On this week’s show we have a return visitor in Amanda Brock from Open UK. We talk to Amanda about open business models, a research project on the UK Open Technology market, and COP26.
You can find our more about Open UK’s work at https://openuk.uk/
This week’s automated transcription:
Intro
Chris: Welcome back everybody. After a two week break to wake breach. I think I nearly said that two week break that we had for a bank holiday and well, well, the two weeks it’s been it’s, it’s gone past it, a flash. Matt, what do you think
Matt: it has gone past in a flash with a tropical levels of rain, but it seems that spring is now here and it’s more.
So that’s good. Cause it is may and it should be. So I’m relieved about that. And two weeks chugging away work starts going around to contracting with suppliers all that kind of thing. I’m trying to buy a car. What interesting world, a lot of car dealerships are they’re in this weird hybrid state where.
Some of that. I mean the whole charade of the negotiation, when they go off into the back room to be able to talk to their manager, to see if they can be able to get a deal and all that Gubbins seems to have been knocked on the head by the fact that for a year they’ve had to sell without being at a user show showroom.
But they’re in this really weird thing now where they, they still obviously got a margin to make. So they start with a very low price and then tried to sell even more crap that you don’t need with You know, ceramic coatings for paint and all sorts of nonsense that go into it. But of course, the main thing they’re trying to do, we’re not looking to buy a new car at the second, add one is try to set the credit.
And if you’re saying actually Ashley we’ve got savings, we want to get a pet. They’re not into it. They don’t care because obviously there’s no money to be made whatsoever. If they’re not selling you some P P P deal or whatever, they call them their personal, personal lease deal. So that’s been an eye-opening experience and Yeah, I’m not sure I want to do it again for another seven years.
I haven’t bought one yet either. So there we go.
Chris: Yes, it’s it is it’s an interesting game. Car sales, no doubt about it. Couldn’t collect. I bought a car, a click by click and collect the other week. So I just, I just bought it and then went to fetch it. I didn’t even go look at it. I knew what I wanted and it worked out well, actually.
Matt: Yeah. The other interesting thing though, is actually talking cars at like a year or two old. It seems like the established auto manufacturers have now realized the power of being able to, this is going to be interesting for the conversations later, but being able to sell software upgrades at premium on secondhand stocks.
So you haven’t got a reversing camera. We can install that that’d be 650 quid. When you know, the camera itself is going to be like, what three quid? And it’ll all be modular in at the bank. It’ll take five minutes to do it. And it’s all just about enabling the software, but. In that you kind of go to the dealership to better get that down
Chris: as a whole, but there’s a whole bunch of Tesla’s stuff going on there.
Anyway. Anyway, we can get into some of this. We’ve got a guest this week who is somebody that we had a year ago just about, and it’s been a whole year. Amanda Centura must hear I’m under Brock is here. How are you?
Amanda: I’m really well. I bought a car last summer too, and they were trying to tell me the second hand cars were going up in value for the first time ever in the pandemic.
Well, they sold me an upgraded SD card.
That’s what I’m supposed to still enrolled in the last year. Well, I, didn’t not
Chris: how’s the last couple of weeks been for you, Amanda. Has anything been excising and happened this last week? Anything thundering down the track.
Amanda: Constant. We are just so busy at open UK, and there’s so many different things going on, lots and lots of people involved and all bringing their own exciting ideas and skills into the organization.
So in the last couple of weeks, we’ve announced, I think probably just over a couple of weeks ago, our chief sustainability officer, a guy called Christian Purina joined us and we’re working on cop 26. We had an entrepreneur in residence, join us and we’re working on a phone just for him. And we have been very busy creating our kids count for a second time.
Chris: Fantastic. Well, we’ll hear a lot more about that. No doubt in the minutes to
Matt: come. And how has the the life in the most mental it’s been for you over the last two weeks,
Chris: Mr. Weston? Well, I w similarly it was, it’s been fairly Torrential in terms of rain, although on this was it yesterday, Sunday, and I woke up and.
I looked outside and there’s some were shining and I went outside and it was not it’s cold. And I dashed out with a mighty roar through my breakfast in the garden for the first time. Well, actually not quite the first time that this year we had it, we had a weird sunny day, a few weeks ago, but it was yeah, it was a bit of a release because it’s been a bit gray miserable.
