Josh welcomes Amanda Brock from OpenUK to chat about sovereignty, policy, open source, and a whole host of other topics. Amanda has front row seat into how sovereignty decisions can affect a county and its open source. It seems sometimes like open source is a global phenomenon, but there are always country wide considerations. This is what the OpenUK is doing in the UK. The discussion is great and the things the OpenUK is dealing with will affect many of us moving forward, even if we would prefer to ignore our digital borders.

This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player.

Episode Transcript

Josh (00:00) Today, open source security is talking to Amanda Brock, who is the CEO of OpenUK I’ve been you know I I told Amanda this before we record. I’ve been wanting OpenUK on this show for like literally years at this point, and I just quite frankly kept forgetting to ask. And so Amanda reached out to me. So thank you so much, Amanda, for reaching out. I am

Amanda Brock (00:17) all right.

Josh (00:17) Really excited to have you here.

Amanda Brock (00:18) Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be with you Josh.

Josh (00:22) Awesome. So why don’t we start out? Just tell us who you are and what OpenUK is and we’ll go from

Amanda Brock (00:26) Okay, I’m CEO of OpenUK and Open HQ. Lots of people haven’t heard about a second brand yet. And I’ve been at OpenUK now for almost seven years, which is a long story that wasn’t intended. I spent, I think, 25 years before that, mainly in the tech sector as a lawyer. And in 2008, early 2008, I joined a company called Canonical, which I’m sure your audience will know well. I was employed with 165.

and I spent five years there at that stage in a company’s growth cycle. Those years are like dog years, so five years was pretty intense. And I built and ran the legal team there, which was really a big introduction to open source for me.

I joined them as a commercial lawyer. I think the expectation was that had a three month contract and I’d be there for three months to do a specific task. And I ended up staying for five years because I really got into open source.

Josh (01:27) That’s awesome. That is so cool. And and so what is OpenUK doing though? Because this is a cool organization.

Amanda Brock (01:34) Well, thank you. OpenUK was set up as a sort of new model of industry body.

We looked at what was happening in Europe and we looked at geographic organisations, other places, and we looked at what was being done on policy and we tried to bring the two together. So we set up an organisation, some of it by design and some of it just by luck or happenstance along the way, that brings together the ecosystem around open source in the UK and then gives it a voice, or we try to give it a voice through policy. We have a group of lawyers who respond to proposals for legislation. We do lots of

work

and that pivots over time in terms of what it is. Unsurprisingly we’re doing lots of AI because we don’t have a choice these days and we also do quite a lot of skills and learning development.

Josh (02:24) And and you have a you have a conference, right?

Amanda Brock (02:27) We do start with OpenCon and we’ve been doing that for four years now. The first three years were a single big event in London. We’ve shifted gears a little bit this year with slightly smaller events or quite a bit smaller events actually across the UK. And we’re just planning next year as we speak.

Josh (02:44) Nice. That’s

very cool. And and I I’ll just start out with saying like it sort of amuses me that maybe a decade ago when any open source people you came to them were like we have to worry about lawmakers and policy and government, we’d be like, Whatever, we’re just we’re open source technology nerds. We don’t have to care about any of that stuff. And like that has shifted a lot over the last probably at least three to

Amanda Brock (03:05) Yeah,

Josh (03:06) five years, I’d say.

Amanda Brock (03:07) yeah, it really has. Somebody else was asking me earlier this week about the shifts in lawyers in this space because back in 2008 there were about 60 of us globally and we all knew each other. There’s obviously a new generation coming into that now and there are more.

But when it comes to really understanding, and it’s not just understanding the licensing, when it comes to really understanding open source and how it works, business models, all of that stuff, what you’re going to get right and wrong in a community, there aren’t that many people that do, it’s quite niche. And I guess

Josh (03:37) Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Amanda Brock (03:38) that’s true also of people that really understand what open source is as engineers, right?

anybody can do it, but it takes something special and a great deal of knowledge to really understand it. was with, I’m name dropping now, I was with Kelsey Hightower earlier this week and I met him for the first time and did a really fun panel at Civo Navigate with him about open source and age of AI. And I was the moderator, so I got to sort play around a bit with him and Liz Rice, Matt Barker, the different guests that were included in it.

