In The Arena by TechArena - An Open Computing Landscape with OpenUK’s Amanda Brock

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock live from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague on her organization’s mission to drive open software, hardware and data contributions for UK developers.

. Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the tech arena. My name is Alison Klein. We're coming to you from Open Compute Regional Summit in Prague.

And I'm so happy to be joined by Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK, who is a keynote speaker here today. Welcome to the program. Thanks very much for having me along, Alison. Amanda, why don't you just go ahead and introduce yourself and the role of OpenUK in terms of contributions to the cloud. Okay, so I'm the CEO of OpenUK.

I was a lawyer by trade, spent 25 years as a lawyer, and the last 15 years I have worked in and around open source. 10 of them still doing legal work and being part of legal communities around open technologies. And the last three and a half I've been the CEO of Open UK. And we're very much an organisation that focuses on the business of open technology. And for us open technology is software, hardware and data in the UK so we're geographically focused and we bring together people so we signed quite like a cold trade-up Association type of organization we're really not we focus

on people who are in the business of open technology and we have a focus on UK leadership and global collaboration so although we're a geographic organization and we bring people together across the different projects, the different open source software, hardware, data projects, we very much bring them together on a geographical basis so that we can collaborate globally. Your keynote today was packed. I was in the back of the room standing

because there was nowhere to sit. I couldn't see that far back. And you know I think it just it just speaks to the value of open and open source and the message that you had to send today. Everyone was riveted. What I think was so interesting is the role that the UK is playing in the open community and the relative contributions the UK is making. Can you just talk a little bit about where you see that contribution and what technologies are behind it in terms of the massive numbers?

Yeah, there's some interesting stories around that actually. So in the UK we didn't have a country organization and there were some people interested in setting one up. Brexit was coming down the line hard and fast and the European Commission who we'd worked a lot with was focusing very much in 2019 on open-source and they set up their open-source program office in 2020. We knew that was coming and there's a bit of a concern that what would happen is that we'd be left out in a limb in the UK and in theory we're way ahead we had our

open source first law or a policy at least in 2011 so 2012 actually so 11 years ago and we had seen an increased adoption across the UK on a fairly gradual basis following that. And then a few years ago, a number of people got involved in Kubernetes, and Kubernetes, the use of open source software in the cloud environment, anybody in the cloud space, anybody in the tech space really, can't have failed to have seen the way that that has just escalated, particularly in the last five years. can't have failed to have seen the way that that has just escalated particularly in the last five years. You know I heard today from AWS, Google were on stage, all

of the hyperscalers, anybody running a cloud builds it on top of the shoulders of giants and those giants are the open source giants. And a huge number of people in the UK got involved really early stage in Kubernetes. Apparently, I wasn't there, but there was a meeting, and there was a flight back from that meeting to the UK that was completely full of open source folk. Oh, that's fun. Yeah.

So what we've seen is one of the great things that Cloud Native have done is they've really pushed to build a diverse community. And we've built on that within the UK. So there are a lot of women involved, a lot of people from ethnic minorities a very diverse group of people and we've brought them into the organization geographically which is nice right and it particularly came to the fore through lockdown where we started to socialize more with the people around us it was very strange it

turned out for me that one of the leads, a lady at Microsoft, Sonia Cooper, who is now our open data lead, Sonia lived six doors down from me at one stage and I had no idea. And we were on a panel discussion. I mentioned the weather in my neighborhood and she was stunned that I lived around the corner from her now. And it turns out, I think there are about 10 or 12 open UK volunteers, you know, who run the organization within a 10 minute walk of my home. That's wonderful. But you don't know that when you meet somebody, right? And we didn't know our neighbors. So one of the great things on a sort of individual level is this brings people together.

It brings people together. It lets them find out what's going on. It lets them work with their peers, speak to their peers. Different projects come out of it, but it's also just that community, which is really nice. So you know there's been massive contribution. We saw in January GitHub accounts in the UK and it's very flawed but we've come to measure the number of open source developers using GitHub accounts and we saw it hit 3 million. I think the nearest in Europe is Germany which was at about 2.1 million.

That's amazing. It's huge, right? It's huge. And when you look at it per capita, we're not that big a country. So we get to 4.5% of the population approximately. And that puts us number one in the world. The US is very close behind us. And I'm sure when they do their next census, you know, it'll be neck and neck. But it's been really interesting to see because it looked like somewhere like India with 9 million accounts and it's much bigger than we are they have much more obvious presence but of course the country is more than three times the size of the UK exactly exactly so it's we've almost

been a hidden center of excellence I think for the last five to ten years in the UK that's amazing you know you're talking about Kubernetes and what that technology has done for cloud and I was just at a Gestalt IT event for the edge and how it's you know invaded into the edge and open source is just so critical in terms of the broad proliferation of this automated, scalable technology. I think that the other thing is, you know, we're Open Compute and you talked about the purview across open software, open hardware, open data. Why is that so important to your initiative?