So yes, yes, it was yesterday. It was nice. And, and really it’s been a. It’s been that kind of, you know, a bit of a continuation of the whole year, really in terms of work, but good. In many ways we know that the customer signed up, so I’ve got somebody to onboard and got, and hopefully another one that’s coming on.
So that’s all good. Right? So ultimate renewal and things like that. And then meeting new people, doing slightly different things. It’s it’s good.
Matt: Do you have any view to actually going to places. Cases outside of the UK?
Chris: No, no, not yet. No. I think organizations all over Europe are still wary about their people going places and, or meeting people from other places.
Right. I think whilst we’re working from home, they’re kind of assuming that, and then not getting near that part, part of that is not being exposed to like. Suppliers and things like that, it might turn up. So I think, I think it’s going to change, but I think it’ll change gradually and I’d be surprised if in, so, I mean, the IDC is one of those kind of international visitors where people travel around quite, quite a lot.
But if you think about what we do, a lot of what we do is around events. So obviously a lot of the events are, if they’re starting to give you back in personally, it’s, in-country rather than internationally. And a lot of our sponsors in terms of events and that our customers, in terms of our vendor research, that they don’t want people to travel yet.
So we could have an event, but we wouldn’t have a speaker. You know, we wouldn’t have a sponsor. So it’s all a bit it’s all very much in a band at the moment, but I would imagine that. You know, if we can have a good summer in Western Europe, you know, and, and things to down a bit then maybe to origin this and where we might start to see like the thawing of that.
Matt: Presumably there’s quite a bit of lead time on organizing an actual physical in-person event anyway, more for being able to get people to commit to going to it and everything
Chris: else. Yeah. I mean, we, in terms of PR you know, proper events, you know, the big things like our summit that we have in October, that’s lots online and it was always going to be online because.
We start organizing that in February, January. And you would, there was no way that we could say, Oh, let’s, let’s hedge our bets and make it physical. I know organizations who have done that and they’ve had to keep moving data back and things because they desperately want to do it physically, but it just doesn’t work out.
And for us, it just made sense to say, look, let’s just, let’s just assume it’s going to be virtual. And and then. The in country stuff, the kind of, you know, like the dinners and things like that. That’s a little bit easy to organize. It’s a little bit shorter notice and therefore those will definitely start up.
It’s just a matter of whether somebody like me goes out to to sit there and take my variants of concern with me.
Matt: And are you looking at in-person stuff yet? Amanda? So
Amanda: we are. And as you know, from our pre-call, I’m sort of so excited about the idea of seeing people face to face. I can hardly contain myself to be quite honest.
We’re looking at cop 26, first two weeks of November, and we’re being told that UK Gover working on the basis that is an in person event. Unless something dramatically changes and we’ll be notified of that as, and when, so we have an open source and sustainability day that we will hopefully host other organizations at.
And we have a submission sitting with the cabinet office that we’re waiting for approval. That’s actually quite exciting. This week, we’ve submitted to build the data center of the future, not to actually build it, but to build a blueprint with a consortium of different businesses. But we, and for a penny in, for a pound.
So we submitted for the IMAX cinema. So if we get it, we get to go and make a movie and I’ve never made a movie. So that would be kind of exciting.
Matt: Absolutely. And a very big movie, if it’s going to be screened at the
Amanda: data center. Yeah. We’ve actually got a friend who is a producer. Who’s going to help us with this. So it’s not. Quite as much the blind leading the blind as that might sound that’d be, yeah, that’d be really exciting. So for us cop 26, potentially it also coincides with our awards, which would mean we would have some hybrid element to it.
Although we’ve planned that as additional event.
Matt: It’s going to be interesting how quickly people want to go back to events as much as the ability to better organize them as well. I think there’s going to be varying levels of some people extremely keen, the other people that are going to be quite reticent to, to, well, what’s the
Amanda: hugging stuff.
So I I’ve been on calls all day and I just saw something go across my phone about hugging is hugging official. No, as Boris said, hug.
Matt: People are to use their discretion as to whether they wish to be able to hug or not. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s up to families and friends to be able to make decisions for themselves as to whether they wish to go.