Kelsey was really adamant about something and he was really adamant that what open source is and this is very relevant to your policymakers what open sources is sharing some code with a bunch of words that are a license and that is absolutely right. Okay, that is what the legal definition of open source is, know, you put bells and whistles on that you’d say your license complies with the open source definition. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that is what open source is per se. But when people just do that, it doesn’t work, right? Depending on what you want the goal to be. And then when I sort of pushed them on that and I used the word success, Kelsey came straight back at me with, how do you define success?

And he doesn’t know me and he doesn’t really know that, you know, I’ve written about how we need a different model for corporates and for capitalism because simply having shareholder value is a bad driver. But with that driver, people do open source and the success is going to be measured on value generated and cost savings and things, right? But

actually what is

Josh (05:15) Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Amanda Brock (05:15) open source, he’s right about what open source is, but he’s not right if you want adoption.

And you you’re of a generation that I’m of where we spent all this work and time trying to get adoption. And a bit of that’s been, be careful what you wish for. And that’s why we’re now speaking to policymakers at the scale that we are, right?

Josh (05:36) Yes, the dog caught the car and I absolutely love that. So

Amanda Brock (05:39) Mm-hmm.

Josh (05:40) okay, so I I also want to kind of as as the the front end of this conversation is one of your I think it’s a blog post or maybe one of your news items. I don’t remember where on your website I saw this, but you said that you want the open UK to be like the Linux foundation for the UK.

Amanda Brock (05:55) so OpenUK is very much an industry organization, a policy organization, and we’ve got the second brand OpenHQ that at some point I’ll explain, but it’s more focused on the policy and at an international level because there is a gap, as you say there. What we think is needed in country is a national foundation. So if you look at China’s journey to open source, a lot of people react as if in 2025, you know, DeepSeek released R1 and suddenly China started doing open source and you and I know

that’s

not true. Lots and lots of great contributors from China to the open source ecosystem. Lots of companies contributing in the same way as the US and international companies do to funding it. And what you see is a very long planned journey into open source that is actually hidden in plain sight, you know, in

2025, they did the 15th five-year plan. So in 2020, they did the 14th one for China, national five-year plan. And that five-year plan says that they’re going to drive towards open source and explains how they’re going to do it. And one of the things they did maybe around six years ago was set up a national foundation, OpenAtom And that foundation now has over a hundred staff and it does pretty much what Linux Foundation does on a national level. But it’s not a replacement for Linux Foundation.

works closely with Linux Foundation, it just does some of the national projects. So what we’ve seen is that in the UK, and I’m sure this is true of every country that isn’t the US or China, we contribute to open source. Now the UK scale of contribution is different from most countries, right?

We

are fifth globally on absolutely everything that I’ve ever seen in terms of number of engineers or number of lines of code or other measures of contribution, all the technologies contributed. So we’re fifth, but we’re nowhere near the size of the countries that are above us in any measure. So per capita, we have a huge tradition of engineering and of open source in the UK. So it’s a really big asset for us. And what we do is we innovate and you’ll hear all the startup

just complaining you know I don’t know how much you guys in the US hear this but we innovate and we build businesses on that innovation and we sell them to the US occasionally to Asia but usually to the US and before we do that we will get funding usually from the US because the terms are better and those companies will become Delaware corporations and the UK stops counting them right it’s just it’s just how it is and you aren’t going to shift that

without the infrastructure and the ecosystem that’s needed for open source. And that means that you have an ecosystem where you build a nexus of people, where you build the tools that are needed. And when I speak to people in government, and I’ve done a lot of this over five or six years, when I speak to people in the public sector who fund innovation,

They fund innovation, they may require it to be open source because they want to see the adoption and they want it to be recycled and reused. They want to save costs.

they put Kelsey’s definition, the true legal definition of open source in the funding requirements that it be shared usually on GitHub, they might even specify about and that it be in an OS if you know, it’ll be an open source license or it will define what an open source license is and it might do it properly and say that it’s OSD compliant. But that’s usually it. Now, if we go back to that measure of success that Kelsey challenged me on, if I was to ask those bodies what success is, it’s going to be adoption.

