Dan Sobovitz
Master of Ceremony
Biography
Dan is a Digital Communication Strategist for VIPs and international organisations; moderator and lecturer on tech and innovation; and civil society activist. He is the Founder of spreadable.io, a micro agency for macro projects; Managing Director of the EU Startup Prize for Mobility and Senior Adviser on Digital Communications at BCW.
For five years, Dan has led the digital presence and publications of the Vice President of the European Commission, with campaigns featuring livestreams from self driving cars, solar planes, VR of satellite launches and crowdsourcing of EU policies. In the field of tech, Dan presents and moderates at events such as Viva Tech, Slush, Beautiful Software Awards, Huawei Academia Salon, ChangeNow, Michelin Movin’on Challenge, and others. He also blogs and lectures about the interplay between technology, society, and politics. In 2013, he co-founded ‘Ceci n’est pas une crise’, a Belgian civil society organisation which analyses the current wave of populist nationalism. In 2023, he founded DemoCrisis, a platform bringing together pro-democracy civil society organisations from Israel, Hungary, Poland, and across Europe. He is on the board of several human rights organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Dan is a citizen of Israel, Switzerland, and Hungary and lives in Brussels with his husband and their two children.
Speaker session
National and Local Governments' Role in Open Source: Champions, Creators, or Funders?
This session will cover the opportunities and challenges of governments taking on various roles in open source. We will compare and contrast the effort of diverse public services that are employing democratic innovation to improve public infrastructure. We will hear about the pooling of efforts on open source between administrations in cities and smaller municipalities. We will also discuss different ways of funding open source development. Representatives of the Sovereign Tech Fund and the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative will share their insights on the subject.
Monika Sowinska
OSOR Project Officer
Brussels
Biography
Project Officer in the Interoperability Unit, Directorate-General for Digital Services, European Commission. Joined the European Commission in 2009 after 20 years’ experience in the private sector in Poland. Since 2017, in charge of the European Commission Open Source Observatory (OSOR). Very pragmatic, energetically promotes sharing and reuse of IT solutions, especially the use of open source as a means to achieve interoperability in public services.
Speaker session
National and Local Governments' Role in Open Source: Champions, Creators, or Funders?
This session will cover the opportunities and challenges of governments taking on various roles in open source. We will compare and contrast the effort of diverse public services that are employing democratic innovation to improve public infrastructure. We will hear about the pooling of efforts on open source between administrations in cities and smaller municipalities. We will also discuss different ways of funding open source development. Representatives of the Sovereign Tech Fund and the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative will share their insights on the subject.
Maximilian Strotmann
Member of the Commissioner Hahn’s Cabinet
Brussels
Biography
Max is a member of Commissioner Hahn's team at the European Commission. He is looking after institutional IT issues and multilingualism, in particular, and digital policies. Max has a long passion for public sector digital modernisation and for innovative startups and communities.
Organisation
European Commission
EU Institutions
Speaker session
National and Local Governments' Role in Open Source: Champions, Creators, or Funders?
This session will cover the opportunities and challenges of governments taking on various roles in open source. We will compare and contrast the effort of diverse public services that are employing democratic innovation to improve public infrastructure. We will hear about the pooling of efforts on open source between administrations in cities and smaller municipalities. We will also discuss different ways of funding open source development. Representatives of the Sovereign Tech Fund and the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative will share their insights on the subject.