Amanda: No, strangers. I
Matt: take it well. No, I think that was always the case. You know, kind of legal kind of way, but who knows? So anyway, before we get into this sort of minefield let’s press on with the show.
We’re going to talk about a whole series of things is been driven by open UK and in the last 12 months ago, Ford as well. So I think we should crack on with it.
Main interview
Main Interview
Matt: One of the tools that we use in the what I grandiosely called production process of WB 40 is a piece of open source software that has been around for quite some time. Now nine, 20 years, I think, called audacity and or Udacity is a sound editor. And it’s. Being used by all sorts of people used by professionals, lots of features within it, very, very much open source.
And then a few weeks ago there was an announcement that a company was acquiring it. And I think it’s a really interesting starting point for conversations about some of the things that you’re looking at at the moment, Amanda, because I know that business models for open technologies one of your areas of focus and.
That from somebody who doesn’t really embed themselves into the board of open completely day to day, like the way you do that feels a bit confusing because how can open source software be acquired? What’s going on there? Can we unpack
Amanda: that a little bit? Yeah. I’m not terribly familiar with the Udacity. I know the product and our voiceover lady.
She uses a law. So, I don’t quite know what they’re structuring Wars, but I assume it’s a commercial sponsor or a company which some high revenue generates on the back of a dusty that’s been sold and the audacity will be the project that they lead. If it’s a community project. And, you know, I, I’m jumping to an assumption immediately that it’s a community project, but one of the things we’d be looking at recently, a law.
Is how people’s understanding of open source very much comes from the way they’ve experienced it. So for some of us, we joined big corporate collaborations, like a Lennox foundation or an OpenStack open infrastructure is that no is open-end for, and that experience of being part of a big corporate creating effectively a de facto standard and saving money and hopefully building better software.
Is one iteration of open source. Another is people creating a project and building a business on the back of it? Like a Hashi Corp, perhaps? Yeah, no dusty I’m guessing. And then you have something totally different where you have developers scratching and H’s Lynise to real estate and creating something like Linux and building a massive community without a business on the back of it.
But with a foundation and over 15,000 people. Have contributed. So you’ve got all these different sort of nuanced slants, but all of them are about developing software, not really about developing business and what we then see separately is how people have built sometimes successful and sometimes not so successful businesses around there.
It must have a software and it sounds to me like a dusty have built a successful business if they’ve sold.
Matt: So w are there, are there sort of typical types of revenue generation from. Yeah, you had to codify
Amanda: so well, it’s a topic inequality, but as a chap called Matt as let, who, you might have come across it four or five one, and he produced a report back in 2008, which was probably the first business model review for open source.
And he set out the, you know, half dozen or so different business models. And I would say they haven’t changed very much. What we’ve got now is slightly different flavors of them. But I think for straightforward open-source based businesses what’s changed most is probably get hub or get, or get lab and gets a language.
Or it’s not even a language as a tool. I think Lynise wrote in 2009, if I’m right. Which means that that whole chef, that whole change is about 12 years old. And when I’m talking about change, what I mean is that we’ve seen. Open source move. So when I started work at canonical in 2008, we were constantly marketing it, selling it, persuading people that were safety use talking to procurement teams, talking to lawyers, and that sort of got bypassed by get hub.
So what happens now is folk go and take the software. Take it into the business, use it, kick the tires, know that they want it. And then they go back to the business associated with that software as inbound. Marketing’s an entirely different approach. They know they want it, they know they want services around it.
And they’re coming to you asking for those rather than you pushing it. So you see the issue that the problem of marketing open-source has kind of disappeared. And it also has an advantage though, where it can scale in a way that surprise. She just can’t compete with. Now, if it’s done well, and if it’s done right.
And I think you have to have that in by marketing focus and what you also see, if you look enough at the different founders talking about it, is that the businesses which have had a single product struggle much more. So we’ve seen a Lastic shift this year from an open source business to, I still have some open, but moving some of its products proprietary and it’s pretty much a single product company.
Someone like Mongo, who’s been through the same, very similar, whereas companies that have multiproduct or which have evolved their support and service offering to almost support their competing products. They’re the ones that do well. So you have to have that as well to, to really seem to thrive. And then the mold is what you’d expect, you know, support is subscription, that kind of stuff.