It’s going to be contribution. It’s going to be engagement with those projects. Those will be the kind of measures, maybe stars.

And you’re not gonna get that as a nobody in open source. Now, again, as I pushed back to Kelsey, if you’re Kelsey Hightower and you put something on GitHub and you don’t tell anybody, there is a strong likelihood that people will come and use it because you are embedded into that open source ecosystem. You are viewed as a good bet or somebody whose outputs are worth looking at.

My favourite case study we did on it was with a plumber in the UK who had been given a grant to build environmentally friendly technology and he built a smart metering system, a monitoring system.

and

he put it on GitHub and he wanted it to be open source. He wasn’t even one of the companies that normally built technology and was taking the money and was dumping it into GitHub graveyard because he thought it was a good way of getting money. He genuinely wanted it and he was angry and he was angry because this open source community hadn’t just popped up and coalesced around him.

Well, we had this Richard, we had this great debate, me and Richard about it, and we use it to explain to the public sector how this goes wrong. And they brought me into mentor, you know, six projects that they gave three million pounds to. It’s a lot of money. None of which have been successful in the open source economy if you measure that by adoption and contribution, et cetera. So.

You know, there is a piece that you have to have the bits in place that enable that success, which is what China was doing with OpenAtom And that includes community building, includes the program and project management, includes the engagement, includes bringing partners in for contributions, you know, to build a healthy ecosystem, maybe using something like the chaos metrics. If you go and use the measures that you would see of what a healthy ecosystem is, effectively what they’ve created is single

single vendor products where only their own people you know employed by them contribute and they’ve put them on github now that that is open source technically but it is not going to achieve the goals they have and i think you will only get to that by having a body they can’t afford to go out for every project that the the uk innovation funds build and hire that suite of people but they can have them fractionally

And there’s a bunch of stuff like that between the whole move towards sovereignty in Europe and how the public sector holds the repos that they’ve got and knows how to manage them and all that sort of stuff. Even knowing what conferences to go to. You need some central expertise and…

I don’t think it’s controversial anymore, but it used to be. I’ve been saying for years that OSPOs are dead. As soon as I saw, you know, people like Chris DiBona being laid off from big OSPOs you knew it had its day, you know, that moment had passed. They replicate them still in some of the public sector, but that would die a death too. And I think you need to think beyond that and where is it going? You see things like the sovereign tech agency in Germany distributing funds.

I think that’s another thing that this foundation, it won’t be a real foundation because we don’t have the same corporate structures, but this institute, this body would be for the UK. But we really need that centralised body and we don’t need to build an ivory tower or a silo. We need a centralised body that brings a group of skilled people who then integrate into lots of different places.

Josh (13:25) Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the first question

that pops in probably a lot of people’s brains at this moment is but there’s already foundations that exist for this. You know, you’ve got the Linux Foundation, you like the Eclipse Foundation, you the Apache Foundation. Why do we need another foundation? Or whatever

you

Amanda Brock (13:39) So

Josh (13:39) call it in the UK?

Amanda Brock (13:41) yeah, there are so many reasons for this. One is around that sovereignty question and future leadership. So if you as a nation are one of the world’s biggest contributors, why would you constantly be sending your IP abroad? Why would you be sending all your assets that you’ve just paid for to another country?

