomist market in Australia use Agworld. They're providing day-to-day recommendations, plans, observations to their growers, for the growers to then act on, convert or potentially convert those activities into actual events to create their farm reculates and start producing data that they can use day-to-day in the future, referring to the past as to what they've done. And significant reporting and analytics, if you let us move around up there, but it's part of presentations. Any data entered into Agworld can be pulled out of Agworld, whether that be product information, field level information, observations, and reported on. Where it can't be or have an integration if anyone's used Power BI, an analytics dashboard that we've just done another integration, it's where mobile devices where Apple only, but it's integrations with a Microsoft company. So Microsoft Power BI, they're some amazing things. Simply pulling the information out of Agworld into Power BI, some templates built, incredible with some of the things that these systems can do. Precision planning, as I've already done, by farmers are in conjunction with their agronomist, their advisors, allows them to work at rotations, allows them to put a seasonal budget together. How much fertilizer am I going to need? How much seed will I need next year to store at harvest time? And simply, we can plan on the iPad, change crop types from week to canola, depending on the market, depending on the rainfall at start of season, and report on these things. So on the iPad, we can put a plan in place in about eight taps, which will then generate each of these aspects, product requirements for the season, work scheduling. When do I roughly need to put pre-plant fertilizer in the ground? When do I roughly need to start looking at post-emergent chemistry? All reportable, eight taps on an iPad, and you can change the varieties. So I can get planning in Agworld, or planning can be done three years in advance, five years in advance, five weeks in advance of sowing a crop, depending on how the season's changed, or five days after the crop has gone in the ground, you can plan for the rest of the season. The planning's like a budget, the crop plans that we put in, like a recipe, the activities that's sent under those plans are like the ingredients that go in to make that recipe. But as I say, collaboration. We're farmers working with advisors, advisors are doing this sort of work on a day-to-day basis. Farmers will typically plan once or twice a year. The agronomists are doing it day-to-day, so they have more experience in the planning phase, but do it in collaboration with their grow. So once we have technology here, a lot of this work can be done, or will be done, while they're sitting in ahead next to the farmer, sitting at the farmer's kitchen table, working out what he needs to do for the cunning season. In season agronomy, so this is the lifeblood of the agronomists and advisors, people like the agronomists that work for elders. Retail agronomists, agronomists working for the likes of rural directions. Consulting agronomists. We'll all operate in a similar space. Agronomists create plans, recommendations, observations, they can draw on maps. So we can see in the bottom, the pivot circle down there. I'm guessing slides. Yield information, so precision things like that we're rolling into Agworld now. We're not doing it, that's the aim of integrations, is to bring that style of information in from the experts. It's about layering and integration, as I say, but working with someone that thinks willing to work with us, commercially sound on both fronts. Top-right maps, farm apps earn the activities that go in field by field. So as I say, scheduling record, so it's complete farm management. We operate in the cropping space or the plant space essentially. Agworld's used here in Australia on anything from opium poppies in Tasmania through to pineapples in North Queensland. We're using pasture country in New Zealand and dairy farms to do forage production, spuds in New Zealand, yams and taro in Tonga, basil in Nandi and Fiji. So we operate across anything that you put in the ground, feed and water. Agworld will cover that space. There's a schedule jobs, it's a schedule workflow, keep records, determine cost of production. I often ask farmers, when I do presentations to them, how many of you can tell me how much you've spent on your farming activities for the current season? I might start on a paddock level. Very rare, unless they're using Agworld, can a farmer tell me how much he's actually spent on a field, spent on his overall farming activities for a current season? I've been with them and farmers are dealing with multi-million dollar businesses and sometimes can't tell us what the cost of production is or where they're spending is at. Agworld helps them do some of those things. Insights, I'll have a look with holding periods that I have, how much nitrogen have I applied to a particular field, how much phosphorus have I applied without, simply by doing actual events, allow some great insights into what they're doing and what's happened on their farm, as I've mentioned, reporting. Key to the process is our standardised data. Agworld controls the naming of products and the naming of pests, problems, crop varieties, we control all that, so simply that products are named the same way throughout Agworld. So on the input side there, each of those products is a different glyphosate, named differently, recorded differently, so I see free typed into any systems, except Agworld. Fields can, you see that could be called home, could be called home place, could be called a number. But once you have people free typing information like that, so non-standardised data, it's impossible to integrate it. There's no way of sharing that information around or matching it between systems. So what does that create? Creates an epic fail. So anyone that's trying to integrate systems that don't have standardised data will know the drama involved there. As I round up PowerMax in Agworld, it's just round up PowerMax and that field is home. It's one of the tricks with the field naming, particularly some of the integrations we're doing in the precision space, is that the one real common factor between a field in Agworld and a field in John Deere, John Deere tractor, is the geolocation of that field. Where that field is doesn't change, the naming may change, but so we don't match field names, we match geospatial information to work out fields that overlay each other. But standardised data allows us to play in this space, so integrating with other systems. So some of these are US based, but some of them, or half of them are Australians, so John Deere Global, John Deere approached us to start working and integrating machine data coming out of the John Deere tractor and the My John Deere system. We're bringing through start stop times, we're bringing through field maps, as applied maps coming out of John Deere headers, John Deere tractors, tractors using John Deere rate controllers. Interesting thing with John Deere, we don't share at this point in time, that's when John Deere is working on, we don't share product information. So do a recommendation in Agworld, send that to a John Deere tractor and the tractor will know, or the tractor driver will be able to see on his John Deere screen. You would think the products that he needs to put into a spray rig, but John Deere in the early days forgot to build a standardised database and only have free-titing, so I mean, John Deere, our farmer may put in, I'm gonna put a weed spray in. I mean, that weed spray is really five or six and two foot AMI and all sharpened or whatever it might be. So we can't match information at this point in time until John Deere catch up and build their own or news house product database. Power BI I've mentioned, CSBP, a fertilizer company in Western Australia, but we integrate information with their soil testing lab. APAL here in South Australia, we're integrating soil testing information. Agronomist goes out to the field, takes a soil sample, scans a barcode, he's already told the system what he's going to be, what he wants tested. Scans a barcode on his iPad, drops the sample in the box and posts it off to APAL. APAL results get fed straight back into the planning page within Agro. So the soil testing integration around the globe is working extremely well. Figured, accounting software or an add-on to the Xero accounting. Figures specifically designed for rural applications. We feed planning information into Figured or farmer feeds the planning information into Figured. That feeds into Xero and can compare cash flows with actual information in Agwell. Satyr maps that provider of the precision, some of the precision software. What makes us successful? Okay, support team. Anyone that uses Agwell and will know what the support to or how good their support crew is in Western Australia. They're every day of the week on, except for weekends, to provide support to our subscribers. And what keeps us moving along is continual updates, continual improvements that our programmers, who are all based in Perth, are far fewer in the US, but significantly our programs are based in Perth, doing work only on Agwild. Thank you. And I think we're into question time. Yeah.