Matt: It was to get hub itself. Of course, is another organization that has gone through the acquisition path and is now owned by
Amanda: to Microsoft. Yeah. It was a fairly sizeable sale acquisition. However you view it. Biggest, I was red, hot 34 billion. I mean, I think it’s still the biggest type transaction in history,
Matt: so there’s definitely money to be made in this world.
Yeah.
Amanda: If you work on it, it definitely.
Matt: So you’re in the process of doing kind of state of the open market. That’s the right term for it in the UK. And you’ve got a series of three phased. Reports are going out the first of which has just been published March, March. Okay. So a couple of months ago can you tell us a bit more about that project and what you’re trying to be
Amanda: able to explore through it?
Yeah, I think I was speaking to Jennifer Barth at It’s me and media who have been the company who’ve supported us in creating this report back in January. And I I’ve sort of been toying with doing something along those lines for a while. The European commission had been working on a report for a couple of years, you know, huge Fastly expansive report.
And I kind of felt that with Brexit, we needed to do something and talking to Jennifer, I really understood that we definitely needed to, because I sort of taught myself into actually. We are the fifth biggest contributor to the cloud native foundation to cloud native in the world. When I say we, I mean the UK and I realized as I was sort of knocking the numbers around and talking about it, that actually we were the biggest contributor and the biggest by number of developers across Europe as well.
And in a very typically British, we just went, you know, we sort of. Probably quietly acknowledged it to herself, but didn’t like to mention it to anybody else. And I think that is something that’s come out of Brexit is that we’re no longer part of the commission’s work on open source or the report. And really, we needed to flag both to business and to government, just the scale of open in the UK and that we.
Of secretly being a center of excellence building over many years in this space. And maybe we need to get some acknowledgement for that. Not so much for a Pat on the back, but to make sure that we’re educating kids in the right way for the future so that we build future generations of it and leverage that success and that we help businesses in that space do well.
I think, no,
Chris: no. I was going to ask you a question on, on that basis, given that, you know, it’s a year since we spoke last and. And given that that is, you know, it’s a, it’s a fact, we’ve got a good culture of open source contribution and, and thinking in the UK, what what advantage does that give us then in terms of, you know, given, given the whole Brexit thing and how we manage our.
Our business and our software development and the way we look at tech in this country and in the future, does that give us that advantage? Do you think in terms of our culture or in terms of the way that the tech community works in this country,
Amanda: I’d like to hope so. And I think that it’s a process of evolution where we are, we’re one of the biggest countries in this space, anywhere in the globe, right.
In terms of. However, you’re going to measure lines, contribution numbers of individual developers that you can identify. But if you look at the countries where compared against it’s like China, India, the us. So we’re obviously nothing like the size. So if you were to look at it in a sort of per capita basis, and we haven’t looked at that yet, it’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Actually, we have a huge tradition of open in the UK, which lens does having skills and areas where the shortage is in, right. They can’t find enough developers and cloud and an awful lot of the cloud software is open source. So there’s lots of space for us to evolve this and I hope, and I think generate more business and not just business.
I think my thinking has shifted a bit in the last year, and it’s not just about getting the businesses that are in the UK and the people in those it’s the business OVO. And so there are a huge number of particularly young people working across open source who are working for international companies who are working for a known UK parent companies, but also for companies that are maybe non-traditional tech companies.
As we’ve seen this digital transformation shift. And of course, if you talk to anybody about recruiting, developers is hard because every business wants them now. And I think. Universally, you will get the same response that particularly the younger developers develop using open source methodologies and practices, and that’s what they want to do.
Microsoft explain that as one of the reasons that they shifted to open, you just can’t hire young developers or the good ones if you don’t do it. So I think by building those skills here and leveraging what we’ve already got, we should be making the UK more and more competitive in the tech space.
Matt: I hope.
Hmm. Do you think that is that shift being driven by the change in things like cloud delivery of software so that where the value is, it’s no longer about Selling licenses because the software isn’t the thing that actually is, is where revenue can be made. You get revenue by getting people to subscribe to the availability of the service, to having software as a service or, or whatever else, or is it, do you think there’s something else going on in terms of some sort of cultural shift?