And we do it a lot in the UK. We’re far too nice. We are not ruthless enough when it comes to business. We’re very risk averse and we’re terribly nice people. We’re bit passive aggressive. But we definitely have this flow where we pay for innovation and then other people buy that innovation and get to leverage it and monetize it and do the GTM on it. And we really have to stop that. It’s not a healthy situation. there’s that. There is building soft power over time with things like if you look at the Agenda AI Foundation,

It’s working with both the closed model and the open model providers to build the protocols, the standards of the future. Whoever controls that will have a hell of a lot of power over time. And again, that’s all going into the US or China right now. So there is room to share some of that. I’m not saying take it away. I’m just saying share it out a little bit.

So the breadth of what I’m thinking of in the foundation is quite wide. I think that probably already gives you some sense of why it needs to be national. And it’s not about the sort of rabid sovereignty that says everything has to be done here. It’s saying, well, I have my share, my neighbors have their shares. We bring those together to a beautifully collaborative whole where we will all work together, but we’re not just going to give everything away.

Josh (15:21) Yeah, yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And and I mean

Amanda Brock (15:23) Does it?

Josh (15:24) this this harkens back I think to some of the work like the I’ll pick on the sovereign tech agency right now,

Amanda Brock (15:28) Thank

Josh (15:29) is while they are a German organization, they are happy to fund efforts outside of the country of Germany.

Amanda Brock (15:34) Yeah.

And I would see it being a similar thing. think there is a need, and I’ve been writing about this for five or six years, there is a need to centralise how we fund open source.

But you’re centralizing that funding to make smart decisions collectively, bringing together the funding from national ecosystems. So they’re bringing Germany’s 50 million. My foundation would bring the UK’s 50 million. It wouldn’t be its only job. It would be a slightly different kind of entity. looking at what they do, they do great work. But why would I replicate what they’re doing and not do what they’re doing plus where I see them going in the future? And I expect they will end up as a codeholder.

Foundation managing ecosystems as well as the managing ecosystems and

tools

and projects as well as what they do now. You know, I see that as a natural evolution for them. So of course I’m going to recommend we do that. And I suspect that everybody will do it over time. know, France set up current AI, they were on a big drive towards public good rather than open source. And maybe that’s the right framing, I don’t know, but they supposedly had 500 million for that. German sovereign tech agencies bring in 50 million a year and OpenAtom is funded.

I think OpenAtom, from what I understand, we’re hopefully going to do a case study with them for a report soon, but what I currently understand is that they have a mix of enterprise and state funding, and I think that’s the kind of model, and I like the idea if you’re building this for the UK, you would have the public sector and enterprise so that one keeps the other honest.

And I would hope that other countries would want to replicate that too. And then, you know, you just find ways to collaborate, but we are going to see more and more of this because there is this massive drive in AI and it might be something where AI is actually helpful to open source to look at cross border governance and cross border management of AI. We’ve needed that for decades for open source right? You don’t want a cyber resilience act in the EU.

and a different regulation in the UK and a different regulation in the US that you have to comply with. That’s just a nightmare and that’s what we’re currently getting. So if you can harmonize an AI, we don’t know if we can yet, we should. And I think we should then start to look at how do we do that in other digital areas like open source.

Josh (18:11) Yeah, well I mean we we see that right with like there was what GDPR and I can’t remember the name of the California data standard, but like, you know, it it’s

Amanda Brock (18:18) Yeah,

Josh (18:19) a mess.

Amanda Brock (18:19) yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So, and there’s also a piece, and I’m not gonna remember the word, I’m really bad at this, it begins with a, adequacy, I did remember it. We have an adequacy ruling in the UK for GDPR. So, although we no longer comply with it, we meet an adequacy test. And you can do that, know, cross border. There are structures that are long established legally that are live for international.

and approvals.

Josh (18:51) Okay, I gotcha. Okay. I wanna loop back to something you were talking about and you you sprinkled this in in your your last kind of explanation and you talk about like code hosting and sovereignty, and you talk about, you know, like a your plumber person who created a project

Amanda Brock (19:06) Thank you.