Well, when we looked at it, historically the model that you'd seen of country organizations had very much been focused on open source software. And the UK has a very strong open data community. We have the Open Data Institute, which Sir Tim Berners-Lee set up 10 years ago, and the Open Knowledge Foundation based in the UK. So there's been a lot more open data going on there

than I think many parts of the world, and it's been very much in the purview. But if you're looking at software today, it's very hard to do much without coming back to data. And opening up the data democratises many things. You also have this balance, of course, with personal privacy. So we knew that we wanted to bring data into the equation. And we looked at all the different opens. I mean, you get open seats, open recipes, you know, the list is endless. But we figured that if you took software, hardware, and data, everything else that we could find

would be sitting underneath it. So we thought that that was a broad enough definition that covered everything and brought everyone together. And, you know, those interact in technologies, they interact in businesses, but also the people who are involved in open hardware have often come from an open software background, open source software background. So there's a lot of overlap and cross-fertilization that goes on.

You know, it's interesting. I come from a hardware background with decades in the semiconductor industry. The work that's done by OCP to create frameworks and models for open hardware substantiation absolutely accelerates the deployment of technology. But open data is a really interesting one to me. I think that when I think about something as powerful as AI and we see generative AI playing out. One of the concerns that I have as just a consumer of content and data is that these powerful technologies will be left in the hands of the few. And open data is such a game changer in terms of giving access to training. That whole conversation around AI is a constant right now.

I've just come from Amsterdam where KubeCon's happening. 10,000 developers sitting in Amsterdam listening to talks about Kubernetes and cloud native packages over the next few days. And I was at something called KubeCon Rejects because my talk wasn't accepted. So I was speaking with rejects. And it was a constant, people asking about how do we keep it open?

Is the technology going to end up in the hands of a few? And there's a lot of different dimensions to this. I think one of the interesting things that's come out recently, over the last couple of years, we've started to look from a regulatory perspective at SBOM, software-built materials. And I think we're going to see, it was leaked at the weekend to the FT, I think, that the commission is looking at having a similar SBOM

for training AI. So you know what it's being trained on. Now that is a really interesting piece in many different ways, partly because it will show you, if you're training your own AI, what your competitors have used, or what a big company has used, if you're an individual trying AI what your competitors have used or what a big company has used if you were an individual trying to do your own little project.

But also it will show you where the biases start to come in. It will show you how training the AI on different information creates different outputs. So I think this is a really fascinating area, but it's absolutely massive. And it's probably got quite a long way to go before we're substituting people very nice you brought up something interesting which is the regulatory aspects of this and you are a lawyer by trade so i'm going to ask you

where are the you know where laws in this and how are we getting protected? How is data getting protected? And what do you see on the horizon in terms of the geopolitical implications? So much to unpack there. So with AI specifically, we have a draft AI bill in the UK. There's AI legislation being proposed in Europe, the US and many other countries. I've purposely avoided it for a very long time.

And I avoided it because I felt that the need in AI, it's a bit like open source, but even more, is to have joined up global responses. You know, if you legislate in Switzerland that you can do X but not Y with AI, but your neighbor next door allows AI to press the button of a nuclear weapon. Right. What happens? And it just always felt to me like this was such a big thing. It needed a UN of technology regulation to pull it together.

And in many ways, open source is similar. We're seeing the security aspects where governments now understand that open source is permeating our national infrastructure and our critical infrastructure so the way i tend to explain it to sort of politicians and people in the public sector of policy is that tech's like a pizza and everybody's always interested in the topping right you go to a restaurant they don't debate the base you either have to come to consensus on a topping or you all pick your own on your own bit of pizza. And I think that AI, ML, blockchain, cloud, the internet, they're all like toppings on a pizza.

And sitting underneath, you've got the base that people are much less interested in, and that's open source. And that's what we need, because if you take that base away, you've got a sloppy mess. I love that analogy. So actually, you need to keep and think about

it and what we're seeing is government starting to realise that that pizza base, that national infrastructure and critical national infrastructure is based on open source software and that they're concerned because they're concerned about security which of course isn't just an open source issue, that's a software issue per se, but the open source piece has a slightly different nuance and when anything goes wrong we're so public about it it's really come to the surface so you know dealing with those issues has been very important and we're seeing responses some better than others from different countries but also we're seeing concerns about this collaborative basis that open is built on whatever

you're doing software hardware data where even if you're just doing collaborative development in a company where you don't plan to open it up we're seeing concerns about where people are and this geopolitical shift and I think for somebody in the UK it's probably more of a concern than to many countries in the world because we've been through three years of everything our daily lives being affected by this shift away from being part of the EU. So it is a major issue and there's a lot of education needed on the fact that we have to have this global collaboration to make open work and that open really is the future.

Amanda, if folks are listening online, they want to find out more about Open UK and get involved or engage your agency, where would you send them? Yeah, I would send them to openuk.uk or amandabrock.com, depending on if it's Open UK or me thereafter. You'll find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm at amand UK. And you'll

also find us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Masterdom. And it's Open UK underscore UK on Twitter. You know, it's interesting, the topics that we talked about today, they form the foundation of what's going to be interesting over the next two years. There's so much. I can't wait to continue to follow the story with OpenUK. Thanks for being on today. Thanks very much, Alison. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena.

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