Amanda: I think we’ve been in this position for a long time culturally, and it hasn’t been acknowledged because it hasn’t been obvious as part of the EU. Why mentioned that the UK is the biggest of the EU. So when you look at it, you’ve got the UK than Germany and then way behind France, there were the European commission’s data that they were using for the report.
They had 490,000 developers as the figure they were using in Europe. And they reduced that to 260,000 after Brexit. Now they said they’re being conservative. But even if it’s 200, that’s almost half of the developers working in Europe. I’m guessing some of it is language-based. And when I look round, and this is something that pleases me, I don’t know what anybody else thinks about it.
But when I looked round the folk who are working in this space and the folk who engage with Oprah UK, not only are there huge numbers of young people, but they’re from all over the world. They’re based in the UK, which is great, but they’re from all over. And I don’t know if they’re attracted here because of that particular skill set or, you know exactly why they’re here.
But it means that we’ve got a really diverse community and it’s interesting and it’s a good thing.
Matt: Mm. Do you think, yeah. Do you think if you think about technology management within you know, not technology organizations, do you think the mindset has caught up there yet?
Amanda: What do you mean by technology management?
So
Matt: people who are CIO CTOs, but in organizations that aren’t tech focused, who aren’t tech centered organizations.
Amanda: I say quite a lot that I think what’s happened is we’ve gone through a digital transformation. I think companies have been in shock and they’ve learned that they’ve gone. Two software designed businesses, and they’re just getting their heads around that.
And what they don’t actually realize is they’re open source. And I know even now you are last people. So we have a questionnaire that would be working on this, going to be sent out next week to business and industry phase two of our report phase one established. What we had with the existing marketplace.
So looking at existing reports we did literature review. We established what that meant economically to the UK and for the UK, that was up to 41.3 billion in GDP per annum, coming from opensource. I think that’s hugely conservative is about 20% of the digital economy. I suspect that if we were to do the figures, right, just based on that methodology, we’d double that and it’d be about 40%.
So. Moving on from that. What do we do? Next phase two is about looking at business and industry and understanding what the adoption is like. So we’re going out with this questionnaire next week. We start our survey on Monday. We are focusing on about eight different sectors trying to gather data. And we ask, do you use opensource?
But even when the answer is no with Ann, go through a list of different software and packages saying, do you use any of the following? Because we suspect people will not really understand or have recognized or thought through that they’re using it. And then interestingly, one of the economists has pushed us to look at what they’ve stopped using or reduced their use of.
And it’s kind of something I wouldn’t have thought about, but it’s an interesting sort of counterbalance to it. What are your adults and what are you letting go.
I was going to say, then phase three is sort of a sweeper upper having established that. Can we find a new ways of looking at how you value the outputs? So what output value in GDP is actually being generated. And if you think about something like public cloud, vast majority of it’s open source, can you imagine how much must be generated from that?
Let’s be huge.
Matt: Hmm, I guess the other part of this is as we get services that are consumed. And so for small organizations in my own organization, the bulk of what we are using now is software as a service. Quite a lot of it comes from Microsoft. So I’ve got no idea how much open-source is involved, how much open technology
to
Amanda: involve.
They’re the biggest contributor in the world, but lines of quote, according to get Harper, right? So they use massive open source. So they may well be filling you with open source, open goodness that you getting without knowing it.
Matt: But I mean, the point is that Ashley is as a technology manager’s views shifts to delivery of business value.
If you don’t have some size enough to actually be doing the development yourselves, don’t run infrastructure yourselves. Increasingly it’s an abstract question that isn’t actually that important because you know, the revenue model for, or the cost model is based around subscriptions for services, not like
Amanda: right.
But it is important that as much as your subscription for service. It’s based on the software that’s there. And a lot of that is open-source and you see an old stuff going on with elastic and whatever else with the cloud companies being accused of strip mining.
Chris: So given that this is, you know, given this is the case and we have this strength in the UK and we have what would probably turn out as a Biff significant contribution from open source. What is the role to government? Amanda is, is, is the government’s role to promote or to encourage or to educate, or is it, should it just stay out that way?
What are you trying to, what are you trying to, yeah,
Amanda: I don’t think it will stay out the way. So I think it is It has a dual role. One part of it is as a consumer and creator and its own business, its day-to-day business of technology. And I think as a population where effectively we’re paying for the code, they’re using.
And that they’re creating, we should want, what’s created for us to be open and shareable and scalable and reuse and not be paying for proprietary code. That’s not needed unless it’s needed. I’m not saying every piece has to be open. And then on the other side of it, we have the, the policy piece. The UK government has been working on a data and digital strategy for some time now.
The devolved nations are also working on theirs. I think Oliver Darden came out January, February with 10 principles. None of those were open source. And one of the reasons that I wanted this report to happen was to demonstrate to government just how important openness to us and the money that it’s generating for the country, but also the value that it brings in the code itself.
And hopefully have them understand that through. I wouldn’t exactly say spoon-feeding, but putting it in one place for them to try and get open principles brought in and the importance of open brought into that strategy and policy. So I think the rule is an escapable. They’ve actually been really good.
So DCMS came along, we did some lunches. We actually start our own, me and my social events. We actually sat round, honestly, an eat a meal together. We shipped people their lunch and then talked about the rapport and DCMS turned up at all three of our lunches. You know, they’ve really engaged well, and they’ve been really good, so grateful to them for that.
Matt: The cop 26 happening towards the end of the year that you mentioned in the intro where do you see the role of open in that whole agenda around the climate?
Amanda: It’s interesting because sustainability is a really broad thing and it’s not just a buy also carbon neutral carbon, negative net, zero, wherever we’re going with that, that that’s all important, but it’s more than just that.
And to be sustainable. One of the things that really impacts is making it open. If you look at the sustainable development goals and digital principles that the UN work on the open source principles fit so well into that. And I think they really set hand in hand for a while. I was on a chaired, an advisory group for the UN for their innovation labs.
And they were looking constantly at what they built, what they created being open source, because then you could scale it across member States, particularly in the pure member States, they could pick it up and reuse and not reuse and recycle is right at the heart of sustainability as well as diversity.
And I guess just the, the open nature of it. It’s inevitable that it works with sustainability or promote sustainability. So we hope to bring various projects. Some of them which are very focused on things like net zero, but some of them may be focusing on some of the broader sustainability issues as well to cope.
I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about coal, but the whole of Glasgow is planned to be this amazing conference and to the whole city. And when we, we actually, we applied to the cabinet office for the IMAX cinema, which will be great fun, but we have a space in a fringe event, in a marquee right next to the main event.
And again, this fringe events across the city. So if this goes ahead, it will be one almighty event. Be a bit of a shock after no events for some, right. All those people in one place. Exactly.
Matt: Yeah, no, no, absolutely. No, certainly not for strangers with the, if you think about some of the, sort of, some of the key players within the, the challenges for net zero or whatever. But how do industries like energy as an industry or aviation or agriculture? Are those industries which have got thriving open.
Community within the moment,
Amanda: funnily enough, that you’re picking industries that we’ve been talking to. So we doing, doing an event with some energy companies and OEF jam in June, where we’re working to open up a dataset to help them do that. On the software side, Linux foundation has an open energy project that we’re a member of.
And they’ve been working with energy companies since 2018, trying to build more software that things like monitoring. And, you know, there are certain. Almost de facto standards that you can create by collaborating across the software there. So it was really interesting and agriculture came up recently as a space that needs more work done in that way, particularly in opening up the data.
So the double pronged approach to it as well.
Matt: I see. I mean, one that’s close to my professional heart at the moment is the construction industry, which Free flow of data between different elements of the construction, then management of buildings.
Amanda: I think about that any major infrastructure project, even just knowing traffic data and moving things around and managing those flows.
There’s so many different aspects to it.
Matt: Yeah, and it feels, I mean, it’s just say particularly with it’s an errand, Chris, that scenario, you know, reasonably well from your days in synthesis management work is that there are things like BIM building information management, but I, I’m not seeing a huge amount of evidence that actually data flows particularly well across organizations or it, or indeed different.
Elements of the supply chain within those organizations,
Amanda: a couple of things there. So if you look at a lot of the database software, now there’s so much open source in that, right? This, a lot of these companies, even the ones that are not obviously open source the backend is so I think we’ll see more and more open around the database infrastructure, but then when you look at the, the data itself, go back to something like open banking.