Josh (19:07) and was like, Where where is everybody? And I think there’s there’s an aspect of this that that sometimes people don’t understand with open source, which is like you can technically open source anything, but

Amanda Brock (19:15) Mm-hmm.

Josh (19:15) there’s definitely a draw

To projects that are hosted in like we’ll say, like some kind of known entity, right? Some like the Linux Foundation or the Apache Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation.

Amanda Brock (19:23) Yeah.

Josh (19:25) And I think the one thing I’ll sprinkle on top of that is there have been a bunch of like rug pulls in the corporate world lately where someone releases a product open source, then they’re like, we’re changing the license, everybody. Ha ha. You know, jokes on you. Whereas that is very much one of the defenses you get with some of these, you know, like sovereign code hosting organizations like you’re talking about. So

Explain some of that to us ‘cause I feel like that is not always

Amanda Brock (19:50) Yeah.

Josh (19:51) well understood.

Amanda Brock (19:52) I think that goes beyond sovereignty and I think it’s explained better by David Soraya-Parris, I hope I’ve said your name right David, who was one of the co-creators of MCP here in London when, and who works for Anthropic and he’s been heavily involved with the Agents of AI Foundation and the sub-foundation of Linux Foundation. And he talks very, very fluently and very clearly about how they are putting that protocol into a foundation to secure it.

longevity as an open protocol and it’s like putting it beyond temptation it’s a bit like I always view Stallman having created copy left to save us from ourselves right as soon you’re tempted to take it and do something that he would have viewed as bad with it you can’t you’re forced into good behavior and I see having a foundation as a way of protecting the openness of something in the long term

You know once it’s out there and it’s open you can’t take it back and a foundation will manage that in perpetuity and theory

Josh (20:59) Yes, yes. And there’s also I mean, you mentioned, you know, conferences and, you know, working groups and interacting with governments and things like that. And when you are a just a person, obviously, the it’s out of the question, but even when you’re a company, you don’t necessarily know how you need to be interacting with various, you know, legal entities and and organizations and other groups, which is like it sounds like it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s a lot of frickin’ work.

Amanda Brock (21:24) Yeah, this is the thing that, I didn’t necessarily mean to do this, but it’s how it’s happened. having sort of rebuilt OpenUK, OpenUK sort of existed for 10, 15 years as an informal grouping of people. know, I didn’t make up the name they did. They asked me to build it.

might as well tell you that I said no, I wasn’t interested and I wasn’t interested. I’ve worked in open source since 2008 and before that from 2000 I’ve been in international roles and I never really felt British. I viewed myself as a sort of Scot who was a global citizen and really that sounds quite pretentious doesn’t it but genuinely in a nice way that all my you know my friends were all over the world, I collaborated with people all over the world so I wasn’t interested in a UK centric organization at all and I changed my mind because

Brexit and if you think about Brexit you know like it or lump it or dislike it you know we’re stuck with it it was one of the most clear and definable acts of sovereignty that you will ever see you know you have whether it was well defined whether it was clear to people what they were voting for or not you have a decision made by a national population in a referendum

that

may not really have been about the issue at hand that might have been an anti-government vote, but it was their choice to make that decision. And at a moment in time, the lights went out on us being in the EU. And I say the lights went out because sometimes when I talk about sovereignty, I’ll show a picture. And there’s a couple of people you might know in that picture with me at FOSDEM And there’s Sheryl Hoong who was…

at the Cloud Native Foundation for many years and there is god I’m bad with names Jonathan Riddle who worked with me at Canonical who is big in KDE has been big in KDE for a long time and we are standing outside the European Commission at midnight on the 31st of January 2020 and we’ve just been at FOSDEM which is why we’re there and in the background you can see a lot of people with traffic cones on their head not because they’re Scottish football fans but because they’re

VLC right I kept sending Jean-Baptiste pictures during the World Cup of all the Scots with the cones on you know they all want to contribute to your community anyway another I digress so we were all standing outside and they literally at midnight put the lights out and it you know really really poignant this is a moment where the lights are out for us we are out and now we have to fend for ourselves and you know frankly it was a shit show trying to put all the regulation in

to sort things out where stuff would apply where it wouldn’t apply international treaties and contracts and blah blah blah so there’s a lot to deal with there right and that made me think a lot about sovereignty before most people and that sort of gets you to a point where you you sort of see how emotional it is and how nationalistic people can be

But actually, we all need the same things. And the more you spend time with people from other countries, the more you see that we all have a lot in common, right? We go through the same things, you we grow up, we’re teenagers, we have, we get married, we have children, we deal with parents getting sick, people dying around us, you know, just the phases of our life, there’s a universality amongst people. Yet we want this sovereignty. And the sovereignty piece has become very, very defined around the…

around digital and around AI because governments have suddenly woken up to something they’ve missed for 30 years and what they’ve missed for 30 years is this progress of digitalization which is entirely dependent on open source, right?

Josh (25:35) Yes. It runs the whole world, for sure. And and

Amanda Brock (25:38) Yeah, right.

Josh (25:39) I mean this it it should be added that the the idea of digital sovereignty is become vastly more important, I think, especially like over in Europe and the UK and and many other countries that aren’t the US, just because the current administration has used some of the US tech against countries and people it doesn’t like, which has really, I think, opened the eyes of like, holy

Amanda Brock (26:02) I feel…

Josh (26:04) cow, like

These people are literally driving the bus, and there’s nothing we can do.

Amanda Brock (26:09) But hang on.

So when you say against people you don’t like, that is the traditional approach to things like trade embargoes or export control regulation, right? You pick the bad guys and you exclude them. And one of the things I like about open source is that open source, according to definitions five and six of the open source definition can be used by anyone for any purpose. There’s no restriction and field of endeavor against people. Now that license is obviously

subject to law, right? Everybody knows that. So your license doesn’t trump law, law trumps a license. So if there is export control, you’ve got to comply with that. And that sort of gets back to your policymakers and all the shifts that we’ve seen in the last few years. And the way dealing with policymakers has evolved, I think I may have gotten a tangent that we’ll cut a minute ago. But…

when you look at policy makers they know that they have to

get that digital stuff to their people, right? They know that they have to deliver services over that digital infrastructure. They know that their citizens expect them to deliver in that digital way. And there’ve been some big shifts that, you know, the iPhone in 2008 bringing us devices, two or three rounds of apps that didn’t work, but 2012 they start to, and gradually everybody moves their life into a digital environment.

And they then had that escalated with COVID. And what they know is that they have to be able to deliver digital services. And people like me were telling them 20 years ago, you’re not watching. You’re not understanding where the money flows. You’re not understanding how these tech companies are evolving.

And you see us ending up with about eight companies who control that digital, even a lot of the open source because they’re the big funders of it, but they control that digital environment. And that’s a challenge for governments. Now.

Brexit is one thing and it’s a very clear act of sovereignty. The EU took a very different approach and we took our sovereignty from our neighbours, whether that was right or wrong, completely different matter. The EU has been throwing stones at the US for a good 10 years in policy.

And part of that, you I started to track it because of Brexit. And I don’t know if I was clear, but I ended up doing OpenUK because of Brexit because I realized that the commission wasn’t going to want us around. It was made very clear to me that, you know, I was, I and another UK national were going to be on a board of a new foundation in the EU. And we were told we couldn’t be because the commission had said if any British nationals were directors, they wouldn’t fund them. So, you know,

that it was like that, it was really horrible. So I realised that there was a real need for OpenUK to do what we were already doing in Europe but in the UK. So you know we did that shift. When you look at sovereignty in the EU in particular and you see it everywhere, you see it in India, you see it all over the world, there is the sudden awakening of governments and public sectors to this fact that they are entirely dependent on a few companies.

