Yeah. Hi, everybody. I'm here actually today to talk about working in open source and in the public service in Germany. So my name, thanks for the introduction, is Pohen Shah and I've been working at the Sovereign Tech Fund since May of 2023. So in the grand

scheme of things, not all that long, but in the history of our organization, maybe over half of its lifetime. If you don't know, what does the Sovereign Tech Fund do? How do I, oh, there we go. Our mission is to support the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. So we're trying to strengthen open source

ecosystems sustainably and we look a lot at security, resilience, technological diversity, and of course, the people behind the code. So that's our mission statement. But what does this really mean? So if you know the XKCD comic about dependencies, which I did not include this presentation, because you've already seen it today, at least once, maybe several times. Our task is to find the people or the person maintaining those

components, the libraries, maybe it's a programming language, a package manager or developer tool, and we work with them to develop a service contract, because their code is critical that it's used in a ton of different places. And if this falls down, then everything stops working. I mean, that's the fear that we all have that, as we said, the lottery

factor or the bus factor or anything like that. Some examples of technologies that we funded in the last year or so are Log4j, Curl, RubyGems, Pendulum, which is working on NTP and PTP, and also as of today, which I just posted, because I'm the communications manager, CoreUtils. So if you're interested, it's on our website, sovereigntechfund.de.

But what does that mean that we're, what are we really doing, right? So like, if I'm trying to convince you to come work in what we call public sector in open source, we're really building a new kind of public sector organization. We are trying to bridge

the gap between public administration, public procurement law, governments, and open source communities, trying to find ways to support them and to make sure that this important part of the work that is being done in the world is also being supported by governments and states in the ways that it really should be, just the way that governments are

responsible for building roads, building bridges, maintaining water and sewage and education systems, all the things out there. That's a whole separate talk on the metaphors that we use to talk about open source infrastructure. Check with me next year about that one. But basically, we want to make sure that these things are being funded

and look at it as a new way, a new area that the government should be active in. So that's what we're doing. We started in September 2022 within the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. When I started with my colleague Abigail, who's back there, in last May, we were, I think, employees four and five. Now there's 11 of us and we'll

be spinning out into our own organization, a subsidiary later this year. And so that is what you would be joining. I hesitate to compare it to being in a startup because I have worked in startups, ones that are venture funded or ones that are not. But it is, we are really, really flexible. We are trying to constantly react to changing circumstances. We have a lot of different stakeholders, I guess. And we definitely are trying to learn

from mistakes and learn from the things, you know, a lot of things that we're doing are new for the first time. So we are trying to use public procurement law to purchase, you know, work and maintenance and security updates on open source software. So why am I spending all this time telling you about this? And it's because we are hiring. We have three jobs open

right now, technologist, program manager, and bug resilience program manager. And before I get into what exactly that is in the last 70 seconds, it's important for me to tell you that if you look in the job descriptions, we are open to all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. We know that the intersection of technology of open source of public sector work is confusing and lots of people face structural discrimination. So if you're

interested, send us an application. We're really excited to hear from you if you're excited by the work that we're doing, especially even if you don't meet all the requirements. So we have a technologist position open, you will be researching emerging technologies, looking at what's out there, explaining them to me so that I can write about them. For other people, for our political stakeholders to understand, you'll be scouting

and assessing potential investment opportunities. And we want you to come to events and network with the FOSS communities so that you can, you know, participate through discussions and conferences and those kinds of things. We have a bug resilience program manager, we were given money to fund a bug bounty program, and we turned that into bug resilience to look at how we can address vulnerability in a systematic way without just dumping more bug reports on

open source projects. And you would be leading that, developing the program's concept further, looking at applications for organizations that want to participate, and working with implementation partners. And program managers are also on the program team. That's a job to oversee the application and selection process, manage and supervise the funded

projects, and contribute to new program development. So that's it. That is awesome. Thank you.