Forsberg method forced by regulation and what we’re now seeing as other regulators wondering how they do that too. You know, how do we make our sector open up? How do we facilitate this? And I think for the energy sector and many of the others, sustainability will actually be a factor that pushes that.
Matt: And do you think it will take regulation for that to happen?
Amanda: I don’t actually, and there’s a couple of spaces where I don’t think regulation will be needed where I could be wrong. And that’s one of them. I actually think the regulators will see what’s happened with open banking and they will go ahead and do it without the regulation.
I know that in Australia, they followed what the UK had done on the open banking space and did it without regulation. I was told by people involved that they thought Australia had done a better job, but then the, when the people running it, I think it must be the regulator, went to government and asked for a law because they had 90% engagement and they wants to force the last 10%.
But I think they also having some freedom and scoping and creasing it rather than being driven by regulation. Maybe better.
Chris: Reduce it and I’m in oil and gas. For example, the, there are, there are pooling of geo spatial data and geo graphical data to say, okay, here we go. We are. Pooling our resources of understanding where the oil is and how you might get to it.
But simply because they’ve realized that they’d just, if you know how the oil industry works, it goes from feast to famine. And when it’s in the farming stage, as you’re pretty much isn’t husband, for some time, they can’t afford to do it unless they pull the resources and they realized that that ecosystem.
Play is the only way to do it. So there’s an industry that has done it on its own the term, but
Amanda: one of the problems with that kind of initiative and this is where you get me being the ex lawyer is the, to open up data Lake that you have to work out what contractually you can and can’t do. And the non-disclosure clauses and requirements cause huge problems.
And I have. Talk to me for a few times about whether we could create a universal clause that was accepted, like a model clause that we could apply to say that you both parties agree, whatever the contracts might have said that we agree just to share this data. And nobody’s in breach by doing that. And avoid lawyers or kill me, but avoid spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal reviews to make modifications to contracts.
When all you want to do is open up the data and you both want to do it to allow that for that specific purpose. And I do think there could be a lot of value increasing that sort of infrastructure.
Chris: Yeah, that’s true. Excellent. Yeah. I mean there’s, if there’s, if there’s
Amanda: that I do 25 years, that’s enough for anybody.
Matt: So alongside the work with the the series of reports and with carp, you’ve also managed to squeeze in writing and editing a book.
Amanda: Do we have to talk about that? That was it. It was a huge mistake. I’m sure the book will be great. I I’m fine. I know because I’ve read 20 people’s work. I know that the book is great, but edit 24 chapters of a book was more than I realized in terms of work.
And if there hadn’t been a pandemic, it wouldn’t be finished.
Matt: But it is presumably more about open. Oh
Amanda: yes. Yeah. The open source law policy and practice, it will be second edition of a text that one of my old professors created with an assistant notice. There were two of them and I thought I’ll take that on and I’ll make it happen because.
10 years since the last edition it’s time, there was a new one and the Oxford university press. So patted me in the back and sent me on my way, probably thinking she’ll never complete that. And then I, thanks to Michelle leaners at NL Matt. He helped me find sponsorship from the beach foundation. So it’s actually open access.
So it will all be worthwhile effectively. We’ve created a tertiary education curriculum for all aspects of open beyond the actual coding. And it’s a gift, you know, take it, you use it, give it to your students, give it to communities, whatever. I’ll just pick that out to see it published
Matt: one of
Chris: the labors of Hercules complete.
Amanda: Absolutely.
Matt: So we might’ve said. Second or third stages of the the report frame it’s going to be available. When,
Amanda: so phase two is going out as a survey on the 17th of May. Anybody listening to this, we’d be so grateful to you for completing the survey or passing it to people, you know, across any sort of business sectors from transport to professional services to retail.
And we are then going to publish the outputs on the 7th of July. And then we’ll be publishing phase three very early in October.
Matt: Fantastic. We’ll put details of the of open UK where you can find details of that on the website@wdfortypodcast.com.
Chris: Yeah. So just before we finish, let’s just quickly touch on the fact that you’ve got another brilliant summer holiday thing for kids coming
Amanda: up.
