Keynote: Software as a Public Service: Introducing the Sovereign Tech Fund
Location: Main room - 10/4/22, 4:00 AM - 10/4/22, 4:45 AM (EDT) (45 minutes)

Felix Reda Board Member, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany

Felix Reda is a board member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a Shuttleworth Fellow and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. At the Open Knowledge Foundation, he helped initiate the Sovereign Tech Fund, a new public funding instrument for open source basic technologies by the German government. From 2014 to 2019, Felix was a Member of the European Parliament, where he initiated the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project with the European Commission. At his day job, Felix leads the control © project on copyright and freedom of communication at German fundamental rights litigation NGO Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. (Society for Civil Rights). He graduated with an M.A. in Political Science and Journalism from the University of Mainz.


Open Source Basic Technologies underpin all parts of our government, society and economy. Supporting the maintenance and sustainability of open source ecosystems should therefore be part of public service provision, like maintaining traffic and communications networks. In Germany, we have convinced the government to support open source basic technologies by creating the Sovereign Tech Fund, which will offer financial and practical support to critical open source projects.