Now I would push back that if your technology is open and it’s accessible, that should be enough, right?

if you have open accessible technology that you can, if you fall out with that enterprise, bring in house and you have enough skills around you to manage that worst case scenario, or if it’s interoperable and you can transfer it to another organization and to be interoperable doesn’t mean having a service layer or egress fees that are so high that you can’t get out of it.

if it is truly interoperable and it’s truly open source, you don’t have that problem. But that’s not the case. And that’s where we see the challenges. It’s really down to governments suddenly having to fix this mess they’ve got themselves into where everything about their nations are dependent on a few companies, mainly from the US. And then the sudden realization that all of their fears had crystallized, as you said, this summer when, or actually in the last 18 months, so, you know,

you’ve done things to people or countries you don’t like but some of the tariffs have been applied to everybody apart from the US and the export control regulation that applied to Mythos and Fable from Anthropic this summer applied to everybody who wasn’t a US national I believe so these are really wide-reaching and they crystallize the fears that a maverick or

a dependency on a country could leave you vulnerable. That became a reality and that’s really shifted it. But I was in China, I think two weeks ago, and I asked my audience if they were, are they aware of sovereignty? Did they know what it meant? And only a handful of them did. So probably like the US, it is not the hot topic. For some it is. And what sovereignty really means is a huge challenge. And for me, as somebody in open source, I’ve never really understood

because you have this balance where you want to make something local but actually you can’t because you’re totally dependent on open source and then you’ve got these people saying open source is the cornerstone of sovereignty but open source is a global phenomena right and going back to Kelsey’s definition you don’t have to have international contributors or global collaboration to build it but the reality of the successful in terms of adoption as it tends to.

And we benefit

Josh (32:05) Yeah.

Amanda Brock (32:06) from those brilliant brains, right?

Josh (32:08) Yeah, yeah, for sure. Wow.

Wow. my goodness. Okay, Amanda, I want to land this plane. So for anyone listening who’s interested in OpenUK or or how they can get involved or or what’s going on, what like what are the next steps? What do you what do you think for anyone interested

Amanda Brock (32:23) Yeah.

Josh (32:25) in this?

Amanda Brock (32:25) Yeah,

I think the key thing is that we have realised that you said it’s hard for people to know how to deal with policymakers and I probably didn’t answer your question. It’s hard for people to know how to deal with policymakers, even for lawyers and for people doing policy, right? Because there are a few companies with a lot of money that throw at those policymakers and when you look at open source, many of those companies are involved and then you have the foundations which are increasingly being forced into policy and there’s nothing wrong with them doing it, but I think

for a while that created a misconception that they were actively trying to represent the whole ecosystem and when push comes to shove that’s not the case right so if you look at something like the cyber resilience act they negotiated it and the foundations have got a separate character characterization of liability or reduced liability as stewards but there was nobody in the room arguing for individual developers and that’s a huge challenge and it’s something that we need to resolve as an ecosystem we need better representation so it’s one

of the things that we’ve tried to do here in the UK and a bit internationally but OpenHQ has been set up to really do research and reporting and some of that

policy work on an international basis. And we started last year working with the Indian ecosystem, helping them for the AI summit they had there. We’re already working towards Geneva and we’ve done some bits and pieces in Africa. But that will, I think, grow on the international policy side because I think there’s a real gap there. And I think OpenUK will probably be a model that we’ll see other people want to replicate over time in the countries.

Josh (34:05) love it. I love that we’re seeing all of these things pop up. You know, you got open UK, you’ve got things in Europe, you got the foundation, sovereign tech agency. There’s various foundations I I keep seeing and and I love it because I know not everything will work and that’s okay, but

Amanda Brock (34:20) It doesn’t.

Josh (34:21) we’re gonna learn on the way, right? And like this is no one knows what they’re doing. If you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s ‘cause everyone else is feeling the same way. So this is great. I mean, thank you for the work. I appreciate the work. I appreciate the time, you know, good luck.

I know how much effort this is. It’s it’s crazy, but yeah, just keep fighting the good fight and and thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Amanda Brock (34:40) Thank you, good to talk to you.