We day, we’ve got a couple of things coming up. We just launched our awards last Friday, which are open uk.uk, but slash awards. And we have eight categories and those will be being an Einstein cult 26, along with the winners of our kids’ competition and the sort of four runner to the kids competition as the summer camp.
And this year we have 10 fun episodes based on the open-source definition. No wonder you’re both looking at me like that, but genuinely they’re really fun. And it’s taken a lot of work to make them fun. We have a very amazing young woman who is in her first year at Cambridge, who has stepped into the role of creative director having taught the course last summer.
So we have a 19 year old who intimidates me, who has done an amazing job. It’s just absolutely amazing job on the the digital skill side. And I’ve been collaborating with her and Pamela Ball, the teacher. So I should say her name, Lorena hall, absolutely amazing. A woman. She’s our creative director and she Pamela and I’ve been building the content and we are halfway through the course that will be easy.
And the course available in July and we are. About to finalize an announcer, another glove kit giveaway. So another year of free mini gloves.
Chris: Fantastic. As somebody who’s a kids made the last year’s glove. And I had a good fun time doing it. I’m sure it would be really, really cool. Good.
Amanda: I didn’t know you’d done that.
I probably did at the time. I forgot. And that’s, that’s great
Chris: to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was, it was really good. And and as you say, you know, it’s, it’s It’s something to do with the summer holidays and it teaches kids about, about something that will be useful to them. And I’m looking forward to seeing the educational and entertaining open-source model content because that’s a challenge.
Amanda: Yeah, no, it has been a chat. When we had one Sunday morning, we were all sitting around and trying to work out how to explain forking to 11 year olds, you know? You’ll see it when you get it.
Chris: Well, I’m looking forward to that.
Outro
Outro
Matt: Fabulous. That’s more or less it for another show. Thank you, Amanda, for coming to join us again. What’s the week ahead looking like for you,
Amanda: I’m obviously working on the survey, so that’s most of my week ahead, but I think I’m going to a restaurant in central London. Well to the street site table, like a restaurant, but that that’s good enough for me at the weekend.
Matt: Everything is open with you. Isn’t it. That’s all your petrol station. Fabulous. And Chris, Chris wants the the next seven days got in store for you.
Chris: Well, that’s an interest it’s in question because I have, I’ve got my diary is full of things that I noticed that I looked at my diary for this week as one doesn’t I’m Monday, just to see what, what, what a wait.
And actually the it’s quite, it’s quite full. But it’s a lot of what I would call admini stuff. So it’s not, not nothing earth shattering. And I’m just looking forward really to getting through the week. Cause it’s last week was a Shortly. It wasn’t it. We had bank holiday. So I always feel that the first full week after a bank holiday is something of a, you know, it’s a trial of strength because I’ve had a long weekend and a short weekend.
I need to get myself back so five to eight weeks. So that, that’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m just getting, looking forward to get through it. But with sanity intact,
Amanda: you mean the end of the week is what you’re looking forward to this week.
Chris: Yes, essentially.
Matt: That’s fair enough. I’ve got a presentation I’m doing tomorrow for an event that’s being organized by prerogative, which is a consulting firm based in Wales.
So I’m going to be talking about how investing in technology is a little bit like buying a new car. And so bring my current. Life into whatever it is that I have. You realize
Chris: you realize that that is essentially the Swiss Toni.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s there now. I mean, the basic idea is it, it starts with the premise that when people say investing in technology will save us money.
It’s a bit like saying buying a car will be cheaper than walking. And that’s the start point. And that actually is the takeaway for the whole thing. And I’m going to start with what it is that you need to take away from the presentation. So there would be 40 distances. You’ve got it there for free.
There you go. And other than that yeah, pretty clean. As long as we had. I I found last week, really hard work, and it felt like there was five days work in four days and quite looking forward to having five day to do five days work, it’s going to be much easier. But there we go. Thank you again, Amanda.
It was great to have you back. Thank you for listening. We we’ll be back next week. Next week we are going to be rejoined. By another guest who’s been away from us for quite some time. But coming back, Tracy Keogh from a grow remote in Ireland. Now that’s an organization surely whose time has come in the last 12 months.
So we were talking about how a grow remote has developed over the last few years. And what I guess the post pandemic world looks like for fostering remote communities of workers, working for organizations away from big offices. That’d be interesting.