I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?

In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:

- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source

- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this

- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)

- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases

I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.

Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.

So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.

My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction